Lives Online: CyberCultural Studies

Check it out:

• Yo! William Wordsworth lays down a hot rap. Respect!
• Choose Your Own Adventures, those fab “turn-to-page-87″ adventure stories from the 1980s are back with slightly updated stories, and a massive update in technology. Now each of the reissued books has “secret” endings built into the book — endings that are unreachable if you only follow the links in the book itself. To find the secret endings, you have to go to the CYOA web site and solve puzzles and trivia games to find out which endings are secret. Web-tastic!
• We’ve been talking about social networking and social news sites this week, but what about the cognitive and emotional aspects of messing with our social networks? David Wong’s classic (and now updated) essay “Inside the Monkeysphere” explains why you literally can’t have 483,775 friends, no matter how hot your MySpace page. (Wong builds on Robin Dunbar’s research into what is now known as the “Dunbar Number.” Check it out. It’s cool stuff.)
• More Star Wars fan films! Here are two that do similar things, but the first (”Legacy of the Jedi”) is, arguably, better than the second (”The Essence of the Force”).

• You may have noticed that I like video games. But I also like boardgames, party games, trivia games, Dungeons-&-Dragons-esque role-playing-games, you name it. Grand Theft Auto links to a review of an old RPG called Puppetland. The description of the game is really interesting, and it’s unfortunate that the game book is out of print. You can still find it through Amazon and Barnes & Noble’s used-book networks, but that’s about it. One of the things that intrigues me about this RPG is the grammatical structure of the game play. (I know, I know. It intrigued you, too. How could grammar not intrigue?) Seriously, though. What does it do to your experience of a game when the DM speaks in the novelistic past tense (”And the Nutcrackers swarmed forward, rolling their eyes and chomping their dreadful jaws.”) and the players must speak in the present (”Eek! I bop you, Nutcracker!”)? Hmm… much to think about here.
• So, you’re surfing around (as you do) and you end up at a blog that’s sort of about zombies, looking at an awesome photoblog post collecting pictures of treehouses. And you think to yourself, how cool is that? And then, your curiosity piqued, you check out the blogger’s Blogspot profile — because who wouldn’t want to know more about Undead Molly the treehouse collector? — and you see that her favorite books are the U.S. Army Survival Manual and Jonathan Livingston Seagull. How cool is that? And what does your blog/MySpace/Facebook page and/or profile say about you?
• What’s the Internet going to be like in the future? Why not check out Imagining the Internet to find out. They’ve got links, interviews, and video all about what your life will be like.
• I was reading LifeHacker (yes, I’m addicted to “productivity pr0n,” and yes, I know I have a problem), and they sent me over to this blog to read about the ways that room wall colors can affect your mood. But what really caught my attention was the way that commenters on the blog got really mean. On the color post “Josh” notes that “What the hell this doesn’t even make sense. Yellow is supposed to convey happiness yet it has been known to invoke anger and rage in people? Lol”. In a post about a trashcan that looks like it was made from crumpled paper, “Sugarcoted” informs us that “Seriously, who would want to look at that ugly basket all day? It makes me mad just looking at it. [...] This basket would make a perfect gift for someone you hate.” And on a post about a silly CD holder, “r” shares that “this is the lamest cd holder i have ever seen”. What do you think? Does the home decor theme for the blog bring out this level of hostility and derision naturally, or is something else going on?
• I don’t really want to live in Los Angeles (though I could be persuaded otherwise — hint, hint UCLA and USC), but man do I want to be able to head down to a uWink for some food, folks, and fun the new media way! Check out G4’s review of the pilot location, as well as Joystiq’s write-up. Drool.