:: jenny chowdhury says, “put that in your pipe and smoke it” ::

Just your average mime taking his yorkie out for a walk on a beautiful autumn day in New York.

click here to see more pics that I took of Cory during our shoot. I ruined a whole bunch of footage because the flash went off during the takes. Live and learn.

Not completely convinced myself, I unwittingly convinced Sai, Cory and Matt that making a movie about a talking mime trying to live an ordinary life was a good idea.

I think we were all just too tired of brainstorming to care if it was a good idea or not. Here’s the assignment:
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still from the video gabe and I did for communications lab

see the video here:
http://itp.nyu.edu/~gac277/movies/roundandround.mov

Both of these guys have something to say about Micropayments a mode to access the internet.

While Scott McCloud has a more utopian view – artists are paid for their work since it is “not a commodity”, Clay Shirky is more of a realist. I know i wouldn’t pay for content if i could find similar content for free elsewhere. But i know there are some people out there who aren’t quite as cheap or poor as me.

Sorry Mr. McCloud

Back in 1993, Biz Markie released the sample-safe, but terribly bland album “All Samples Cleared” in reaction to being sued for using an unauthorized sample on his 1991 album “I Need a Haircut”. The lawsuit served as a major speed bump in Biz Markie’s career and although he eventually experienced a smaller second wave of success, I often wonder how many other top ten hits Biz would have produced had he free reign to sample the musical spectrum.

The story of DJ Danger Mouse’s “The Grey Album” starts off with a similar premise, but ends on a happier note (at least from the viewpoint of the artist producing the remixed track). DJ Danger Mouse used/infringed upon copyrighted material from Jay-Z’s “The Black Album” and the Beatles’ “White Album” and created a remix dubbed “The Grey Album”. What a clever idea, i thought when i first heard about it. Those holding the rights of the high profile “White Album” weren’t as enthusiastic and filed suit against Danger Mouse. (I’m not sure how Jay-Z, who’s made a career out of borrowing others’ songs, felt about this whole thing.)

So how is Mouse’s case different from Biz’s you ask?
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It took me 4 tries to get through “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” and I only got halfway there. I’ve now spent over three hours reading and re-reading re-re-reading. While some of his sentences and sentiments are clear, I still don’t know what his overall message is. Am I retarded? I think this is why I ended up studying engineering instead of Art History.
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week 2:

I learned a wee bit of CSS last year from a colleague, but was lazy about using it. I continued to make web pages using a non-MX2004 version of Dreamweaver, where all design element formatting is achieved using HTML. I couldn’t make a 1px outline around a picture, but did it really matter? Well the simple answer, as it turns out, is yes it does matter. My pages always looked like crap. I’d move things around in their table cells, change font, etc. but the pages still looked clunky and unprofessional. But I was stubborn. I already knew HTML and could get content up. When I looked at CSS code, I saw lots of thing I didn’t immediately recognize and I refused to digest it.

Then two weeks ago, I installed Dreamweaver MX2004 on my new machine. I didn’t realize that it created internal CSS on pages by default. I looked at my code and was baffled. Then, concurrently, we received the assignment to redo our pages with CSS. So I knew it was time. Time to get hip to it!

Before redoing my site, I went over the CSS tutorial at W3schools.com. It was helpful, but left a lot of questions unanswered so I bought a CSS book from the company that produced the book that introduced me to HTML, Peachpit press.

I took the content from my old home page and created a new file without any formatting at all. Then I created an external CSS sheet and began to play with background color and font color. I changed both until I found a combination that I found aesthetically pleasing. I created a few text styles that I knew I would be good for use throughout the site. I played with link styles, removing the default underline and using a hover underline style. I still used an html table and formatted it using html. But I hope to change this as soon as I get a little more comfortable with CSS.

I then took my other non-formatted pages and linked to my newly created CSS sheet. Like magic, all the pages on my site were suddenly cohesive and continuous, styled the same way. I went back over each page and made some internal CSS changes that were particular to a single page. I started to see why CSS is so important and so much better for formatting pages.

And I really started to see how problematic tables are. Their content seems to move around from page to page even when you want it static. This is something I’ve definitely got to work out.

I’d also like to create blogs to manage my weekly entries more efficiently. I’m sure after I make these changes, I’ll want to make more. As it goes, each iteration deserves another evaluation.

week 1

response to
1)”Jury Convicts Video Game Defense Killer”, CNN.com Thursday, 8/11/05
2)”No Strong Link Seen Between Violent Video Games and Aggression”, News Bureau, U of Illionois at Urbana 8/9/05

Last November, I interrupted two teenage boys from their game of “Slime Soccer”, a simple two-player, relatively non-violent computer game, an evolved cousin of “Pong”. In fact, I had interrupted, forced quit, and remotely shut down many computer games over the past three years. It was one of the requirements of working in the computer lab at a high school where game play is prohibited. Sometimes, upon finding student game play, I would look the other way. The school was an academic pressure cooker and I sympathized with how desperately students desired to fill their 5 minutes between classes with something fun and alternative. However, on this particular morning, the two students were becoming aggressive. The boys, who had previously shown themselves to be “super nice” kids, were rising up in their seats and pushing each other. I rushed to their console and told them to stop playing. When they failed to cease their keystrokes, I reached for the monitor button, but was intercepted by a pubescent hand with a death grip. The student grabbed me so hard that my arm turned red where his fingers had just dug into me. I was shocked. So was he. He looked down in horror, in disbelief over what he had just done. Later he said that he was so revved up by the game that he felt like he had lost control. He said he saw his arm going in to reach for me, but didn’t think that it was his own.

This experience proved to me that video games, even simple seemingly non-violent ones, could aggravate a violent tendency in some individuals. However, games making a person kill? That’s pushing it. The two articles “Jury convicts video game defense killer” and “No Strong Link Seen Between Violent Video Games and Aggression” highlight extreme examples on opposite ends of the spectrum. I think that “Grand Theft Auto” may have had an influence Devin Moore, but the defect was not as much in the “Rockstar” brand game as in Devin Moore’s propensity to be influenced by it. If Grand Theft Auto had the type of effect that Moore’s Lawyers are claiming, we would have all been dead before Grand Theft Auto 2 ever came out! In general, the lawsuit goes along with the trend of blaming society’s ills on non-parental, oftentimes corporate influences. Perhaps it was the combination of his childhood abuse and the game. But then, doesn’t the fault lay with his guardians (or whoever abused him) who made him susceptible to this type of stimulus in the first place? When I had the incident with the student, the parents stepped in, the child was counseled, and evaluated. I’m sure that Devin Moore’s killings were not the first exhibit of his violence. I’m certain if he had been evaluated properly, some action would have been taken so that these killings would have been prevented. The case begs the question, should companies have to pay for the mental defects of a few? It’s a stark contrast against big tobacco where the proferrered product kills or injures the majority of people who uses it. But when a single individual is at risk, is it fair to apply blanket policy? My opinion is that it is not.

On the other hand, while the second article “No Strong Link Seen Between Violent Video Games and Aggression” initially seems to champion a studies findings that no link has been seen, it ultimately only shows that more research needs to be conducted on this topic. One study is never enough. The scientists only tested one type of game, didn’t concentrate on a single age group and stated, “because of the study’s design, only moderate or large effects…were detected”. The results don’t convince me of anything. I have seen the violence first hand, and while it was not extreme, it was present.

While I thought the study was inadequate I thought the last statement the scientist made was brilliant and truthful and thus worth repeating here. “Games are about solving problems, and it should tell us something that kids race home from school where they are often bored to get on games and solve problems. Clearly we need to capture that lightning in a bottle.”