So I got my hands on a new MacBook Pro. It’s seemed very fast, but you don’t really know how good a computer is until you see how it runs a couple games, am I right? So I decided to test it out, espeicially after a guy over at the Vanguard forums asked about how good his Mac would be for Vanguard and he got all kinds of ign’ant guff from the regular brand of PC partisans who didn’t understand his question (he was aksing if the MacBook running Windows would run Vanguard, not if there would be a “mac” version). So I typed this up:
Ok, first of all — I’m no super star video game scientist, so don’t start waving technical stuff in my face that I should have throttled the buffer overide and overclocked the stfpu in order to get “real” results. (more…)
Flyff: Fly For Fun is the cutest free mmorpg I’ve seen in a while. I think they may use in game RMT for funding, which is less cute.
Dofus Arena looks to be Final Fantasy Tactics remade as a multiplayer internet game.
Uh-oh. I hear my productivity dropping through the floor now.
A review of Cybertypes by Lisa Nakamura.
From: Kali Tal - Reviews: Lisa Nakamura: Cybertypes:
Nakamura gives us excellent coverage of the phenomenon she calls “techno-Orientalism” in her chapter “Race in the Construct and the Construction of Race: The “Consensual Hallucination of Multiculturalism in the Fictions of Cyberspace.” In this chapter she takes a variety of popular “cyberpunk” novels and films including Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, William Gibson’s Neuromancer and Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash and The Diamond Age to task for reinscriptions of racism within their texts. Her reading of Andy and Larry Wachowski’s The Matrix is most interesting for its incorporation of George Lipsitz’s notion of “the possessive investment in whiteness”(78), upon which her analysis of the character Cypher is founded: “the only white man on the crew betrays the humans precisely because he wants to jump the ship of multiculturalism and reclaim his possessive investment of whiteness.”(78) Nakamura persuasively argues that “[Cypher's] claims to being oppressed while he is receiving no less and no more than any other crew member invokes the ways that a lack of white privilege can be experienced as oppression.”(78) The comparison of Cypher to Allan Bakke (famous for his “reverse racism” suit in the late 1970s), filtered through Lipsitz’s lens of possessive investment is downright brilliant, and all by itself is worth the price of admission.
Seriously, was Cypher the only white guy in the crew? I swear there was another white guy.
Edit: yeah, there was another white guy. The idea that Cypher’s sellout is an pointer to white privilege is still pretty compelling though.
For some reason the neologism “Cybertype” irks me. Apparently Nakamura also coined “Identity Tourist” for which I am eternally grateful, and so I’ll probably let cybertypes go.
Decline and fall of the Roman myth - Newspaper Edition - Times Online
The Romans kept the Barbarians at bay for as long as they could, but finally they were engulfed and the savage hordes overran the empire, destroying the cultural achievements of centuries. The light of reason and civilisation was almost snuffed out by the Barbarians, who annihilated everything that the Romans had put in place, sacking Rome itself and consigning Europe to the Dark Ages. The Barbarians brought only chaos and ignorance, until the renaissance rekindled the fires of Roman learning and art.
It is a familiar story, and it’s codswallop
a post over at Terranova led me to this collection of links at Gameology:
Race and Video Games | Gameology
These should be helpful in future papers.
The folks over at Metafilter were talking about this weird radio station in Arizona that seems to play mostly dinosaur rock, KCDX FM.
In the thread, people also mentioned Radio Paradise and of course WFMU.
Nothing to add, I just wanted to remember those radio stations.
