I'm back after a great holiday. I will link to some holiday pics later....However, today most importantly is the long awaited big ADSL-day. ITU has kindly agreed to pay an ADSL connection from my home and just half an hour ago, a technician visited my small apartment and installed the ADSL-plug. So now on to connecting the router, making the network card work and then ta-da, at 4pm there should be hole through (ADSL working at the central then). So this will be the last home message broadcast to the world through my trusty 56 kb modem. An era is over... But will I for once succeed in making a out-of-house connection work in less than 24 hours or will I be doomed to days of offline silence? The story continues....
# posted by Lisbeth at: 12:10 (0) comments

Aargh & Sorry! This blogg & webpage have been down for several days, due to a mess-up during a back-up. Still on holiday, but at least now you can browse through the archives...
# posted by Lisbeth at: 13:21 (0) comments

HOLIDAY! From today and 3 weeks ahead till July 30th, I'm away on holiday. So this blogg might not be updated for quite some time. I'll be traveling in car to Budapest and visiting a summercottage on Fyn (.dk), so I don't expect to be online much, but in case you need it, please try mailing me anyway!!

In my travel luggage is books, lovely, theory-empty (?) fiction books, which I have been looking forward to reading some time. There is both an Australian, a Japanese, an American, a Finnish and a Danish author in my pile, so I expect my summer to be pretty international :). One of the Danish books, I want to read, is "Det bliver sagt" (It is said), an autobiographical story about pedofilic abuse experienced through the eye of the child abused. It is written by a former Comparative Literature classmate of mine, Kristian Ditlev Jensen. It was published in late spring and got raving reviews for both its literary qualities and the chilling honesty of the writer. I so admire his courage and I truly hope that this is one of the books that might change the world just little bit, such as Kristian hoped.
# posted by Lisbeth at: 16:43 (0) comments

Filtering through the stuff on my desk. Copy of an article in Danish newspaper Jyllandsposten. Estimated value of the world market for computergames in 2000: 170 milliard Danish kroner...
# posted by Lisbeth at: 16:35 (0) comments

Reading a review in Comparative Literature, and relating it to what I wrote earlier today, I want to examine the notions of the referentiality and non-referentiality of literature further. Dorit Cohn: The Distinction of Fiction.
# posted by Lisbeth at: 15:46 (0) comments

Via Jill and her bloggerised talk, I came across Crimescene - a black hole in my world so far. It's a site where you can participate in the investigation of fictitious crimes. Says Tom Arriola, crime designer:

After the fact, I discovered what I was doing in Crime Scene was calling attention to the fact that everyone thinks the Internet is real. You call up a file on your screen: the population for every major city in the United States. But I could make up my own data file, and change the numbers, and have my own list of the populations of the United States -- and it wouldn't be true. But people could call it up and think that it was. It's a virtual world that confirms itself.

Makes me think of the micro-nations I investigated in relation to a paper I did earlier this year. Talossa.com, The Holy Empire of Reunion, Uteged, they all take advantage of the fact (though in a playful way, mostly) that on the internet, you can never tell fiction from truth at first glance - and by filling their sites with fictional facts of history, polictics, people and languages, photos and maps in abundance, you could almost believe in the reality of the these worlds, just because of the overflow of details.
# posted by Lisbeth at: 11:58 (0) comments

Webhoaxes. I've earlier written about the Kaycee Nicole Swenson hoax. Turns out this kind of feigning (terminal) illness on the net, has a name:"Munchausen by Internet", as reads in article in Wired, They think they feel your pain. Well, perhaps it is much about a psychologically induced & non-natural need for attention and feeling of power and as such something worthwhile considering as a mental disorder...however, I think there is indeed an element of creativity and performance involved too ("how long can I feign this, how many people can I convince by my writing?"), which is different from those suffering from Munchhausen offline. It's about being someone else and being it in a convincing way, not just being someone elses disease. It's about performing a character which can be a perfect person that suffers in a graceful way, in contradiction to your RL less than perfect and messy self and those RL most often disgracing fatal illnesses. I have seen several people die of cancer and it is Never cute...
# posted by Lisbeth at: 15:55 (0) comments

And more computergames. Game Studies - the international journal of computer game research - is finally online with its first issue. There are some excellent people writing for it - and it includes a couple of articles, first published as papers at the CGDT conference and a couple of new pieces + 2 reviews, of a book on games and of The Sims. Espen, Jesper and Susana have been working like mad to launch it. Cheers for them!
# posted by Lisbeth at: 15:03 (0) comments

Final Fantasy out soon as film. THink it is old news, but now I know :) Completely computer generated, it seems. And it shows (in the trailer)...even if they have taken great care to reproduce "human skin" as realistically as possible as it says on the film's homepage. Wonder if there is already a name around for the "genre" of computer games turned into film. Think I read somewhere, but forgot.
# posted by Lisbeth at: 14:53 (0) comments

Are 3D computergames realistic? Some players from Clan Eleven has made this "documentary" to prove those who believe so wrong. Contrary to the film, I mentioned yesterday (based on Counterstrike) which seemed to take the concept of Counterstrike a little bit too seriously for my taste, this film takes the piss out of 3D combat in a nerdy and highly self ironic way ;)...
# posted by Lisbeth at: 14:24 (0) comments

The Danish web zine Søndag aften, the July issue, has a little thoroughguide to electronic literature (Danish...- mostly poetry). It mentions a piece, De ubrugelige by Flemming Christensen which I havent heard of before. It boost's to be the first Danish Interactive Crime Story. You receive the story in e-mail portions + you can write the missing pages of one of the character's diary. There's also an aspect of it which involves being admitted to the next level of the story by guessing certain secret codes. I'm in!
# posted by Lisbeth at: 13:25 (0) comments

The Resource centre for Cyberculture Studies has a recommendable book section with monthly reviews of 1-3 cyberculture titles (cyberculture understood in a very broad sense, includes media, literary critism & rhetorics, sociology etc). Written by scholars in the field, it's a nice resource centre for checking out those books in the margin of your studies which you are considering whether to spend money on or not. It goes back to July 1997 and includes reviews of Hayles, Murray, Lanham, Snyder, Bolter too. I guess, since most of the reviewers are American, they tend to be more entuisiastic about the books, than most Europeans I have met do, but still the reviews are thorough, so you should get an idea whether a book suits you or not. A minus is that books are not reviewed around the time of their publication, rather a few years after.
# posted by Lisbeth at: 12:31 (0) comments

Regarding the Lucky-Lucky Flash video I mentioned in post of the 29th. I ran it by a friend of mine who speaks a little japanese this weekend - he couldn't really catch the words, but ensures me that it is autentic japanese - and that it is a very common thing to suddenly have a chorus in English in the middle of a genuine Japanese-language pop song. Imagine if it was the other way around...
# posted by Lisbeth at: 12:11 (0) comments

Counter-strike the movie (4min 40 sec), believe or not. I'm as bored with it as I am with the general concept of running around in a building trying to shoot other people before they shoot you. Sorry, I'm just never going to wake up one morning to find myself turned into a first-person-shooter woman overnight..even if all the guys keep telling me that Counter-strike is Soo great. - "Terrorist wins" and what's scary, it doesn't really matter, because in 2 seconds, the film or game starts all over again...
# posted by Lisbeth at: 12:04 (0) comments