Tremor

Hmm, the earth just moved. And not in that sense, since the closest I was to that was watching Coupling on the BBC.

The funny thing was that the local dogs started howling five minutes before the tremor, and stopped shortyl afterwards. Let's hope this wasn't a far-off effect of something bigger.

Gonna interact yo ass!

"Interactive", along with its variant forms, is well on the way to joining the List of Words I Hate. There was a brief time when describing a medium as interactive actually meant something, largely because most of the media we were familiar with at the time weren't interactive. When computers came along, we were impressed. The program said something to you (like "Press Enter to continue"), then you did something (like pressing the Enter key), and depending on what you did, it did something else (like cover the screen with static). We were so impressed, in fact, that we needed a word for this kind of thing, and thus came up with "interactive".

Of course the word had been knocking around for some time before that: according to the OED, it first appeared in print in 1832 (though it was not to be used for computers until 1967). However, it only really took off in the 1980s, when ordinary people realised the power at their fingertips as they crouched over their Apples and Commodore 64s. Now, almost everything is "interactive". I was in the bank today trying to do things the old-fashioned way, waiting in line with no other claim to my money than a driving licence. Since anyone who is silly enough not to use Internet banking and arrogant enough to expect bank clerks to hand over hard cash is made to wait for hours just to remind them what a technobarbarian they are, I had plenty of opportunity to take in every printed word in the bank, which boasted no less than three electronic devices (not counting the ATMs in the wall outside). One was an incredibly sophisticated way of getting the slip of paper that you need if you really want to talk to a carbon-based life form. You can touch the screen in the appropriate place, swipe your ATM card down the side, or probably just stare hard at it, and you get a piece of paper with a number equal to n+100, where n is the number in the LED above the cashier's desk. Another was an equally touchy-feely Internet terminal, as a last reminder to customers that bank clerks are highly-trained professionals who have more important things to do with their time than answer questions or hand out money. Finally, there was a good, old-fashioned telephone attached to the wall.

But wait! This was no ordinary telephone. To compete with its high-tech brethren, it had been upgraded to make it an "interactive telephone" (or rather, since this is Turkey, an "interaktif telefon"). Now maybe I am dull and literal-minded, but I cannot imagine what a functional but non-interactive telephone would be like. Either you pick it up and listen without being able to say anything, or you talk into it and get no response (this is not high-tech, this was the state of most British payphones during the Thatcher era).

Another case of interactive silliness is a phrase that has become popular in educational circles: "interact with the text". If I go to another seminar where some budding pedagogue talks about "getting students to interact with the text" I will run the risk of having a serious interaction with the presenter. We're not talking about hypertext here; we're talking about books. You can't interact with a book. You can read it, think about it, write notes in the margins, spill coffee on it or throw it across the room, but whatever you do, the book will not react. It will sit there, stubbornly being the same old book. You can't even give it instructions to turn the page when you finish it. Compared to a book, those Sinclair ZX81s were paradigms of elegant social interaction.

Out of sheer perversity, I just googled on "interactive yogurt OR yoghurt"* One of the sites that came up was entitled "The Interactive Kitchen". Please, I do not want my kitchen to be interactive. I want my kitchen to be full of simple but servicable tools that do not answer back - knives and saucepans, for example. I have just about got the hang of using my microwave oven (even though it doesn't run Linux and thus has no command line). The last thing I want it to do is give me snappy comebacks.


* For the benefit of people wanting to solve this British vs. American spelling controversy, the correct spelling is "yoğurt", which is pronounced in various ways depending on which Turkic ethnic group you belong to - where I am, it's pronounced something like "yourt".

Begging for articles

A favour to ask ....

I've set my students an assignment to find and evaluate an online article that makes an argument about a female hero in film or television. There is plenty of good stuff out there about Xena and Buffy, but it's a little harder to find suitable texts outside this area. We're looking for texts that follow at least some of the conventions of academic writing (clear argument, avoidance of incomprehensible slang, citation where necessary etc.) but are not so academic that a non-native-speaker undergraduate would find them impossible to understand (e.g. something with a title like "The Rights (and Lefts) of (Cat)woman: a post-structuralist anal-ysis of fe/male (s)heroes." is out).

If you can send me any links to suitable articles on popular female heroes (Catwoman, Charlie's Angels, Nikita, Sculley, Ripley etc.) I'd be very grateful.

(cross-posted to academics_anon)

This is the kind of thing we could do with now ...

In some villages, women maintained an active role in maintaining order. The mother of one of my instructors told how when she was a small girl in a village in Kyushu, the southernmost major island of Japan, men were often gone from the village in certain seasons to join up on labor crews. When there was a disturbance at night or a suspicious character entered the village, the women would grab their naginata, which hung ready on one of the walls of the house, and go running outside to gather and search the town for any danger. Her grandmother was the leader of this "emergency response squad," and they were a naturally autonomous group within the village. Protecting the neighborhood was simply assumed to be one of their functions.

I want this game just for the graphics

Age of Empires III screenshot

I really wish that Microsoft would stop producing crappy operating systems and stick to what they are good at: peripherals and games. The first Age of Empires was an amazing game, which is not surprising given that they poached the authors of Civilization. It was the first popular real-time strategy game, and people were willing to order moronic peasants to go to a new forest when they'd finished chopping down the old trees, and ignore logistical anomalies like being able to march a legion from Rome to Egypt in an hour. Who cared about finicky details like that when you could make catapult triremes and watch them lob boulders onto your rivals' cities?

AoE II is a bit "Hmmm". I tried it a while back and gave up after getting frustrated by having to tell peasants what to do and and build things like granaries. This is the Middle Ages, and I don't want granaries, I want mangonels and trebuchets! I might give it another go, though, in the unlikely instance that I have game-playing time between now and AoE III hitting the streets (and by "streets" here, I mean the guys who sit on the street peddling pirated software).

AoE III is beautiful. I have to hand it to the developers, they really know how to make a renderer render. Reflections in water, smoke coming out of chimneys, even wind ferchrissakes. It's alll about colonising America, and you can play a variety of European powers, including the Ottomans (definitely my choice if I play this game). However, as far as I can tell, although native Americans feature heavily (if you play the French, you get a bonus for co-operating with them), you can't play them yourself. I hope they rectify this in the final version. One of my favourite "what if?" fantasies is going back to the mid-nineteenth century, finding a nice peaceful tribe like the Zuni or Hopi, and giving them a load of Gatling guns.

(/)

After trawling scholar.google.com for articles on female action heroes (see earlier post) I have come to the conclusion that anyone who puts parentheses or slashes in the middle of words in titles of academic papers should be, in good old-fashioned Maoist style, "sent to the countryside for re-education". Titles like "Brain Sex, Cyberpunk Cinema, Feminism, and the Dis/Location of Heterosexuality" or "Anxiety and the S(ub)lime Body of God" are not clever, just silly. Neither does putting "shit" in the same sentence as "trope" make you academically daring; it just says "I'm a naive postgrad who's just read Deleuze."

And by the way, "queer" is an adjective, not a verb.

I am so glad I spent my twenties bumming around playing music and working as an artist's model rather than going on and doing a PhD in English Literature.