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Just makes me want to play....
As a thoughtful gamer with a family full of gamers, and a therapist who studies gaming, I would LOVE to see this film. The trailer is designed to be sensationalistic. Hentry Jenkins of MIT, huge in the game world, is actually very pro-gaming. The point would be to get people communicating about it all...pros, cons, effects on some people (pros & cons) and stop the arguing back and forth. I do wish they'd left Jack Thompson out of it as he has proven himself to be a nut (as any gamer knows), and I wish they'd included neuroscientist Marco Iacoboni from UCLA...damn, it's interesting...
Should add I spent last evening watching my spouse and sons play "Left for Dead" online (it's all an experiment for Mike - it's LIFE for the adult offspring).
Fascinates me...the whys, the experience, the effects...the complexities of how the brain interacts with electronic media...
Henry Jenkins to Jack Thompson:
...In a battle between a cheetah and a giant squid, who would win?
In our case, you are a trial lawyer and I am an educator. LIke the cheetah and the squid, we are creatures of different domains. You make your living constructing emotionally persuasive arguments and breaking down hostile expert witnesses. I make my living teaching, explaining, analyzing, and interpreting. You are the product of an adversarial system where there are two sides and only two sides and where every encounter is a zero-sum game which one of the two sides must win. I am a product of a system which seeks to insure that all sides get heard and that everyone ends up understanding each other's perspectives."
It would be interestintg to explore the issues with you, but a debate would not be the right context for doing so. Frankly, I'd be much more interested in being part of a larger panel discussion..."
Henry Jenkins of MIT responds to Jack Thompson regarding the film "Moral Kombat" on the topic of video game violence. I've met Henry - I like him. I haven't met Jack. I'd like to (yes, I know he's crazy but I do well with crazy folks - I'm curious about everyone). I'd really like to see the film, but there seems to be so much controversy about it, no one can find it.
As a big fat squid, I love to get people talking. To each other.
When I become a hair stylist I am going to be a very good one and cut hair with these triple bladed scissors using both hands at once (I'm going to this 70 year old dude now who was trained by these people in Taiwan and cuts my hair this way...he also straightened it with formaldehyde...quite the innovator).
I want people to break out of their lives, and realize that they are really the masters of their own destiny. I want people to find the strength to be the who and what they need to be. I want people to find the purpose in their living that only they can find. I want people to face their fears, and overcome them. Basically.... Hope, empowerment, sacrifice, courage, selflessness, and thought. I want to do something with music that at least for a few people, changes everything. I believe Socrates said if you change the music of a people, you change a people. I want to change it all... with a song. Ok, so I'm a dreamer. I know it... But the world needs a few dreamers. - Rogue, The Cruxshadows
Jean Kilbourne's early work had a lot to do with my aversion to commercial television. My friend teaches a Women's Studies class and wants me to present on Violence Against Women. Taking it globally and historically, it's a very broad issue, especially if one considers the implicit cultural messages that can contribute to all sorts of "violence." I'm having a hard time not developing an entire semester of material.
"I'm glad to hear that Jessica is now doing the dishes in the evening. As we discussed last week, it's much better to use rewards to motivate kids to do things rather than punishing them. However I'm wondering if giving her your pot every night after she cleans the kitchen is the best way to accomplish this..."
We should reject the idea that the mind is something inside of us that is basically matter of just a calculating machine. There are different reasons to reject this. But one is, simply put: there is nothing inside us that thinks and feels and is conscious. Consciousness is not something that happens in us. It is something we do.
A much better image is that of the dancer. A dancer is locked into an environment, responsive to music, responsive to a partner. The idea that the dance is a state of us, inside of us, or something that happens in us is crazy. Our ability to dance depends on all sorts of things going on inside of us, but that we are dancing is fundamentally an attunement to the world around us.
And this idea that human consciousness is something we enact or achieve, in motion, as a way of being part of a larger process, is the focus of my work.
http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/noe08/no
Nia: A Cure for Shame
She'd spent her life loathing her body. Then she discovered the physical -- and sacred -- power of Nia dance.
I grew up in a Southern Baptist home where dancing was prohibited. In the winter of 1957, I was 6 years old, one of those kids CBS tried to protect by shooting Elvis Presley only from the waist up for fear that the sight of his gyrating pelvis on The Ed Sullivan Show would overstimulate what were euphemistically called our physical impulses. CBS need not have worried about me. Preacher after preacher had told me that my body was a vessel for the glory of God. I believed them, and I came to see my body as something to be despised, a mere suitcase that carried my brain, my spirit -- and all my dangerous emotions.
I remember a Friday night in sixth grade when most of my friends went to the Methodist church for a sock hop. I spent the evening on the back porch, staring at the stars and begging God to let me live my life free of bodily concerns. Instead of feeling deprived, I felt morally superior.
Today I look back at that overly pious 13-year-old who longed for a disembodied life, and I think: Be careful what you pray for. The year after the sock hop, I was unprepared when one hot afternoon I started my menstrual cycle. The sight of my blood was terrifying. I thought I was dying. My mother assured me I was not, but her explanation was not comforting. "Every month?" I asked plaintively. "This thing will happen to me every month?" Now my body was unfathomable.
As a young woman, I avoided not only unpleasant sensations, such as jittery nerves from too much caffeine, but also pleasurable ones -- even those as simple as deep, slow breaths. Denied the respect it deserved, my body slowly extracted its own revenge -- mysterious aches and pains, a punitive relationship to food, cyclical dieting, shame about sex, and constant weariness.
More: http://www.more.com/health/fitness/nia-a-c
Watched this last night. Very well done, though depressing (felt a lot like work).
Captures what the MMO experience is like for some people though, which is valuable for people who don't get it.
God I love this. Should I live to be 80, I want to be doing this. May need some testosterone supplementation...
Another aspiration added to my list. This may look easy...it's not.
Tonight I danced and danced under a huge yellow moon with old friends. Heaven.
Typical Friday night insomnia youtube scrounge for interesting stuff. Started with fire dancing, mostly bad, found this. I love the simplicity and the fusion of Tribal Bellydance with Asian elements, minimalist movements, solo drum. Less is seriously more.
I LOVED this film. I haven't seen a film I've loved in a long time.
Sometimes parents have no clue how monsters are created.
