WOW. She is such a snob. So WHAT?
Perhaps she can get some sponsorship from FRENCH AND ARROGANT, which is not only her motto, but also a cool French fashion label.
LOVED doing the MySpace page with Patricia and Jane, and watching all the other pages created by the other students in class.
Patricia chose a perfect color for the page, and both she and Jane worked hard to make Coco Vain's image come through.
While discussing our group online identity performance piece it dawned on me that I wanted to create a MySpace page for Coco Vain, the video game character I created for my video game idea Natasha's Race to Dakar.
Lucky for me I got to work with Jane and Patricia who were happy to help create a page for the French motorcycle mechanic and mouse!
We got together a few times and set up parameters for her identity, her likes and interests etc. She is so FRENCH it's a bit too much! Turns out that Patricia loves to draw clothes, so we're working on uploading drawings that Patricia made to show Coco Vain's forthcoming clothing line for the desert!
Yeah.
Join MySpace and you can see her entire profile page!
LOVED working on the podcast with Sam and Ronnie. It was fun to hear what different kinds of women think about games and gaming and learn about why they play. Sam was speedy and efficient in his audio editing, which made it easy to finish the project on time. I get lost in research and can spend hours reading about women and games, not sure why exactly but find this fascinating.
The pod cast is on my other flash drive so I can't load it today but will this week.
Sam and Ronnie and I decided to do our podcast on video games, specifically, girls and women and the games they play. Sam loves video games and I love doing research on women and games, so that was the start of the idea.
Ronnie's mom plays games on her ipad and Sam's sister likes to play Halo with her boyfriend. We want to ask them questions such as: why do they play games? what do they like about playing games? what would they be doing if they weren't playing games?
If we can find an arcade in town we'd like to interview some girls or women playing video games. Our plan is to also interview me after playing Guitar Hero or a similar interactive music or sports game.
We would like to incorporate some good audio, since it IS a podcast, and Sam has offered to help with that and record some of our podcast in the sound studio in Milton Hall.
In the old days, just last year, when we still lived in a 1500 square foot house and had a land line with an answering machine, people would call, the phone would ring, and, if I didn't feel like getting up to find the phone and answer it, which was most of the time, there would be 'the message' portion of the call. A voice, of someone I know or a credit card customer service representative from India or my Mom, could be heard bouncing off the walls, enticing me, urging me, calling to ME to ANSWER!
Now that I only use my cell phone, this problem has been erradicated. My ring tone sounds, and if I don't get up to look for my phone who cares, they can leave a message. That's what it's for!
Sometimes I miss the sound of my Mom's voice in the house but that's it. I certainly don't miss the loud ringing.
The cell phone has enabled me to listen to messages and talk when I choose, not because I feel pressured by a disembodied voice echoing in the empty space.
My Life and Technology According to reports from my mom, my first technology was a play stove. She awoke one cold morning when I was about 3 (1962, Philadelphia, winter) to find me attempting to cook bacon, limp and raw, on the tiny tin stove.
Considering the importance of food in our family, this makes sense to me. If you can’t eat it or use it to talk about food while cooking (phone), or do it enough to get hungry (skiing), or look up recipes (cookbook) or find photos of French pastries (food blogs), or actually fry an egg with it (stoves) what good is it?
Perhaps this is why I am not impressed with smart phones. When my husband rushed towards me in the Portland airport last Thanksgiving (food, again) to show me his new SMART phone, I watched his face in amazement, trying hard to imagine a piece of black plastic stirring this level of excitement. After he explained its other worldy ability to locate Orion and other celestial bodies, I looked at him and said “Let me know when it can bake a cake.”
While today is not the perfect day to bake a cake or anything else with our electric stove, it is a perfect day to contemplate the role of technology in my life. I am writing this with a #2 pencil in a spiral notebook. Abnormally cold temperatures have caused havoc with the electric grid, requiring rolling electricity blackouts.
Snow on the ground. No school. No electricity. No internet. I am relegated to technologies of the 20th century and before:
Pencil (circa 1560’s England)
Paper (ancient China)
It’s a Luddites dream come true! Everybody seemed to get along just FINE with these for hundreds of years. In fact my husband and I got along for SIX YEARS without electricity or running water while living in our small house (250 square feet) on 5 acres north of Taos, New Mexico. We heated our cozy love shack with wood and cooked with a 1950’s propane stove. Racing out in the snow to fire up the generator on a cold winter night was more of a weekly event. We may be the only couple in America who watched the first four seasons of Lost on a Macbook powered by a generator! If we had a fight, there was no place to go, no screen to use to check out and ignore each other. So when I use modern technology now, this is my reference point.
I am not for or against technology. They are TOOLS. We now have more sophisticated tools. To be enthralled I need to see or hear or feel a human touch as part of the end result; the smear of pencil lead, the smell of cake, the transfixing power of images or the sound of music.
After the play tin stove, aside from the Chatty Cathy talking doll I received at the age of four, my next technology memories revolve around music and images.
A year after their famous visit to the Ed Sullivan show, I recall holding the Beatles album Hard Days Night. A couple years later, at eight years old, I walked to the local Thrifty drug and purchased Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Anxious to open it and play it as soon as I got home, I tore open the shrink wrap while still in our driveway. The album slid out and smashed on the cement sidewalk. For my eleventh birthday I wore a white faux leather Nehru jacket and go-go boots and my girlfriends and danced to the White Album’s Birthday song over and over and over, played on my dad’s fancy stereo. Later when I purchased my first stereo with money earned babysitting, I loved to pick up the arm and move the needle back to a favored track and listen to it again. On family vacations in our Lincoln Continental we played eight-track tapes of Glen Campbell singing The Witchita Lineman or Dionne Warwick ‘s version of I Say a Little Prayer.
While today most computers are equipped with simple movie editing software, in the 1960’s our family made 8 mm movies by hand! A crazy psychiatrist friend of our family had an annual contest, to coincide with the Oscars. Our movies included insane stunts my dad had coerced from my mom (he once drove down the block at 6 am in her ski gear attached to skis and clamped into the ski rack her arms flailing against the grey sky). Often they would return from the party, slightly drunk and in their sexy black evening wear, holding a gold statue we’d won for Best Film! My dad edited the films by hand, and I’d help by holding the film spool on a pencil while he cut the bits together.
I didn’t edit again until I took a 16mm film class in Paris in 1977. My film studies took me next to the University of Illinois, Chicago where I learned VHS video tape editing and analog image processing. This training helped me land an editing gig years later, making documentaries on Buddhism for Mongolian television.
In 2000 I had not touched any editing equipment for over 10 years. VHS tape was gone. No problem! My now friend Linda Hattendorf, documentary filmmaker (http://www.thecatsofmirikitani.com/aboutMakers.htm) was the editor at Dharma Vision. My new boss said Linda would train me to use editing software Final Cut Pro. On my first day at work, Linda popped into the office, sat with me for about an hour, clicked and pointed around a screen littered with confusing icons and then she said “I have a massage appointment. I gotta go. You’ll be fine.” That was my ‘training’. The next few weeks were challenging, but transfixed by the beauty of the Buddhist world of Mongolia it was easy stare at a screen in a dark room and forget this was a ‘job.’
"Ah, editing Buddhism documentaries, wasn't that nice?"... this would be a relaxing and healing thought during the TECHNOLOGY HELL of my next 'real' job in Taos as a loan processor for a mortgage company.
The hell... day 1 again. My boss is no where to be found. She's in an airport on her way to Florida to visit her husband. She's left me a long, long list of things I need to get together, documents - verifications, taxes, income statements, details details details. I have to scan and fax. For hours. It is overwhelming. I hate it!
I am having a difficult time saying 'discourse communities' without feeling as if I should be trying out for a part as a school teacher in a BBC drama... it feels like such a stiff and wordy way to say
My PEOPLE... My Tribe? My peeps??? (I'll have my discourse community call your discourse community?)
Something simpler than Discourse Community - and I'll take my tea M.I.F., s'il vous plait. (That's Brit slang... Milk in First, vs. T.I.F., Tea in First, the entire country says CUPPA, that's the British discourse community way of saying 'cup of tea')
But I digress from this exciting new topic...
10 of MY Discourse Communities
1. My Family - which includes talk about skiing and cooking and many nicknames
2. My Home Town - grew up in Ketchum/Sun Valley, Idaho
3. I Will Teach You to Be Rich by Ramit Sethi - a super cool money blog
4. ADV Rider - a world-wide online community for adventure motorcyclists
5. Taos, NM - having lived here for most of past 20 years, very important!
6. Facebook - Need I explain?
7. Francophiles: People who speak French, cook French and have lived in PAris and watch French movies and know who the hell Catherine Deneuve is!
8. Game Developers Club at NMSU- Group interested in making video games (this woman is NOT a member, she is Catherine Deneuve! from group 7!)
9. Bollywood Lovers: People who watch Bollywood films from India
10.Dakar Rally - fans and participants of famous off road motorcycle race
ADV Rider -
From the list above, ADV Rider is the community that is predominately written word. But festive icons such as this: are VERY important part of the discourse. These and other symbols are used to emphasize and reveal emotions, which gives the forums a very boyant feeling.
Trip to Europe Summer 2010 with my husband on a BMW 1200
Dream ride
DAKAR rally and Heroes Legend rally classic road to Dakar
Other interests
hiking/cooking/travel/speaking french/film/video game design/singing French songs
Occupation
Full Time Student and aspiring video game designer
Awesome people and places with MASSIVE DETAIL AVAILABLE: Imagine a place you'd like to ride, or an off road dream bike you'd love to build and you can do a search and most likely find something about it, plus awesome photos such as
Jenny Morgan entry from the 2011 Dakar Rally, where she unfortunately crashed on Stage 4:
Hi John - If you look back a few pages (quite a few pages) you'll see some pictures, but basically it happened at around km 96 on the 4th stage - I'd just crossed a dry lake (chott) and was staying wide to stay out of the dust from other riders, and the soft sand on the piste that was cut up by then...
Unfortunately, at a track junction, a grader had pushed a new road across the desert, so rather than the mounds either side being typically a foot high (which would have been fine), the banks either side were more like three foot high...
I saw them at the last minute, and hit the first one pretty fast (40-50 mph), made it over but was completely out of shape by then and slammed into the second bank on the far side of the grade road, which is where (I'm pretty sure) I broke my leg in the impact... it was one of those "I'm not going to get away with this one" moments, and I basically shut my eyes... miraculously the bike made it over that second bank, and I finally fell off about 30 yards on... close to the piste itself as you can see from the photo:
This shot was taken by a helicopter as Carlos Sainz came buy... although it looks like I'm alone, as you can see, my bike is back up on it's stand (to make it more visible) and there was another rider who'd stopped to help, plus the film cameraman on the ground helping to slow the traffic... the cars were still doing about 80mph when the passed mind you!
So you can tell by above, it is full of language used to describe epic adventures!
The List of Early Technology in my Life... continued
I woke up the other morning and remembered about Chatty Cathy.
She was sitting under the Christmas tree one year, I must have been about 4 or 5.
A tall doll with a cord. Pull the cord, and SHE TALKS.
That's technology, isn't it?
"a capability given by the practical application of knowledge" or
"a manner of accomplishing a task especially using technical processes." Webster's Collegiate
So instead of the mother having to stop what she's doing, like baking cookies from scratch or vacuuming something (Chatty Cathy was produced by Mattel era 1959-1965) she could let the DOLL talk to her daughter.
This was after my Mom learned I required constant supervision, even if it was a doll, as if left to my own devices I might get in trouble, like the time she found me with my toy stove.
My ongoing attempts to extricate myself from the tribe of the most digitally retarded of the Digital Immigrants made grand strides this weekend as I participated in the Global Game Jam.
Not being a programmer or animater yet, I spent the weekend doing some analog activities such as drawing images of endangered cute and furry animals. Late Saturday night I ventured into digital territory and downloaded free audio editing software Audacity, found royalty free audio sites and making some cool sounds (wav file at bottom of link below).
The theme of the jam this year was Extinction.
I worked on a team led by Daniel Jaramillo, grad student at NMSU Computer Science dept... he is DEFINITELY a digital native, being a programmer guy, and taught himself how to program for Windows 7 mobile phone games to make our game, Veloutinous (yes, it's from the French word Veloute).
Even were I not a WORD based thinker, who not only enjoys the feel of paper in my hand but REQUIRES a print out to actually READ anything, I definitely belong in the Digital Immigrant camp.
I was born the same year that Ben Hur was made, which includes a famous action scene, the chariot race, in which special effects as we now know them were not yet invented. Watch it...a couple guys DIED in the making of this film... today, sissy actors wouldn't dream of jumping into a chariot like Charlton Heston did... digressing... oops.
I was fortunate to attend a small private school in Sun Valley, Idaho. Jack Hemingway was my French teacher. We studied LATIN, ancient Greece, European history... then we'd go skiing all afternoon.
It was a very physical lifestyle, full of snow and mountains, paper and pens, books and notetaking... and in class, we'd look at EACHOTHER around a big rectangular table.
If you were stoned, or hadn't read last nights assigned chapters of Look Homeward Angel, the teachers could SEE it in your eyes.
Seeing people's eyes these days, much less their faces, is more likely to happen on facebook than in person, in class.
Why is this? Because they are staring at SCREENS.
all the time.
Ten Things I've seen Students Do while Staring at Screens:
1. Risking their lives by staring at their cell phones while in a crosswalk.
2. Talking on cell while skateboarding on a crowded sidewalk.
3.
About Me 
