I just saw a Facebook ad for “custom term papers” (not linked, but you can find 212,000 results by googling that term). Basically, you hand them your research and they churn out an actual report. And they’ll even write your Master’s thesis for you!

My goodness, people. This is why writing centers and editors exist. Let me give anyone who wants to use a site like that a hint: academic writing is about clarity and organization. If you can explain your research to these people, you can save yourself $20/page and write minimally your own first draft. I won’t deny the need for corporate professional writers… but it strikes me as unethical to pay someone for a paper that you’ll then get graded on. It’s called “credit where credit is due.” Seriously. Learn it before you enter the corporate world.

Source: xkcd.com

Sally pointed out this blog, which features strange maps and their function. I must admit I find it fascinating. This map, in particular, is a startling reminder that reality differs greatly from our perceptions thereof; this map, on the other hand, fills me with empathy for the designers. I’m actually working on a similar map for a conference program at the moment, so I can honestly say, given the design problem (too much text, too little room), the designers could have done worse.

So… apparently they’re making a print volume of Wikipedia now?

I’m actually kind of torn on how I should feel about this. On the one hand, this almost completely contradicts everything that makes Wikipedia what it is: a triumph of collective intelligence–a living, very searchable document. You can’t put something like that into a book. You can’t put hypertext into print, nor can the general population collaboratively edit the printed word (unless they’re publishing it on Kindle). It is a useful document precisely because it isn’t printed.

On the other hand, a printed version would be great for archival purposes. I’ve wondered what a hypothetical alien archaeologist would say about our generation; we’re leaving increasingly fewer traces of individualism. Even my own hypothetical grandchildren may or may not get to see photographs from years of my life; it simply depends on the state of technology. Maybe .jpgs will no longer be valid file extensions in fifty years. Guess what: there went the last three years of my life, if I never got them printed. So an archive strikes me as an incredibly useful tool for future historians.

Regardless, though, who do they actually expect to *use* this?

Larry Norman, Christian rock legend, passed away this morning.  For those who don’t know who he was, in many ways he did for Christian music what Elvis did for music in general. I can’t even find the words for a tribute appropriate to his level of impact.

Well done, you good and faithful servant. Can’t wait to meet you in Heaven.

I refer you to this piece.

I actually *wouldn’t* take that bet–in short, the bet is that video games will never be a significant form of cultural discourse. In many ways, I agree with him that video games require too much of an investment. A game like MYST takes several hours to play, but its story can be summarized in about thirty seconds. Additionally, as long as libraries exist, books and a limited selection of movies will always be free, but video games will likely always come at a cost (unless you have a friend willing to loan you a system and games, as I do). So, yes, by virtue of investment of time involved, I agree: there’s a barrier to cultural relevancy.

After this point, the writer’s argument rapidly falls apart. To wit (emphasis mine):

The mode of expression in a video game is the interactive system. The simplest game would contain one system. Pong, for instance, is born out of the interplay of three systems: player input moves the paddles up and down; the ball bounces back and forth according to a simple physics simulation; a score increments based on the ball leaving one or the other side of the screen. So, you move your paddles to affect the ball, which affects the score. Fast forward to a popular contemporary game like Grand Theft Auto 3, Halo, or The Sims. The number of systems in constant interplay is countless. One must be systems-literate enough to process the outputs and required inputs of these webs of interactivity to gain any benefit from the experience. Compared to film, television and books, which all use plain talk and linear plot to express their meaning, video games speak to the audience in a completely different language.

Uhm, hello? As I have a degree in literature, I must disagree with that statement. Point: William Faulkner. Just as there is such thing as a reading level, so is there such a thing as a video game literacy level. Take DDR or Guitar Hero. Their interfaces are definitively NOT easy, but they operate on several modes–beginner, intermediate, advanced, etc. Just as you don’t read a baby Joyce, but rather Richard Scarry, so also you don’t start a new player on the hardest song of the game, but the easiest. Games are designed with a learning curve in mind. Even linear games, like RPGs, start the player off gently with easy battles or puzzles. Pong may be a great game for beginners just trying to grasp basic gaming concepts, but the player will want to move on from that eventually, just as most people move on from Harold and the Purple Crayon.

Moving on:

Film and novels never had to overcome the stigma of starting out as children’s distractions. They may not always have been respected artforms, but they were at least always seen as entertainment, if low-brow, aimed at adults.

What? Socrates, arguably the father of Western thought, hated the written word. Hated. Writing was considered destructive, especially to the rhetorical canon of Memory. (This is a valid point, but that’s a different blog post.) Perhaps it was never considered a children’s activity, but it most certainly was a subject of great debate. Guess which side won.

I speculate that games will grow up. My generation–the generation that grew up on Mario, Final Fantasy, heck, even the arguably educational Oregon Trail–is hitting the workforce. The game industry is going to grow up, and is already growing up, and we’re already proving that we’re taking the medium with us.

Will video games ever be considered culturally relevant by, say, the Baby Boomers? Doubtful. But even my late-adopter parents play the occasional computer game, and if you ask virtually anyone of age 30 or younger who Mario is, I can almost guarantee they’ll think of a short Italian plumber with a red cap. Moreso, probably at least 75% (that’s a conservative estimate) of those who can identify Mario have had at least one experience with a Mario game, whether a single round in Smash Brothers at a friend’s house or countless hours playing every game to exhaustive completion. Show me an American child who has never even touched a video game, and I’ll show you a child who is entirely too sheltered.

For Christmas, Mom and my paternal grandmother collaborated and put together two notebooks of family history–one of as much general information as they could possibly gather, and one of Grandpa’s collected letters from his army days. I’ve just started reading the latter.

And it’s kinda funny. Grandpa was a good writer.  I mean, I’ve no doubt that, in transcribing them (we have typewritten transcriptions, not handwritten ones), Grandma cleaned them up somewhat. Certainly some swear words were censored (though whether that happened on Grandpa’s end or on Grandma’s is up for debate. But really, he had the art of letter-writing pretty well mastered.

This leads to an interesting question: am I his heir? I don’t mean this in the “I’m totally an awesome writer” sense,  but in the “what am I communicating to future generations?” sense. Sure, I’ve been journaling off and on for about fifteen years now, but *what* am I journaling? Will my hypothetical grandchildren be able to look at them and say, oh, this is what life was LIKE for a DigiRhet M.A. student in 2008?

In that, war writers had it easy. In writing to my grandmother, Grandpa couldn’t just be like, d00d, Soldier Fred and I totally pwnd some n00bs; he’d have to explain who Soldier Fred was, who n00bs are, and what pwnd means. He’d tell stories. And my hypothetical grandchildren will, in some ways know him better than they would know me from, say, this blog post.

I know; it’s a question of audience. My journals are primarily for myself, or, in the case of this blog, for a quasi-professional audience. In many ways, I think I’d rather be writing for my grandkids.

This post by John Stackhouse is an interesting commentary on Westernized humor. I have little to add other than a memory: on a mission trip to Guatemala, three of us dressed as clowns. We attempted to be silly in a standard ha-we’re-clowns way, but when one clown pulled a chair out from under another, none of the kids laughed. Apparently in America our standard of humor is a lot meaner than elsewhere.