jkane's blog

Hello everyone! I hope everyone is excited about starting classes on Monday...personally I wish the break were longer but oh well...
Anyways, I decided to hop on here and leave a message because I stumbled across some awesome news...THERE IS A THIRD BOOK IN THE CATHY'S SERIES COMING OUT IN MAY! It is called Cathy's Ring and I have already pre-ordered the book on Amazon...
Well that is all I have to say!
Good luck!

This final project was a nice finale I think to the course. I decided to create an Inform project that explored the various parts of the course that I felt were the most important. I focused on ARGs, IF, and VR and then under each other I added in 'rooms' describing some of the things we did in/for class that went under each other those categories. This whole course has been different than what I had imagined going into it. I mean that in a good way. I never knew how to work with HTML, nor would I have ever made the time to learn, yet it is something that is going to be a very handy skill in the near-future. Being an English major, I wasn't too keen on all the projects that involved working with the computer but the explorations really did me a lot of good. I was introduced to a whole new genre of 'gaming' and it's all useful knowledge. The new technologies are a bit scary (I have flashbacks of different movies) but I am excited to see what keeps coming. After taking this course, I am sure that I am more prepared to handle it and be able to take part in it all. I was never good at the interactive fiction games.  read more »

I was wondering why the ARG blog didn't count...I thought it did and was told by a fellow classmate or 2 that it was, but my last blog-check-in thing is a N. Sorry to whine, but I want that easy P

Well let me first say, thank you Professor Whalen for allowing us to do this ARG project in groups. I had been stressing about it because I was over-thinking it but it didn't turn out to be a horrible thing and that is because the Ninja Turtles (+1) ideas all seamlessly meshed well together.  read more »

So I have been following an ARG called Lif3 for the projects we're doing and I have to say it is definitely interesting. When we first began discussing ARGs I could not really see a good reason why people would become so involved and why they would want to get 'immersed' in it. However, after watching/reading this particular ARG I can definitely see the appeal to their potential greatness. Lif3 has recently gotten more complicated because it is actually connecting some of its aspects to earlier ARGs and it just amazes me how much time and effort is obviously put into this. Of course that is also very daunting since we're going to be trying to put something similar together and I can just imagine that the creators of these ARGs are dedicating their lives to creating them like its a full-time job. On Monday my group will be giving a presentation on Lif3 and my goal is to make sure that it conveys the awesome-ness level that it is because I think it is a great example of an ARG.

Our group has decided on the name Ninja Turtles and our wiki is ninjaturtlesplusone.pbwiki.com

So I just finished Cathy's Key and I have to say I really enjoyed reading it. There were some unanswered questions I had which made me google the book to see about there being a potential third book in the making. I didn't see anything that suggested that - which bummed me out. The books were both relatively short so I did end up with more questions versus answers but I still enjoyed the journey. I haven't look at the evidence of Cathy's Key as of yet. I had glanced at the evidence from Cathy's Book (after reading it) and thought the concept was nifty and original. I had shown my family and they really liked the concept of the extra items as well. As for these texts being ARG, I don't really think so. I enjoyed these books because it wasn't like the other literature I have been assigned for my other classes and I read each book in one sitting. I got suckered into the potential love story and ended up disappointed...why can't Cathy get into a freak accident so we can all find out she really is immortal! Dang it! ;-) haha Obviously I am engaged in Cathy's story and I want to find out more. If there were a third book, I would definitely check out a copy from the public library.  read more »

The purpose of this Interactive Fiction game was to elaborate on some of the topics we have discussed in class. For instance, I felt some of the web blogs involving the virtual realities were an interesting concept that I decided to integrate into my IF game. Many of the stories were written by real people that were doing the research through their virtual worlds. The character of my game is a journalist that logs on and is assigned a job based on intel that their VR receives and then relays to the character. Then the character enters the setting that the story requires journalistic work, which is a virtual prison in this case, and gathers evidence by taking photographs and will create a story based off of that. As soon as I became more familiar with the Inform manual and what Inform was capable of, the process became smoother and it got easier. I had started off with another concept but it just wasn’t really something I was enthusiastic about. After reading some of the blogs in class, I got this idea of being an online journalist and I expanded on it. As I said before, the difficulties were in finding out what I could and couldn’t do.  read more »

This conversation we are having in class is hilarious. I have some mixed feelings on it. I do not participate in Second Life or World of Warcraft so I don't have firsthand knowledge of anything and this is the first time I've read any sources that revolve around it. First of all, I am not going to be judgemental of people hopping on these sites to get their sexual kicks. Everyone is entitled to do what they want for a fulfilled/satisfied life. Just because I don't have any part of it doesn't mean no one else should. The conversation reminds me of an article I read about HBO's 'Bunny Ranch' and one of the women said something along the lines of: it's better to have the weird, freaky people going there versus somewhere else. I think the same thing goes for virtual reality. I would rather have the people that may have strange or freaky desires to go online and share that with similar people then them going around in reality trying to find it...or take it. Online activities are not based in the 'real' world and I think it would save alot of people grief if negative activities were done online. I hope I wrote that in a way that made sense.  read more »

So early this morning I was unloading my dishwasher and the final scene of Snow Crash popped into my daydream and I decided I'd remember it so I could blog about it. Was I the only idiot who fell in love with that robot dog? I don't have the book on hand but it was the dog that Y.T. had previously taken care of, before it was turned into a machine-thing. I thought that the scenes in which the dog/Rat Thing was doing things to save her were really cool and sweet. Other than that I don't have too much to say. I doubt the hackers in the metaverse really learned anything from their close call with the viral Snow Crash; they pretty much concluded it was Hiro's way of honoring David (5 goes in there somewhere I think). I look forward to the rest of the readings since this one was a fun-read.
Alright, now mentioning Inform...  read more »

Has anyone been listening to the news while reading Snow Crash? I am usually not so good at multitasking (when it comes to reading) but I realized that while I was listening to crisis after crisis, I began to pay more attention to little details about the book. Okay, so the American economy is quickly free-falling and no one knows where the handle for the parachute is. So as I am listening to the stock market dilemma and etc etc etc, I think to myself that this same type of predicament is probably what sent America into the sorry state it was in the Snow Crash setting. Have you kept up with me so far? I hope so because I don't feel like going back over it. The U.S.A. owes billions of dollars to other countries and we've all heard the presidential candidates claim the cause of all our strife has been companies not having enough regulations. At one point in the book, Hiro suggests to Y.T. that the mafia would be a criminal activity if there were still laws. Obviously the U.S.A. in this book is a small piddly city-sized country and most everything else are business-like places.  read more »

When it came to organizing my websites I decided to make sure than any one of them could be the first one viewed. Because much of the foundation of my thoughts were scattered between the four sites, I made sure that each site was related to the others in some small way. The four ways I split my thoughts was: the fictional characters biographical page, her company’s homepage, a page on virtual reality, and her inventory page.  read more »

Essence of VR
“The burden of input rests with the computer, and the body’s free movements become text for the computer to read.” (Under ‘Full-Body Immersion’ p4)  read more »

Shade drove me crazy. It was constantly frustrating me and I didn't get sucked in to his apartment world. The only reason I even forced myself to sit through it was because I knew there would be discussions in class and I wanted to have some form of opinion. I admit my frustrations probably stem from the fact that the computer/program is smarter than I. Also, I lose patience easily when I am not interested. I appreciate how much work went into creating it. I think that the man was one of the three people that disappeared; then he died out in the desert and he is haunting his apartment because he doesn’t realize he is dead.  read more »