Some dreamers hope their new states will be the lands in which they can be (or might have been in some previous age) their own kings and queens and heroes, in which they can play with dreams of power and glory without fear of failure, as the Brontë sisters did in composing their childhood epics of the kingdoms of Angria and Gondal. Indeed, Bruno Fuligni, in his study of ephemeral states and micronations, L’Etat, c’est Moi, calls such entities private monarchies or, perhaps more accurately, cryptarchies.
But the actual state can’t be set aside at will. One can’t merely nail a declaration of independence to one’s front door and bid the state farewell. Failing to pay taxes, for instance, will soon make one’s true sovereign, the non-fictional state supported by lawyers and policemen, exercise its power to collect.
@ Cabinet
I eagerly anticipate at some as yet undetermined point in the future having a complex thought of which I do not later discover Jay David Bolter has already said a portion, both more intelligently and a decade earlier.
@ Planned Obsolescence
But some educators are going a step further, teaching kids to make the games themselves. It turns out to be perhaps the ultimate form of liberal arts. In order to create a computer game you have to think about the content. You have to write a script. The programming involves logic, math and science. And to understand how you distribute a game you have to get into issues of marketing, sociology, and Internet culture. Panelist Rafael Fajardo, a professor at the University of Denver, says that his program, which teaches teachers how to teach kids to make games, is working to “change the culture of education.”
@ Fortune
Welcome to Zombinc!
We are a staffing service that allows you to employ zombies – those single-minded, hard working individuals – instead of shiftless human workers. Zombies can work tirelessly around the clock, they retain the talents of their former lives, and if injured or unable to work because of decomposition, we can give you a new one at no extra cost or liability!
Many times I’ve seen sensible people drop their inhibitions the minute they enter a MOO, a chatroom, or more recently Second Life. I haven’t seen it happen so often via voice on applications like Skype – perhaps the voice is a little too real for such behaviour. But it’s clear that newbies often feel shrouded and hidden in the jungle of virtuality, and thus enabled to misbehave in a somewhat exhilerated way. Sherry Turkle has written about this phenomenon quite widely. I’m mentioning it here because I think it works as a nature metaphor – the web as jungle or forest. I’ve written elsewhere about the web as the site of The Tempest but now I’m also thinking that it’s a kind of Midsummer Night’s Dream, just like the one that takes place across the river from me every summer.
~ Sue Thomas
Bouvetøya lies some 1,600 km south west of the Cape of Good Hope, on the southern extremity of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. As with the other islands on this feature, it is volcanic and numerous eruptions are known to have taken place here. Other islands are reputed to have been sighted in the vicinity, such as Lindsay and Thompson. The latter is now believed to have been destroyed by a volcanic explosion in 1895.
Nevertheless, Bouvetøya can be considered the most remote island on the planet: now that sealing and whaling have ceased in the Southern Ocean, it is only rarely visited by man.
I shall stopover en route to Inaccessible Island.
When you have a past, Vovonne, you’ll realize what an odd thing it is. In the first place, there’s whole chunks of it that have caved in: absolutely nothing left. Elsewhere, there’s weeds that’ve grown haphazard, and you can’t recognize anything there either. And then there’s places that you think are so beautiful that you give them a fresh coat of paint every year, sometimes in one color, sometimes in another, and they end up not looking in the least like what they were. Not counting the things we thought very simple and unmysterious when they happened, but which years later we discover aren’t so obvious, like sometimes you pass a thing every day and don’t notice it and then all of a sudden you see it.
~ Raymond Queneau
Leaning comfortably on his elbows, Pierrot was thinking about the death of Louis XVI, which means, specifically, about nothing in particular; his mind contained nothing but a mental, light, and almost luminous mist, like the fog on a beautiful winter morning, nothing but a flight of anonymous midges. The cars were energetically ramming each other, the trolley wires crepitating against the metal net, women were screaming and, farther off, all over the rest of the Uni Park, there was the hubbub of the crowds enjoying themselves, the clamor of the charlatans and clowns doing their tricks, and the rumble of the machines wearing themselves out. Pierrot had no particular opinion on public morals, or the future of civilization. No one had ever told him that he was intelligent. He had frequently been told, rather, that he behaved like an idiot or that he bore some resemblance to the moon. At all events, here and now, he was happy, and content, vaguely. Besides, among the midges there was one that was bigger than the others, and more insistent. Pierrot had a job, at least for the season. In October, he’d see. For the moment, he had a third of a year ahead of him and it was already chinking with the simoleons of his pay. That was something to be happy and content about for someone who had a permanent knowledge of uncertain days, unlikely weeks, and very deficient months. His black eye hurt a little, but has physical suffering ever precluded happiness?
~ Raymond Queneau
Passively Multiplayer Online Game is an infinite game built on individual network histories, transforming our web surfing into ongoing social play. With a game head-up display in Firefox, players can bomb each other, wage war over web sites, and lead other users on web missions. Ordinary web sites become caches for items and currency. PMOG fuses an MMO into our WWW.