The Supervillain Project

The videos that follow are my latest project. More to come.

Hope you enjoy.

Expanding the social media empire

I've opened a twitter account.

It is for the life I should be leading.

Otherwise known as the life I am leading IN MY IMAGINATION........

Cause life is too short not to be entertaining.

My life remains odd

So why so few posts posts over the last few weeks? I got busy with real life stuff that would have made for some interesting posts if I could have made time for writing.

There was a Film Seminar on campus that I got busy helping with. I might do a post or link to that soon, still deciding. We had a visit from a different documentary filmmaker, Helen Whitney, that ended up providing me with some good ideas for an upcoming class. The Official Parents of Professor Matthew came to visit for a weekend and we managed to avoid any real fight, only one small loud disagreement that ended quickly. Anyone who knows of my relation the the Official Mother of Professor Matthew should be shocked and amazed by this. Oh, and I presented my research project on porn at an academic conference.

"What's that?" you might be thinking as you read this. "Porn?"

Yes, porn. I have now added Porn to the list of my research topics. You may adjust your disgust or jealousy levels accordingly. Think about how much time and money is spent making and consuming it. And yet not many academics are willing to be associated with researching it and the stigma that it brings.

But I've never been someone who has done the "safe" thing. Or the "intelligent" thing for my "career." I'm not great at avoiding being an "embarrassment" to "myself" and "others."

Three of the many odd realizations you have when you are looking at pictures of naked people for a living:

It becomes work! Sure, it's better than grading lousy student papers. But it is weird when you attach a sense of responsibility to nudity.

You reach a point when you think you are getting boring or monotonous wanting to talk about your conclusions with people. "Hey, you wanna know what else is fascinating about porn? No? You're leaving? Okay, maybe we can talk about it later...."

I started to get very paranoid while analyzing the photos that I would come across someone I knew. Luckily I did not. Oddly, I did find out I have friends who do know people who have posed for or photographed porn.

I have future research ideas, so I'm not done with the topic. Professionally that is.

And what do you want to bet that I get at least one or two extra hits from this post and that those people are upset when they realize what I'm actually writing about.

This has no right to be this awesome.

The whole mash-up idea has a certain level of fascination for me. In its most primitive versions it is very rough, little more than replacing the chorus of one song with a much different song that almost, but not quite, fits.

But at its finest, it shows great talent and vision to see how two songs that don't go together actually belong that way. Yes, DJs have been mixing songs together for years. But the fusing that a good or great mash-up shows, perhaps better than anything, the true power in the hands of the average fan in the digital age. The ability to take something so pop (or pap as the case may be) and make it this compelling:

What else is the Internet for?

Let he who is wearing white shoes cast the first stone

Don't know if this came across your pop culture radar but I just found out about it. A month or two ago, former relevant performer Pat Boone made some...interesting remarks about his feelings about homosexuals, equating people who protested Prop 8 with the Mumbai terrorists. Yes. Seriously. No, really, go read the article and come back. He went there.

One of my favorite blogs, Armagideon Time has been taking Boone to task over the last few days. But I couldn't resist taking a shot myself.

I was working at a record store when Boone's covers of heavy metal songs came out.

At the time I thought he was in on the joke. Now I wonder if maybe he was thinking, "Pat Boone is back on top, baby, giving the kids what they want." At this point he's obviously delusional so anything is possible.

I thought about buying it for the weirdness factor (and because it would be dirt cheap with my employee discount). Now I'm glad I didn't.

On the other hand, you'd think that Boone would be a little more supportive of minorities. He made his career ripping off African Americans in the first place. You'd think it would have made him more open minded.

Groundhog

This is pretty lame to just post links to other sites but considering my love for the more peculiar of the holidays (previous posts about Halloween and April Fool's Day) then you got to know I love Groundhog's Day as well.

So watch this while you ponder the impact of Punxsutawney Phil seeing his shadow today.

I need a ruling on this

Please, someone help me with this decision. I can't make it on my own.

Thanks to Pandora I get exposed to bands or songs I'm not familiar with from time to time. Sometimes they rule and sometimes they suck.

But I can't decide on one band. Interpol, do they blow are they actually secretly talented? My opinion varies wildly from song to song. Somebody help a brother out here.

The obligatory election post

So at some point every blogger needs to put something up about the upcoming presidential election. I think it's in the fine print when you accept the terms and conditions of getting your blog.

I'm going to go in a different direction though. Because I teach media classes I often resort to using examples from commercials and such to illustrate points in class. Like the equal time rule that governs commercial rates and times and ensures fairness with regard to broadcasting. And I try relatively hard to be nonpartisan during such times. I try to qualify when one party does something particularly heinous that the other party isn't any better. All that sort of lip service.

Thing is I bet my students think I'm a Democrat and an Obama supporter. But they never actually ask.

Technically speaking I define myself as a Social Democrat. That's a socialist that wants to change the system through education rather than violence. I hold out hope that we can create a better society. Probably just deluding myself. But come on, Sweden and Norway can make it work.

I don't even have a joke for this

The movie Species has Ben Kingsley, Michael Madsen, Forest Whitaker, Alfred Molina and Marg Helgenberger. It makes me wonder what kind of other movie they could have made with that cast.

Oh, and the selling point at the time was Natasha Henstridge, not the rest of the cast. I'm not going to go so far as to claim you are freaking out right now but I'm betting you've at least paused to think about this.

And for those of you struggling to remember, Michael Madsen was the one who played the psycho in Reservoir Dogs. Tim Sizemore is the one with the drug problem.

I bet this doesn't happen to math professors

Some time last semester I was working in my office and a staff employee asked me about a comic strip on my door. It pokes fun at the career options of people who pursue higher degrees in the humanities. So he asked me what I studied. I told him media.

Here is the thing about studying media. Everyone has an opinion about it. And most of them that feel they need to share their opinions do not think happy thoughts.

He proceeded to tell me what was wrong with the news. I think it was mainly that they ruined Howard Dean in the last election or something. And I made a crucial error. I tried to argue logically. And play devil's advocate a little. I mentioned that if enough folks don't watch something they dislike its ratings will suffer and it will be replaced. Wrong tactic to explain things so simply.

He began ranting at me about other issues wrong with the news. Apparently a common misconception is that I have some level of pull with the networks and can get them to fix things if you complain to me. And I tried to point out that he was trying to argue several different points. And he got more worked up about things stating he was doing no such thing. Then I realized in his mind he wasn't. He was basically making one big argument and that is "Media is bad and you must agree with me about that."

He was was basically hoping I would say, "You're right, media is terrible." And I wasn't doing that. Which just made him more aggressive. I finally told him I really needed to get back to work since I had class in five minutes and I don't really even watch American news programs. I watch BBC America (remember that thing early about if you don't like it, avoid it? I follow my own advice) and pursue news online.

He went away and then came back three minutes later and made what he thought was some sort of sweeping finishing statement that was kind of sad considering he probably spent the whole time thinking it up. "The root word of news is new." Yeah, great. Except like I tried to tell him, finding new gets hard when you have 24 hours of news day to fill. Which means you turn to fluff to get something novel but he hated fluff news too. Way to argue for and against yourself at the same time.

And just in case you were wondering, this sort of thing happens semi-regularly to me. People find out what I study and suddenly they have a face for their harsh opinions about everything wrong with the media. I bet there are other academic fields that inspire similar reactions but I bet physics professors don't ever hear "You know what's wrong with gravity? It's incompatibility with quantum mechanics."




Written while listening to the Replacements. Good times.

Guitar Hero

That is why I'm not posting more. Guitar Hero. If you play it, you know the joy it brings.

If you don't, well, what are you waiting for? It is awesome and terrible in its power to addict and enslave. Don't say I didn't warn you. I taught my department head how to play last week. I'll be taking my system in for the last day of lecture in my class on video gaming and she's asked to "observe" the class that day. I'm pretty sure I could talk her into getting it so we can have it around our offices. For research purposes of course.

At this point I'm starting to almost get comfortable with medium difficulty. But I'm still not ready to attempt to tackle hard. Soon hopefully, but not yet. I also really wish Wife would play but she's a little intimidated by it. She's from the Genesis/ Super Nintendo era of controllers. Anything more than three buttons starts to overwhelm her a little. I wish it wasn't so because I'd like to share this with her, but such is life. She is willing to hang out with me and read while I play, something she doesn't do with a lot of other games.

By the way, if you didn't pick up on it in the second paragraph, yes I get paid to talk about and play video games. My job is cool.

Too smart for my own good

I'm a professor of new media and culture. I started this blog as a test of the technical elements of blogger since I'm having my classes use it. I had to know how to in order to teach it. Now my students may not appreciate this, but the advantage they have is they at least have some sense of the purpose of their blog.

But I'm not so sure about mine. Maybe I'm just overthinking but I can't decide what my goal here should be. Is this some sort of online journal? Should I use it to explore my thoughts on new media similar to what my students are doing? Is it just a dumping ground for random ideas? Is anyone even paying attention other than my wife and one reader in Chicago and two in Kentucky (Hi Monya, Amanda, and Jason by the way)?

I feel like I should try to figure out a purpose otherwise I'm just adding noise to an already overcrowded blogsphere. Did you know that at one point blog tracking site Technorati was reporting that two new blogs were being created every second? That's a lot of noise for anything to get around and through. I think part of this concern is that we're doing the chapters on the failure of the WWW to live up to the sheer volume of hype attached to it.