Author: Jer Clarke

(via Louisa’s LJ)

Been spending a lot of time inside while in japan, but luckily made a friend on Craigslist Tokyo who showed me around and helped me order food at restaurants, which is pretty much impossible as it often involves using a vending machine with no pictures and meat in all the choices (by the way, Craigslist is awesome, as I’ve been discovering lately. The Montreal page gets a fair amount of traffic and scored me a sweet apartment).

I updated my Flickr account with photos, highlights below:

New Friend from the Internet

Reality to George Lucas: You’re Fired, Noob

Arcade P.O.Ds

It’s supposed to look like a “peach”… uh hunh.

I’m consistenly alarmed (as in, lost and rendered useless) by how few people know English around here, but that’s good for them and probably just because I was spoiled by India. Things maybe aren’t as constantly surprising as I thought they might be but that’s probably because I got my astonishment out of the way before I got here (thanks for spoiling the surprise, Internet).

Made a big update to My Flickr Account, hightlights below:

Shadow of Tokyo

Pachinko

Water

Helpful Robot Arm

A bit late but I was in India so forgive me. Ed Felten’s blog Freedom To Tinker is always a fascinating read about technology, law and encryption, but he’s also really funny when he tries:

How the Grinch Pwned Christmas: The Grinch, determined to stop Christmas, hacks into Amazon’s servers and cancels all deliveries to Who-ville. The Whos celebrate anyway, gathering in a virtual circle and exchanging user-generated content. When the Grinch sees this, his heart grows two sizes and he priority-ships replacement gifts to Who-ville.

Read the rest.

Having parted company with my travelling partner Jenn Brea, I decided to see Pushkar, a stoner haven near Jaipur where alcohol and meat are illeagal but you can buy hash-based drinks in all the restaurants. I made some friends but got sick and felt lonely and missed Montreal, so there you go.

I’ve realized that in captioning my photos I’ve put a fairly detailed travel log into My Flickr Account, so if you’re looking for details feel free to sift through the images. There’s also lots of good monkey shots in there.

I’m now in Tokyo where the toilet washes then dries your butt for you, out of India where the sink drains onto the floor, go figure. Pictures of that to follow.

Highlights from Pushkar:

A Different Kind

Parade – or – food for the sacred

Moti

How Many Can You Count?

20 million people is too many it seems, Delhi was terrifying and pretty decrepit, though I might be biased because I was staying in one of the worst neighboorhoods. As soon as the conference was over (4 days in Delhi) I booted out to Jaipur, a “small” city of only about the size of Montreal, chosen primarily because my pilgrimage to Galta, a.k.a. monkey temple, required it.

We saw a few of the tourist sites but Galta was definitely the best, both because I was able to reunite with my ancestors and for the outrageous view it afforded.

I’m now in the hippie infested town of Pushkar, on the road to pretty much completely missnig christmas, sorry Jesus.

Highlights from My Flickr Stream below. (lots more monkey pictures there)

Two drivers for the price of one

Hills from inside Monkey Temple

My ancestor overlooks the city

Sandalwood Tika is good luck

Flight to Delhi involved a stopover in Japan for the night, which was beautiful. So far Delhi itself is mostly terrifying but also enlightening.

I’ll be uploading the mass of my photos to my Flickr account to save this site from being overloaded, so head there to see all the details. Below are a few of the highlights so far.

13 Hour Flight

Good Morning Tomorrow

Welcome to Japan

I’ve been meaning to post about The Daedalus Project for awhile now but haven’t had the time. Nick Yee has been running it for several years, compiling survey data and analysis about how MMOs (Massively Multiplayer Online games, like WoW) are played, why they are played and how players live their lives ouside the game. I’ve used his research in several papers and always find it insightful and caring towards the complex and nuanced nature of MMO gaming. More than worth reading through the article list whether you’re a gamer or just know one (and if you don’t know any you will soon), if only for gems like the fact that 30% of all female players end up in real-life relationships started through the game, an astonishing statistic as far as I’m concerned.

Today’s update contained what is no doubt one of the best articles I’ve read about MMO addiction and how we talk about it. Yee is critical of the way the media is tossing around the A-word without giving careful consideration to how the games are actually used by the “addicted” gamers. Though you could almost always make this claim about the mass-media’s treatment of a topic you care about, the fact that most reporters likely haven’t even played a similar game points to the fact that a communication problem is pretty likely in this situation. He then points out how words like “dependence” better capture the behaviors which he likens more closely to shopping-addiction than the more physical and accepted as dangerous drugs-addiction. Most importantly, he proposes that the media and analysts are missing the other negative factors that influence someone’s likelihood of becomming dependent on a game. The social awkwardness or unfortunate circumstances that could drive someone to prefer a fantasy world to the real one.

Link to full article.

These are obviously important considerations to bear in mind but I think he’s missing an important element of the problem, the fact that the game itself is to blame if it’s absense would have prevented the problems that result from it’s presence (which sounds redundant but might need to be pointed out explicitly to make sense). To save your eyes from text-murder I’ll put my full response to his article (posted as a comment on the article) below.

Continue reading “The Daedalus Project and MMO addiction”

Hit me so hard I had to share it. All the washed out scrolling backgrounds we stared at as kids would represent these kinds of wastelands were the violence of the games to be real. The desolation of the landscape and the weary look on Mario make me want to defeat Bowser more than ever.

(Found here by Boris. The artist, “The Phlash”, does a ton of anime-style murals around montreal, including the one that got artbusted).