Jamie Antonisse

Here's an open letter in response to RJ's most recent head-scratcher. It began life as a comment, but my comment-etiquette sent me back to my own page.

THE THIRD YEAR STUDENTS
WILL BE DEFENDING THEIR MASTERS THESIS PROJECTS
TODAY (YES, TODAY, March 13th 2008)
IN ZEMECKIS 201, AKA THE ZML,
AT 6 PM SHARP-ISH.

This event is open to the extended IMD community and the Interactive-curious. It is a formal presentation of / critical in-depth look at each of the 11 projects that will be showcased this May at the Thesis Show.

Little known fact: the average horse chokes on exactly seven blog posts. Now that Spring Break is here, and I have enough half-written entries to choke a horse, I figure I'd better get to work.

I'm thinking one a day. Here's the playbill:

Review Haiku for Bow Street Runner:

Mass Effect, Beware.
This game's writing is better.
Acting? Slightly worse.

Wherein I attempt to engage in thoughtful discourse about the South By Southwest Festival while watching the movie Bubba Ho-Tep.

I'm going to try the "less is more" approach for describing this project: one sentence a picture!

My project, the Hidden Coast, was a featureless bronze cube on the outside.

On the inside, however, it was a series of archetypal scenes representing different phases of a story or life.

Pretentious Tuesday is over, I missed it, and I'm not feeling the promised essay on puppeteering tonight.

So instead, this:

Give it 38 seconds and you'll either be suitably impressed or suitably skeptical. I've never seen anything NEAR this level of dynamic response.

First off, apologies are in order re: the blog and my schedule... I got some unexpected (good) news early this week, and it's taken up a bunch of my mental real estate. All the entries I mentioned (with the possible exception of the Charles Barkley... does ANYONE know anything about running RPG Maker games???) will be up soon.

I haven't talked much about The Cache in this space recently, but that's not because nothing's been going on. In fact, I'd say it's quite the opposite... TOO MUCH has happened in the last month, and I haven't really had time to process it, much less force it into sentences. I'm going to try to rectify that now.

Beating out the entirety of YouTube, this was the stupidest thing I saw this week.

Congratulations, billboard. It was not enough for you to be absolutely devoid of meaning. You've managed to imply that recycling is somehow controversial, that this woman did something WRONG that must be justified.

Perhaps someone accidentally combined these two billboards:

I just lost three hours of work. It's my own damn fault, but if I hadn't been distracted by chat windows, facebook games, web comics, link aggregators, et al, it wouldn't have happened.

The details aren't worth repeating. The point is, I'm taking a sabbatical from the wonders of the web. It's overdue: for weeks I've found more and more time has been disappearing into the maintenance, collection and dusting of my imaginary extensions.

So I will check my email twice a day, in which time I will allow myself to move my cars in Parking Wars exactly ONCE. I will not play Packrat. I will not sign into Gmail chat or AIM. And, unless compelled for a particular assignment, I will not touch the blog or wiki. All my work will be offline. I will write letters and bake bread. I will learn to play "November Rain" on my acoustic guitar. I will do most of the above.

I'll be back in a week, a better man.

I'm back from the edge.

It turns out fresh baked bread is delicious, November Rain is not as good without the strings, and I can actually work efficiently at my computer if I ignore 3/4 of the options open to me.

I'm going to have to remember that, moving forward.

I've been fully back online since yesterday afternoon, and the difference has been night and day. It started out innocent: after opening up Firefox, I talked to a few friends, checked my usual pages. But within an hour, I had returned to a troublesome pattern, the timesink that inspired my self imposed off-lining in the first place.

As it turns out, my instincts were the same as millions of other online chumps. When given the agency of the network and the choice of any online activity, I spent my time playing the slots.