a looking-glass book

a jog/bake-athon party

mailed this out, but thought id throw it up here as well:

nothing like waiting until the last minute.
actually, this is mostly due to the madness that was the thesis show opening (http://interactive.usc.edu/thesis2005)

kurt and i are throwing a jog/bake-athon tomorrow night at our apartment tomorrow night.

the theme (according to kurt) requires one of two things: a baked good or a jogging costume. and bonus points if you manage to collect signatures pledging for you to attend.

in reality, this is a graduation celebration, before everyone's families come into town and get too busy to relax (again).

let's say 8pm, our place.
if you need directions or more info, just track one of us down. and feel free to bring friends.

know it is short notice (and a work night for some of you), but we are only graduating once. so drop by, have a drink and help us celebrate 3 years of hard work.

im famous...again

whee!
taken just a few minutes ago by the illustrious julian bleecker.

zemekis on cbs

the zemekis piece for 'polar express' that i sat around for aired this morning. i got up in the middle of the night and turned on the vcr (see, ancient technology is still good for something). i went to bed.

i got a call at 7am from janeann and one at 10am from my mom. wandered out, watched the piece.

its a shame - they only used 2 pieces of footage. the first is describing 'the next spielberg'. this is sad cause zemekis was talking about it in regards to new media and digital stuff. cbs cut that bit out.

the second is better, because it is me. they didnt make me look stupid (thanks cbs) but instead made me look like one of his graduate students he advises. but there i am with an isight on my head and rocking my fantastic four shirt. go nerdiness!

im not complaining too much - it did get me on national tv, if only for 10 seconds of so. you at least hear part of our dialogue as he wanders away from me.

Download file (quicktime, 1.3 meg, 37 seconds)

i am cool!

from will, over im:
"because you are so awesome, I need to send email to you all the time"

there you go.

web censorship

most of the people on this side of the world don't read my personal blog. yesterday was a bit of (behind-the-scenes) 'excitement' over there.

it seems that one of my friends had to have all their posts pulled down, off the site. not their choice and im not really able to discuss it over here, in public.

its an issue. it rears its head in different ways. this whole 'public vs private' that seems to be hitting me daily. yesterday it was more of a professional vs private life thing.

people are getting canned all the time over blogs. see this, just a couple of weeks ago. it makes no sense - fired for blogging about work - as a web developer. like the guy fired from microsoft last year for taking pictures of apple machines.

its becoming a real thing. that your job determines what you are allowed to put in public. (i think it was last month's 'playboy' (yes, i currently have a subscription, let's move on [see? another private vs public topic.]) that had a blurb about police officers getting in trouble for starring in online porn.)

so why bring all this up? why make a post, a hand wave over all this?

because my thesis is going to make this topic of blogs look like an anthill. when you can suddenly be incriminated because there exists records of your actions, what then?

big brother wont turn out to be the government. itll turn out to be my peer group. itll be will and kurt and todd and brinker and stephanie and my girlfriend and my sister and all the people close to me who disagree with variable x on how i lived my day. whether its the route i drive, the food i eat, the people i talk to - all this will be not only public, but then open to debate.

you want collective responsibility? this has the opportunity for it.

so far, ive been lucky. no where that i have been employed has had issues with my site. at this point, its so tied into who i am, what i do, that it would probably come first over a job. thats some serious stuff. and not everyone feels that way. and not everyone has that choice - most of these people have been fired/disciplined after the fact.

i didnt mean to go off on such a rant about this. but its a serious topic to consider, this whole 'public face/private face'. the legal, moral and socilogical implications of it arent to be downplayed. the facets of your life that will be affected are serious.

im ready to get fired for it.

excuse me while i go put on my camera.

bio

for those of you stumbling across this site, i thought an introduction might be in order. (its dry, it perhaps boring, but i wanted to push out my skillset, background and thesis work in some sort of collected manner for those who havent heard it 600 times.)

im tripp millican, a third year in the program.
ive got a bs in computer science from william and mary ('98) and a bfa in communication design (w/ an emphasis on kinetic imagery) from virginia commonwealth university ('02).

from 98-02, i worked as a web developer for a number of companies, including several fortune 500 ones. most of my work was design oriented, with some light server-side programming.

on my own, ive done a fair amount of database and server-side programming - personally its been in asp and mssql, but here at school, its been php and mysql.

whew. that was dry and boring.

my thesis is working towards a 24/7 point-of-view video recording system, publishable to the web. its a very deep project - the more i dig, the more stuff seems to surface.

im way into narrative. reading, writing, telling stories.

i'm always looking for help - programatically or creatively. im working towards several hardware systems right now and would love you to be interested enough to volunteer wearing it one day so i can see your life.

you can aim me at trippywah
or email me at trippp at gmail
(and yes, its with 3 p's, as gmail makes you have 6 characters)

'virtual boyfriend'

sent to me, i figure this balances out the virtual girlfriend bit. i mean, who doesnt want a boyfriend pillow? (thought youd like this kellee)

no, its true

im alive. and out of the hospital. ill be at home for the next 2 weeks or so and then ill be mostly normal for a while. sweet. catchup time soon.

this week in movies

off subject, but since i know most of you dont follow my 'other' site:

'dogville', lars von triers newest movie plays at the egyptian on tues night at 7.30. 'cremaster 1 and 2' are a double feature thurs night at new beverly cinema. fri night at the egyptian is 'ace in the hole' (billy wilder/jack lemmon) which is unavailable on vhs/dvd. sat and sun afternoons are screenings of lars von triers 'the kingdom' (split into 2 parts).

i would love company to any or all of these, given my health holds/continues to improve. let me know - these should all be awesome shows.

well

this post wont count for much, the ones in the next 24 hours should count for a lot more. but i cant believe i havent posted in almost 2 months. this is not due to sheer laziness on my part.

im about to finish a second draft the paper i posted in october. hopefully a more rounded version, more fully explaining my ideas. working on this paper has led to more ideas, 2 future sections exploring more of these ideas.

ive got a ton of ideas to sketch out on here and i plan to in the next 24 hours. but realizing it had been so long but yet not quite being ready to post them, im throwing up this 'useless' post in the interim.

ah well.

vr. and html.

stupid and silly. but it still amuses me.

audiotistic

on sat at the la sports arena, 2pm-1am audiotistic

chemical brothers (dj set), nas, big boi, ed rush and optical, bad boy bill, doc scott, doc martin, seb fontaine, qbert and automator, z-trip...and more.

30 bucks. whos in? i need a posse.

also, even though i wont be here:
monster massive on halloween - not only felix da housecat and spooky, but this:
"Everyone who passes through the gate will get a pair of 3-D glasses to participate in the visual candy of Chromadepth 3-D, an effect that transforms two-dimensional images to three."

who says i cant post on topic?

tv's tipping point

will, im sure youve already read this but here it is anyway. from slashdot:
tv's tipping point

fightbox?

youve got to be kidding me.
fightbox - a TV show which is "...a gladiatorial arena-style competition between virtual characters, created by members of an online community who compete... to get a chance of appearing on the show itself..."
(from slashdot)

'geo url'

geourl icbm adress server

GeoURL is a location-to-URL reverse directory. This will allow you to find URLs by their proximity to a given location. Find your neighbor's blog, perhaps, or the web page of the restaurants near you.

a reply to ashley's statements

i am replying to ashley's piece, located here. (havent mastered the talkback portion, perhaps it could help me in an instance like this. but i bet not.)
----

while i don't disagree with everything you state here, i think you make a lot of assumptions and overlook a lot of facts.

"I want to look at how little presence in women and other minorities could perpetuate this aggressive behavior and/or negative attitudes and beliefs."

there is absolutely nothing in what you say about how not including genders or races in games could lead to aggressive behavior or negative attitudes. in fact, everything you state is about how the way they _are_ included causes issues.

you make this mistake several times and i think there is a huge distinction between the two.

in a society with so many kids who come from households where their sole parent or both parents are working out the house, computer use should decrease isolation (and by decreasing isolation, increase interpersonal communication/relationships, decreasing depression and aggressive attitudes)

the prevalence of game play in the lives of men and women may not be equal. suggesting that game play reduces interpersonal interactions may not be entirely erroneous. however, girls, especially those of adolescent age (the age when depression rates climb for females and remain steady for males) depend more on validation through interpersonal relationships to bolster their self esteem. if female teens and young adults could learn to integrate more rewarding and distracting activities such as game play into their daily lives, there might be incredible benefits, such as reduced depression through alternate coping means (distraction--video games, rather than ruminative coping).

[thanks to rachael for the previos two paragraphs full of thoughts on the subject. they were too good to go unmentioned.]

furthermore, you point out yourself how females tend towards puzzle games over action games. then is it any wonder that there are fewer leading female characters in action games? you say you gave up on games when you were a teen, playing super mario brothers. this fact seems to tie into your statistic about teen girl players. you played then, so is it really so tough to believe that girls that age continue to play video games?

these companies know their audiences, they know who are buying their games. and to assume they are going to make games with equal representation when their audience is skewed to one demographic is naive. i think 16% is a pretty good number considering. it also makes me wonder exactly what gets counted in that - there are plenty of animal characters (crash, spyro, all the newer ps2 characters whose names escape me at the moment). sports games traditionally do not include women characters (much like real life). these facts are going to drive that percentage down.

women were portrayed as bystanders 50% of the time? then 50% of the time they werent. come on, thats an absurd statistic.

more likely to scream? again silly.

and wearing less clothes? of course they are wearing less clothes. if you are selling a game to a 15 year old boy, what is he going to want to see? half naked women. thats a given. is there a reason maxim does so well? and is this a bad thing? i would argue no. you might argue that it creates unfair standards in the minds of the viewers which can lead to self-esteem issues in women. but if you use that argument, let's turn it around as well. the heroes in games, mostly male, are certainly not built like i am. they are much bigger and stronger than i could ever hope to be. it works both way.

look at fighting games. they contain a variety of characters of both genders (and some other fanciful beings usually) that cover a wide spectrum of body types and attitudes.

I wont try and defend your statistics about minorities, but I would like to ask how many other video game characters are hurt in games. I know for a fact that female African-american characters are not the only ones who get attacked or hurt in games and showing a statistic like that out of any sort of context is unfair.

from your genderspace post:
“Having said that, I often wonder how many gamers are avid porno-watchers. I wonder this because the women in both pornograhic films as well as games have the same look. Just look at the pictures of the women that the author posts within her article - all are beautiful, big-breasted, smiling and posed perfectly for the male pornographic gaze.

I can't say that if game companies started paying attention to this sad reality, thus creating believable female characters, that I would be any more inclined to play games. The truth is that I lost interest in gaming years ago ... sometime shortly after Mario Bros. for the Super Nintendo. While it's hard to determine exactly why I lost interest, I feel confident in saying that, like most women, games simply don't appeal to us like they do to men. This is decently obvious given the unfeminine goals of games: shooting people, raping prostitutes, racing cars, making tons of money, conquering the world, etc. Personally, it all seems like a waste of my brain power to sit in front of a TV, push buttons, and get upset, for no meaningful reason.”

1. I can think of absolutely NO game which has you raping prostitutes or anyone else. I believe you are referencing GTA3, which allows you pick up prostitutes and then later, if you wish, beat them up. the game lets you attack anyone though. to eliminate this ability for one character would be jarring. the game never actually encourages you or asks you to attack or even pick up these women. how is this different from real life?

2. see my previous comments about women in games and how they are portrayed. society has determined a basic level of surface-level beauty. this is reflected in pornography, video games, movies, the media in general. it is something we are all aware of and videogames on a whole does not stand out as any worse then these other mediums.

3. the end of this quote, you mistake the medium for the content. that’s a mistake. just because you don’t want to ‘conqueror the world’ doesn’t mean that someone else doesn’t. and it especially doesn’t mean that the media itself is at fault or flawed. it means that there hasn’t been content you appreciate yet. that’s like saying ‘i don’t like paintings because I don’t like pollack.’ its ill-informed.

“This research team found that between 90 and 95 percent of test participants showed an unconscious bias against blacks. We can only assume that those beliefs are the same with respect to gender, age, people with disabilities, etc.”
no we cant. there is no evidence that this unconscious bias comes from video games. youre extrapolating data and making assumptions which are a little tough to swallow. “the test participants discriminate against anyone who is different then they are.” i don’t buy it.

you seem to get extremely worked up about how women are being oppressed. id really like to see you also tackle the other half of this equation and see how women can and are empowered by games and how many of the facts you consider as negative, could, in fact be taken as positives as well.

foxtrot again

its aslmost sad i can relate so well on so many levels to this. back to hacking away at javascript, windows apis and winamp...

you know you're a nerd when...

design

well, this has a semi-new look now. i'm not even close to being done on it, but i wanted to start playing with the templates. this should suffice for another couple of days, until i get back to tweaking it. the issue right now is more of figuring out how i need my (currently nonexistant) data to be filtered and stored. thatll go a long way to help me figure out what the ui is all about. i guess i have been spoiled by madeofglass - i have had the opportunity to build it up gradually for the last 3 years. i don't have that luxury here. i don't have logs to consult for usabilty testing. on the other hand, i don't have 10 other people using this blog. i can do whatever i want here, for once. hence, the absurd design. for now.

first post

just witnessed on my roommate's away message on aim:
Auto response from [censored]: FACT: Mike Brinker isn't here.