127.0.0.1 is the loneliest number.

I really would like this shirt, because it makes me laugh. However, I feel it would join my collection of geektastic shirts that alternately get me weird looks or people stopping me on campus pointing and jumping up and down and going “O.M.G. WHERE DID YOU GET THAT?” (This would actually be fairly cool if these random people didn’t actually spell out ‘O.M.G.’) The Han Shot First shirt is especially good for this reaction.

Anyway!

I’ve been insanely busy this week, between meetings and classes and my assistantship. But somehow I managed to write a 3500 word essay on video games, the perception of games as less, the violence/sexuality debate, and the deviance of adult female gamers. And how they aren’t really deviant, but society refuses to wake up and smell the next-gen consoles. I might post it at some point, if people are interested. It’s not anything really publishable, but it’s a memo for my thesis. For those who don’t actually do qualitative research, memoing is basically something you do throughout every step of the process. You write theory, you write observations, you write reactions, you write basically everything up. I love writing, but sometimes it’s enough to make me remember why positivism is so popular. (Not that I’m not doing a pretty heavy quantoid project this semester — ordered probit and trend analysis, anyone? — but…)

Oh, and I did a crapload of work for the union. Yep. Here at SIU we’ve got a graduate assistant union and just finished bargaining our first contract, but there’s still a lot of work to do to strengthen the union and truly create an environment of solidarity and just working conditions. I’m actually going on a retreat this weekend to plan and organize. I’m looking forward to it, it’ll be fun (and hey, it’s paid for, including free booze and food) but I’m also not sure I want to spend three days in close contact like that. Oh well! Too late to back out now, I’m a union officer (head of the stewards council), so it’s sort of part and parcel of leadership.

I’m sure you all don’t want to hear me babble about that.

In other, er, virtual news, the Devil May Cry 4 demo was fun but… same-old same-old. Rock Band drums are difficult; I just can’t get that foot pedal down. I’m fine with the pads but whenever I have to hit the pedal, whoops, there goes all my rhythm.

The Mighty Boosh is hilarious.

truth and consequences

It’s been ages since I last blogged and that is entirely my fault! Really. Very sorry about that. I’m going to try and be much more conscientious about it. It’s not that I don’t have the time to write, now that I’m back in school, it’s more that when I’ve finished all the other stuff I need to do (studies, mostly), I find I don’t have the energy to apply my brain power.

Today, of course, I have both time and energy. Yes, I know, I could be using that to get ahead on work (such as seminar paper writing, finishing up my lit review coding for my qualitative research project, writing the feminist essay that’s due December, working on that editing for the journal I’m assisting with, ad nauseum) but I decided I’d spend a little time before my stats study group blogging.

Let’s give the quick and dirty update:

1. Next time someone asks you to proof a 55 page prospectus, ask for money. Trust me on this one. Really. Either that, or something equivalent to the amount of headache, eyestrain and exclamations to your pet “HOW COULD [PERSON] GET A MA WHEN THEY WRITE SENTENCES WITH NO VERBS; INSANITY!” (see also Confessions of a Journal Editor by Jeffrey J. Williams)

2. It’s the “rainy season” here now. It just finally started getting cold and, shortly following the onset of 50F temperature, it started to rain. According to someone who did her undergraduate work here, it’ll keep raining until winter hits.

3. I think I’ve fairly well settled in here, at least with my cohort and the other MA students. A few of the first and second year PhD students too, I suppose, since they’re taking classes. The third and fourth years… I’ve only met once or twice. I’m getting along really well with all the professors too, which is nice, even the one who drives me up the wall with the insane (and one might argue unreasonable) amount of work she assigns for the semester. This is the qualitative methods class, of course, so on top of everything else we have to do, we’re also conducting a “good, non-descriptive research project” with a final paper that should be “journal-ready.” Not that any of our research, at least us first year students, will be journal ready of course. No reputable journal would publish research, even qualitative research, based on “at least two interviews.” Given that some of us didn’t get our human subjects approval back until late September or even early October (like me, of course), most of us won’t have time for follow-up interviews or anything like that to make the methods conducive to in-depth study. Oh well. It’s not like this is what I’m going to do for my thesis.

4. Speaking of my thesis, I’ve decided what I want to do. I won’t actually be starting until next semester when I take deviance. Essentially, I’m going to be studying female gamers; how they “do” gender on the internet, their interactions with the games, their interactions within female gaming communities, their interactions with male gamers, thoughts of educational gaming, games as toys, and how they reconcile the expectations of femininity with the masculine image of gaming (despite marketing studies on game use and consumption). It’ll be fun; I’m looking forward to it.

5. I am not, however, looking forward to writing up fieldnotes and transcribing the interviews I’m going to do this weekend. Hooray for laziness.

6. Virtual worlds threaten ‘values’: I read this news item earlier this morning and cringed. While I agree in concept — have you seen; some of those Bratz dolls? — that letting toy companies teach our children is probably a bad idea, I cringed more at the sensationalism that the BBC indulged in when they reported the item.

7. There is no seven. There is only Zuul.

I’ll try and actually post more often. At least twice a week. Honest.

Cat on my head.

Domain successfully reclaimed. Databases almost successfully retooled and updated. Some data lost, recreated the pages and link listings. Mourning the loss of all comments. Wonder how long it will be before someone reads this page again. Fond of speaking without pronouns.

All pretentiousness aside, I’ve somehow managed to survive my almost first week of work + graduate school. This makes me happy; it would make me happier if I weren’t still sick. Yes, the head cold is still here and on top of that I managed to bite my tongue somehow last night while I was sleeping.

There’s apparently hurricane Dean boiling and brewing right now. We talked some about this last night at work and it didn’t really hit me until this morning. You see, I just started working for Hyatt. (Queue another post sometime later about the insane corporate culture they have.) I’m in training to be a reservation agent, which means I’ll be talking to those people fleeing from the gulf. Already people are packing up and leaving New Orleans for fear it hits them and the levees break again.

You can talk all you want, and I know I spent a lot of time being pissed off in my econ class because of the horribly racist and classist connotations of the professor’s take on the situation, about Katrina and just how bad the government response was and what should have been done to help move people out and why some couldn’t, etc. And it really hit me that I’m going to be working in hospitality during hurricane season. I’m going to be assisting this people, or at least be trying to, find them a place, any place to go that they can take themselves, their things, their families, their pets that’s safe. That’s really a pretty awesome responsibility.

In other news, I think I have about three different ideas for research papers right now and at least one doesn’t seem to have much in the way of literature out there about it, at least when I did some preliminary searching on the topic yesterday, so it’s a possible thesis topic. The other big one probably has been done but I haven’t actually tried a lit search yet. I plan on doing some Monday afternoon. This weekend is strictly for relaxation and catching up on stuff I need to do.