Out of curiosity?

Do I know anyone who will be in Seattle (or rented car rate reasonable driving distance of Seattle) at the end of August?

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.

Typing numbers on a laptop really sucks.

In a moment of utter and blissful geekitude, I spent the last, oh, five hours playing with random variables in the General Social Survey (GSS) 2006 data to see what weird and random things I could find out. Now I have to stop because my shoulders hurt from the oddly stooped position I’ve been sitting in, the cat wants attention, and I think I want to spend some time baking. And possibly some time cleaning. And relaxing. I’m ahead on work. For now. I suppose if I really wanted to be ahead I could get started on my crim lit review. Or work ahead into some ANOVA stuff for stats, since my brain was apparently eaten by the Correlation Monster.

Or I could actually write that post about games that’s been in my brain for ages. But I probably won’t. I’m lazy. I’ll write it up tomorrow while I’m waiting between class and appointments.

In other news, I apparently got a tuition scholarship. Heh.

…I could read an actual book. Of fiction. Must resist urge to go to bookstore. Must. Resist.

I just spent a half hour playing fetch with my cat…

…and it was terribly relaxing. Everyone should have a pet to play with.

Let’s see, what to update since the last time I wrote?

1. I got an assistantship! Yay!

It’s the one I wrote about earlier, working under the editor of Design Research Quarterly. The articles are pretty interesting, so even if the writing is dreadful in the pure form and it takes me five hours and three Aleve to edit one article, it’ll be worth it. The experience I get in the editing/publishing end will come in handy later on if I ever hope to have a position in the publication side of research (and the idea of me being a knowledge gatekeeper of that sort is both hilarious and intriguing). I also think it’ll make me an even stronger writer, also very necessary to surviving grad school.

And yes, because I’m materially minded, a partial tuition waiver. It’s only a 25% position, so they only waive 9 hours. I’m taking 11. I pay 2 hours worth and fees. The fees are what really suck. Still, it gives me about $2500 back out of the $4200 for the semester plus a (tiny) stipend. That’s nothing to sneeze at for something that’s in theory only 10 hours of work a week.

2. I’ve been sort of running stats study groups for our quantitative methods class. It’s more fun than I thought it would be because I find that I actually still remember and understand this stuff from way back in 2004 when I took undergrad stats. Also very helpful when you take into account that Sherkat tends to jump steps like crazy and assume we can keep up. So far I have been but I definitely have to remember to ask him to slow down and explain things when we get to the higher end stats formulas that I haven’t really dealt with or used. Regardless, the groups help me cement my knowledge, figure out alternate ways of explaining what’s going on, and it’s a great sort of ‘intro’ to teaching. Most of the tutoring I’ve done up to this point has been one-on-one, so the group environment is nice.

Is it weird I like statistics? I remember being the girl in high school who cringed through her math courses. I survived them and did well because I studied judiciously not because I was “good” at math.

3. I’ve been cooking a lot more since I moved down here. Some of it is out of necessity. I’m hungrier because I’m running around like crazy. But I also need the leftovers. I can’t eat out as much as I used to be able to; I really miss those nice big paychecks from CMR. Alas.

4. I have some thoughts on bootstrapping in discussions of prejudice that I kind of want to talk about at some point. When I’m not in the middle of sauteeing pierogis.

5. Also have thoughts on the use of the tyrant figure and anti-establishment coding vs. establishment frameworks in video games, also to be talked about later. See reason above.