Review: I Shall Wear Midnight by Terry Pratchett

I Shall Wear Midnight There’s a moment of sadness with every new Terry Pratchett novel. Since the English comedy-fantasy author’s 2007 announcement that he has Alzheimer’s disease, he’s admitted that each book may be his last. He’s undoubtedly bringing one part of his legacy to a bittersweet conclusion with the final tale of Tiffany Aching, the young witch on the mystical planet called Discworld. Across the first three books in the sequence of young adult novels (The Wee Free Men, A Hat Full of Sky, and Wintersmith), Tiffany went from callow apprentice to respected hag o’ the hills.

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Gamefication in Education at SXSW (2016)

(Following on from yesterday’s posting about how IT and games are changing the education world, here’s an interview I did for the Austin Chronicle with Grace Lau, director of VR the Global Nomads Group, a nonprofit dedicated to reducing the barriers of understanding between kids in different nations.)

It’s a small world, but, as the old saying goes, you wouldn’t want to walk it. For centuries, the only way to truly experience another culture was to visit it. Now international travel has never been easier, but it seems too much of the conflict-ravaged world is off-limits to the students most eager to learn about it. For Grace Lau, director of virtual reality for education nonprofit Global Nomads Group, technology can still help bridge the gaps of oceans and borders. She said, “When you put people in front of each other, whether it’s face to face or in the virtual world, we found that they’re able to draw out those natural human connections.”

The purpose of GNG is to make students into global citizens. So far, the nonprofit has linked students in the U.S. to kids in South America, Thailand, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and nations across Sub-Saharan Africa – “places with the largest culture gap between the U.S. and abroad,” said Lau. However, their biggest initiative at the moment is in the Middle East.

The core of this initiative was Project Syria, a collaboration with virtual reality pioneer Nonny de la Peña that connected South Central Los Angeles’ View Park Preparatory Charter High School and Mahatta Community Center in Amman, Jordan. Originally commissioned by the World Economic Forum, this VR tool simulates the experience of being in a conflict zone. Lau said, “Through CGI, Nonny’s team at Immersive Journalism re-created a street bombing in Aleppo, Syria. So with these headsets, the students in L.A. went through what it would be like on that street corner. Then we connected those students with Syrian refugees here in Jordan.”

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The Not-So-World Wide Web (2008)

(There’s been a lot of discussion about representation and access on the Internet in the last couple of years, but this piece I wrote for the Austin Chronicle’s SXSW 2008 coverage shows the issues have been debated, especially about the Anglocentric and Americentric nature of Internet culture, for a lot longer than that.)

Back in 1990, when Tim Berners-Lee wrote the code for a browser he called WorldWideWeb, it was supposed to connect everyone. “Its universality is essential,” he later wrote, saying it could “make sense of what we are doing, where we individually fit in, and how we can better work together.” But whose idea of universal? Is it a one-size-fits-all, anything-goes approach, with no restriction on content? Or a tamed Web, where no one can find anything upsetting?

Before content, there is language. The Web was built in English. All those acronyms (http, URL, TCP/IP) mean something in English. Most websites are in English. But an all-English Web can also be an excluding Web. “Providing a service in English only shuts out huge amounts of users,” says Stephanie Booth, Web consultant and writer of Climb to the Stars, one of the first major bilingual blogs. Living in Switzerland, a country with four national languages (German, French, Italian, and Romansh) where many citizens speak conversational English, she is exposed to the complexities of translation on a day-to-day basis. “People may speak enough English to communicate with the man on the street, but it’s not sufficient for them to try and tame new, potentially scary software or services in that language.”

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Gamefication in Education at SXSW (2008)

(Gamefication has become the buzzword in education circles, and here’s a SXSW 2008 preview for the Austin Chronicle on those issues.)

The line between educational software and games has always been a blurry one. Now educators and game developers are doing more than just making toys with some redeeming qualities: They’re adapting lessons from gaming into the curriculum, from interactivity in Nintendo’s Wii Sports to cooperative play in Halo 3.

“Games are largely misunderstood,” said Suzanne Seggerman, president of Games for Change. “They are not inherently sophomoric.” G4C introduces activist groups to the educational benefits of situated learning – the cognitive process of learning through doing, or in this case simulated doing. The idea is nothing new. “The U.S. Army has [combat simulator]America’s Army,” Seggerman said, “and it’s their number one recruiting tool. So why shouldn’t nonprofits have access to the same tools?” ‘

She points to the award-winning Darfur Is Dying. It’s a different view of battle to, say, Call of Duty: a deceptively simple online game in which players are Sudanese refugees, avoiding Janjaweed militias while foraging for water. They learn and are inspired by doing, a process she argues has always been part of gaming. “Will Wright has had hundreds of people mailing him, saying they became urban planners because of SimCity,” said Seggerman.

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Interview: John Halcyon Styn (2007)

John Halcyon Styn(In 2007, as part of a package I produced for the Austin Chronicle on the interface of cinema and the Internet, I talked to John Halcyon Styn: a multi-time Webby winner, he made his professional reputation as a business-to-business marketing and branding consultant for an adult Web company running. We talked about what the film industry, especially independent filmmakers, can learn from online porn as a distribution model.)

Richard Whittaker: Why has porn taken to the Web so strongly?

John Halcyon Styn: The adult industry doesn’t have the option to go through traditional channels, so they’ve been forced to innovate. There are not a lot of advertisers who are prepared to subsidize adult content. But they have a product that is so much better suited to get people to pull their wallet out, which is a greater incentive to take risks and try new technology. Video distribution via IP and download on demand are convenient for every part of life but are a godsend for a porn consumer. In the same way the VCR revolutionized our viewing habits and was pushed by the porn consumer who enjoyed the privacy of it, this just takes it to the next beautiful level. It’s a purely personal, private commerce.

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Review: Nevermore (2010)

nevermoreTechnically, Fantastic Fest ended on Thursday: But the final curtain did not fall until Saturday and the last Austin performance of Nevermore, horror icon Jeffrey Combs‘ one-man stage show about the life of Edgar Allan Poe.

Set in 1848, it presents a pivotal moment in Poe’s life: A year after the death of his wife and muse Virgina, the West Point graduate-turned-poet and author was engaged to essayist Sarah Helen Whitman and seemingly turning a corner in his career and personal life. But what looms over the performance is the dark knowledge for the audience that Poe himself will be dead within two years.

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The Future of Film (As Seen in 2007)

(In 2008, I wrote this piece on the future of cinema and the Internet for the Austin Chronicle. So no surprise that some of the prognostications were way off target. However,  there’s some early wisdom about the way cinema was changing, including Arin Crumley and Susan Buice getting ahead of the curve on  predicting theatrical on demand.)

The Web was going to be a bottomless well of content. No matter what your interest, you could log on and find something to fit your tastes. And go as far as you’d like from there.

There’s a problem with that. Infinite is a big number. Audiences can’t browse online forever. Talented artists and content creators spent more time keeping up with software than actually creating content. Learn HTML; XML comes along. Master Shockwave; here comes Flash. When independent filmmakers finally get online, they’re competing for bandwidth with someone innovating new ways to drop Mentos into Coke.

The old days of a Web campaign for a film attracting audiences on novelty alone are over. According to Henry Jenkins, director of the comparative-media-studies program at MIT and a South by Southwest Interactive 07 speaker, “It’s no longer the case that, if you build it, they will come. If you drop your film on YouTube and do nothing around it, it will get buried under a billion other videos.” Instead, filmmakers are finding success in reaching out to online communities, and firms are developing new Web tools to build and maintain those links.

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Review: Bloodworth (2010)

There’s always a sneaking suspicion that every touring musician is just running away from home. In Bloodworth, the longer they stay away, the more everyone gets hurt when they return.

Adapted from Provinces of Night, William Gay’s 2002 novel of the Tennessee back waters, Bloodworth walks a similar path to another of his recently adapted stories, SXSW 2008 award winner That Evening Sun. Both combine a slow-burn rural drama with an ensemble cast of rare authenticity.

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Interview: Simon Barrett

There aren’t many famous scriptwriters in the horror community, but Simon Barrett is undoubtedly one. Starting with the (in)famous Frankenfish, Barrett’s character-centric approach to the genre (especially with his long-time collaborator Adam Wingard) have become critical faves, with You’re Next and The Guest making many best-of and end-of-year lists. The first time I interviewed him for the Austin Chronicle was at Fantastic Fest in  2010, when he had just won the best script award  for his radical new take on the serial killer genre, A Horrible Way to Die. The impromptu interview took place in the hallway at the Alamo South Lamar.

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Richard Whittaker: It’s a pretty unique take on serial killers: Where did the story come from?

Simon Barrett: We got a couple of false starts of trying get projects financed that [Adam] would direct and I would write and produce, and he was getting kinda frustrated. He’d say, ‘Serial killer movies always get made,’ and I was like, ‘I don’t want to write a serial killer movie.’ I don’t like most of them, and between Se7en and Zodiac, David Fincher‘s said all there is to say on that subject. They’re all either procedurals or ‘inside the mind of a psychopath,’ which I don’t enjoy and I don’t think it’s possible to do effectively.

But he started talking about Ted Bundy, and how he escaped from prison and was thought to be hunting for his ex-girlfriend. That got me thinking about something that excited me, which is the idea of addictive love, and that serial killers are real people with parents and ex-girlfriends. If your kid grows up to be a serial killer, how do you trust a decision you’re going to make ever again? And if your ex-boyfriend turns out to be a serial killer, what’s it going to be like if you ever start dating again? Can you trust another human being?

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Review: Redline (2010)

redline
Looking to start your engines? Kick it into gear with Redline, the deranged turbocharged anime from Madhouse Studio. If Jack Kirby had been the artistic director for F-Zero GX, you’d get this a nitro-boosted sci-fi speedster that proves that hand-drawn animation can still burn off CGI.

The cursory plot sets a weird cadre of drivers and their souped-up machines against each other in the ultimate intergalactic road race. The only thing cooler than rockabilly antihero JP (voiced by Tadanobu Asano) is his gravity-defying hairdo. But he’s caught between on-track rival/unrequited love Sonoshee (Yū Aoi), killer robot warlords, and gangster race fixers: Can even his turbo-charged hotrod save him now? Continue reading Review: Redline (2010)