Great job to everyone on presentations! I thought they were awesome. I'd still be really interested in exploring everyone's work more, so it'd be cool if you could please post a link here if your project is available online.

Here are links to my own project, which was about fanvidding:

view the video here (also includes info and notes)

here is my critical appendix, which greatly expands on the things I talked about during my presentation and includes relevant links

For starters I definitely agree with most of the people in our class in that having to blog, edit the wiki, and do our final presentations/projects (not to mention class reading) has been a lot. I still think it was overall a good experience though, I only wish we had had more time to dedicate to one project as opposed to trying desperately to get *something* posted on the blog & wiki.

What surprised me the most was that once I got the hang of the wiki, I was much more interested in editing and reading it than the blog. It's funny because I've been a very enthusiastic blogger over at LiveJournal for four and a half years now, updating an average of three or four times a week. I've never had any real trouble thinking of things to post over at my personal journal, it's pretty compulsive. On the other hand, I found it in general to be extremely difficult to come up with things to post in this class blog of ours. Maybe it's because I'm not used to blogging about academic topics? Or that I prefer to have discussions about class material that are engaging and can evolve than posting something flat?

First of all, I wanted to say how much I've been enjoying the final presentations we've seen so far. Really interesting stuff! I also think it would be super cool if those of you whose projects are available online would post links so we can check 'em out. (Or if you already have, could you shoot me the link anyway? I might've missed it.)

I finally got my own video project online last night, and I'm looking forward to presenting it on Wednesday. It took me a whole month to complete but I'm really happy with the finished product! I'm also happy that it's already being well-received in the online world, with 115 views and 15 comments in the first 12 hours it's been up.

I just watched the new South Park episode entitled "The Snuke", which is a parody of the show 24. In this episode Kyle (and later, government officials) track down a Russian terrorist from Kyle's bedroom by cross-referencing user profile information on websites such as eBay, YouTube, PayPal, MySpace, J-Date, eHarmony, Google maps, and Mapquest. I was amused. :) It reminded me of our discussion in class about the extent to which we release personal information on the web and the potential it has to cause trouble...!

As this is a day late, I suppose I'm using one of the grace days.

I would really like to do a creative project for the end of the year. I'd like to take this opportunity to do something totally different as academic work, seeing as how we write papers pretty much constantly in college.

It's probably obvious by now that I am a huge fangirl (I blame Battlestar Galactica's season finale for this being late! ;) and I have been searching for a way to incorporate my passion for fan/audience studies into this course. Fans produce tons of creative work in all kinds of media, and I was thinking that I would undertake such a project myself and then supplement it by applying both the process and product to our readings in new media.

I've been enjoying all of the cyborg readings, even if I'm still not sure I'm getting all of it. (Our class discussion did help some, though.)

Reading about cyborgs instantly makes me think of my current favorite TV show, Battlestar Galactica, which is based around a war between humanity and the Cylons, their robot creations (which include models that are nearly undetectable from real humans). The idea of humanity, what separates biological humans from their unnatural counterparts, is a big theme of the show.

Did anyone else find the reading really difficult to physically read? I'm thinking a new pdf might be in order! I don't do well reading pdfs on the computer screen, but when I printed it out it was all grey and pixelated, almost unreadable. :\

I also was looking over the syllabus and realized that proposals for our term projects are due right when we come back from break. Yikes! I mean, I haven't even finished the midterm project yet, it's hard to think about a whole 'nother one. Hopefully we'll go over it somewhat in class tomorrow...

Ok, so I was bored one night and decided to show Facade to one of my suitemates who I thought might get a kick out of it. Well I was right -- she was instantly fascinated by the game and completely sucked into it. While watching her play it was so interesting to see how differently she approached the game than how I had played it. The kicker? She easily got Trip and Grace to make up and stay together, a feat I wasn't sure was really even possible. And she enjoyed it! Then it occurred to me that this friend of mine was about to go to grad school to learn how to be a therapist, and I wasn't so surprised that Facade was a fun and relatively easy challenge for her.

I want to do my midterm project on the website Television Without Pity. I've enjoyed visiting the site for years now and would like to take this chance to analyze it. I would focus on how TWoP succeeds as a "hybrid" site for TV fans. Its content is written by semi-professionals who are clearly fans themselves and not typical critics; it has episode recaps, polls, merchandise, an extremely active set of message boards; the site's visitors can choose thier own level of interactivity with the TWoP site and community; etc. The writing on the site is also unique in that while it is clearly a fansite, the recaps & message board postings are often extremely snarky.

Going back a couple days of discussion, but it's funny: Windows Vista Speech Recognition Tech in Action! I'll stick to my keyboard kthnx.

I got so frustrated with my homework this weekend that I almost decided to light my New Media Reader on fire, but then I remembered how much it would cost to buy a new one. I find these readings painfully outdated, but I guess that's kind of the point.

Also, all of the anti-television talk bothered me. Moulthrop has no problem referring to TV simply as "the idiot box", and happily reports that hypertext will probably replace TV instead of books.