Elijah Meeks's Blog, page 10

Introducing the Art of Hajra Meeks

A while back I put together a site to display some beautiful artwork, hand-built in php with css and all the bells and whistles.  Then I found out that even though my work was standards-compliant, Internet Explorer sadly isn’t.  Now, through the joys of WordPress and its limitless plugins, I’ve begun the process of folding Hajra’s work into Seven Lions.  Hajra created the cover and interior illustrations for Son of the Great River–the cover is inspired by the cave paintings at Lascaux and her pe

Michelle Obama at UC Merced

Well, apparently Cadie didn’t take over the world, and all my INTERCAL studying went to waste.  To top it off, I just found out that the First Lady will give the commencement address at the first full graduating class at the first University of California campus located in the Central Valley (No, Davis doesn’t count, it’s right next to Sacramento, for those of you who are UC Davis graduates and never realized it).  As a member of the founding graduate class at UC Merced, I’m extremely heartened

Googlewatch Was Right All Along

Google, always unwilling to take second fiddle to any high-level existentialist act on the part of Wikipedia, has gone and unleashed an AI Singularity with a love for pandas.   I choose not to believe that this is the latest in a long string of April Fool’s jokes from the monolothic search engine with a taste for whimsy.  You shouldn’t either.  I’ll be too busy learning INTERCAL to write anything further.  I for one welcome our new autoheuristic overlords.

Wikipedia, the True Killer App

Despite having killed more people than Jack the Ripper, Wikipedia appears unsated and has struck down yet another hapless victim.  While I’m sure Bill Gates has bigger things on his mind, the death of Encarta isn’t exactly the case of a youth struck down in the prime of life, but rather the gentle ushering of a terminal patient to a better place.  There was much talk on the part of the World Book’s Paul Kobasa for collaborating with Wikipedia during Wikimania 2006, but it seems that Web 2.0 has

Ricoeur, Ricoeur Everywhere and not a Drop of Significance

That’s the problem with reading about hermeneutics, as soon as you start, everything in your life becomes a piece of some gargantuan puzzle. That must be why so few people study hermeneutics—admirable self-denial. Or maybe it’s because they’re too busy watching a cat in a Kleenex box on YouTube.

I just finished reading Michael Wesch’s essay on learning in new media environments and there was a part that really startled me, because I was just referring to the perlocutionary act.  While I was lo

The Creation of Media as Work

I’ve been reading Ricoeur’s From Text to Action, and I think I’m starting to see the link now between the creation of media (either text or digital) and the creation of literature (here I’ll flatter myself and claim that Son of the Great River is literature) and the continuing tribulations of the publishing industry.  Ricour makes the point that writing, and here I’d assume also any other form of knowledge representation, such as animated explanations of the Creative Commons license, is structur

Son of the Great River Now Out

I can finally announce that my new novel, Son of the Great River, is available on Amazon.  If you’d prefer it in eBook form, you can buy it direct from the publisher.  But wait, you say, this book is published through some whacko outfit called Booklocker and so it can’t be any good!  You’re not alone in worrying about the quality of print-on-demand books, but before you scoff and run away, let’s take a look at what you really mean when you think of print-on-demand or vanity press books.

You had t

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Bigger than Andre, badder than the entire WWF

Remember back when Knife Party was just a tag on a San Francisco sidewalk (or maybe that was Monkey Knife Fight…  you always forget to document the street art until years later…) and not an awesome piece of digital media deriding the Neocon war machine with a British accent?  Giant Media had its roots in the same subversiveness and now it’s spawned into an entire industry suitable for philately, sovietology and, um, trying to figure out just how much

Animation as Tetrad

I’ve been struggling lately trying to figure out what I mean by animation and how it relates to cartoons, games, diagrams and Edward Tufte.  There is, I think, a thread that links strategy gaming to the representation of people (or their bubble-enshrouded thoughts) as abstracted collections of lines and filled spaces that focus on process.  That’s the whole point of my theoretical Animated Clearinghouse of Verbs and Processes that you can see in all its Youtube glory at  Animated Ancient China I

The Strategy Game as Digital Humanities Document, Part III

The actual forms of interaction between the elements of a game are, for the most part, the realm of the designer. A player can only be interactive within a gameworld, in whatever manner made available in the creation of the software. While this has changed in recent times with open-source gaming as well as toolsets for modifying proprietary games, the most common experience of a player will be the game as envisioned by the designer. “Civilization is an engrossing game, but it uses some very o