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Rather than just concluding with a summary of all the ways theory can be brought into research and daily life, the authors take a different tack to suggest he reader is not out of e woods yet and the only way through is to examine each tree by its roots. Fortunately there are enough common elements in the soil to make generalizations about Social Order, Conflict and Postmodern theories but it's still our job to sift.

What seemed to be a random assemblage of semiwords got amazing precise halfway through a round of twenty questions: a quantum theory is proposed (the reason I started down this circuitous reading list) and after a silly yet sustained storytelling stint with a Mookse and Gripes, gets to the heart of the matter: Chickspeer! How did Joyshem know Julius Caesar was the most quantumiest play ever urged to a stage?

The long hiatus in getting to the end of my final chapter (which happens to be in the middle of this textbook) gave me plenty to consider about the role of narrative in academic research. Who tells story and has stories told about them may seem a minor distinction but can reveal a rift in the so-called official story. Better to have, as Brenneis puts it, stories "contesting truth and negotiating reputation" (p. 144).

Taking a less cosmological view of time than Stephen Hawking, the authors have their time-theory grounded in history, sociology and literature which prove to be less firm than the quarks and gluons calculated but never seen. Social Order Theory, which goes by many other names, is responsible for keeping things just so while its invisible hand speeds us up because money. Kudos to Idle No More for an anti-time reality.

More nicknaming, this time for ALP, but still not any bit closer to understanding her or the type of relationship she has with anyone else. Only really know she is she from reading about her in the introduction, the last place I recall seeing quotation marks. Despite Joyce's mention of the "the nonpresence of inverted commas" (p. 108), he inserts provoking marks between time and space on page 124, a quantum equation?

Excellent way of bring back into the discussion on theory ideas debated a few chapters earlier, like Darwin, schooling and social order, to explore what we consider natural. The obvious move forward is to denaturalize all argument on our culture is vitally connected to nature: just at a place where the war boy Nux moves from Immortan Joe's dying world and becomes encultured (and helpful) for Furiosa and the Vuvalini.

All attempts at making meaning aside, Joyce is committed to stringing together the most creative non sequiturs in what looks like a normal novel: hardly any phrase is repeated, other than clipperclipperclipperclipper and other catchy coinages. Proper names and locations rarely get spelled the same way from one chapter to the next. So yeah who might Kurt Iuld van Dijke be and did Joyce just rebrand Hinton's tessaract?

Looking at games from the sources of uncertainty is a tidy way to summarize and recategorize most of the games mentioned in Chapter 4, but ultimately sort them into two broad types: games that work and those that don't. Chess, with its millennium-long development, is finely crafted to produce uncertainty in a way most digital games do not - yet Costikyan's confusing conclusion asserts many games defy categorization.

Wonder what happened to Persse O'Reilly, the character balladed at the end of the last chapter? Will probably never hear anymore about him, much like what I suspect of the many names and the manymanynicknames that appear in this chapter. Somehow television gets mentioned, an almost anachronistic invention that somehow fits perfectly with the narrative if you could imagine the author changing the channel mid-sentence.

This chapter is where the theorists pick up speed, gain ground and prove their mettle by demonstrating that reality is not as real as we perceive, and neither speed, ground nor mettle matter. As intriguing as phenomenology is, especially as I explore the possibility of researching virtual reality and quantum physics, it is a bit surprising that most of big ideas reported come from 1967 - what is new to be said since?

At some point in this chapter, the reader is introduced to H.C. Earwicker but still not sure what he is doing. Is he still alive at this point or any other place in the book? Finnagain been long forgotten and this story is somehow related to his wake! Plenty of other names get mentioned and a caddish character makes some sort of impression on who exactly? A nonsense nursery rhyme brings this chapter to a quick close.

There is a certain amount of uncertainty to the ranking of games: familiar, well-played games like Super Mario Brothers or Monopoly end up as simple whereas straightforward Rock Paper Scissors has psychological elements revealing the complex nature of gameplay. None of them are analyzed according to popularity, but it is curious that one game I am most interested in researching, Minecraft, has not yet been mentioned.

As expected when dealing with the unexpected linguistic twists and turns of this tale, there is little sense to be made on first read. Yet for all the manymanysyllabicwords and broken poetic patterns scattered throughout the first chapter, there is still a sense that all of it means something as if with patience and the ability to leave the incomprehensible behind while moving onto the next sentence, some ideas form.

The authors set up a familiar situation, a classroom, and abstract-ize it into theory by using a metaphorical 2D map: you are here but what about those othered by the Eurocentric tendencies in education? While they zoom in on details and out to a global/galactic perspectives, the image of a classroom morphs into one of the many dynamic sequences from the Mad Max: Fury Road movie, as all awesome ideas should.

Had a sense that if I read a few chapters of this book at night, the dreamy flow of words would be easier to understand. It fits with the Penguin editor's claim that the Wake night is to Ulysses' day. He also mentions that only PhD students will enjoy this book, if they ever actually enjoy reading anything; as I am now in that boat and far beyond the point of no return in my studies, on with waking.

Sherlock Holmes and newspapers, a natural fit as his home was in mass print culture, but Sears and Cairns launch off from this coincidence to consider the ways researchers process data; all three ways, it turns out. As I understand, the theory behind the research and methods used are entangled, so I would like to know what theory supports the unethical research of book club - no seriously, this might be a way for me.

There is a curious nasty streak present in Costikyan's analysis of why we play: while providing a simplified version of neurological impulses in humans and other animals, he runs down theorists like Caillois and Malaby as being wrong, refusing their verbiage for his and yet lamenting that they cannot see beyond the binary of win/lose. Hard to tic-tac-toe with someone who naïvely believes that only he is always right.

With lightening speed all the plot threads are woven together in a satisfying conclusion that leaves room for the next instalment of the Four Horsemen Ride to London cycle. A little unsettling to find out this late in the book that one of the character did not actually exist throughout the narrative but I suppose that even religious fanatics have a flair for the theatrical. The Absolute lineage should have footnotes.

Refining the reason for why theory matters, the authors bring in three frames to look at society, explaining how social order, conflict and postmodern are all uniquely different ways of viewing events, such as the 2008-2009 financial crisis. Tips on formal theorizing will help make sense of an airplane that went missing over thirty years ago to why in his first year the president of the university retired last month.

Each of the main characters, well past the narrative threshold, have entered several caves in preparation to face the monster inside. London around them is overrun by plague, making it a less dangerous place outside (except for the rats) while inside Newgate and the East Cheap apartment, traps are laid for William and Sarah while Pitman and his family suffer in their confined places, as does Lucy much to my surprise.

One troubling feature of the graphic guides, other than the clip art-ized images repeatedly used, is that I am no closer to seeing the original text where these impressive ideas about the incomplete reality can be found in the source material. I have a better sense of what to look for but will either have to choose randomly from the guide's selected list. Just like the big Other, there are no answers to my questions.

For all his quick thief-taking, Pitman is a bit slow on the uptake when Coke tells him he did not murder the Finchley Five. The discovery of the sixth victim, the late Mr. Chalker, at least confirms that they have a common enemy to find while the reader learns a bit more of the heroes' and villain's origin stories. By the end of part three and the closing of Othello, the dynamic duo becomes a fantastic four.

The authors offer up a theory about theories for everything and select some pertinent examples from evolutionary biology and sociology. Their leaning towards Lamarck, by stating that Darwin's theory sucks, is a subtle nod towards epigenetics. This fascinating theory lends itself well to the Indigenous knowledge that is acknowledged as the counterpoint to written Western knowledge which will be the bulk of their text.

The tip-off early in the second part of this novel, the missing ruby from the dead woman's necklace, indicates clearly that this is not a whodunnit but rather a grisly thriller where the puzzle pieces are all laid out and it is up to Coke, Pitman, Absolute and Chalker to sort through them. King Charles and his devils seem to be on the side of the angels. This section wrap ups nicely in what may have been Essex House.

For someone so ideologically opposed to Derrida's deconstruction, Žižek has a knack for taking apart strongly held Western view (about communism, Sept. 11th attacks, the church and Nazis) and turning them into psychoanalytic examples of the Big Other and so on. His interest in quantum mechanic and digital reality may already match my own, and now I have yet another push to get on with reading Finnagans Wake!

The book takes a chatty approach to learning what theory is and why it is so important for researchers - just the kind of inspiration I need to launch into another round of funding proposals! Yet the authors are theorizing differently from more voluminous academic writing by making it an active learning process for their students and hopefully their readers, too. I may have to include a chapter in my next BEd course.

Carrying on the historical fiction from Mad Robbie's rebellious days, here is London a few months into the Merry Monarch's reign and the sense of doom that will follow a return to a more decadent past. Like all disaster stories, it starts with small incidents on the outside: a highwayman's quarry mysteriously dead before they could stand or deliver. We also meet in utero the lynchpin for so many of Humphreys' novels.

Raising questions about how game narratology can be and providing some methodological questions I can get behind, Ryan wraps up her thoughts on narrative in a digital environment which has a few ups and downs. Some of the ups include quantum mechanics and virtual machines, but then we wade through the downers such as strange code poetry and bottom out with Woody Allen's fictional sex life—does he write anything else?

Once more unto the breach, dear friends and formerly betrothed. The cast of Barbara (and Jim) get back for several reunions in he age of Wikipedia. Bully for Bill that 'the New Bathroom' was one of the few remaining episodes that defined not just the once-popular series but an entire decade of TV comedy, but as expected he faired poorly post-BBC fame. Sophie keeps a shrewd eye on Max's new media desperation.

Rounding out the discussion of interactive narratives with all the affordances and pitfalls of digital media, it is clear that authors can only do so much with the fledgeling hypertext and Flash/Director programming. Even the most up-to-date AI behind Façade works if the reader accepts one's hosts as a-holes. Ryan studies the could-have-beens (Macromedia!) while today YouTube has already left its Adobe nest.