Category: media

media, culture and society

Beowulf movie

If you are a Tolkien fan, it is most likely that you have already taken a look at the ancient epic, Beowulf. And if you are also a fan of Neil Gaiman, you might be interested in the spectacular new movie adaptation he has been involved with. Still here in Canada, this movie is making just now headlines here, being heralded as the first in a new wave of movie making, marrying real actors with the fantasy of digital animation. See the trailer:

WordPress.com broken?

Something very strange is going on in WordPress.com right now: people report entire blogs of messages gone missing, stats pages broken, categories messed up, all sorts of weird behaviour that could perhaps best be captured by the expression: “this service is broken”. Several of my blogs (some of them related to my teaching) are hosted in WordPress.com, so lets keep our fingers crossed. One of the discussion threads runs here (hopefully, if the forum area does not broke down, too): http://en.forums.wordpress.com/topic.php?id=17723&page&replies=6

Raph Koster's casual virtual world

Raph Koster demoes here his new Metaplace platform — a do-it-yourself virtual world in casual, Web 2.0 oriented way.

Alpha testers, feel free to register: http://www.metaplace.com/

TLS on contemporary culture(s)

TLS (Times Literary Supplement) has hold a central place in the literary lives of educated Englishmen from the year 1902 when Times first started featuring it. An interesting sign of times, even this ivory tower of analogue culture is taking into account some current discussions around the digital domains. See e.g. a review of Andrew Keen’s book The Cult of the Amateur) on the differing concepts of ‘culture’ that surround the ongoing debates on blogs, for example. To us who are also drawn into the realms Tolkien created, irrespective of the medium, TLS also offers something in its recent installment, including a piece discussing Diana Pavlac Glyer’s work The Company They Keep: C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien as Writers in Community and the glimpses to the lives of the Inklings it offers.

Future technologies

Predicting future is hard, but fun job. Here is a pick of videos from YouTube:

There is something slightly comical in this line of techno-futurism and excitement about the future, if you keep on watching these long enough. On the other hand, optimism is sweet. One-sided, but still sweet.

Google video embedding into WordPress

I had to move from using Youtube into Google Video service to share our family videos — the benefit of Google is that they do not appear to set any file size or duration limits for the video clips. YouTube is also too slow and unreliable these days (downsides of too fast growth?) Embedding Google video into a WordPress.com blog was not so simple though. The way I finally got it working is to take the Google video ID from “Mail this video > Embed HTML” code box, and insert it into code to replace “XYZ” below:

Thanks: Embed Google Video & Odeo In WordPress « Twist & Shout

Updated: travel schedule with web links

I updated my travel schedule and listed also the web pages for those conferences and seminars:

Note that the dates are my travel dates, and thus not necessarily those of the entire conference or seminar duration. See you somewhere around this globe this fall!

Trapped in the Closet

I have never really got into the hip hop culture, but it seems it is also evolving into interesting directions; check out R Kelly and his ‘hip-hopera’ “Trapped in the Closet”: http://www.ifc.com/static/sections/kelly/trapped.html

Golden Compass, Stardust, LOTRO

Fantasy in its various shapes and types has been my enduring passion from the childhood days. This summer many nights have been spent adventuring in LOTRO (Lord of the Rings Online) game world, familiar from years of literary adventures in the Middle-Earth. Then there are the movies. From my favourite authors, Stardust is based on a novella by Neil Gaiman (as a graphic novel with illustrations by Charles Vess). Still waiting for this to premiere in Finland, this should be fairly ok. Another interesting question mark is how the movie version of Golden Compass will look like (based on the charming His Dark Materials novel series by Philip Pullman). The trailer at least looks fantastic enough, or what do you think?

Ubuntu, WordPress, Copyblogger

As you might see from the site, I am currently evaluating a new style for this blog. Upgraded into Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty, setting the WordPress into its most recent version 2.2.1, it became apparent that I needed either a thorough rewrite of the old theme I had been using, or find a new one that would support the new functionalities. The one that I have chosen is ‘Copyblogger‘ theme by Chris Pearson. I liked the style because it is typographically clear, simple, yet visually strong. It is also fully compatible with Worpress 2.2+, supporting widgets and opening up opportunities for more customisation. I have tweaked yet only little bit with its code, but under the hood I have several new plugins doing their work. Hope you like the style too — and please tell me if you notice anything odd. This site is even more ‘under construction’ than usual for some time now. If I’d only have a more powerful server, to speed things up a bit…
Ubuntu, WordPress, Copyblogger