Riba Rambles:
Musings of a Mental Magpie

Posted by Lis Riba at 9:00 PM

On Thanksgiving, I pulled out the holiday mix tape disk I created last year.

It has the following tracks:

1. The Hebrew Hammer theme song
2. Hannukah in Santa Monica by Tom Lehrer
3. I Have a Little Dreidel by Barenaked Ladies
4. Dreidel medley from South Park
5. Chanukah Song by Adam Sandler
6. Give the Jew Girl Toys by Sarah Silverman
7. Christmas Wrapping by the Waitresses
8. Father Christmas by the Kinks
9. Christmas Celebration by Weezer
10. Merry Frickin Christmas by Frickin A
11. Yellin' at the Christmas Tree by Billy Idol
12. Won't Be Home for Christmas by Blink 182
13. Chiron Beta Prime by Jonathan Coulton
14. Podsafe Christmas Song by Jonathan Coulton
15. Linus and Lucy by the Vince Guaraldi Trio
16. Dreidl Bells by DJ Flack

Held up pretty well, if I do say so myself.

I think if I were to remix it, I might remove the Adam Sandler, and possibly see about finding a copy of "Christmas Eve/Sarajevo 12/24" by TSO for the finish.

If anyone wants their own copy, for the time-being I've uploaded it to http://www.sendspace.com/file/fmkdjz.

Posted by Lis Riba at 12:25 PM

From Elizabeth Bear:

Charlie the Coyote.

Charlie's an orphan coyote who is being raised by Shreve Stockton, a woman who lives in rural Wyoming, and her tabby cat Eli. She's an evocative photographer, and an articulate writer.

There are Charlie calendars and prints here.

The story is fascinating and the photographs stunning -- Ian was right when he told me to read Daily Coyote from the bottom up, to watch the cub grow and follow the evolving relationship between Charlie and Eli.

Posted by Lis Riba at 11:42 AM

According to today's Globe:

On Wednesday, [MIT] celebrated the completion of a six-year initiative to put its entire curriculum online, with all 1,800 undergraduate and graduate courses - lectures, readings, labs, even problem sets and exams - available with just a few clicks and a spirit of scientific curiosity.

A sidebar gives some of the statistics:

• 21 courses with video lectures
• 1,800 syllabi
• 15,000 lecture notes
• 9,000 assignments
• 900 exams

The project is known as Open CourseWare, and can be found at:

Posted by Lis Riba at 11:30 AM

From Shakespeare Geek Duane, I discover Arden is released!

Arden was Shakespeare MMORPG, being developed by researchers at Indiana U.

Unfortunately, it sounds as though this release is more about the end of their funding than achieving their goals.

In fact, the official announcement sounds rather... depressed... about it:

In Arden I, we implemented the vast majority of content items that we hoped to. If you run around in Ilminster (our opening town) and talk to every NPC, you should encounter all of these things fairly quickly: Shakespearean quest lines; historically accurate tavern games; NPCs and resources drawn from Shakespeare; Shakespeare Q&A games that give experience points; Shakespeare text objects that grant power (text-as-treasure); Shakespeare texts accessed verbatim, in summary, and in quest/plot form.

In short, lots of Shakespeare. It's also rather boring, as I've said before. We failed to design a gripping game experience. As several of our playtesters said, Where are the monsters? -- a good question to ask of any serious-games initiative. We do have monsters, Shakespearean ones even, but they are out in the woods somewhere, not part of the main game experience.

No monsters is a big problem for our larger goal, which is to use virtual worlds to run experiments. No monsters means no fun, no fun means no people, and no people means no experiment. Back to the drawing board. ...

I am releasing Arden I to the public now for two reasons. First, there continues to be tremendous interest in the basic idea of building a virtual world at a university for the purpose of research and education. Arden I splashes lovingly cold water on the face of anyone who dreams about that. The research and education part is easy, as you can see here. You can also see that fun is not so easy. The second reason to release is to encourage other people to build on what we started. If you want to take a traditionally-conceived Shakespeare world and make it fun, please do. I think it would be cool to see where others would go with it.

In other words, the play's the thing, and this doesn't play well...

Or so they say.

The game requires Neverwinter Nights: Diamond; I now want a copy so I can explore this environment for myself.

Posted by Lis Riba at 11:00 AM

So, I'm currently reading Becoming Shakespeare by Jack Lynch, yet another book about how Shakespeare became Shakespeare in the centuries after the man's death.

It's an entertaining book, and many of its anecdotes new to me, but I've read the basic plot many times before (including Reinventing Shakespeare by Gary Taylor, or The Making of the national poet by Michael Dobson).

As a friend recently said, there are really only about a half-dozen books about Shakespeare, but they've each been written hundreds of times.

I don't begrudge the existence of this book, because it is entertaining, and may be able to reach people as yet untouched by the previous works. And I'm all in favor of popularizing the subject.

But the book is arranged thematically: how the plays were staged, edited for print, adapted... And for me, this jumping backwards and forwards topic-by-topic doesn't really clarify the progression in his status; I prefer a chronological approach.

At any rate, I didn't actually start this post with the intention of writing a book review, but rather to point out a passage that caught my eye:

[C]ritics lined up to attack [Shakespeare's] fondness for puns, an example of what the eighteenth century called "false wit." Samuel Johnson, for instance, wrote about how "quibbles" (puns) affected Shakespeare like a will o' the wisp -- "A quibble is to Shakespeare, what luminous vapours are to the traveller; he follows it at all adventures, it is sure to lead him out of his way, and sure to engulf him in the mire" -- or, to switch metaphors, a dangerous seductress: "A quibble was to him the fatal Cleopatra for which he lost the world, and was content to lose it."

I always find it amusing to realize that the aspects of Shakespeare's writing that most vexed past critics are precisely the reasons we love him so much today.

Call it poetic justice, I suppose.

PS: if I were ever to write a blog (or journal) dedicated to Shakespeare criticism, another anecdote inspired the perfect overarching title: Greenfield's Table.

Posted by Lis Riba at 7:12 PM

or when geekly obsessions collide...

So, was looking up some liquor-related information for Ian, and stumbled upon the website for Sir Walt's Original London Liqueur

Hayman Distillers has brought history alive with the recreation of the original recipe that Sir Walter Raleigh cococted whilst imprisoned in the Tower of London. Known as "The Great Cordial", the original recipe was believed to have been lost, but recently it was rediscovered by Hayman Distillers. ...

Bottled at a strength of 65% and 40% abv, Sir Walt's Liqueur is in the Absinthe category. ... In the gardens of the Tower of London, Raleigh grew a variety of herbs and spices, many of them originating from plants he had brought back from the New World. By combining his alchemic and botanical experiments, he was able to produce the famous Great Cordial.

Doesn't that sound cool?

I don't know if it's available for sale in the States, but I want to at least get a nip-bottle's-worth to taste...

Posted by Lis Riba at 2:30 PM

Presenting:

24 -- the unaired 1994 pilot:

Credits: Written by Dan Gurewitch Directed by Sam Reich Shot by Vincent Peone Edited by David Fishel Produced by Jordan Hall and Jen Dunlap

As the screenwriter of this short film observes, 24 is completely dependent on current technology; the whole premise would collapse without it.

Technical pedantry ahead:

Of course, while my home net access was still limited to dialup speeds in 1994, I had been on Usenet for at least six years by that point...

Which suggests that CTU'94 wouldn't've been using AOL, but ARPANET with IRC or TALK. [Anybody still remember having to uuencode digital files?]

And, of course, this video showed the worst way of tearing off the tractor feed. Everyone knew to wait until the whole document printed, then fold back and forth along the perforations. That also enabled you to make the longest streamers.

Maybe they should've had the files on a Mac disk which couldn't be read by their PC...

Via Pam Spaulding of Pandagon, who tries to springboard it into a discussion of people's first computers.

Our family briefly had some Radio Shack keyboard that ran on BASIC and plugged into the TV, but that didn't last long. [We may even have returned it during the warranty period; I can't quite recall.]

My first was a VIC-20 with cassette drive, that I got from my HS boyfriend when he upgraded to a Commodore 64.

How about you?

Posted by Lis Riba at 10:15 PM

Ian and I are once again at home.

I shall write more of my travels tomorrow night, as I am tired and should shortly to bed.

I have been barely online all weekend, so if you have or know-of any news I should read, please let me know (with links if possible).