Sunday, August 19, 2007

Table top gaming; graffiti blogs

Table top gaming should not be neglected as libraries move more toward incorporating gaming. Many bookstores already know this! Pokemon Days at our local Books-A-Million are packed with kids & PARENTS. How cool is that?? Our local Barnes & Noble encourages chess. And what about those restaurants that have those wooden peg games? The family interactions that occur around those games are priceless.

What is it about those kinds of games that literally engage people, that draw them in as active observers and participants? What kind of cerebral/neural impulses are firing? What would happen if the library environment is furtile with creative potential, welcoming discovery?

Many moons ago, I used to frequent a seafood restaurant near Folly Beach, SC, that encouraged customers to doodle and leave graffiti in spiral bound notebooks provided by the owners. There were stacks of notebooks filled with "Kilroy was here" type doodles, thousands of visitor comments, philosophical treatises, poetry, limericks, incredible art. Maybe we need "graffiti blogs" for our patrons? What would they say about our libraries and their services?

Friday, August 17, 2007

Wrath of the Lich King



MUST
REACH
LEVEL
70....
gasp

Sunday, August 12, 2007

second life

Wonderfully astute! Parallel worlds merge in this delightful youtube.

jill/txt » World of Warcraft

jill/txt » World of Warcraft I'm waiting for the publication of this anthology by MIT Press. Edited by two researchers from the University of Bergen, this is a scholarly work on various in-world and real-world aspects of World of Warcraft.

Thursday, August 09, 2007

My New, Almost Screaming, Machine

Yesterday my youngest and I brought up my new improved desktop PC. Still tweaking the configuration, but I am jamming! Spent time on Second Life, and SL did not crash it: that's the ultimate test. I ran around IF in WoW with no lag. Soooo happy. I even "splurged" on an inexpensive but 2kewl box-- had to, b/c my cooler wouldn't fit in the old Gateway case. LOL.

I had inherited my youngest's Gateway, purchased in April 2001. Over the years, he replaced the power supply, upped the memory, replaced the cd drive, and generally grumped that the graphics card wouldn't handle Half-Life's graphics. (BTW, I have a very clear recollection of arguing the quality of the graphics card in the Gateway store... I wanted a better one.) When we purchased his laptop for college, he donated his old PC to me.

We kept the DemonBlue480 power supply, the cd/dvd drive, and the hard disk. We bought a NZXT Apollo case, ASUS A8V-XE chipset, ASUS Arctic Square CPU cooler, an AMD 64 bit 2.2G dual core processor, a gig of ram, and a HIS 1650Pro graphics card. Could it be tighter? Well, yeah... but it's a far cry from that Gateway SELECT 1000 CS. Next? A new monitor... he's loaned me his Samsung SyncMaster 226BW widescreen LCD panel until he goes back to college. I'm ruined now; have to save up for my own.