Persuasive Games produce a variety of games with the objective of stimulating thinking and experience of real world issues with a view to persuasion, instruction, and activism (or at least, social awareness). Saw a link to their latest game ‘Airport Insecurity’ today when following up some virtual reality links.

Ian Bogost, Partner, and Game Designer at Persuasive Games, commented “Airport Insecurity simulates standing in line, and calls attention to our oblivious acceptance of security practices. The point of the game is to draw attention to the relationship between our perception of security, the reality of its effectiveness, and what rights we’re willing to give up on faith. The government has classified negative GAO reports on the TSA, and we culled as much data as we could from news archives to recreate a representation of how airport security currently works in America. We hope the game will challenge citizens to ask harder questions about the relationship between policy and civil rights.”

More also at Water Cooler Games, a site that looks at “the uses of videogames in advertising, politics, education, and other everyday activities, outside the sphere of entertainment.”

Online Journal of Public Theology (Mostly an American perspective)
WHY STUDY RELIGION from the AAR.

I borrowed An Ordinary Joker: the Life & Songs of Peter Cape from the library on Saturday. It’s a collection of biographical pieces, his poetry and a CD of him performing some of his songs. Cape wrote a variety of pieces in the gap between the the Second World War and the rise of global communications when New Zealand was beginning to struggle with its own self-identity in the world. Some of these have entered into Kiwi culture including “Taumarunui (on the Main Trunk Line)” and “She’ll be right”. Cape was a writer, poet, actor, musician, priest, journalist and producer among other things and the book talks about those sides to his life.

The NZ FOLK SONG site has this to say (as well as links to lyrics and scores)

(JA) Peter Cape is best known for his songs ‘Taumaranui On The Main Trunk Line’ and ‘She’ll Be Right Mate.’ He was the voice of those rural New Zealand men who had been transplanted to the big city suburbs. He expressed their yearning for that lost way of life with its physical and emotional simplicity, where men may have been socially inept, but were proud of being physically self reliant.

Personally his poem “Trinity” and the New Zealand Christmas poem/song “Nativity” are my favourites.

The Guardian publish their list of the top 20 books for geeks. Just in time for finding that literary Christmas present for the geek in your life. Check of course that they don’t already own them. I’ve read most of the list (maybe 15 or 16) but not some of them for a while. See : Top 20 geek novels — the results! from Guardian Unlimited: Technology.

Via: Neil Gaiman’s blog where he’s having some trouble trying to phone home with his iPod.

IST Results – Robo-rodent gets ‘touchy-feely’ with artificial whiskers.

Robots that ‘feel’ objects and their texture could soon become a reality thanks to the innovative and interdisciplinary research of the AMouse, or artificial mouse, project.

See also IST Results – Embodying artificial intelligence for some general discussion on A.I.

The other day I was re-watching “Kid’s Story” off The Animatrix DVD. Of all the various Matrices (plural?) that’s the one story that gets me every time – in just over 9 minutes it seems to capture many themes that might make it a useful analogy in a religious context. Does the kid have a “conversion” moment or is it a journey? What role does faith serve in appropriating grace? The sense of hope that it leaves rather than (for me) the sense of despair and futility at the end of the third movie. As well as the “putting to death” of the old self for the new.

If you haven’t seen it hire the DVD and watch just that one story. The animation style is great too.

Maybe Stu could do something with it?

Wired News: Real Story of the Rogue Rootkit has a follow-up to the Sony BMG copy-protection debacle, including the really good question of why the anti-virus and security software we all “have” to use on Windows didn’t pick it up. And also that the DRM software may have used other software outside of the scope of that software’s licensing.

I wonder if the Sony offer to replace affected CDs will happen here in NZ? Must check my CD collection.

I like the Apple web browser Safari but I often had problems with it under Mac OS X 10.2 (Jaguar) and 10.3 (Panther) around its inability to send a “deep refresh”. In Firefox I’d click Ctrl-Refresh to get the most recent page (and in IE I could do similar) but the web toolkit that Safari (and NetNewsWire) use doesn’t allow that. It’s been a real source of frustration because my ISP has an upstream cache and Safari will only get pages from there until they expire. Which meant things like editing blog entries, refreshing web site changes and getting the latest RSS feeds wasn’t reliable. (I’d post stuff on here and it would appear in the news aggregator half a day later.)

However, last night I installed Privoxy which is a caching layer that you can set up between web applications and the net. Configure it to always ask for the most recent page, point the default OS X proxy settings at it and Safari/NewNewsWire works just fine! Excellent.

BTW – Privoxy isn’t the easiest to configure if you’re not comfortable with modifying configuration files and setting up proxy settings.

So now I can get my RSS/Atom feeds reliably outside of the Sage plug-in in Firefox. I’ll keep using Firefox as my browser because it can by-pass Privoxy but now my “Apple” apps will work just fine.

Maybe this is all fixed in Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) with Safari 2.0 but I’m not there yet.

Also, if you’re getting fed up with Flash slowing up web sites (can we all say “TVNZ“?) try out the Firefox plug-in FlashBlock. It marks the Flash on the page but doesn’t load them until you click on them or set up that site to always load Flash animations/apps.

Just received a copy for Living on the Boundaries – Evangelical Women, Feminism and the Theological Academy by Nicola Hoggard Creegan and Christine Pohl and published by IVP. Nicola is one of my PhD supervisors and I’m looking forward to reading the book over the next few weeks or so. Nicola’s off to AAR so I should be able to make a good start before she gets back. From the blurb,

What happens when evangelicalism meets feminism?

In their own biblical and theological training, Nicola Creegan and Christine Pohl have each lived at the intersection of these two movements They now both teach in Christian institutions of higher education where others follow along a similar pathway. They have a story to tell about their experience along with those of ninety other women they surveyed who have lived on the boundary between evangelicalism and feminism. They explore what it was like for evangelical women who pursued doctorates in biblical and theological studies. What were their experiences as they taught and wrote, were mentored and became mentors? What are the theological issues they faced, and how did they respond? How have they negotiated professional, family and church commitments? This well-informed, multidimensional and sensitive narrative of women’s experience will be illuminating for anyone involved in the academic theological world.

You can download a sample chapter from the link above.

The book will go next to Elouise Renich Fraser’s “Confessions of a Beginning Theologian” on the bookshelf. (See Greenflame: Beginning theologian)

I’ve got several ideas running around in my head for academic articles relating to religion and comic books. But I’ve never really figured out where I could send them, nor read other examples of how people engage with comics at an academic level. Until now.

ImageTexT: Interdisciplinary Comics Studies

The objective of ImageTexT is to advance the academic study of comic books, comic strips, and animated cartoons. Under the guidance of an editorial board of scholars from a variety of disciplines, ImageTexT publishes solicited and peer-reviewed papers that investigate the material, historical, theoretical, and cultural implications of visual textuality. ImageTexT welcomes essays emphasizing (but not limited to) the aesthetics, cognition, production, reception, distribution and dissemination of comics and other media as they relate to comics, along with translations of previously existing research on comics as dimensions of visual culture. Exploring all periods and all countries, and deploying a wide range of disciplinary approaches, ImageTexT is designed to foster innovative discussions of the political and social implications of comics, to generate original formal aesthetic analyses of comics, and to broaden theoretical discussions of genre, period, narrative, and complex image/text relationships in comics and related media. ImageTexT will include reviews of current scholarship in the field, announcements regarding relevant conferences and upcoming publications, and links to other theoretical projects of interest to readers. ImageTexT will also provide currently unavailable English-language translations of seminal essays of comics theory. ImageTexT is listed in the MLA Bibliography, beginning summer 2005.

“Up, up and away!” so to speak.