The only blog

While here at the annual meeting of the AAA, I’m noticing a dire lack of technology.

First, I’m counting about 12 laptops in a 2,000 person crowd. Clearly those world-traveling, tribal researchers have yet to experience the conveniences of contemporary mobility.

Second, of the 532 available panels available over the next four days, there’s only one on video games. Maybe I’m not understanding what it is that the Society for Visual Anthropology is all about. We’re the only one.

Too much focus on the idea of non-humanity, however, is always met with too much of it on its antonym. Humanity is our natural attitude; all violence is politically cultivated.

And so it goes. They raised some devastating questions, but them anthro-peoples are alright. Learned something, met some people: it’s nice to not be the only one interested. I was flattered, though, by one or two.  Which was nice. Some of the more normative instruction was well taken, noted, and ignored. You don’t own a field just by claiming it; you build it. I’m still not sure if modding will be the whole thing or just a chapter. But whatever it’ll be, it’ll be better because of today.

I guess after all the straight & narrow from Northern European philosophy, mathematics, engineering, and massive industrialization, the flowery French writers were just more romantic. After those cranky mega-highbrow like Marx and Nietzsche, you really need a break. Coming to America was exactly what chilled some of those Frankfurter Schulers the f out. They still write about revolution, just no longer on the street but from a seat.

Choice quote:

“the real world of game developers affects the game worlds that they build.” — Casey O’Donnell