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GooTube’s got company December 22, 2006

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Something new in the blagosphere? Lulu.tv and Lulu.com are offering free, on-demand video and book publishing, and the author keeps 80% of the profits. For any print publishing, this is based off of the number of sales (which, I assume, are made one at a time - how much quality they sacrifice for cheap one-off printing costs I don’t know). For the videos, they promise 80% of the ad revenue generated by video views goes to the person who uploaded it. I don’t know what sort of algorithm they’ve got rigged up for that one, but with a little bit cleaner and tighter presentation on their .tv site, I think they could give the new big kid on the block a run for their video advertising dollars.

warcraft, death and fictive kinship groups December 12, 2006

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Assuming that what Stan says is true, there is a place for bonding in World of Warcraft (WoW). A very real place, since the average amount of time spent in the game by each of its >7 million subscribers is around 2 hours a day.
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Sprechen de Simpsons trading card game? November 27, 2006

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Check out the english version here

Out of the bubble and into the game November 18, 2006

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This site has been suffering from schizophrenia lately, divided between thoughts on TWU, vague motions towards the religious, a smattering of the political and a healthy dose of video game frenzy. To cut down on the clutter, I have decided to do the following:

  1. Everything with a particularly religious bent has been redirected to mythmeme, a site I started with some friends to play with the metaphors various religions bat about these days.
  2. All my bits and pieces on life at Trinity were to appear on the site twubits.com, but since I find myself caring less and less about the political side of my school, I don’t imagine you’ll be hearing much more from me on that topic.
  3. This site is going to be dedicated to my attempt to make it big in the electronic game industry. Specifically, I’m going to be posting clippings, theories, success stories, failures, lessons learned and more from the gaming world, crossing the spectrum from the casual game market and its players to “serious games” to the big guns like EA and Blizzard. I want to figure out why they succeed, why they fail and how I can get in the game, first on the level of corporate elearning and eventually the broader entertainment world.

To those of you who have followed my commentary on TWU, thank you for reading. Perhaps out of the new mix there will arise a truly independent student press that will not hesitate to hold the administration accountable. Maybe that will be Mars’ Hill, and maybe it will be another project in the blogosphere where it can remain safe from the pharisees. To those of you who have read this blog for gaming news and general thoughts about the future of technology, stay tuned. It’s time to extend beyond TWU, beyond Langley, and into the future of play.

Bring it home, boys, bring it home October 25, 2006

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Eidolons October 18, 2006

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Re-examine all that you have been told… dismiss that which insults your soul.
–Walt Whitman

GooTube October 16, 2006

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Google bought YouTube for $1.65 billion. That’s one thousand, six-hundred and fifty million dollars.



Chad and Steve

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Raymond’s plan for TWU September 20, 2006

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I went to my first Undergraduate Academic Council yesterday, and heard Dr. Jonathan Raymond’s unveil some of his new ideas for TWU. The highlights? If all goes as planned at the board meeting in October, Student Life as we know it will no longer exist at Trinity. The focus of both the Board and the President’s Cabinet over the next year will be almost entirely on policy, based on the Carver model. And by next Fall we should have a framework from which to focus on academics and become Canada’s premier Christian university.

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TWUSA wants to spend your money September 13, 2006

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Every year we hear about the big pile of sludge money that gets shifted over to the subsequent year’s council, unspent and unused. For the past couple of years it has been around $30,000. The reasons for such a large carry-over each year have more to do with underspent budgets and unclaimed CUBE money than broad financial mismanagement, but the fact remains that it’s a whole bunch of money that we’re left with each year.

Quite frankly, we don’t know what to do with this money, and I would like to hear from students to get some ideas. So far I’ve heard the following:

Do you have any other ideas?

UPDATE: I just had a new idea. What if we dissolve the association and just send $300,000 a year into an endowment fund. After 5 years we’ll have about $1.6 million, and about one hundred grand a year from the interest to give to students who need it.

Machines and the mind September 10, 2006

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Less than a month before world chess champion Gary Kasparov was defeated by Deep Blue, Harper’s Magazine held a forum entitled “Our Machines, Ourselves.” The dialogue has been included in the coursepaq (Doede’s spelling) for a course I am taking entitled “Philosophy of the Mind.” Below are some excerpts:

“The only instinct that has proved more consistently human than our drive to invent tools has been our need to demonstrate our superiority over them.” (more…)