RIP Heath Ledger

http://forum.newsarama.com/showthread.php?t=144093

apparently heath ledger died. this is weird. he was only 28. condolences go out to his family and i hope his daughter is okay.

i just spent too much money on a worthless machine that will be obsolete the moment i open it

i just bought a computer today. i had to order it so it wont be here for awhile which is not really helpful cause i could use it now but in order to have a useful useless machine i had to order it. now i have a couple of weeks to wait for it to show up at my house and then i hope no one steals it while i am at classes. classes are not bad this semester all stuff i want to be in. my poetry writing class may be a little harder than i was expecting but it should be fun. the first day we all had to write a poem in the first ten minutes and as i sat there listening to the class's poems i thought to myself what the hell? there were not any sad poems. no poems about destruction. no poems about death. i thought for a second i was in the twilight zone. where were all the goths with slashes on their arms or the kid who obviously was not maintaining his hygiene. i thought it was supposed to be a poetry class for people who wanted to write poems not a class for people to write how much they love being themselves. needless to say my poem was the only sad one.
my cat finally died. she was not comfortable so my folks had her put to sleep and then cremated which was oddly fitting cause the last time i saw her she was trying to shove her face into a furnace to keep warm. well hopefully when my computer arrives i can update this thing with more stuff like drawings and photos and stories and poems and the abundance of crap i have to say.
peace me out

why does school suck all the living fun from my being?

hey all. back to school this week. last semester at the u of i (barring any sort of gigantic disaster). i have been extremely tired since returning. i do not understand it. i have been going to bed earlier and earlier and nothing seems to help. i have also had heartburn for a couple of the days so far and now have a headache at work. hopefully this weekend i will get a computer and some sleep. three days off is gonna be useful.
back to work i go.

still alive and kicking but more out of habit than anything else

hey all
i just wanted to post to try to get back into the habit. i have to kinda restart a project that is due on monday. so i am a little upset about that. i asked some of the university donors what they thought of the junior senior painting show and they said that they thought it was one of the better shows they had seen from the university. so i guess that is a good thing. i am terrified of applying to grad school. not because i am afraid of getting rejected but more out of a realization that this means that my undergrad is over, which in and of itself is not that upsetting but i am gonna miss seeing these people on a daily basis . enough rambling for today! i will be back

interactivity without all the technobable or the tech which provides said babble

hey all
i guess i need to push forward and do this homework.
i am gonna talk about this one project from conrad bakker(who happens to be a teacher of mine). the project is written about here http://www.we-make-money-not-art.com/archives/004308.php
apparently he hand crafted replicas of small objects that he found on the street (or objects that he likely would have found on the street) and he then placed them back on the street and documented them. but he also left them there like their forebearers. so he made like wood rubber band sculptures and left them on the ground like the rubber bands would have been that inspired the sculptures.
these pieces may not come off as overly interactive but the idea of leaving the artworks floating around brings up a potential for public interaction. it does not seem to be the largest factor in making the work but can not be ignored. if something is left anywhere it is likely to be found by someone else and then they may do something amazing with it but that may not be documented.
this reminds me of a piece that ryan thompson(a grad student) was showing the studio class documentation for. he was in russia and left these white washed unarmed toy soldiers everywhere and he too documented them. he was not solely interested in what happened next but it was at the back of his mind.
people leaving things behind allow for the interactive magazine found to be in existence. without people within our society being interested in what other's leave behind no one would bother with that magazine but it is fairly popular. i for one am immensely intersted in odd things that i find discarded. this fascination with leaving items and then sharing our finding of them cereates a unique interactivity between artists who purposely leave art behind for the public to do with as they please and with the public who will actually notice the things that are left behind. it is not the most obvious means of creating interactivity but it is one of the few methods that create a lot of possibilties without necessarily any culminating results being made aware to any of the people involved be they artist or public.

Bye, bye Lucky

i found out my dog died. we had had her for 13 years and she died this weekend. it put a whole downer on my weekend (which actually was not that bad other than loosing my dog) . i dont know what killed her other than just being old. apparently she had been eating odd things not that long ago but long enough not to think that that is what did her in. also she may have had a tumor in her stomach so that probably did not aid her health. i will miss her greatly. i no longer want to do anything because of the grief but that is not what she would have wanted. my dog was all about happiness and being as happy as doggily possible. bye bye lucky. i love you and will miss you dearly
robbie

ficitonal game

so for this fictional game i want to take a look at tag removed from the sense of touch. lazer tag does this in a way that shifts the game to relying heavily upon the sense of sight. i was going to see if i could think of a way to shift the game into relying heavily upon the sense of sound.
i know that in ordinary tag the sense of sound comes into effect when you are listening to see if the person who is it is running up behind you to tag you. now i was trying to think of a way to create a version of tag that used sound waves like how the lazer travels to hit a sensor in lazer tag.
so in sound tag you where these suits that are full body suits. this suits allow full mobility so that you can run at full speed and duct and stuff like that. they have sensors in them that monitor the sound waves for key commands that are prerecorded before each match. this is so that the monitors could be able to grab a hold of your vocal patterns. the suits also have a visual sensor so that when other suits pass in front of yours your suit will notice.
the prerecorded command is a command that tells the suits to prohibit movement but the recorded command only works with the suit that is on the visual monitor tha is on your suit. so the visual monitor would be on the chest of the suit and if you spoke the prerecorded command when another players suit was within the path of your visual monitor they would be frozen. the combination of these two monitoring devices woould be key to getting past the ability for people to just yell the command. this also creates an emphasis being placed upon the language of the game. tag you are it or i got you becomes as crucial in this form as it was in the orginal form of tag. the importance in lazer tag falls heavily not on the auditory or language used. it is more upon the line of sight of the lazer light and monitor. this new version combines the element of sight and hearing. i dont know, but it was fun to think of new ways to play tag. (too bad i'm stuck inside)