Get off your Ashley furniture

I did not grow up with gaming systems in the house. So when I read the article by Steinkuehler and Williams called Where Everybody Knows Your (Screen) Name: Online Games as "Third Places" I was quite impartial to what they were discussing about the gaming world. I've always had a bit of an opinion about about gaming, but I often don't know what to think about online gaming where you connect with other people and play against them and interact with them.

Being someone who has been quite an active person her whole life, seeing people spend hour upon hour in front of the television playing video games. In my opinion I think online gaming is a poor excuse for socializing with others. I have a friend who is a complete "gamer" and I have to admit, he is quite socially awkward when it comes to public situations. I'm not basing my opinion on solely him, but I have seen this in many "gamers." In the article, Sennett states "people can be sociable only when they have some protection from each other." I find this to be a plausible statement to me. Maybe it's because I'm a sociable person that I'm bothered by the whole gamer lifestyle (I don't mean to offend any of you readers out there), but I feel that there are much better things that these people could be doing with their time to benefit their minds and health (those two even co-relate). How can anyone expect to get decent social skills when a majority of the interaction that hardcore gamers get it through online contact; there is no direct face to face interaction. Like Sennett said, there's protection there. Please realize that not everybody gets their dream job of being game testers, so you're going to have to get up and learn a thing or two to make ends meet, and gaming probably won't be one of the acceptable things on a resume.

I guess I just don't really know how to respond to these chat parties about games and such because I just am quite unfamiliar with it. I've just never been too gung-ho about it.

Praise the god WWW-Dot

When I read the article by Cheryl Anne Casey entitled Online Religion and Finding Faith on the Web: An Examination of Beliefnet.org I was struck by a few key sentences and basically couldn't focus on much else, one of these sentences being "God created a set of conditions from which life would emerge. Like it or not, the Internet is one of the most dramatic examples of something that is self-organized. That’s the point. God is the distributed, decentralized system" which was a quote by a woman named Sherry Turkle. I was actually taken aback by this comment!! It hit me how people are actually treating the internet like some sort of god! Yes, lower case "g". Lately, I've been feeling that religion is being more of a fad than a deeper-self choice. And what an easier way to pick what kind of god to worship than one that is right at your finger tips where you can pick and choose and explore different faith's and basically make a little spiritual collage of what you believe in, all in the house of the god of "www-dot".
But woah now, I am not saying that the internet is like the anti-christ. I love the internet. It is so handy. I am talking strictly in terms of religious uses, like beliefnet.org. Let's not go personifying the world wide web. Yes, the internet has really helped to tighten different types of communities in the sense that they can communicate with each other and church bodies can connect (and obviously in more ways than just religious reasons...), but please let us not forget what is on the other side of that screen sending out those emails, posting those bulletins, updating those web pages: real people!! People like you and me, not some sort of gadget god or godess.
Alright, now that you know what one sentence out of the entire reading said, I apologize for not really responding to much else. This little tid bit of the article just got my heart a-beatin'!!

Rant done.

Charlie Brown is so stealthy

While reading a chapter from Schultze's book about comics, I thought to myself, "nope, I don't read comics, this doesn't apply to me." But then I remembered, actually, all the comics that I used to read. Every time my parents would get the Winnipeg Free Press, I would rush to grab it so I could read the comics in the Entertainment section (but only the ones with the bright pictures and the least amount of reading). Peanuts, Marvin, Family Circus, Baby Blues...those were my favorite. Every now and then I'd actually take our comic books from my school library (Tin Tin anyone?). As I got older, I began to realize that some of these "secular" comics had some strong Christian values in them. As Schultze mentions in this chapter, B.C. and Wizard of Id were among the few that I noticed to mention something of Christianity. I thought this very clever: overt Christian values subtley placed in the Free Press...nice.

When I was in my pre-teens, I was a subscriber to a magazine put out by Focus on the Family called Brio. At the back of every issue, there was a comic featuring a girl very much the same age as the girls subscribing to the magazine. I always found this comic to be cheesy...but for some reason, I found myself unable to just pass it by. Bright pictures...bold words...just so much fun!....(taste sarcasm?). Despite my attitude towards it, I'm sure many girls were inspired by these things, and even if I wasn't a huge fan of the comic, I don't doubt that it shaped certain things in my mind.

But now, in my wise old age (hmm...), I occasionally stumble across a comic or two and the ones that stick in my mind are ones that I will read in an Evangelical Confrence magazine making fun of themselves or things like it. I'm one who needs to make things light hearted, when I see others finding the same humour in things it draws me in.

Perhaps now that I have been reminded of comics and their ability to be so stealthy, I'll keep a look-out for more.

(p.s. Apparently I could not open a certain website to blog about it: http://www.wacc.org.uk/wacc/content/pdf/1329 )