Every so often I get the urge to reskin this site. The fine folks at WordPress have made it so easy to do, I just like to take advantage. With the recent 3.0 release, they have added a bunch of new features for themes, and I wanted to test drive them.
Sure, it’s a little more mundane than my past looks, and yes, it is very, very white. But I’ve always said my theme is a reflection of my mood. I’m feeling very minimalist lately.
As for the new logo, I really liked that image. The little blue guy is definitely blocking the kick. To me, however, it still looks like the little white guy has hauled off and kicked the other one in the junk. That made me laugh really hard. I’m not sure Keith Haring would be terribly excited to know he inspired an image of a guy booting another guy in the jimmy… but hey, that’s art, right?
I hope to update the site more frequently as well. So those of you who were shocked to see two posts in your feed reader – both in one month – beware. I’ve got some stuff on my chest I need to get off, and this is where I do that.
Social media is full of awkward moments. There was the George Allen “macaca” incident, the “Key Influencer’s” denigration of Memphis, these not so great moments from Facebook, and too many more to possibly catalog. That’s the thing I love about social media. It really affords you possibilities to interact with others that you would never otherwise have.
Take, for instance, my recent retweet about a Bertolli’s ad campaign. @LowbrowKate tweeted the following.
Marissa Tomei is WAY to good for this: http://intotheheartofitaly.yahoo.com/
I couldn’t agree more. I have been a fan of Tomei since My Cousin Vinny. She’s way to good an actress to be shilling frozen Italian food in webisode format. But look at the rest of the cast and you will see the star of the short lived MTV Sports – none other than Mr. Dan Cortese. So I added some commentary on my retweet.
RT @lowbrowkate: Marissa Tomei is WAY to good for this: http://bit.ly/aFCSJF | Dan Cortese makes sense, though. He needs the work.
Well last night I got a reply from Mr. Cortese (which has since been removed). Here’s the screen grab from Tweetdeck.
I couldn’t help but have some fun with Cortese. My reply back?
@dancortese1 No offense, dude. You were great in Veronica’s Closet.
Where else but social media can a two-bit political hack and a D-list TV star interact so freely?
God bless the Internet.
(For the record, I had to Google Cortese to find something he was in other than MTV Sports. I don’t recall ever having seen Veronica’s Closet. He has apparently done more stuff recently. Frankly I am jealous that he got to travel through Italy with Marisa Tomei. Back in the early 90s, many a guy I know would have traded a left testicle for that opportunity. Way to go, Dan!)
It occurred to me today that you really don’t hear much about Beelzebub in a political context anymore. I was thinking about my childhood (and gaming in particular – and by gaming I don’t mean video) and remembered all of the dire warnings hurled at me regarding the dark lord.
Dungeons & Dragons was a tool of Satan. Heavy metal music was a tool of Satan. Alcohol was the Devil’s elixir. It seemed like just about everything you might enjoy doing was a tool of corruption placed on Earth by Satan.
You just don’t get that much anymore. I mean, in some pockets, I’m sure those charges are still leveled. They just don’t enter the mainstream consciousness the way they used to. Video games are allegedly bad, but not because they’re a tool of Lucifer, they’re bad for much more concrete reasons. People rage against video games because they claim they rot the minds of our youth or they lead to school shootings, or they’re a gateway drug to heroine. They are no longer simply written off as a tool of the dark arts.
In some ways, that makes me kind of sad. Satan is no longer the guilty party in any activity today’s youth engage in. I actually miss a world where every issue was discussed and debated in terms of Satan’s presence. Even if you partook of the devil’s playthings, there was a certain comfort in knowing it was all part of a great cosmic Yin & Yang. Now we have scientific studies of kids who go on to commit crimes and whether too many hours spent playing Sonic the Hedgehog was to blame. It has become all too sterile, and it’s just not the same.
I’m off to Seattle this afternoon for the Penny Arcade Expo. PAX is a conference for gamers and game designers. I’ve never attended anything like this before (despite my love of all things geek, and gaming in particular).
On Sunday I’ll be speaking on a panel about gaming and advocacy. The purpose of the panel is two-fold.
First, we are looking to teach gamers how to advocate for or against policy issues that impact them. It seems not a week goes by that I don’t see an article about some misguided state legislator who has determined that video games are the root of all evil. They typically then go on to craft legislation that seriously impedes the rights of gamers. We hope gamers will begin to take these issues seriously and organize to become a significant political force.
The second purpose for the panel is to talk a bit about how political groups and causes are using games to convey policy messages. Following the Obama team’s use of paid advertising in an online racing game, the use of such tactics is getting pretty advanced. I, for one, am looking forward to hearing from my fellow panelists as well as the audience on that topic.
If I pick up nuggets of wisdom from the panel, I’ll be sure to pass them along via my blog as well as my Twitter feed. Follow me @MichaelTurk (if you aren’t already.)
Finally, it looks like 11 of my 20 readers have voted in the “How Would Gilligan’s Island Vote?” poll. If you haven’t, I hope you’ll weigh in. I’ll be posting the reply’s over the weekend.
This was originally going to be a straightforward post. I wanted to look at the Gilligan’s island characters and make the case for how each character would vote. My original concept was simple enough:
- The Professor – This would normally be an easy lift. He’d likely be the typical liberal academic. Definitely a Democrat.
- The Skipper – Former Navy man, the guy everyone looks to for tough leadership. He’s definitely a Republican.
- The Millionaire and Lovey – They’re unabashedly rich, and have no qualms about it. They’re Republican.
- Ginger – Like the prof, she’s the typical Hollywood starlet. She may not actually be liberal, but that’s the trendy thing, so she goes along. That’s a Democrat.
- Mary Ann – A girl from the heartland with mid-western values. She probably digs God, Guns, Country, and country music. She’s a Republican.
- Gilligan – He’s kind of clueless and rarely gets anything right. He’s a Democrat.
Like I said, that was easy enough. Until, that is, I started talking to my friend Paul about the list. He’s a liberal, so he views the world through a skewed perspective, but he had some interesting thoughts.
For instance, the Professor, he argues, is a dedicated academic, but also has a heavy lean toward technology. That may indicate he is more Libertarian. Ginger, he suggests, strikes him more as a Patricia Heaton type. He thinks she would actually lean GOP. What about Mary Ann? She may be a farm girl, but she also comes across as a bleeding heart. Could she be a closet lefty? Could “means well, but usually gets it wrong” be applied equally to paint Gilligan as a Republican? While we agree on the Howell’s, could they actually be limousine liberals?
So I decided to change the focus of this post. Rather than declaring how the Island would vote, I’m asking. I’d love to get your thoughts. I’ll tabulate it all and report back on the consensus (if there is one) view.
