Every year, I've seen less trick or treaters come to my door: it seems like fear of terrorists and other such "boogeymen" has driven this holiday to nearly a halt. I spent too much of my evening while awaiting children [I was dressed up as Jack Sparrow myself...] online, and saw a dismaying number of people engaged in facebook Mafia and Scrabble. Rather than join them I grabbed a friend and we went trick or treating ourselves. We saw perhaps 20 or 30 other people out during our wanderings through the neighborhood and encountered the rare outpourring of Halloween spirit in the form of a costumed man waiting to chase children out of his yard or a nicely decorated house with moving ghosts in the windows. But mostly these were blips in a generally dismissive scene.
The virtual world holds its counterpart to the more traditional Halloween. It's possible to go "trick or treat" within World of Warcraft: visiting the innkeepers in any town and passing the virtual pumpkins and apple bob my character can possibly get candy or be transformed into a costume for a while representing another race [or even a ghost!]. Sometimes the virtual innkeepers are feeling mischievous, and then my character might end up hopping around helplessly as a frog for a while. The spirit of Halloween even continues in the form of quests, from taking orphan children around the smaller villages to a very high level quest to defeat the Headless Horsemen. I can trick or treat within Facebook, too, visiting friends for Bloodtinis and other such goodies.
Second Life doesn't feel like a place for trick or treating: it's a costume party year round, and I didn't get the sense of much different in the world for Halloween. Perhaps somewhere more was happening, but mostly it felt to me like Halloween is too generic a metaphor for daily Second Life existence to be of much particular interest to the Second Life denizens. The trappings of Halloween, however, seem to be everywhere. I see people dressed as beasts or bunnies or strippers or pimps. In many ways the more wild outfits in Second Life wouldn't be at all out of place in a costume shop. There's even some of the same focuses I've seen in the transformation from children's costumes to "adult" costumes as sex replaces both cute and evil as the defining characteristic and everything from pilot to french maid is recast in objectified extremes.
What is it that's killed Halloween? Is it fear of neighbors as pedophiles and candy as poison? Or is it that we spend so much more time now in virtual masquerade that the real thing has lost its magic?
Showing posts with label nostalgia. Show all posts
Showing posts with label nostalgia. Show all posts
Thursday, November 1, 2007
Thursday, October 11, 2007
Textual Memory
I've spent the last two days exploring an new Facebook application, Visual Bookshelf, that's been surprisingly apt at triggering my memories: all it is at heart is a database for storing all the books I've read, but it's given me a different way to think about my reading. I have an easier time remembering those books that I devoured in youth than the books I've read over the last few years. Of the hundreds of titles I've uncovered just wandering about and trying to remember my past favorites, most are picture books or children's fantasy novels.
Perhaps the most disturbing part has been trying to recognize the covers that I remember so clearly in the modernized rereleases of most of the "classic" children's books--though that's at least more heartening than seeing other books I grew up loving, like The Last Elegant Bear and Amy's Eyes, that have fallen so from the world that even Amazon can't bring up an image of their covers anymore. Some of the titles leap to mind as I delve further into the virtual bookshelf, like Dragonsong or The Power of the Rellard. I remember little stories... like trying to find my own copy of The Power of the Rellard after checking it out of the library almost constantly for years to read the story of a crippled girl who comes into tune with a strange natural force. I finally asked one summer at a used book store in California if they could hunt it down, but before I talked my parents into forking out the fees for the search I happened across the book in a remainder bin at a Books a Million of all places. [This was before the days of point and click used book internet surpluses, which have sadly made great quests for a remembered book obsolete].
There are books just beneath the surface of my memory that I still can't find, like a series of science fiction novels involving a girl and psychic struggles that I could have sworn was by Anne McCaffrey or a story of a rat living in the sewers with a matchbox for a bed...
Then there are the books long forgotten that suddenly emerge full-thrust into my brain at the sight of the cover unwittingly pulled up through the library's recommendation feature, like Mrs. Piggle Wiggle and Mr. Popper's Penguins. How could I have forgotten those? I must have read them each more times than any book I've picked up as an "adult." Or what about The Cricket in Times Square? When I saw the picture of the cover of that story--a cover that was so perfect it's been spared the changes of time--the big city adventures of Chester the Cricket and Tucker the Mouse seem like they were part of my life only yesterday.
There's some memories that are so old I didn't know I still could call them up: like my old school addiction to John Bellairs's children's horror novels, long forgotten. I stopped reading them years and years ago when I read one called "The Eyes of the Killer Robot" and couldn't get the memory of the robot out of my head. I hid the novel under the sink downstairs so I wouldn't have to keep it in my room, and I never read them again. With a click of a mouse I can have another copy sent to me...I might cave to that particular impulse. I'd like to know why it left such a mark on my psyche.
The pictures come to my mind and disappear faster than the search engine works. I find myself wishing for a search engine that would let me type queries like "that book with two women, one a mage, one a warrior, sworn to the same bloodoath quest in a strangely dark universe that bears no resemblance to Xena, Warrior Princess, I swear." I'd love to put my own memories on a data network in searchable form, and figure out more of the patterns of the memory. I'd like to see the day of reading books hidden in my texts through class after class that links a glimpse of a familiar pattern of equations with Raistlin Magere's haunting golden hourglass eyes. [I went back to visit one of my science teachers from middle school and to judge their science fair a few years back. She still remembered me as the girl she constantly caught reading books during the lecture. Eventually she'd given up on stopping me.]
I found the Anne McCaffrey science fiction novels only because the cover--The Rowan--hasn't changed. I still can't remember what happened within them, even though I must have read them all a dozen times and even checked out the books on tape over and over again. The covers tell me absolutely nothing, just beautiful women sitting alone in graceful poses on each sequel, looking defiant and inscrutable. Another remembered story I may have to visit as an adult.
When old stories come through my dreams each night I never know where they come *from*, but I sometimes feel the threads of old stories--of mice come to life and organized for battle, of children hiding in libraries, of closet doors that contain whole worlds. I know there was a book where a boy ordered mail order wings. He painstakingly assembled them and flew across the world only to learn that the price of wings was gradual transformation away from humanity. [This book I still can't find, much to my dismay. When armed with neither title nor author, I can't even expect the "Visual Bookshelf" to be of much use.] There was another book about a girl captured by another Indian--I suppose the PC term is Native American, back when I learned it we still said Indian--tribe who runs back across the country to her own people. That book I found--Naya Nuki, Girl Who Ran. I don't think I have it anymore, though I remember where I got it, in the small children's section of the UCSD bookstore. These stories, of escape and flight and transformation, these still shape my dreams.
I recognize the fragments even though I've long forgotten the whole.
Perhaps the most disturbing part has been trying to recognize the covers that I remember so clearly in the modernized rereleases of most of the "classic" children's books--though that's at least more heartening than seeing other books I grew up loving, like The Last Elegant Bear and Amy's Eyes, that have fallen so from the world that even Amazon can't bring up an image of their covers anymore. Some of the titles leap to mind as I delve further into the virtual bookshelf, like Dragonsong or The Power of the Rellard. I remember little stories... like trying to find my own copy of The Power of the Rellard after checking it out of the library almost constantly for years to read the story of a crippled girl who comes into tune with a strange natural force. I finally asked one summer at a used book store in California if they could hunt it down, but before I talked my parents into forking out the fees for the search I happened across the book in a remainder bin at a Books a Million of all places. [This was before the days of point and click used book internet surpluses, which have sadly made great quests for a remembered book obsolete].
There are books just beneath the surface of my memory that I still can't find, like a series of science fiction novels involving a girl and psychic struggles that I could have sworn was by Anne McCaffrey or a story of a rat living in the sewers with a matchbox for a bed...
Then there are the books long forgotten that suddenly emerge full-thrust into my brain at the sight of the cover unwittingly pulled up through the library's recommendation feature, like Mrs. Piggle Wiggle and Mr. Popper's Penguins. How could I have forgotten those? I must have read them each more times than any book I've picked up as an "adult." Or what about The Cricket in Times Square? When I saw the picture of the cover of that story--a cover that was so perfect it's been spared the changes of time--the big city adventures of Chester the Cricket and Tucker the Mouse seem like they were part of my life only yesterday.
There's some memories that are so old I didn't know I still could call them up: like my old school addiction to John Bellairs's children's horror novels, long forgotten. I stopped reading them years and years ago when I read one called "The Eyes of the Killer Robot" and couldn't get the memory of the robot out of my head. I hid the novel under the sink downstairs so I wouldn't have to keep it in my room, and I never read them again. With a click of a mouse I can have another copy sent to me...I might cave to that particular impulse. I'd like to know why it left such a mark on my psyche.
The pictures come to my mind and disappear faster than the search engine works. I find myself wishing for a search engine that would let me type queries like "that book with two women, one a mage, one a warrior, sworn to the same bloodoath quest in a strangely dark universe that bears no resemblance to Xena, Warrior Princess, I swear." I'd love to put my own memories on a data network in searchable form, and figure out more of the patterns of the memory. I'd like to see the day of reading books hidden in my texts through class after class that links a glimpse of a familiar pattern of equations with Raistlin Magere's haunting golden hourglass eyes. [I went back to visit one of my science teachers from middle school and to judge their science fair a few years back. She still remembered me as the girl she constantly caught reading books during the lecture. Eventually she'd given up on stopping me.]
I found the Anne McCaffrey science fiction novels only because the cover--The Rowan--hasn't changed. I still can't remember what happened within them, even though I must have read them all a dozen times and even checked out the books on tape over and over again. The covers tell me absolutely nothing, just beautiful women sitting alone in graceful poses on each sequel, looking defiant and inscrutable. Another remembered story I may have to visit as an adult.
When old stories come through my dreams each night I never know where they come *from*, but I sometimes feel the threads of old stories--of mice come to life and organized for battle, of children hiding in libraries, of closet doors that contain whole worlds. I know there was a book where a boy ordered mail order wings. He painstakingly assembled them and flew across the world only to learn that the price of wings was gradual transformation away from humanity. [This book I still can't find, much to my dismay. When armed with neither title nor author, I can't even expect the "Visual Bookshelf" to be of much use.] There was another book about a girl captured by another Indian--I suppose the PC term is Native American, back when I learned it we still said Indian--tribe who runs back across the country to her own people. That book I found--Naya Nuki, Girl Who Ran. I don't think I have it anymore, though I remember where I got it, in the small children's section of the UCSD bookstore. These stories, of escape and flight and transformation, these still shape my dreams.
I recognize the fragments even though I've long forgotten the whole.
Monday, September 24, 2007
Digital Stories
On the website I write for, CinCity2000, we're making the move to having a Video Game Week starting today. Normally, we're a cinema website run by a small cult of film geeks, so taking on video games is branching out for us: my first piece for the week is up, Fighting Purple Tentacles: A Wasted Youth Playing Adventure Games.
The fundamental difference between film and video games is in the interaction. When we talk about film, we're talking about a story that exists the same in static form no matter who is viewing it: while viewers bring different knowledge into a film and a different interpretation out of it, the film itself is unaffected. Video games change to the player: the order of events and even the outcome can change depending on the player's approach and skill. Talking about the experience of a video game, then, becomes more personal: a player might remember spending hours trying to "beyond the pail" in Companions of Xanth [the final solution involves a catapult] or finally consulting a hint book to find out where a hidden key is concealed.
I remember all the games I grew up with in context of the time: when I go back to play these games now, it's far from the same experience. I'm not living with the parents who used to be my companions in adventure. I feel like I'm slower with the puzzles than I used to be, as if the logic that I used to rely upon for those types of journeys went rusty when I started higher education and started taking in too much literary theory. Still, there's the same sense of accomplishment in figuring out a puzzle to get butter from a butterfly or save the world from a rampaging purple tentacle.
Meanwhile, the face of games is changing, and the adventure game's almost disappeared into obscurity while games like the latest iteration of Halo [reviewed by my colleague Big Ross] transform gaming from a hobby for geeks in their basement to one for frat boys and normal folk, kindof like film itself.
The fundamental difference between film and video games is in the interaction. When we talk about film, we're talking about a story that exists the same in static form no matter who is viewing it: while viewers bring different knowledge into a film and a different interpretation out of it, the film itself is unaffected. Video games change to the player: the order of events and even the outcome can change depending on the player's approach and skill. Talking about the experience of a video game, then, becomes more personal: a player might remember spending hours trying to "beyond the pail" in Companions of Xanth [the final solution involves a catapult] or finally consulting a hint book to find out where a hidden key is concealed.
I remember all the games I grew up with in context of the time: when I go back to play these games now, it's far from the same experience. I'm not living with the parents who used to be my companions in adventure. I feel like I'm slower with the puzzles than I used to be, as if the logic that I used to rely upon for those types of journeys went rusty when I started higher education and started taking in too much literary theory. Still, there's the same sense of accomplishment in figuring out a puzzle to get butter from a butterfly or save the world from a rampaging purple tentacle.
Meanwhile, the face of games is changing, and the adventure game's almost disappeared into obscurity while games like the latest iteration of Halo [reviewed by my colleague Big Ross] transform gaming from a hobby for geeks in their basement to one for frat boys and normal folk, kindof like film itself.
Wednesday, September 19, 2007
Mirages of Cuisine
I've got an article up on CinCity today: The Culinary Arts: A Gourmet's Appreciation For Film. Writing that piece, I've been doing a lot of thinking on how food is presented to us in media: the Internet's even made it so online ordering from restaurants and the grocery store ala PeaPod can allow for the coveting of food through a virtual image right through delivery. Seems to me there's something lost from the experience of going to a grocery store--or better yet, a farmer's market--and selecting the perfect parts from which to craft a meal. I won't be surrendering my food purchases to a clickable shopping system anytime soon.
Wednesday, September 12, 2007
Teddy Ruxpin
When I was little, I grew up on stories of Teddy Ruxpin. He was a teddy bear with his own world and stories of quests for crystals and fights against evil. Thanks to YouTube, you can see him again [or for the first time, if you weren't a child of the late 80s].
Teddy wasn't just a show. He's not a distant animated character on a TV screen. Teddy was a robotic bear. His lips moved when he told me stories. His eyes opened and closed. It doesn't sound like much now, but to me it was as good as him being alive. I cycled through story tape after story tape, reading along in the little picture books and imagining rainbow waterfalls and magical airships across fantastical lands.
But one day, Teddy stopped talking to me. It wasn't just his battery: he was dead. My parents couldn't afford to replace him. I cried over a teddy bear that wouldn't talk to me anymore. For years he sat up on the shelf, looking down with open, still eyes. He wasn't even very huggable now that his life had drained: the bulky plastic cassette mechanism stuck out of his back and the padded clothing over it couldn't disguise the harsh edges.
Teddy Ruxpin is back for the current generation: his newest incarnation is hopefully more durable. Doesn't look likely--he only comes with a 90 day warranty. I'm tempted to bring him home and see if a talking bear can still bring to life a peaceful world--but I suppose it's too late for me. When I was growing up, a talking bear was a revelation. Now Furby has brought to life the "emo-tronic" friend who learns its name and thrives on attention. Giga pets forced school children to interrupt their class schedule to remember to feed and care for their tiny on screen friends. Catz and Dogz inhabit the desktop.
In A.I, a robotic child is the new generation of the emo-tronic pet: he carries around the old style, a teddy who can only walk about stiffly and speak in a halting voice. Each older generation of animatronic companion is discarded as we ask for more features, more responsiveness, more love. I'd settle for my old Teddy Ruxpin back, and perhaps a bit of that childish joy that allowed him to be, for me, real.
Teddy wasn't just a show. He's not a distant animated character on a TV screen. Teddy was a robotic bear. His lips moved when he told me stories. His eyes opened and closed. It doesn't sound like much now, but to me it was as good as him being alive. I cycled through story tape after story tape, reading along in the little picture books and imagining rainbow waterfalls and magical airships across fantastical lands.
But one day, Teddy stopped talking to me. It wasn't just his battery: he was dead. My parents couldn't afford to replace him. I cried over a teddy bear that wouldn't talk to me anymore. For years he sat up on the shelf, looking down with open, still eyes. He wasn't even very huggable now that his life had drained: the bulky plastic cassette mechanism stuck out of his back and the padded clothing over it couldn't disguise the harsh edges.
Teddy Ruxpin is back for the current generation: his newest incarnation is hopefully more durable. Doesn't look likely--he only comes with a 90 day warranty. I'm tempted to bring him home and see if a talking bear can still bring to life a peaceful world--but I suppose it's too late for me. When I was growing up, a talking bear was a revelation. Now Furby has brought to life the "emo-tronic" friend who learns its name and thrives on attention. Giga pets forced school children to interrupt their class schedule to remember to feed and care for their tiny on screen friends. Catz and Dogz inhabit the desktop.
In A.I, a robotic child is the new generation of the emo-tronic pet: he carries around the old style, a teddy who can only walk about stiffly and speak in a halting voice. Each older generation of animatronic companion is discarded as we ask for more features, more responsiveness, more love. I'd settle for my old Teddy Ruxpin back, and perhaps a bit of that childish joy that allowed him to be, for me, real.
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