Of Meat and Men

At 9:30 this morning I think achieved Hank Hill-level boring middle-agedness. Later in the day I gained the official designation of “Yeast Scholar.” I think it’s instructive, and germane to this course, to examine the relative satisfaction I derived from each.

I stood in my bedroom this morning, grinning at my laser printer as the second page of a four-page document rose smoothly up into the output tray. I pumped my fist like Tiger Woods sinking a long birdie putt at Augusta National and would have shouted “Wh-hoo!” but for fear of waking up one of my apartment mates.

For many months this printer had forced me to feed it one sheet of paper at a time. If I actually loaded a stack of paper into the supply slot, the glutton would suck down most or all of the sheets together and screw up everything.

But now I, a man who has never so much as used a washroom in an ITT Technical Institute, had tamed the rapacious LaserJet 6L. Best of all, this was not some take-it-apart-and-put-it-back-together-and-see-if-that-works act of desperation (a specialty of mine). I’d fixed it methodically, using replacement parts and an instructional video ordered from a site thoughtfully named Fixyourownprinter.com.

The parts and instructional CD arrived on Friday, which was the same day I launched my career as an adventuring “Pastamancer” in the Kingdom of Loathing. I liked the Monty Python-esque character names and storylines of this site and the intentionally minimalist graphics. But let’s face it, unless you’re 10 years old, fetching meat for an owl so he can glue the head back on his action figure will never be as rewarding as vanquishing balky feed rollers and pressure pads in your very own word-printing machine. Am I right, men?

I have some suggestions for the Kingdom site, and, mind you, this is 122 pieces of meat talking. The letter/number requirements for the user name and password seemed ridiculously restrictive (Is this NORAD?). And the type for the menu of links at the top of the screen (“character,” “inventory,” “skills,” etc.) must have been set in something like 6 pt. Way too small. Adjusting the type-display size using my browser controls didn’t affect those words.

The type could have been larger at Magnatune, too, but at least there the browser’s type-size adjustment worked. The radio playlists of full-length cuts were a welcome feature. So many music sites give you only samples. Magnatune would do well to further subdivide its music, though. For example, folk and roots rock must have been lumped in with pop or rock or some other category.

Lastly on this week’s Web explorations was xkcd. (Can we be any more obscure with the site names?) Some nice nerdy toons here. Hit the “random” button to explore. I expected the “next” button or the forward-arrow button to take me to the continuation of “Pod Bay Doors,” but neither did. And when I clicked on “RSS Feed” or “Atom Feed” (whatever that is), my Firefox browser took me to a page of XML code.

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For the second week, I have no idea if this is what our instructors are looking for by way of a reflection paper. I hope so. Being a former newspaper reporter, I found the readings on the future of newspapers on the Web to be fascinating and thought-provoking. I read for hours and hours and can’t wait to discuss that material.

The Global Shift. That's Shift, with an f.

I couldn’t help but wonder where the Aspen Institute’s wiki was (say that three times fast) when I ran into the following analogy by Richard B. Adler, “rapporteur” of “Next Generation Media: The Global Shift.”

In describing Craig Newmark’s altruistic reasons for keeping craigslist noncommercial, Adler writes, “In this sense, Newmark is spiritually closer to Dorothy Day of Hull House than to Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com or Bill Gates of Microsoft.”

The problem with that is, Dorothy Day is not of Hull House. That was Jane Addams. Dorothy Day was the cofounder of the Catholic Worker Movement.

I went looking for a mechanism to submit my correction but in the appendix found only notes and biographical information, along with directions on how to order other reports. The “contact us” link on the home page delivered an impressive two full screens of names and hyperlinks but nothing about errata.

The cumulative effect of this week’s readings and online investigations was to remind me that the Web is far from a finished product and not always hospitable either.

In the ink-and-wood-pulp Los Angeles Times that arrived in a plastic bag at the foot of my apartment stairs this morning, I read about a virtual bank within Second Life called Ginko Financial that apparently vamoosed with some amount of participants’ real money (as opposed to the Linden Dollars the avatars carry). Linden’s reaction was to order all the remaining banks to liquidate pronto and leave the world.

I signed up for Facebook a few years ago when I was writing an article about college students using the site, but I never went beyond registration. Re-registering for Facebook and for some other sites like it (MySpace, Friendster, etc.) reminded me of why I hadn’t plunged in originally: I didn’t understand the point of participating.

I still don’t. The sites speak enthusiastically about reconnecting with friends and business acquaintances, but I don’t think I’m the only person who already stays connected with the people with whom I want to remain connected. And vice versa. I found hardly any familiar names among those registered on these sites, leading me to wonder, if nobody I know is using these sites, is there any reason I should?

From one of the sites I sent friendship invitations to five people. These were ignored by four of the five. The only one to respond was my daughter, age 22. Yes, I do have friends, but they either don’t know about these communities or they don’t consider them to be worthwhile.

If these social networking sites want to penetrate the calcified consciousnesses of more-mature people, I suggest they make it obvious what the advantages are of participating. Providing real-world examples would help. So would a video-style demo of how to develop and design a worthwhile page.

The same goes for Second Life. After choosing the attributes for my avatar and being told I’d completed all initiation tasks successfully, I was left to wonder, “Now what do I do?”

Actually, although I haven’t traveled anywhere yet in Second Life (where’s the door?), I just received a communication from someone inside. “Fatapussy Farrjones” has invited me to join her(?) group. As she explained(?) in an email, and this is cut-and-pasted verbatim, “we are a Publc Relations Group= we provide to find friends for all lands and new/old groups in SL... you can call Gen. Manager Fatapussy Farrjones for more informations.”

I haven’t called.