I am a Defender-ship. I am fiercely protective of my friends and loved ones, and unforgiving of any who would hurt them. Speed and foresight are my strengths, at the cost of a little clumsiness. I'm most comfortable with a few friends, but sometimes particularly enjoy spending time in larger groups. What Video Game Character Are You?

posted by Lisbeth at 17:43

Back in Denmark and on sickleave until January 20th due to RSI problems with my right arm. Still not able to sit at computer and type for very long, so probably wont be posting much before well into the new year. In the meantime, merry christmas and happy new year to readers, new as old :)
posted by Lisbeth at 12:00

Leaving for Denmark tomorrow, which is a bit sad. Very nice colleagues here, beautiful nature and peace and quiet. Arm still badish, though, so looking forward to discussing options of sickleave with my doctor etc :(. Will be pretty busy when I arrive back home, so might for sake of arm and lack of time not post here for some days.
posted by Lisbeth at 15:09

Is this a cybertext? When the entire "ergodics" consists of pressing the "play"-link which releases the non-interactive Flash-animation, but the work is based on a machine and requires a certain application (Flash) to be viewable? Should the process of installing Shockwave etc on your machine in order to view a piece be included in what we think of as the process of "reading/playing/using" the work? And is our efforts then ergodic?
What matters - I like it a lot whatever name theory endows it with (the author himself refers to it as a hypertext...). And it uses music from a computer game;). XYLO in WordCircuits.
posted by Lisbeth at 16:27

I recommend acupuncture - it helps almost instantly, though you have to take sore arm for a couple of days into account. Still mostly AFK, but wanted to let readers know that ITU apparently has had major virusattack while I have been stored away in a safe place here in Norway. Resulting in the ITU network being closed down all Sunday the 16th of December (so this site will be inaccessible too, I expect) and all(!) the C-drives of all employees forcefully being re-formatted and reinstalled with viruscheck....I'm glad my laptop is here with me, as it currently holds all my thesis-material on the infamous C-drive...
posted by Lisbeth at 12:57

AFK
Pain. I am once again down with a severe case of RSI, Tendonitis or "mouse arm" as we say in Danish. Hardly slept last night because my right arm felt like a rod of iron, glowing with pain and tension all over. Since my first "attack" of RSI back in 99 when I had just finished my dissertation and was incapacitated for more than a month afterwards, the arm has never really gotten as good as the left again, even though I only use the mouse with left hand, work with a mouse-trapper (marvelous ergonomic device) and do remember to do my stretch exercises ever so often. Nevertheles, in periods during which I write a lot, the pain returns. So guess I will have to follow the same "cure" as Jill. No blogging, no e-mailing and no surfing for a while. But hope to be back to wish you a merry christmas...

Last words from Händels Messiah, which I did get tickets for, beautiful as ever:
Behold, I tell you a mystery;
We shall not all sleep;
but we shall all be changed in a moment,
in the twinkling of an eye....
posted by Lisbeth at 13:45

Christmas spirit. I am sure most people have some kind of event, or thing, or smell which signifies christmas to them. And once they have seen, touched, smelled or heard that special christmas token, the christmas spirit can find its way...To me, one of these tokens is going to a church and listening to Händels Messiah. In Copenhagen where I normally live, I have gone to listen to it the last 4-5 years, the last couple of years in the Cathedral of the city; people will buy their tickets weeks ahead and cue for hours to get in and get a good seat, as seating is free. And it is part of this experience to stand outside and freeze for a long time to get that good seat, and then enjoying the warmth, and the muffled noises and the flickering mellow light of the candles even more, once you are seated. In just a few minutes, I'll leave Bergen Uni's campus and, under my umbrella, heard down to the Cathedral of Bergen and see if I can get a ticket for their Messiah. "For he shall reign forever and ever..." (Hândel, that is....)
posted by Lisbeth at 17:09

Play a game and win travel!...or jeans.
posted by Lisbeth at 17:57

k.i.s.s. of the panopticon - cultural theory for the rest of us
posted by Lisbeth at 20:42

Zarf's List of Interactive Games on the Web
posted by Lisbeth at 20:30

If I were a work of art, I would be Pablo Picasso's Three Musicians.

I am colourful and provoking, always looking to break out of the mould and to pioneer new ways of doing things. I have a jaunty outlook and although I am a bit weird, most people have some idea what I'm about.

Which work of art would you be? The Art Test
posted by Lisbeth at 15:12

The conference site for the Computer Games & Digital Cultures conference in Tampere, June 2002 - which I have kindly been invited to co-plan - has now opened at Gamesconference.org with the full CFP. We hope that this site can also be used to announce future conferences in this area - and this one is going to be a GREAT conference, so hope to see you there:)
posted by Lisbeth at 13:52

Missing code..missing page. Torill drew my attention to the fact that my posts no longer came with a url-reference to the post's place in the archive. And I found out that mysteriously the tag which contains the code for this function had - without my knowledge - disappeared out of my template!! I have now reinserted it, so the referencing works again. Weird though...Also for the last couple of days, some people have had problems reaching this page. It is NOT my fault, but due to general problems and work on the ITU server I suspect. They are changing our systems all the time, as always with the occasional server crash as a result :(.
posted by Lisbeth at 16:59

My imagined readers....Perhaps it is sometimes useful to sit down and think about who you are actually writing for - why have I actually felt the need to move the really long posts somewhere else?? Who are the imagined readers of my blogg? Well, some of them are definitely just not imagined, but very real: myself (this blogg was initially mostly thought of as a personal notebook), colleagues like Jill, Torill, Hilde, Gonzalo, Anja, Susana, Jesper etc - people who are familiar with my subjects and do not mind long posts or obscure thoughts (or so I imagine). Then there are those I know are there - people who might have mailed me commenting on the blogg and whose URLs I recognise regularly in my URL-statpage. They are not all necessarily readers familiar with my subject and I do not want to neither encourage or disencourage them with my writing - though I do like to write in a way which could make my subjects seem of relevance to others outside the field. Then there are the "official" readers, those who come to this page via the ITU and DIAC staff homepage. For the sake of those I want the page to both look professional and provide some "professional" information - and I think it is also mainly because of these imagined readers that I find myself more and more reluctant to post more personal information here: I do no necessarily want colleagues or students of mine to know what is going on in my private life. On the other hand, I want them - and especially students (who could themselves go on to become ph.d.students) to know what the life of a ph.d.student is like - I want to share reflections, informations, silly moods and depressed moods with them to "demonstrate" that the life of a ph.d.student is definitely versatile, not always fun, but mostly rewarding...And being a ph.d.student, sometimes rather busy and not with much time to see friends has also made some of them read the blogg: "then at least we have an idea of what is going on in your life" as one of them said. Another friend commented that she would like to see me "contextualise" things more - which I have occasionally tried to do. But seing that the crowd of my imagined (and real) readers are growing, I find that the only way to avoid absolute schizofrenia and the trap of trying to cater for everybody's needs is to try and posit myself as the most ideal reader of this blogg. What would I myself like to read - in which way - and what would I need to "contextualise" in relation to a URL or thought for it to be useful for myself a year down the line?? But also contemplating now more than ever - knowing that a new term is starting - during which a lot of students will be coming this way - to move the blogg somewhere else on this site, not as index.page and that way keep a little distance, maintain some privacy (as far as that is possible in a public media)...I'll keep you posted;).

Well, perhaps this is what is most interesting by blogging: this experience of having not just one implied reader, but multiple readers whose actual existence I can track by looking at my webstats or the referrals to my writings in other blogs, and how this affects the way I think about writing. And how in the end, I find myself having to return to the notion of an implied reader (myself) to be able to write....Hmmh.
posted by Lisbeth at 13:09

X-mas - a favourite word. Stats from search on Danish search engines now show that "jul" (the Danish word for X-mas) is now the most popular search word, even more popular than the till now all time favourites 'sex' and 'porn'. Apparently it is a local Danish phenomena. The aforementioned words are still the most popular search words worldwide. Oh, yes, we are definitely a nation of "hyggers"!
posted by Lisbeth at 12:40

Tourist in your own work
A good friend from Denmark is visiting these days. So taking time off work to show her around Bergen. It is interesting the way, you so quickly appropriate a city and start thinking of it as something familiar, as yours, which often means that you stop seeing it. And then someone new to the city comes along and notices things you never saw or just see through because you have seen them too often. And in an odd way you get to be a novel tourist again. Perhaps doing research, writing a ph.d. is not that different. At some point you stop seeing what is new in your work yourself, and everything you have to say seems mundane and trivial, too familiar. Until someone comes along and tells you that "hey, you are actually writing something useful here!" which boosts your mood immensely. Another reason why you should always share your writing with others, however sensitive you are about it. Re: Torill's comments on burn-outs.
posted by Lisbeth at 11:56

Welcome to GameGirlz.com! - Your Source for Games: From a Girlz' Perspective. Guess once you start looking there are several of these places around. Courtesy of Edgames.
posted by Lisbeth at 11:35