Protocol 7

It’s been quiet around here, and I only have World of Warcraft to blame. I still bathe on a regular basis and haven’t given up my day job (yet), but I forget to eat and am incredibly moody when the server is having problems (more often than not on Khaz’goroth).

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Soft toothbrushes in Japan are *really* soft. I like them.

I just started reading The Robot in the Garden: Telerobotics and Telepistemology in the Age of the Internet, and started with Telepistemology: Descartes’s Last Stand by Hubert L. Dreyfus. The first paragraph details a disembodied future mediated by the internet/communication technologies and tells us we are getting closer and closer to such a future (natch). To pull a quote:

“When we are engaged in such activities [reading news, shopping, talking to friends, doing reseach], our bodies seem irrelevant and, thanks to telepresence, our minds seem to expand to all corners of the universe.”

Uhm, irrelevant bodies my ass. Mr. Dreyfus has obviously not had the pleasure of sitting on a plastic crate covered with a yoga mat for 5+ hours of computing time. My body has never been more relevant, or I so painfully aware of it (this is also due to the bruises from a grappling match post-viewing of the Ultimate Fighting Championships… grar!).

There is a thread that has been running on the women-dev mailing list (igda’s list for women in game development) addressing feelings of guilt related to killing in video games; it’s been somewhat nebulous in that the degree of guilt felt varies depending on the creature, the situation, and the video game being played. For example, in WoW there is a mission that requires the player to kill 10 cougars with the explanation that the population needs thinning. One woman found that she couldn’t bring herself to kill the animals, while many others cited the fact that it was for population control rather than for pelts or teeth (as is the scenario in several other games) that enabled them to kill the animals without feeling much guilt.

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Succinctly put by Formant:

“Any sufficiently advanced technology becomes indistinguishable from a dating service.”