Regarding the Programming Succubus

In my usual stumbling around on teh intarwebs, I came across this post on "the Programming Succubus" in regards to experimental game design. It's an intriguing concept. Not being a game designer myself, the principles Benmergui lists aren't directly applicable, but I certainly empathize with the concept of succubi in project development. Personally, I have to deal with the incubi of sequential ordering and design.

Those pretty much sum up my problems with the Noel Heikkinen Project; I found I had to finish one thing before I went on to the next, and I had to do it all in order. The design for all nodes had to be established before I could write, and the writing had to be completed linearly, even though each node stands individually--linearity is not required. The design demon, requiring perfection, meant that I spent literally hours on the swirl motif before I could even move on to photograph selection. Hours which, coincidentally, I didn't have. By the time I got to the writing phase, I was under such a tight time constraint and so stressed out that I literally couldn't write anymore. And it's a problem I could have avoided, too; I had most of the text written out mentally months ago. I just couldn't write it until I saw what its layout would be.

Is this really a problem? Maybe only if you're also a victim of the incubus of chronic procrastination and are trying to do relatively in-depth work in a short period of time. I envy people with the internal organization to keep things on schedule. Even deadlines barely work for me anymore.

An update? Craziness!

Two bits of news:

(1) I just registered wasabijane.com, so hopefully soon I'll start blogging over there. I'd been needing a portfolio site for a while. The 100mb MSU offered just isn't enough if you do anything fancier than plain html, and anyway, my own domain should be a bit more permanent. After all, what kind of digital rhetor doesn't have her own domain?

(2) Projects kicked my butt this week. I don't even have the server space (yet) to post one of my projects (ironically, the one that's just a paper)--my server space won't be activated for a day or two. However, my other course has all students' projects online, and they're worth checking out. This includes mine, of course, but I'm not direct-linking it here yet--long story that I'll explain in a few days. Just realize the version that's up is actually a draft. A near-final draft, but a draft.

Web 2.0 vs. University Outreach in the Product Development Cycle

Note: If this post seems out of context, it's because it is. It was written for a screen capture for a section intro for this project:

http://msu.edu/~eldredl/web2/intro.swf

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Much of UOE's work--especially that of their Communication and Information Technologies unit--is on product development and dissemination. Products, of course, take many forms--Web sites like that for MSU's Year of Arts and Culture; events like the annual World Usability Day; publications like the Engaged Scholar magazine. The question under consideration here is how UOE as a whole and CIT in particular can learn from the Web 2.0 product development and dissemination cycle.

Jing

I've been playing around in Jing lately. It's a pretty neat tool--it doesn't record videos with sound (no saving YouTube files, for example), but you can make short videos as you write. Pretty neat, actually. The really interesting thing is that videos are ultimately recorded in .swf format--that is, Flash.

I love Flash. In terms of, say, web site design, it may not be the most usable thing in the world, but I actually understand how flash works--its thought process, if you will.

And the neat thing about it? I may be able to actually go in there and modify it to my needs! If it's primarily a flash-based product, that's an API i actually understand! Mashup land, here I come!