Week 8 Symposium Notes

  • Video Games as hypertext
  • Hypertext Narrative is not the same as Interactive Narrative
  • Games are not about story telling eg. Tetris
  • You cannot win a story
  • No consecutiveness
  • Link to what is required to understand argument
  • Family trees- hierarchical
  • ‘Intertwingled’
  • Keyboard- layout to slow down typists
  • Unchanged for 140-150 years
  • Hyper textual mode of reading- jump around, read other things mid-essay etc
  • Hypertext is cinematic
  • Nodes= film shots
  • Meaning is outside the shot, it is relational
  • All parts and relations between the parts
  • Long Tail
  • Excluding content that you are not interested in eg. Facebook feed
  • How taste cultures form
  • Determined by markers of your identity + self driven stuff eg lifestyle choices
  • How clusters form in networks
  • Ways around recommendation hierarchies
  • Democratization of tastes
  • Power to make judgements
  • Equal access?
  • Facebook driven by advertising recommendations, selling ad spaces
  • Facebook= ‘social media disaster’
  • Different from Amazon
  • Page rank on Google- how many links come into your content
  • Important to link to each others’ content
  • Scale-free networks do not have centre eg. Internet
  • Appears to be built randomly, but has a structure

80/20

I find the 80/20 rule in the Barabasi reading The 80/20 Rule somewhat confusing but also interesting.. If it is indeed accurate.

I gather that this is ‘Murphy’s Law’ so is not a set in stone law, however I find it hard to believe that in a business the majority of the time only 20% of employees will be making most of the profits.

I can imagine that 80% of links on the web point to only 15% of webpages as most links would point to Google, Facebook, perhaps Twitter or news sites too. There are so many webpages out there that it would be easy to figure out the most visited, but so much harder to figure out the least visited.

I am not completely sure if the above ^ has strayed completely away from the context of the reading as I really struggled to understand it and will be asking a lot of questions in my tutorial.. Particularly about the opening story regarding laws and economics.

Interpretation of the Bible

From this week’s un-lecture, I really liked the idea brought up that authors can never control interpretation and the perfect example of this is the bible.

Ask one person and they will tell you the Bible is a work of fiction, ask another and they will base their morals and values around what is inside it. This is difference in interpretation on an enormous scale.

An author can have an intention of what they want a story to be about, but there is no way of stopping people’s demographics, upbringing, friends and family from influencing their interpretation of it.

Perhaps the reason one person may love a book while another can hate it could be because of how we interpret said book. Perhaps it is just to do with personal taste. Perhaps the two are related.

 

Un-Symposium Notes Week 7

  • Remarkable animals vs. choose your own adventure
  • You can create one hundred thousand billion poems from a mixture of 10 sonnets
  • Documentary= statements about reality, alternative representation
  • Documentary can be created through poetry
  • Interactive documentary is less fixed/concrete
  • Emergent
  • Stories about the world not stories about A world (documentary)
  • Doco is a genre but within docos there are genres
  • Britannica will be dead, Wikipedia will not in near future
  • Authors can never control interpretation eg. the Bible
  • Encoding and decoding stories

 

The Benefits of Hot Yoga For Students

It is a well-known fact that yoga has many benefits both for one’s physical and mental health, so there are no surprises that it is the perfect activity for students.

Spending so much time cramped over a laptop both at a desk during uni time, and in bed watching TV shows at night really does take its toll on the body and I seriously cannot think of a more enjoyable way to balance this out than to go to a yoga class. The new blood flow that you gift to your body during a yoga practice, from your fingers to your toes, can either clear the body of the tension held throughout the day, or perhaps prepares the body for a new day.

Starting the day with a yoga class is also a great way to fill yourself with energy for the day to come, so drop that Red Bull and hit the studio instead.

In terms of benefits for your physical being, yoga, particularly a dynamic Vinyasa flow class, is a fantastic way to build upper body strength and also to tone the muscles. Forget squats; try a powerful chair pose instead!  Yoga also has benefits for the cardiovascular system, as during a class you tap into your breathing and learn to control it so that it flows with your movement. Summer is coming and I know that a lot of girls go on diets or fitness fads to try and get “bikini ready”, but I can honestly tell you that by heading along to a couple of yoga classes a week alongside a healthy diet- which you do learn a lot about being surrounded by like-minded people, cannot be beaten. Everyone loves to share recipes for healthy treats and new exciting brands to check out for example Pressed Juices and Rawsome Organic chocolate who joined us on our Open Day.

In terms of mental benefits, yoga helps you to keep focused and set intentions. It especially helps you to block out the information you don’t need so you can focus on the task at hand.

On top of all this, and I know this sounds CRAZY, going to a hot yoga class with a hangover is actually one of the best cures I can think of. Drinking a ridiculous amount of water and then sweating out all the bad stuff makes you feel like a new person afterwards. You are sure to leave the class feeling detoxed and refreshed.

To read more about the benefits of yoga, feel free to visit the Kula Yoga Studio Blog- http://kulayoga.com.au/blog/

Kula Yoga Open Day

It was a day to be remembered last Sunday at Kula Yoga Studio, with the 30 day challengers completing their Nourish, Nurture and Navigate challenge, it being Kula’s first birthday and heaps of new people coming in to check out the studio and give the classes a go.

We started out with an Intro to Flow class taken by the lovely Colin, in which newbies to both yoga and the studio got to experience the dynamic pace of Vinyasa flow.

From 2pm-4pm we had some beautiful girls from Pressed Juices and Rawsome organic chocolates come in to give everyone a try of their delicious products. The coconut- smoothie style juice was definitely a favourite, alongside the coffee crunch gluten and dairy free chocolate. I am sure everyone is now addicted to both!

The second round of guests then arrived for an Intro to Hot class lead by the wonderful Lauren. It’s safe to say everyone had their A-game on, enthusiasm and sweat levels were high, and everyone was keen to give all the poses a try.

There were prizes drawn at the conclusion of each of the classes, with yogis winning amazing LuluLemon yoga towels and osteo consults.

Without a doubt the Kula Open Day was a massive hit and owner Kacey should be so incredibly proud of what she managed to put together. Super impressive and no one could have asked for a more beautiful atmosphere in the studio that day.

WE LOVE KULA

Notes on IMAP

IMAP- Internet Message Access Protocol

Designed by Mark Crispin at Stanford University in 1986.

All activity takes place in an email server and each device remotely connects to this server

Continuous intelligent communication between your devices and the IMAP server

Allows you to access email from multiple machines- laptop, smartphone, office computer etc

IMAP allows you to flag emails as “urgent” etc

Using IMAP you can create folders that will be shared across your devices

Supported by Outlook, Thunderbird, Mail

IMAP downside= it can take up plenty of space on a mail server thus causing your inbox to fill up, email browsing can sometimes be slower because the device has to download info off the mail server every time a new mail is viewed instead of just reading the file off the local device

Latest version is IMAP4- you can search through your mail messages for keywords while the messages are still on the mail server

Difference between POP (Post Office Protocol) and IMAP- in POP all your email will be downloaded to the computer and then deleted from your mail server, whereas with IMAP it remains in the server and you can access it via another IMAP mail client

IMAP advantages- messages stored on the server and are not affected if your computer fails

Watts Six Degrees Introduction

Upon reading the Introduction to Six Degrees by Duncan Watts, I found myself thinking how much we as a contemporary society enjoy a new (or old) piece of technology that makes our lives more convenient and/or comfortable.

I have been asked to house sit for my Dad’s friends for a couple of weeks and some of the reasons I said yes include: the remote control windows and blinds, the Apple TV, the coffee machine and the amazing heating, as well as a chance at autonomy for a bit.

I can’t think of many people I know who would voluntarily say “I would love to move to a desert island and live with no technology for the rest of my life”. People might say they would like to do this for a bit but then come back to the reality that is this age of technology.

I can safely say I enjoy my comforts. Being able to turn on the TV when I am at home on a sick day seems essential. As does being able to check what’s going on in the news on my way to uni on my phone, and for these reasons I agree that power plants seem to be even more vital than roads at this point in time.

Let’s be honest in the future roads could be replaced with something high-tech who knows.. Or maybe we will all be driving flying cars.

Whatever the next major invention may be, you can guarantee there will be people lining up to be the first to try it, as we have seen with Apple products. People have a fascination with the new and the shiny.

Kula Yin Yoga Masterclass

On Sunday the 18th of August, Kula held it’s first ever Master Class and after such amazing success we can all be sure it will not be the last.
My Mum and I were of course the last ones to show up and were running around like crazy people trying to organise ourselves, but as soon as we got into the packed room there was this sort of relaxing but eager buzz about everyone.
The incredible Mysan Sidbo lead us through two hours of Yin Yoga, a practice that a lot of people in the room had never tried. It was an eye (and hip) opener as it is of course very different from the Yang practices that many of us yogis are used to.
We were all assured by Mysan that it is normal sometimes when you come out of holding a long Yin stretch to feel like a 102 year old woman, and that it helps you to sympathise when you do see elderly ladies walking extremely slowly down the street. Most importantly this means that you have worked into your fascia and ligaments- something many of us forget to do.
You realise the importance of working deep into the joints in Yin yoga, as it is hard to understand how much emotion and pressure is held in them until you try to release it.

Walking out of the studio at the end of the class- after almost falling asleep to Mysan’s soothing voice in relaxation, I was sure that I was going to be struggling to walk the next day, however I was not sore in the slightest and felt more open than I ever have before.
Through the laughs, the pain, the long poses, the bolsters and blankets, everyone learnt a lot about not only Mysan’s Yin Yoga but also about their own bodies.
Kula will be starting regular Yin Yoga classes at 8.30am on a Sunday morning and I can’t think of a better way to release and compliment other activities at the end of the week.

An Ever-Changing Story

When I think of a story that changes it’s shape every time you read it, I think of a city; in particularly a city that one does not visit too often.

My example could be Christchurch, New Zealand, somewhere I frequent once or twice every couple of years. Each time I visit Christchurch, it’s story is evolving, whether it be through my grandparents moving house, or through the earthquake that devastated the city centre.

Each time it tells me something different about itself and this is the example I come to when I think of an ever-evolving story. It could be telling the story of the banding together and strength of the community in rebuilding the city, even using shipping crates as restaurants (a pretty cool idea if you ask me). It could be telling me the story of the brisk winter that is just ending and the warm summer ahead.

I would be intrigued by a story that changed its shape each time I looked at it, as it would mean that it was an active entity that you could never get sick of. It would be fascinating to be able to explore different outcomes like in those movies where you can choose your own ending.

An ever-evolving story would be full of life, and in fact could be a metaphor for life and therefore I would be intrigued to see it happen.