This is my blogchalk:
United States, Georgia, Atlanta, English, Chuck, Male, 31-35, film, literature.

Friendster asks me to describe myself. Gender, age, occupation all are no problem. But then there are my interests, my favorite music, favorite TV shows and "about me." I don't actually have an internal list of favorite music so I can't simply make explicit what was implicit all along. I'd have to fabricate a list and do so pretty much without context.

"This is a heinous proposal," said NAACP member Michael Bond, son of NAACP chairman Julian Bond. "It's still a Confederate flag. It's completely objectionable."

Class is often invisible in America in the movies, and usually not the subject of the film. I just saw a wonderful film called "Better Luck Tomorrow" by Justin Lin about rich, Asian-American kids in Orange County and how they go astray and how they get into drugs and then into crime. And I saw another movie by Larry Clark called "Bully" about poor white kids who get into drugs and are led astray and get into crime. And these two movies are instructive because neither one of them seems to be totally aware of the class issue. One is about a lower economic group, the other is about a higher economic group, and both are totally involved with story and character and personal relationships. We don't have a lot of class-conscious filmmaking.

"I'm glad to have Adrian's LiveJournal still around, although I never visit it anymore," said Palm. "I keep it on my 'friends' list just so I can see his name every so often, but I can never bring myself to click on his name. The first year or so after he passed on I visited it with decreasing regularity, until eventually I couldn't handle the emotions. I had to move on. But the idea that it is still around is comforting … it's almost as if he isn't dead."

I need to think more about how to frame the issues. In particular, one would need to define "information technology" before arguing whether something belongs in the category or not. Ditto for "user" and "input" and "change."

materiality depends on how the work mobilizes its resources as a physical artifact as well as on the user's interactions with the work and the interpretive strategies she develops--strategies that include physical manipulations as well as conceptual frameworks. (33).

It is a condition of online works that they stutter (I'd recommend reading Deleuze and Guattari's Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature to get a valuable take on stuttering, or indeed note Deleuze's description of Godard as someone who makes the cinema stutter), that they don't flow in a controllable or controlled way (regardless of the fantasy of Flash).

We didn't spend a lot of money on anything, but all of the money we had was put into the camera department to capture the landscape and environment in a way that would be cinematic. -- To me, film is the perfect blend of pictures, performance and music. To create an evocative mood, tone or atmosphere, they really need to compliment each other and bring the audience to a new sense of place.

It's a furiously kinetic display of pyrotechnics from the director Tom Tykwer, who fuses lightning-fast visual tricks, tirelessly shifting styles and the arbitrary possibilities of interactive storytelling into the best-case scenario for a cinematic video game.

Tykwer does this with a vigor and pizazz that offset the essentially empty nature of the exercise. He makes "Run Lola Run" sufficiently hot, fast and post-human to pull that off.

Abandoned buildings, broken down cars, busted pianos -- images of materials that have outlived their usefulness seem to permeate this movie. The dreamlike music of artists like Will Oldham and Sparklehorse parallel the seemingly slow lives lived by the characters, who aren't ambitionless (or bored) so much as thoughtful and unhurried, if vaguely dissatisfied.

hints at a burgeoning romance between the adolescent Regina and a local kid, then leaves it hanging. We can easily assume that the friendship sputtered away to nothing. But why pique an audience's interest in one particular angle of a story if you're not going to do anything with it?

a story told in letters, narrated by characters who don't know how the story is going to end....Richardson called this "writing to the moment"; things happen to his characters, and almost immediately they are writing about them in their letters. They do not narrate a story from a temporal position months or years later, after they've had a chance to sort things out.

The forum at blogshares contains some really interesting conversations about all of this [the method of estimating the value of blogs], including one thread warning of the potential of a market crash.

Blogshares is a brilliant concept. It's like the gaming version of the short article I wrote last year on Links and power. I'm disheartened that jill/txt is only valued at $218.80, but I've been interested to see that almost all the blogs I regularly read and wanted to buy shares in have low valuations too.

Instead of just demonstrating against this war (the first of many?), now is the time to propose a better, more American, course. We must lead and strengthen existing international institutions, including the UN, and design new ones, including, for example, an international peace-making force. We must start immediately to repair badly damaged relationship in Europe and with nations such as Russia and China. And we must have a foreign policy based upon America's highest and best principles (as I outline in my San Francisco speech), that inspires and gives hope to the millions of fellow inhabitants of the globe who would like to respect and admire us.

the mask of righteousness conceals the real issue - that of the fundamental purpose of such imagery. wars are as wonderful for photographers as they are for arms manufacturers - they provide the opportunity, in the guise of revealing the truth, for feeding the voracious appetite for war-porn. substantially, since no American newspaper is ever going to show pictures of the burnt and mutilated bodies of civilians, especially not women and children, nor of American casualties, the photographer's role is limited to mediating between the reality and the Hollywood version of 'war' (we'll skip over the issue of whether this Interference in Iraq is a war or an illegitimate invasion).

It's fascinating reading, though less about the war now than about the experience of travelling in such a region at such a time. It's also about being and not being at the same time: he's a journalist but not a journalist. That double vision is valuable.

My view has shrunk from a wide-angle lens to something resembling looking through the wrong end of a telescope.