Building Bridges, Not Walls (Also Random Country Fair?)

I attended a workshop titled "Building Bridges, Not Walls: Exploring Multicultural Friendships."I lead a group called Building Bridges so I thought this would be appropriate.

It was a'ight. It is a program run by counseling center paraprofessionals. They are basically undergrad students who aspire to one day run programming and give advice to youngsters. Our presenters did well, but I felt really old. There were twelve people there and I think they were all freshmen/sophomores. That's cool.

Basically we did an icebreaker with a ball of yarn where we had to throw it to people who share interests with us. I got thrown the ball of yarn multiple times because I like everything. Maybe if I was Alejandra I would be yarn-less. We also did a lot of interactive exercises where we "speed-friended" and role-played.

At the end of the workshop I don't know if I had truly learned anything, but I think that if I was a freshman or sophomore I would definitely have taken some great knowledge from this. It basically discussed how to be a good friend and then how to bring in different cultural background in that relationship. One of the best things covered was how to analyze conflict and address it in a way that is beneficial to both parties.

You must observe the situation at face value, then weigh in the judgments made by people based on their cultural identities. Then you must look at the feelings felt by both parties and the needs they are trying to fulfill based on these feelings. So if your friend John asks if he can bring his boyfriend to your party, but you think your friends will be weirded out by two dudes and you tell him no and then he is mad: analyze what happened (he asked, you said no), what judgments (you felt like there would be homophobia), feelings (John feels confused, hurt, sad, oppressed. you feel conflicted, cautious, anxious), and then needs (John wants acceptance and for people to meet his boyfriend, you want John to be comfortable but also for you homophobic friends to be comfortable). And then you communicate with John and try to figure it out.

It seems like a simple, fairytale approach to conflict resolution, but it's ok to dream sometimes.

I forced them to take a picture of me with the handbook.

ALSO

On my way to this workshop I stumbled upon a World Fair in the Illini Union. They had a lot of world foods (bananas, samosas, danishes... our world is apparently really simple) and booths for different clubs from different countries (Scandanavian Club sounded the best because they had a photo of Robyn up on their board). I stood around and signed up to receive info about volunteering in Israel and then I left because some guys with guitars were playing music from the 90's... poorly.

I then went grocery shopping and ran into Bill Berger.

That video has nothing to do with anything, I just thought I should share the wealth.

Gaming is for Grown-Ups: A View of the Industry

Jack Buser, Sr Designer, PlayStation Digital Programs

I felt like such a geek because I loved this lecture so much!

AND HE DIDN'T EVEN TALK ABOUT ANYTHING GROUND BREAKING!

But it was so cool, because he put up pictures and played trailers for games and he made nerdy jokes that I understood.

Realistic photo-representation of us.

Jack Buser was a U of I grad (apparently 75% of speakers at this university were at some point). He studied computer science (or computer engineering… or both), and started doing his projects and thesis work on audio because that is what he really loved. He got a job at Dolby Digital right out of college and worked on some audio stuff for DVD and then eventually somebody brought in a PlayStation 2 prototype to see how DVD would work on it. He convinced them to put Dolby systems in the gaming system to make the sound of games and movies phenomenal. After a few years he was hired by PlayStation to work on PlayStation Home (which is PlayStation’s virtual world, like Second Life, but on PlayStation). He then was made into the senior designer of Digital Programs and works now on PlayStation Network stuff and their new Mobile services.

Jack went over the different kinds of games which I will summarize because it is necessary to know when looking at the future.

CORE. People’s preconceived notion of ‘games.’ First-person shooters. Heavily graphic games that people get invested in.

CASUAL. “Time wasters” that people can just sit down and play for a bit. Like Rock Band or Guitar Hero.

ANCIENT. Mancala. Games have been and will be around forever.

SOLO. Pac-Man. Single-player games were a product of the 1970s. Before that single-player was basically limited to solitaire.

SOCIAL. Farmville and Facebook games. These games are redefining what it means to be ‘social.’

MASSIVE. World of Warcraft. MMORPG (Multi-Massive Online Role Playing Games). People do not consider these as “Social” games but they are. People meet people online, get into gaming guilds with them, and often consider them close friends or even get married to them.

MOBILE. Phone and handheld games that would be impossible to realize in the living room.

MOTION. Kinect, PlayStation Move (focus on getting the player active). He didn’t mention Wii even though Nintendo changed the industry by focusing on motion.

AR. Augmented Reality is the future. On the Nintendo 3DS, there are games that use the camera to capture the world in real time and then you fight things that are changing in this “world.” Down the road, this could be used for many things. For example, Jack showed a prototype photo of a street view and bubbles popped up displaying reviews for restaurants, common tips, tweets about a place, etc. Completely immersing the user in social media bullshit. Twitter is stupid… but it is still pretty cool.

FUTURE. There was a picture of a cloud? The sky is the limit… maybe?

Aside from that, Jack didn’t really expand on any ideas or breakthroughs in the industry. I did notice that he only mentioned Nintendo once and that was when bragging about how he got sound to be focused on in gaming. Feuding? He also was talking about the digital programs division and how they are re-releasing old games from previous systems so that younger audiences can discover these great games. I find this hard to believe, because my nephew is thirteen and he has no interest in playing old PlayStation games because of the graphics. I want to play them, but I’m a nerd who grew up playing video games.

Jack Buser talking about nerd stuff.

It was hard to focus because the room smelled like terrible BO. You need to shower boys and girl. I thought maybe it was just this instance, but I did some researching and heard personal anecdotes of the ripest of lecture halls. There was also a Homestuck (Homestuck is a web comic that is vastly popular among geeks and nerds on web forums right now) sitting behind us. I didn’t get a picture, but here’s kind of what she looked like (sans horns). 

Jack ended with a trailer for one of my favorite games that was just recently released. The game is so simple but it is gorgeous and was nominated for a Grammy for its soundtrack. Here’s the trailer. Watch its glory.

Tesla Coil Concert

So this was cool...

I was standing too far away to get a decent photo during the performance. 

I had heard of Tesla coils before and had seen David Bowie play Nikola Tesla in The Prestige, so I was pretty interested in this. Let's just say Bowie had some big coils.


It fascinates me the things that science can do. It is fathomable that electricity shot at a certain voltage and frequency could make sound, but making an entire score is incredible.

If you want to understand Tesla coils a little better here is a cool and nerdy explanation I found online: http://www.sciencebrothers.org/how-a-tesla-coil-works/

I was there.

I want to see these suckers used to power everything wirelessly. I like technology but I hate having a ton of cords. Clutter is bad and cords are clutter. But other than my first world problems, these could be great to deliver electricity places during natural disasters or emergencies. I don't really know about them that much, so I can't say that my fantasies could be reality, but in theory if we could deliver electricity wirelessly imagine what we could do! Cool stuff.

Making music with these coils has apparently become a meme on the internet. Although I just thought it was people having fun with science. I guess anything can be considered a meme now if there's enough of it on the internet. Does that mean that dicks and vaginas are memes? Because there are certainly plenty of those online.

A lot of the songs played were sci-fi theme songs (Doctor Who, Star Wars) or video game music (Mario, The Legend of Zelda). They knew how to play to their audience. The crowd loved it.

Here are some cool videos I found online. I was far away from the action on Friday night because there were thousands of people at this concert:

I also went to Engineering Open House, but it was so busy I walked out and left. I saw a 2-liter tornado though. Those are always cool.

This stock photo came from some children's ministry website. Teaching kids how Jesus will rock their bodies like a hurricane since 75AD.

Jovi Radtke

Wooohooo!!!

Jovi Radtke was such a nerdy, silly, queer person. I could dig it.

She identified as a boi, which means she identifies as female, but often expresses her gender more masculine-ly. After a quick research session (wikipedia) I discovered that this term is also used for young boys who like older men, butch lesbians, and by Avril Lavigne.



Jovi Radtke is a spoken word artist, a slam poet, which is just a fancy way of saying rapper without music (is that ignorant? that's just how it felt). I really enjoyed her performance and her poetry.

There are more videos of her stuff on YouTube but I won't just post her videos. She didn't have background guitar/drums at this performance, it was just her.

Most of her poems were about hard-hitting issues like suicide, transgender violence, and any other gay hot topic that all us gays go through. It was true and real and she was good, but I had heard most of it before.

But on that note,  I still want to emphasize that I liked the night and her performance. Just because I'm a sassy bitch and I've heard it all before doesn't mean that it wasn't inspiring or meaningful. And although Jovi's poems were well-worded, funny, and often inspired a rise of action, what hit me the most during the night was hearing her introduce her poem about Brandon Teena.

I was first shocked that people hadn't seen Boys Don't Cry or at least heard about Brandon Teena. But I guess I'm just old. I remember seeing the film at 3am at a slumber party when I was ten. The guys wanted to watch it because they heard you see tits. There are indeed tits, but I focused more on the violence and hate that was focused on. Jovi talked about how she was ten, living in Nebraska when Brandon Teena was murdered (in Nebraska). She remembered seeing stories on the news and thinking that if she ever came out Brandon's story would be her story.

I grew up in a small town that was overwhelmingly strict puritan. Any break in sexuality 'codes' meant discrimination and excommunication. I grew up believing that Jesus was going to come and set me on fire because I thought about naked men from time to time. I then became aware that other people might want to set me on fire because I thought about naked men from time to time. I saw films like Boys Don't Cry and Brokeback Mountain. I heard news stories of violence. People talked about Matthew Sheppard and at that time said, "If you just stay in the closet and do what you want on your own time, no one will want to hurt you."

But that is destructive to the mind. And Jovi talked about that, and I understood it perfectly. That has always guided my work because I want to open about my experiences because I grew up feeling like I needed everything to be a secret.

So the performance was fun. If you want more info about Jovi, you can see some of her performances on her website or just search her name:

www.joviradtke.com