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

Afrofuturism and "Trans"

Afrofuturism: Black Science Fiction - Nnedi Okorafor

To start off this interesting debacle at the Bruce D. Nesbitt African-American Cultural Center (or as everyone calls is BNAACC or even more commonly Black House), I arrived a few minutes before the talk was supposed to start. There were very few seats left and the space was awkward to maneuver around. This is not BNAACC's fault, we all have shitty facilities and we do what we can with them. But this talk was part of the "Lunch on Us" series. As I said previously, I usually avoid these talks because they often are bad. But the topic of black sci-fi doesn't come up every day so I thought I would check it out.

BNAACC had pb+j's as well as cereal. It is cool in theory, but once you add trying to balance a bowl, milk, sandwich, cup with water, backpack, and coat/notebook/anything else you might be carrying... It was awkward. I spent the first five-ten minutes trying to figure myself out. I had to put the bowl down and take off my coat and then get up and reposition and get water and then sit down and then pick everything up for someone who wanted to get out... I ended up spilling milk on myself and the ground and then had to get up to find a napkin or paper towel... ugh.


If there was any lecturing taking place I would've missed it, but luckily there was ten minutes of announcements... -_- This worked for me because I was figuring my life out (and by life I'm referring to  cereal and pb + j). But if I had decided food was irrelevant and was ready to learn, I would've been waiting and hearing every schmo's two-cents about their upcoming internship opportunity, community vote, and zit they recently popped. I only was focused for about two-three minutes of announcements and I was already done. It was a waste of valuable time.

Anyway... when Nnedi Okorafor actually started to talk, I was impressed. She started off by giving a brief list of black sci-fi authors to look into: Sam Delaney, Octavia Butler, Nalo Hopkinson. She also explained the differences between fantasy (mystical, unexplained) and science fiction (technology, science). Then there was a blurb for an anthology we could look into called AfroSF. It contains sci-fi written by Africans. That would be interesting to investigate.

Nnedi then started to talk about her life. She grew up in South Holland, Illinois and said it was very racist during the 80's. She would go to Nigeria every year and was astounded that race had no significance there (although their big issue was tribalism). She attended UIUC and ran track and then was diagnosed with scoliosis after her freshman year. She had surgery and was supposed to be fine but ended up being paralyzed from the waist down. She had to go through rehab and teach herself how to walk again. While she was going through rehab she had a lot of down time and started to write to escape her bed. Then she kept writing.

What I loved was when Nnedi started discussing the fears that come with being a black writer.

- Fear of being too black. This includes revealing your black name. She said if there is an African name and the audience can't pronounce it, they will probably not read the story. She also related it to J.K. Rowling not revealing her name out of fear that young boys wouldn't read Harry Potter.

- Fear of showing your black picture on the cover. They worry about sales dropping when they see a black person on the book sleeve or inside cover.

- Fear of writing a black planet. This one relates to sci-fi, but the idea that the majority is black or an entire culture is black. She later tied this into her character development and maintaining black characters.

Another interesting anecdote came up when Nnedi discussed the cover art for her novel "The Shadow Speaker." She brought up the point that we assume characters are white until further notified. She knows of this and continually mentions the dark skin of her heroine throughout her story. But when the cover came back to her it showed a white woman in the desert. She was outraged and had them retry. They sent the same cover back but had darkened her skin a bit on Photoshop. She was still outraged and asked for them to re-do it. But they said they had no black people in their stock archives. HA. That was ridiculous to me... but it was not surprising. Anyway, they re-shot a cover with a black girl and Nnedi was still upset because her character was supposed to be bald but decided it was a compromise she could live with.

So I just keep rambling and going but at the end of this all I was intrigued and inspired by black sci-fi. You don't see a lot of it (the same goes with most black media in America) and when you do it often never focuses on Africa (except for Egypt and S. Africa). This recent work I've been doing has been dealing with black and white and Africa hadn't crossed my mind. ...it did, but I don't think it's going to come into play anytime soon in this series of work. I just want to read now...

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Trans Screening ...

This movie sucked ass.

trailer: http://vimeo.com/34482159#

Should I even say more about it? I don't know, maybe I am biased from my history in LGBT issues, but I feel like this film pretended as if it would shine a light onto trans* issues. If it did anything it was teach a very very simplified (in a bad sense) view of transgender people and fed into stereotypes.

First, the cinematography was similar to local downtown shopping adds (it looked like local furniture store quality) and the editing was horrendous. We would suddenly switch back and forth from 6-10 (I lost track) stories of different transgender people and then suddenly someone else would be brought back into the mix and it was a mess of confusion that made me want to leave the room. The music was all royalty-free music that could probably be found on iMovie or Windows Movie Maker. It was horrendous and was used poorly in a way that made these serious topics almost appear a mockery or a joke.

Technical aspects aside, the content was poor too. They only focused on people who felt a full shift from male to female or female to male and relied on stereotypes to reinforce that switch. The little boy who "loves to play with dolls and wear dresses" or the girl who "played with trucks and liked sports." It is a very limiting and generalizing view of transgender.

They didn't mention any other parts of trans* identities. (I found out a few weeks ago that you should put a * after trans to include everyone on the gender spectrum. Always want to be inclusive.) They had males who became females and got vaginas made and they had females who became males and had their breasts removed and looked into penis grafting and such. But what about the females who never get a penis or their breasts removed? What about males who get breasts but keep their penis and still consider themselves trans? What about someone who one day feels like a man and dresses the part and the next day feels like a woman and dresses the part? What about them?

Apparently there is only female to male or male to female.

Eh, at the end of this story I was disappointed and would not recommend this film to anyone ever.

But my teeth look good and Alejandra looks cute.

Lincoln's Legal Career

I made my way over to the Rare Book & Manuscript Library and was astounded by how nice my shoes sounded on the third floor of the Main Library. It must have been from the silence echoing through the deserted hallway. I thought this over for a long while.

As I entered into the room I was impressed by the layout of the conjoining rooms. I assumed that they were viewing rooms. There were large glass windows with empty tables behind them. Being rare books and manuscripts they want to make sure people don't damage them or steal them. Constant surveillance. But it makes for a sexy library.

A man from the library introduced the lecturer, Guy Fraker, and put in a lot of Lincoln humor. "Lincoln's birthday was eight score and six days ago." "Buy this postcard set, it will only set you back a Lincoln (aka $5)." I thought it was funny. Oh yes, it was also President's Day. Everyone in the room was a total Lincoln-phile. President's Day is like their Christmas.

So Guy Fraker (who got a BA and JD at UIUC) started to introduce himself and talked about his admiration for the library at UIUC and how he is a lawyer not a writer so he needed a lot of help writing his book. Eventually he started to talk about Lincoln. Fraker stated that the mission of his book was to give Central Illinois credit for putting Lincoln in the White House.

The rest played out as a very specific history lesson. Let me summarize into the things I found most interesting:

- Lincoln cared about keeping the Union alive and abolishing slavery. When he said Union he meant democracy more so than just a group of states. Also, it is a misconception that Lincoln didn't care about slavery. Lincoln's views on equal rights for all races was a little less equal but he did view the act of owning another person as evil and immoral.

- Lincoln was one of the few lawyers who went on the whole county circuit. Most would hit up one or two counties, but he hit up all 14(?) counties. He would be gone for eleven weeks, twice a year, so twenty-two weeks total. Many thought he did this because he didn't like staying at home with his wife, Mary. She had to raise the kids all on her own. Then she went crazy.

- The county circuit was Springfield - Tazwell - Woodford (where I'm from) - McClean - Lacon - Monticello - Champaign - Danville - Paris - Shelby - Sullivan - Decatur - Taylorville. From this I learned that Champaign County was the second smallest until the railroads and the University were built.

- Also, alcohol was a bigger issue than slavery in Illinois because no one in Illinois owned slaves. Most of his circuiting was for alcohol distribution rights.

- A lot of the people he knew on the circuit court encouraged him and helps get him votes to become President. 

Really this was just a fun little history lesson about Lincoln's time in Illinois. They had cake, but I didn't eat any. I was definitely one of two people that were not librarians, histories, or some other form of high scholar. I made a swift getaway.

They were selling his book. I did not drop any Lincolns for it though...

4000 Years for Choice - Heather Ault

I have been semi-attending the Office of Inclusion and Intercultural Relations "Lunch on Us" series for the past couple of years and what I have generally found is that they are current MFA or PhD candidates giving us a proposal of a theory they have. I generally do not learn much and then end up feeling like I am stealing food from the University. I steer clear of these lunches.

But "4000 Years for Choice" was a lunch and lecture made in heaven. I was so impressed.

The lecture took place in the Women's Resource Center (which is unfortunately hidden by Coco Mero diminishing visibility and access) and when I entered the center the first thing I noticed was they were serving Indian food.

Destiny.

I had walked past Bombay Indian Grill on the way and muttered to myself, "Maybe I should skip this lecture and get Indian food." But I convinced myself to attend, BAM! Life kicked in and rewarded me with naan and eggplant curry.

So anyway.... The lecture was being led by Heather Ault, a local designer who got her MFA in New Media here at U of I. That was pleasant surprise #1. She had also done some classes (maybe got her BFA? it was unclear) at Humboldt State... Luke Batten, lololol. Pleasant surprise #2. Lastly, she wasn't awful and presented sleek, sexy materials that promoted positivity and a re-approaching of the activism movement. And that was all I learned within the first ten minutes.

She talked about how she focused on four segments of pro-choice activism to re-imagine the way people protest for pro-choice organizations. History, Images, Language, and Spaces. I will try to briefly sum that up:

History - can date back at least 4000 years to Ancient Egypt, books in the 30s, Roe v. Wade in 1973, and most people surveyed today think that contraceptives were created within the last 40 years
Images - pro-life and pro-choice campaign photos, historical ads for syringes/sponges/condoms, cartoons, focused on fallopian tubes rather than the fetus image
Language - National Abortion Rights Action League vs 40 Days for Life, looked at emails sent by them, language they used, Battle vs. Story, mobilization vs. persuasion, saw that pro-life emails were more positive
Spaces - transformed posters into signs, professional-looking signs (people thought they were pro-life because of how professional they looked)

Then I had to go to make it to class and missed the last ten minutes.

Ault did not look at the pro-choice movement from the tradition lens of "WE ARE OPPRESSED! WE HAVE NO RIGHTS! WE ARE BEING MARGINALIZED!" but instead from a positive "WE ARE PROUD! WE ARE STRONG! WE ARE GOOD PEOPLE!" This positive we-succeed instead of we-need attitude caught my attention and from researching the "4000 Years for Choice" project other people have noticed too. I want to follow in Ault's footsteps and use my work in a way that is positive about what I am fighting for and not victimizing myself... because honestly people get bored with that and end up resenting the person crying about how their woes are worse than everyone else's.

Me before the lecture

Me after the lecture

I also learned a ton about the sexy history of contraceptives.

;-D win win.