More than mere marginalia

Just do it!

Participate: The revolution of fan culture. from lori on Vimeo.
The creator of this video is a friend of my old sparring partner Badger, who tells me that it is a student exercise. The video has no authorial overview and is a bit short on analysis, but the interviews more or less speak for themselves so that the end result is well worth watching. I found the video particularly interesting because I believe that the advent of the shared narrative of RPGs' was a pivotal moment in the development of the participatory culture lori takes as her subject.

In a pleasant coincidence, hard at a curry cook-up last week I listened to Paul Merton's The House That Jazz Built on BBC R4 (last chance to listen again Sat. 12/12/09). Fascinating in its own right, this documentary about Ronnie Scott's world famous London jazz club proved apposite because of its reference to the egalitarian ethos of the jazz scene in the early postwar days; an ethos in which the barriers between creator and audience were permeable in a way which immediately reminded me of lori's video. This parallel is doubly apt because some roleplayers like to use the metaphor of a jazz band's jam session to convey the nature of a roleplaying session.

Lori also has her own cartoon blog: Kids Watch Too Much TV (neat title!).
This strip speaks to my geeky heart!

No end of fun!
A recent Stumble! brought me to a page where I could make my own animated snowflake. Something about this was strangely familiar. Sure enough, this was another nifty internet timewaster by Ze Frank, whose Drawtoy featured @RD/KA! in September.

Just as with Drawtoy, this apparently pointless exercise could be of some use to roleplayers. For example, I can easily imagine images like this being returned by a hyperspace scanner; on the grounds that- relative to realspace, hyperspace demonstrates [technobabble]unstable post-fractal geometries and unpredictable spacetime inversions driven by wormhole hyper-tunnelling [/technobabble]. ;)