Short Storyspreadsheet: Excel as a Trojan Horse for Literature

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(Thanks, David!)

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Today's episode of Boing Boing Video is the first in a series of featured interviews conducted during the recent Game Developer Conference in San Francisco. All last week, we ran a marathon streaming video webcast from a friend's loft near the conference site, and tons of interesting people stopped by. Today, we present a conversation and Katamari Damacy Cosplay Dance-off with Jane McGonigal of Institute for the Future.

Jane talks with us about her research into emotion and gaming, and her project "Top Secret Dance-Off," which explores how we respond to online interpersonal reactions -- and, what kind of "play" activities make us feel good about ourselves and each other.

For instance, she says that the experience of humiliation -- say, the embarassment you might feel dancing in front of a streaming video camera -- involves a brief blip of happiness. Jane explains why, in this 10-minute clip that melds neuroscience, sociology, and funky Katamari choreography.

Don't miss the very end. Jane and Xeni test out the theories in a not-so-top-secret Bollywood dance-off.

[ Credits and props for BBV Live @GDC09: Production Team -- Jolon Bankey, Derek Bledsoe, Daniela Calderon, Eddie Codel, Xeni Jardin, Allison Kingsley, Matty Kirsch, Alice Taylor, Wesly Varghese. Special thanks to Wayneco Heavy Industries (accommodation and studio facilities), Virgin America Airlines (air travel), Celsius (thermogenic energy beverage), Ustream.tv (streaming video host). Moral support, production assistance, additional talent, and good vibes provided by: Domini Anne, Scott Beale, T.Bias, Jeremy Bornstein, Brandon Boyer, Chris The Van Guy, Peter S. Conrad, Marque Cornblatt, Wayne, Bre, and the entire de Geere family, Marcy DeLuce, Cory Doctorow, Joel Johnson, Kourosh Karimkhany, Jim Louderback and the Revision 3 team, Karen Marcelo, Rocky Mullin, Alicia Pollak, Jackie Mogol, Taylor Peck, David Pescovitz, Micah Schaffer, and Teal. ]

Over at Slate.com's XX Factor blog, Susannah Breslin writes:

Not long ago, I was contacted by a representative from Médecins Sans Frontières, or Doctors Without Borders, who pointed me to Condition: Critical, an online project that seeks to give voice to victims of violence in Congo. I've written about the situation in Congo here previously; New York Times East Africa bureau chief Jeffrey Gettleman has done an amazing job of chronicling the atrocities and their aftermath in a civil war-torn country where rape is used as a war tactic. "According to the United Nations," Gettleman reported, "27,000 sexual assaults were reported in 2006 in South Kivu Province alone, and that may be just a fraction of the total number across the country."

Condition: Critical looks to bridge the gap between Congo and the outside world with testimonies, videos, and photographs focusing on Congolese women who are victims of sexual violence, who emerge from the jungle after being kidnapped, raped, and enslaved by soldiers, who in some cases are unable to speak. Gettleman: "Many have been so sadistically attacked from the inside out, butchered by bayonets and assaulted with chunks of wood, that their reproductive and digestive systems are beyond repair."

You can follow Susannah's work here, and she posts brief items to Twitter and Tumblr, too.

La vita e' bella

Even though I wrote this ten years ago, even though I am not a futurist or a pessimist, I did not expect this kind of development of events: after all this time, after such an experience, history does not, unfortunately, walk with big steps as Zoran Djindjic, our killed president, hoped...

On 24 March, 1999, NATO begin air strikes on Yugoslavia.

26 March 1999, 5.p.m.

I hope we all survive this war, the bombs: the Serbs , the Albanians, the bad and the good guys, those who took up the arms, those who deserted, refugees going around the Kosovo woods and Belgrade’s refugees going around the streets with their children in arms, looking for non existing shelters, when the alarm for bombing sets off. I hope that NATO pilots don’t leave behind wives and children whom I saw crying on CNN as their husbands were taking off for military targets in Serbia. I hope we all survive but not this world as it is. I hope we manage to break it down: call it democracy call it dictatorship. When USA congressman estimates 20 000 civilian deaths as a low price for the peace in Kosovo, or president Clinton says he wants a non harassing Europe for American schoolgirls, or Serbian president Milutinovic says that we will fight to the very last drop of our blood, I always have a feeling they are talking about my blood, not theirs.

And they all become not only my enemies, but beasts, werewolves, switching from economic policy and democratic human rights to amounts of blood necessary for it (as fuel). Today is the second aftermath day: I went to the green and black market in my neighborhood, it has livened up again, adapted to new conditions, new necessities: no bread from the state, but a lot of grain on the market, no information from the official TV, so small talk among frightened population of who is winning. Teenagers are betting on the corners: whose planes have been shot down, ours or theirs, who lies best, who hides best victims, who exposes best victories, or again victims. As if it were a football game of equals.

The city is silent and paralyzed, but still working, rubbish is taken away, we have water, we have electricity... But where are the people, in houses, in beds, in shelters... I hear several personal stories of nervous breakdowns among my friends, male and female. Those who were in a nervous breakdown for the past year, since the war in Kosovo started, who were very few, now feel better: real danger is less frightening than fantasies of danger. I couldn’t cope with the invisible war as I can cope with concrete needs: bread, water, medicines... And also: very important, I can view an end, finally we in Belgrade got what all rest of Yugoslavia had: war on our territory. I receive 10-20 emails per day from friends or people whom I only met once: they think of us, me and my family and want to give me moral support. I feel like giving them moral support, I need only material support at this moment, my moral is made out of my needs.

(more after the jump...)

Paul Williams, the legendary creator of Crawdaddy! Magazine, fell off his bicycle in 1995 and suffered a traumatic brain injury, which has led to early onset Alzheimer's. His family's having difficulties with his care, and so a few of Paul's friend have set up a website both as a tribute to his life and work and in order to make an appeal for help.

Apart from being a true Founding Father of 'rock writing', and Philip K. Dick's literary executor, Paul should be of special interest to Boing Boing readers for his place at the crossroads where the science fiction fanzines of the '50's gave rise to an empowered and self-aware music-fan subculture -- and helped create what we now know as 'the '60's'. For anyone with a curiosity about the formation of world-changing subcultures through grassroots media, Paul was there when blogging was a twinkle in a mimeograph eye.

The difficulties Paul's wife, the singer Cindy Lee Berryhill, and his son Alexander, now face due to Paul's need for full-time care are an opportunity for crowd-sourcing at its best. This is a rotten time to be hitting anyone up for contributions for anything, but it is simply the case that if everyone who acknowledged how Paul changed their life by his music-writing and editing -- or by his efforts propagating the writings of Phil Dick back into prominence -- were to give even five or ten dollars it would transform a very unfortunate situation. (If everyone whose life had been changed by Paul's work but didn't even know his name were to contribute, they'd build his family a castle.)

Short of donating, just visit the website and glimpse some of Paul's many cultural legacies. The "Writings" section contains a lovely cascade of testimonials from people like Peter Buck, Lenny Kaye, Johan Kugelberg, Michaelangelos Matos, David Fricke, and others, some nice links to material like the original two-years run of Crawdaddy, and his legendary Rolling Stone interview with Phil Dick., as well as a guide to every book Paul ever wrote