Actual house:

The Source engine version:

Not bad, eh?

Advantages: This would be an example of a Mirror World; it mimics an object in real life, virtually. This would probably be best used for virtual tours. I know there is a function in Source where commentary markers can be placed in locations referenced by their content. This would work well for anyone who could not actually visit the house.

Classes:
Pros:
Homework due only every other day, still small numbers of people in each of my classes
Cons: Not as regular a group of people as in high school

Enh, this is all stuff that everyone's gonna find. I'm enjoying myself greatly, learning a lot, and it really excites me that I already have a potential research opportunity. School is finally starting to seem relevant to my future career. That makes all my work seem doable. It's been really easy for me to adjust, I dunno who has a problem with it. The freedom is great and I still get stuff done. Everything seems in balance.

Pat Mulholland,
Signin' off.

Luckily we have this system.

Register and feel safer! Kind of brilliant of our school to have such a system.

These "tech disasters" range in severity. The article's written in a British perspective, but a lot of these seem to happen in America. Frankly I'm not surprised. Anyways, the majority here don't seem to be human error persay; obviously the software bugs were caused by human error but software bugs occur regularly. I'd call it more fate that transposed these small flaws into full-blown disasters.

The one is a pretty normal criticism, the article sort of sums it up when it says

The Cult of the Amateur, is rather lightweight and we treat it here as an example of a traditional approach: "The cultural sky is falling, and it is all the fault of the Internet!"

I think the other one is pretty unique, it actually deals with some serious issues about the entire Western culture. It's from the perspective of a Buddhist, and it's neat to think of the internet in a new philosophical way.

I hope to hear from everyone over the next semester and to share with them interesting experiences from our research opportunities.

Cyberpunk is a subgenre of the entire punk subculture. Cyberpunk stories, set in the future, focus on antiheroic protagonists who deal in the realms of the illegal and subversive. Unlike mainstream science fiction, the goal of Cyberpunk is not to showcase a single new technology, but to explore how technology will affect the societies of the future. Cyberpunk settings most often portray the future as dystopian despite all of humanity’s advancements. The authors of these works do this to point out modern day societal defects, giving the genre its punk ideology. Although primarily a literary movement, Cyberpunk occasionally crosses over into other forms of media; easy examples would be The Matrix or Blade Runner in movies. Common themes include genetic and cybernetic augmentation of the body, drug use, corruption, the danger conformity poses, capitalism’s inherent failings, and the computer programmer as the new outlaw.

The first author I’ll mention is William Gibson. I don’t think anyone cares about his background or other biographical stuff so I’m going to skip that. Gibson actually coined the term Cyberspace, which is thrown around a lot nowadays. His first novel Neuromancer explored the idea of having a universal virtual network. I’ll run you through a summary I wrote real quick just for context.

A freelance hacker is coerced into working for a mysterious employer to illegally break the constraints the government has placed on an Artificial Intelligence named Wintermute. The hacker, Case, eventually discovers that his employer is Wintermute itself. Wintermute was created as the logical half of a larger entity, its twin Neuromancer having the ability to emote. Case, with the help of a cybernetically enhanced female assassin, a Rastafarian spaceship pilot, and the reanimated memories of a dead hacker, breaks the restrictions around Wintermute, allowing the two AIs to fuse.

The world Gibson created for the story was wraught with sexual depravity, more widespread and more potent drug abuse, corporate corruption and other extensions of current social issues. Wintermute and Neuromancer embody several extremely human traits; Wintermute, cold and calculating, represents both the male personality and the left logical hemisphere of the brain. Neuromancer, perceptive and empathetic, represents the female persona and the right creative hemisphere. Their fusion creates a very much human superintelligence. Gibson’s portrayal of the two stands in contrast to the mechanical actions of the human characters. He’s hinting here that technology dehumanizes in an equilibrium reaction; the more we make machines manlike, the less like men we appear.

Neal Stephenson would probably be considered postcyberpunk, which is basically one two many prefixes for my taste. The distinction between cyberpunk and its post cousin lies in the outlook of the protagonists. Postcyberpunk protagonists are not inherently lowlife characters; they instead work against some aspect of their same dystopian futures. This makes postcyberpunk works decidedly more upbeat, and Stephenson’s works have made me laugh harder than any other author I’ve read, except maybe Mark Twain. The change from cyberpunk to postcyberpunk styles is most likely due to the contradictorily positive effect of the internet and other emergent technologies. Still, Stephenson’s and Gibson’s works share so much thematically in common that I find it hard to separate their two universes. Stephenson and Gibson actually have a friendly feud going on between them, and meet often at writers’ conferences.

I focused on two stories of Stephenson’s, Snow Crash and the more recent Diamond Age. Snow Crash looks at a world governed solely through capitalism and unified by a virtual reality known as the metaverse. Diamond Age focuses on the growth of nanotechnologies and how they will change our lives. Most notable in this book is the existence of a “feed” which is like having a water line into your house that instead brings in pure elements, which a matter compiler can then rearrange into nearly any form via nanotechnology. The result is a fairly cheap answer to world hunger, but problems stemming from the tribe-like architecture of the new global society end in bloodshed.

Stephenson likes to focus on the interactions of people with new technologies, and doesn’t often help his readers with some of the lingo. New acronyms pass in and out of conversation, indicating the complete integration of things like the Feed into everyday life.

I’d really suggest any of these books, or even any in the cyberpunk genre for you guys to read recreationally. Really fun and interesting stuff.

Check out these interviews for a more personal look at the authors:

Gibson

Stephenson

GDM, a journal for the pros, interesting outlooks inside

The Valve Developer Wiki, basically the handbook for using Valve's editing tools. Infinite knowledge is stored here, it explains every keyvalue of every entity in the game. However if you want more in depth explanations and examples of implementation, you'll have to head over to some sick nasty...

...Tutorials. My favorite are the SDKnut's tutorials, which explain most of what you would want to do. It helps to have a human guiding you step by step sometimes. Which is why the next one is so useful.

Forums. The official Steam community forums have years of questions asked and answered and if the archives don't help you it's likely that an active member can.

The Mod database.
Here you can view the lives of nearly every single Mod out there. There lies hints to what makes a mod successful, as well as tips to get over the slump a lot of mods hit halfway through their production.

Not sure how useful this will be to anyone but me, but I think if someone had helped me out with this information I would have had an easier time getting acclimated.

I was introduced to modding through my interest in Counter Strike. Me and Pat Bonner got all up ins with the mapping, which is basically one of three tiers of construction that go into a mod. Portal sort of stirred my interest in actually working on a real mod.

The three tiers:

Programming. Although Source's "source code" isn't available for editing, classes and header files may be edited freely. A modder can also create new classes, including new NPCs, a different GUI, new weapons, etc.

Mapping. The next level is implementing these new classes, as well as existing architecture, in a "map", or the world in which a user interacts. These includes designing the flow of a game, creating the setting, establishing the game's mood, and scripting game events. A mapper lays down the walls, ceilings and floors, textures them, inserts "entities" to produce effects, and places in lighting.

Modeling. Unlike the starve-yourself one, this Modding involves manipulating in 3D, textures and primitive objects to create the detailed representations of smaller objects or more detailed objects than the mapper can handle. They design the weightmaps for ragdoll effects. Some do double time as animators, designing the motion of the ragdolls and then creating scripted sequences in which characters interact.

Here's two I'd like you to look over:

This one just sort of praises it in general. Nothing I didn't know already, it's fantastic.

For a more serious, indepth and probably overexaggerated look, check this one out. Examining everything from sexuality in the game to minimalism, it's quite the philosophical tour de force.

If you read my earlier article, I suspect it's because of the writing that the game played out so well. Also, being a two hour (appx) long game, they were forced to plan out every second the player would go through. The puzzles being linear, storyboarding must have been easier, as well as the timing of ingame events. Indeed the developer commentary points towards this being the truth.

So there's this guy who's a guy in real life but a girl in Second Life... and then there's this other guy who was playing a guy in Second Life for awhile, but then decided to be a girl instead, and then the first guy met the second guy, and they fell in love, so now they're a couple-- even though they're really two guys into girls.

Look, I don't think it's that hard, you're not really into girls if the "girl" you're in love with is a dude. I'm not getting political here, the plain fact is that these two guys are in love with each other, no matter if there's a female facade they associate each other with. They might not be sexually attracted to each others' male RL forms, but I don't know how cool it is to be lusting after a female avatar anyway. Two guys who aren't gay, but share similar likes are, I know this sounds crazy, probably more like friends. I don't know why these two are keeping this relationship going, because it has 0 possibility of translating into a stable RL relationship.

Second Life is pretty much the playing ground of sexual deviants. This story just demonstrates how deviant a G-rated relationship can get.

I thought I'd look into the program a bit more and judge its effectiveness. I've come to the conclusion that the Take Control program is probably very helpful for the computer illiterate. However, I think that the average Penn State student will know enough about the concept of the internet to understand how a Facebook picture could be shared with others.

I think the way they address the consequences of such things, though, definitely highlights some areas students might not consider before posting a picture. It actually made me more conscious of my stupid Facebook profile, which I normally don't give half a regard to.

ITS has managed to get this campaign out there in several ways. One, through posters, Stall Stories, flyers and man-size cardboard cut outs in the HUB. Two, by offering some pretty sweet prizes to encourage interaction with the site. In order to enter the contest a student has to actually read a lot of the material on the site and pass a quiz. I entered a long time ago because either prize is pretty awesome, and I'm sure many more were drawn in by this.

Presentation: 4/5 Fairly effective at getting the word out about the program, but I'd like to see maybe an email or something more convenient for a student to just click and read. The warnings are encapsulated in Facebook-esque profiles, which make them more humorous and easy to digest.

Information: 3/5 Useful for those just getting started with social networking, and to at least put a slight caution of sharing passwords etc in the minds of the students

Overall: 7/10 I think it's great the school is working to protect its students electronically as well as through campus security.

Anyway, enter the contest, but you better not win because I want that stuff.

Try it! Wait, someone already has Read and be more or less disgusted. It's even worse that these are Penn State students, but in such a big school I guess there have to be the occasional idiots.

Relevance?
Facebook usage and security settings. The group had created a photo album showing off their racy costumes, intended to be viewed only be close friends. They set the viewing privileges to reflect this. However, some sort of mixup occurred where the girl allowed the album to be viewed outside of the friend circle and a group was created focusing on the album's content.

Do I really have to point out the moral(s) of this story?

Just manage your profile on the internet wisely.

Shameful picture of one of the perpetrators: