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CMS News Archives
CMS alum and current instructor Sam Ford had his course "American Soap Operas" Slashdotted:
from the stranger-than-fiction dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Wikipedia apparently wasn't enough. There had to be a course on the much needed subject of soap operas at MIT. Here's the Course Description: "The television landscape has changed drastically in the past few years; nowhere is this more prevalent than in the American daytime serial drama, one of the oldest forms of television content. This class examines the history of these "soap operas" and their audiences by focusing on the production, consumption, and media texts of soaps. The class will include discussions of what makes soap operas a unique form, the history of the genre, current experimentation with transmedia storytelling, the online fan community, and comparisons between daytime dramas and primetime serials from 24 to Friday Night Lights, through a study of Procter & Gamble's As the World Turns."" All I really need to know I learned from my evil twin, who fathered my unborn child, who has a extremely rare disease that only one of my many CIA contacts, who is also sleeping with my wife, can cure.
In "Addicted to Peter Lorre (That Voice, Those Eyes):
Directed by Jay Scheib, "Addicted to Bad Ideas: Peter Lorre's 20th Century" is based on the band's 2007 album of the same title, on Chunksaah Records. The music veers from piano- and guitar-driven rock to tense chamber arrangements, and the lyrics draw from Lorre's films and Stephen D. Youngkin's 2005 biography, "The Lost One: A Life of Peter Lorre." ("I don't act, I just make faces," goes one song.)
But Mr. Scheib, a theater professor at M.I.T. whose multimedia work "This Place Is a Desert" was in Under the Radar two years ago, said the show was not strictly biographical. "It ended up being more about how the band's live show is influenced by Lorre's life and times than any kind of a biopic," he said.
The Singapore-M.I.T. Gambit Game Lab ("gambit" for gamers, aesthetics, mechanics, business, innovation and technology) brings together computer geeks of Cambridge and computer geeks of the Asian city-state. The point: to develop video games for the global market from the outset, not translate them from one continent to another.
Eitan Glinert, there as a master's candidate in computer science, got to thinking about one market lost in translation. "People with disabilities were being left out of progress in the gaming market," says Mr. Glinert, 26. For his master's thesis, Mr. Glinert wanted to make a game that would work equally for the visually impaired and for the seeing, so they could play together.
Read the article at NYTimes.com . . .
From "Free speech versus fear: How the Wilson administration targeted civil liberties":
Governmental repression is only one of the subjects of Capozzola's broader but more academic study. Wartime mobilization, he argues, redefined the citizen's relationship to the state. A Selective Service Act touched unprecedented numbers of American men; federal officials scrutinized conscientious objectors and registered German aliens; and agencies issued vast streams of pro-war propaganda. Yet "Americans consistently needed less outright repression than the wartime alarmists claimed," for countless people eagerly volunteered to police themselves and their communities by physically attacking strikers, burning books, and even lynching suspected traitors. During the war, the "actions of repressive state institutions, private organizations, and spontaneous crowds left more than seventy Americans dead and thousands terrorized by tar, flame, or the noose," Capozzola writes. Uncle Sam "invoked a culture of obligation," and many Americans readily complied.
On November 21 2008, the Futures of Entertainment 3 conference took place at MIT, and moderator Henry Jenkins joined Alisa Perren (from Georgia State University) and super-designer Alex McDowell at MIT to discuss the work behind making Watchmen so beautiful. For over 100 minutes, they talked set design, easter eggs, how some movies fail in the marketing department (Fight Club) and how they've all remained pretty on top of Watchmen to keep things like the toys (which will be featured in the movie) top notch.
But most interesting were the stills McDowell shared with the crowd that allowed us into Dr. Manhattan's apartment and inside a few other rooms in Watchmen. Even though Zack Snyder admits he followed the comic-book panel storyboard style of directing, there were a few places that weren't terribly fleshed out in the novel, where Snyder could have a little fun.
Read more at io9 . . .
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