manuscript
During the last days the process of writing the dreaded book, which now definitely will be christened "maxmod—an ethnography of cyberculture" (note the humbleness, it's an ethnography, not the ethnography), was going really well. I've got a run. Recently I read an interview with Philip Roth—he produces two pages of manuscript a day, up to ten pages on exceedingly good days. Yesterday I managed to write three and a half pages, one page of those falling into a hard to write section. If I can keep up yesterday's pace, I'll be finished in a hundred days. So, in order to crank up the pressure valve even more a bit, let's declare today as day one of a hundred, and let's see if I really can do it.
 
In fact, I have to do it, or will find myself out on the street. Hence I have to tone down the frequency of blog entries on astray issues. To keep it running nevertheless, and because I believe that this belongs into the whole project's weblog, today I created the new section "↵manuscript." In there I will post bits'n'pieces of my draft, not in the order the parts will appear in the book, maybe some won't make it in the book at all, or get rewritten later on. If I really can keep it up like yesterday, entries will be steadily trickling in.
 
At 2AM last night I called it a day and, for relaxation, watched Season 1, Episode 5 (SE1EP5) of "Twin Peaks". Yes, the fandom is right, every episode I watch leaves me with a question, becoming ever more burning ... The phone number of Sherilyn Fenn? Anybody? No? All right, that settled, I am only left with making it official: David Lynch is a genius. Watching "Twin Peaks" is not just pastime, but a measure to keep myself in the write mood, just like my current rereading of "Neuromancer" for the umpteenth time is.

sidebar writing

 
The download links for ↵my writing have found a place in this blog's righthand sidebar now, too. Ye ole dissertation was added to the downloads:
 

particle stream

 
Steadily they are trickling in like particles nomadizing in cyberspace ... Andrew Mactavish's ↑Andrew's Blah Blah Blog, Frans Mäyrä's ↑frans goes blog, and Julian Raul Kücklich's ↑playability and ↑particle stream were added to the "games related" section of my blogroll in the sidebar to the right.

subcategory excerpts
Finally I introduced the subcategory ↵excerpts to the category ↵literature within this blog. That's something I intended from the start on, but never did till now. Over time I realized that, maybe because of vanity, this blog more and more became a platform for publication, somehow I had started to write something like a private online magazine, and did no more see it as a work-in-progress information dumpster, no more as something containing raw material. The excerpts in this category may be boring for the occasional reader, but for me it's the opportunity to have access to my material from everywhere. And then, maybe it's useful for others, too. I believe in sharing. Yes, I do.

cyberpunk review

 
No, that's neither ↵Teh_Masterer, nor ↵him—it's a character out of ↑Mamoru Oshii's 2001 movie Avalon. I took the screencap from ↑cyberpunkreview.com, a blog and "The most complete cyberpunk movie site on the net". It's nicely organised, decently looking, and the reviews are in-depth. Everyone with an inclination towards cyberpunk will find movies there s/he desperately wants to watch. And there's more—beyond reviews—there. Cyberpunkreview.com goes directly into my blogroll.

max payne modifications collection
All of the 'classic' anthropological fieldworkers collected the artefacts of the cultures they did research on. For a long time 'material culture' was a big issue in anthropology, but became less and less important through time. It indeed became some sort of 'deprecated' subdiscipline. Only during the last years 'material culture' was reborn in the wake of globalization and research on commodities and consumption. Game-modding communities actually produce a lot of artefacts, therefore they possess what anthropologists call 'material culture', although the artefacts are almost exclusively immaterial by nature (text, program-code, applications, 3D and 2D computer-graphics [still and animated, interactive or not] sound and music).

Quite naturally a modding-community's central, most important artefacts are game-modifications. Since the beginning of my involvement with the ↵MP-community back in 2002 I have collected every MP-mod I could get my hands on. Now finally I started to sort and catalogue the collection, and a first step is done: The ↵mp1mods-section of my website now contains an alphabetical list of my collection of modifications for the original Max Payne computergame (↵Remedy 2001). The list still is faulty, maybe some ↵MP2 mods have crept in, and there sure are double entries. I have tried to furnish download-links for every mod—I really would love to host all the mods at my server, but I guess than the university's IT-crew will slap me around a bit with a large trout. For now 99% of the download-links lead to the matching download-page at filefront. This is because when ↵MPHQ finally went down the drain, GutBomb had the good sense to migrate its mod-database to filefront. The latter worked out to be very reliable over the years. So essentially my list is a copy of what was hosted at MPHQ back in ye olde days. I will add more download links later on, and if a mod is absolutely no more to find on the Internet, I'll host it here—I guess.

The next step will be revising the mod-categories here at xirdalium and then create an according entry with full credits and information for every mod.

P.S.: Although the MP-modding community is a small one compared to the according communities of e.g. Quake or Unreal, the size of the list already is impressive, IMHO.

Tim Berners-Lee's blog!

Sir Timothy "Tim" John Berners-Lee, the legend who invented the World Wide Web, now has a weblog: ↑timbl's blog. Till a second ago there only was one entry yet (↑So I have a blog, written one week ago), but—hold your breath—already 395 comments. This of course goes directly into my blogroll.
via entry at boingboing

max payne related machinima
As a result of my fighting hard against the virulent ↵wandering astray online—the getting lost in the cyber trenches—I finally started to fill up the ↵machinima-section of my collection of artefacts created by members of 'my cyberian tribe', the ↵MP-modding community. As everything around here inside my anthropologist's hut online, the section still is very much ↵WIP, but I am dedicated to not let the work on it idle again.

massive literature update
Pitfalls of virtual property (↵Bartle 2004)
The power of gifts: organizing social relationships in open source communities (↵Bergquist & Ljungberg 2001)
Anthropological perspectives on technology (↵Schiffer 2001)
Technology as the anthropology of cultural practice (↵Aunger 2003)
Ethnologie des joueurs d'échecs (↵Wendling 2002)
Pushing the wood: Chess playing as an anthropological subject (↵Lavenda 2003)
Nexus: Small worlds and the groundbreaking science of networks (↵Buchanan 2002)
Six degrees: The science of a connected age (↵Watts 2003)
A new science for a connected world (↵Valverde 2004)
Self-organization and identification of web communities (↵Flake et al. 2002)
A highly efficient waste of effort: Open source software development as a specific system of collective production. (↵Gläser 2003)
The new superorganic (↵Hanson 2004)
Further inflections: Toward ethnographies of the future (↵Harding 1994)
Real fictional society: Agonic relations in online gaming communities (↵Kline 2004)
The anthropology of cities: Imagining and theorizing the city (↵Low 1996)
Roles and knowledge management in online technology communities: An ethnography study (↵Madanmohan & Navelkar 2004)
Social networks and cooperation in electronic communities: A theoretical-empirical analysis of academic communication and Internet discussion groups (↵Matzat 2001)
Academic communication and Internet discussion groups: Transfer of information or creation of social contacts? (↵Matzat 2004)
History and play: Johan Huizinga and his critics (↵Anchor 1978)
A sociological perspective of sport (↵Leonard 1980)
Leisure and sport (↵Brezina 1983)
Can culture be copyrighted? (↵Brown 1998)
Art, behavior, and the anthropologists (↵Dutton 1977)

filing up 3
↵hell's kitchen
↵cs offline
↵style

filing up 2
Just for the record. Today I finally found time—still way too less—to delve into my fieldnotes-folders on the HDD. At least I managed to post eight fielddiary-entries from back in 2002 and 2003, when I struggled hard to create the basic shape of my project and did not yet have any strategy how to deal with the whole thing—and was all but sure that it ever would indeed become a project. I left the fielddiary-entries as they were—as far as this was possible. E.g. information which should remain private was taken out. The following entries were added to this blog, filed under the appropriate dates:

↵matrixed reality
↵sig
↵wookies chat, too
↵ls4 released
↵catastrophy
↵3dsmax
↵neo
↵mphq via IRC

access
Today I augmented the very first chapter of maxmod's projected chapters, which is called ↵access—straightforwardedly worded: I beefed it up without adding much content, well there's some new text, and now I am pimping it shamelessly. It may not have been a great idea to conceptualise the chapters right out of the mælstrom of my consciousness at an early stage of the project. But hey, online everything is easily to be changed and changed again. Everything at my website and weblog is to be understood as work-in-progress. With the aptly named chapter ↵access I attempt to tell my first encounter with gamemodding and those who now are 'my cyberian tribe'. If you like, go there and have a look at it—there are pictures, too ;-) Feel free to ↵write a comment on 'access' here.

anthronauts
Sometimes my babbling indeed hits furtile ground, so I had to update my blogroll:

↑anthronaut [astronauts, argonauts—got it?] is a weblog by "an Anthropology undergraduate student at the LMU Munich. Starting from July 17th 2005, I´ll spend two months working in a warehouse in Istanbul. This weblog is a sort of "field diary" for the length of that stay and maybe longer. I´m going to publish here my working experiences and my reflections about Turkish culture in Istanbul, the one in the enterprise itself and also about Turkish culture and identity in the context of migration." Hell, I am touched.

Anybody interested in China and anthropology? Rex? Head over to ↑vernant's blog. Vernant is a former student from '↑my institute' who defected to the ↑LSE. Traitor! ;-) That's the way it is: You nurse them, they grow up, one renders expert opinions on them and gone they are.

Already way overdue to be reported here: ↑Biella Coleman's weblog 'sato roams' roamed to a new address and now is called ↑interprete. All the fine content has roamed along.

If Biella's deep immersion into hacking by anthropological means has infected you with the virus called ↵cyberanthropology, don't miss ↑the cyberfield's strange mélange of English, German, ↵anthropology, and informatics.

Already being at it, consider orange's ↑sblog and Andrea's ↑zerzaust, too.

If you'd like to see all the anthropology blog stuff in a compact, comprehensive and digestible format, that is if you want an ↑anthropology newspaper on your screen, go to said test-project by Lorenz.

Not anthro but like the formidable ↑gamersgame one of the better game-related weblogs: ↑gamestay. For the German native-speakers I recommend ↑d-frag—being in the same league of quality as the aforementioned two blogs.

filing up
This project started some time in 2002, the exact starting point can't be named, as the idea gradually developed by associating otherwise unrelated input. After ↑KerLeone had preached enough I converted into an ardent believer in weblogs. Consequently the two of us started the ↑ethno::log. Soon it became clear to me that I needed an own weblog for my project, but due to a whole array of contrarieties it did not see the light of day before late 2004. Until then I wrote and saved everything on my harddrives, or published it over at the ethno::log. Especially the latter's categories ↑cyberethnologica, ↑tools, and ↑tech. adaption harbour a wealth of entries worthwhile for my project 'maxmod' (↵abstract). Besides many other things, xirdalium is my slip box (Zettelkasten) which hopefully—as time goes by—will turn into an orderly filing cabinet. One of the reasons why I chose ↑blosxom as my weblog-software is the fact that I easily can 'forge' entry dates, which allows me to fill up the blog with entries written or begun a long, long time ago while preserving the project's chronology. Now I have started to enter those stories from the past—especially some which I originally posted at ethno::log, because of lacking my personal weblog. Just to not let it get lost and forgotten below the sides bottom, here's what I inputted today (in reverse chronological order, 'newest' on top): ↵wandering astray—↵scambaiters—↵visual jack in—↵xenophilia—↵unix history.

xirdalium::category::hardware
This weblog is meant to fulfil a whole array of purposes. Among those is organizing and structuring my material and thoughts. The magnificent ↑search plugin is an essential part, but categories are nevertheless necessary. Problem is that I have to think up the categories myself, as the software won't. I asked it to do so, but it stubbornly refuses. In my project's ↵abstract I already boasted: "[...] the interpretation of the fieldwork-results will be set into relation to the appropriate parts of the history of technology [...]". History of games'n'software is all fine, but the machines themselves and material culture are absolutely vital. In consequence I created the new category ↵hardware.