The Linkety Links

If you are in need of some heart warmth and happiness, may I suggest the following:
Chapter-mate Stephanie Dray (who also goes by Stephanie Draven) relates her tale of getting the call about the Rita nomination.
A look into a day in the life of Batman.  (Yes, you may have heard about him speeding. This is about his hospital visits to sick kids.)
And more news that chocolate makes you skinny(er).

Static vs. Interactive

As some of my fellow noodlers have already heard, I went to the Art in Video Games exhibit at the American Art Museum over the weekend.  Now, going in I basically knew the title.  I'm a big fan of science museums, in part because they tend to employ a good level of interaction, but given that it was an art museum I expected this to be more static, which was fine.  I want to say, up front, that I am still thrilled that this exhibit exists.  I'm not a huge gamer, but certainly even my peripheral awareness can tell the difference between Super Mario Brothers and World of Warcraft and see that there has been a clear effort to render not just graphics but worlds. And, you know, it was free.
There were a few stations up front that had videos of folks talking.  One of them had a guy talking about the complexity of music composition for a game where the player doesn't have to progress in a linear fashion, which I found really interesting.  There were stations with several games, mostly of the old school style.  I was there on a rainy Saturday, so was unsurprised to find the stations all taken with small children.  (I heard one kid getting off the elevator say with glee, "I've never gotten to play a game in a museum before!")
The next segment perplexed me.  There were stations again, divided by gaming system listing four categories of games per station, with one display of each (I guess that was the art part) stacked on top of each other and each station had a handset where you could listen to something.  (I tend not to like handset displays, and again, many were already occupied.)  Now, this may be a non-gamer thing, but displaying by game system seemed an interesting choice.  Certainly the systems have different capabilities and games offered, and I'm sure that has some effect on the art, but it seems like the modern systems advances have been more about the player method of interactions, and not so much the graphical display.  And the choice to stack the art in static form in columns of four meant that it looked almost like the art wasn't the focus at all. 
I, personally would have been fine with the art being displayed in static images so you could better examine the detail, but the back lit graphics just looked washed out and busy since they were all jammed up together.  Hopefully more exhibits like this will occur.  The NPR Monkey See blog has a post suggesting it was the committee/populist nature of the selections that is the problem.  Possibly so. I still recommend stopping by if you can. (For non-locals, this exhibit is set to travel.)

7 Things: The Youth Edition

This past weekend was the worship service put on by the youth, which is always a fabulous thing.  (I am biased, but participation in our congregation tends to go up, particularly compared to other lay led services, and typically I sit next to someone who tells me how this is their favorite service each year.)
1. The timing of the service was such that we knew it was likely it would coincide with the search committee's announcement of the new ministerial candidate.  (Several years ago, their service coincided with the associate minister announcing her candidate-ship elsewhere). 
2. But the planning started in February, and when we hung out they seemed mostly done.  (These things are never totally done until you do them, but there you go.)
3. This year's theme was Utopia, so there were readings and songs and a dance about this.  They did a great skit for the story time* spot about working to make the world closer to your own utopia. 
4. There was a pony themed reading. (Although it is my understanding that "My Little Pony" has more to do with unicorns and pegasuses, but there you go.)
5. The seniors who wished to spoke (this year three of them chose to) and made me cry.  (In a good way.  They are pretty proud of making us cry.)
6. There were musical interludes. In the second service there was a minor technical malfunction with a guitar, that the other member of the duo covered well by offering to tell jokes. 
7. But as silly and corny as it is, it is moments like these that instead of feeling sad for humanity, I think humanity is lucky.  These guys have big, big plans to fix this world. 

*It goes under a number of names, but we have a spot early in the service where the kids who are there with their parents get a story or reading or lesson that in theory has multi-generational appeal, but tends to be aimed at the younger kids.  Normally, after that they get sung off to class.  For the youth service, a larger number of them stay for the whole thing.

What Does it Mean?

Given that the movie you may have heard of based on that book you may have heard of opens now (probably, by the time you read this), there's been increasing discussion about what it means.  It's interesting.  I think my thoughts on dark YA are pretty clear, but it's interesting.  I have a friend who find the very discussion of it too much to bear, and that's fine.  It's also interesting given, that until it became a media sensation, several places were hiding 50 Shades of Grey on some of their bestseller lists so as not to offend anyone and yet Hunger Games is fine. (So, government sanctioned violence fine, consensual sex with mild erotic content, less fine.)  It's interesting that Bullied, a documentary about real kids facing real dangers gets rated R, while Hunger Games does not.  (The difference there appears to be fictional kids do not swear, and real kids do.)
I personally really hate the child in danger trope, you know where someone has to go do a bunch of ridiculously dangerous and violent things just so some little off-screen moppet can survive.  (Not saying you can't enjoy that, just saying, it does not generally appeal to me. Although I do enjoy some "Man on Fire".  So, there you go.) But Hunger Games is making some interesting points about this fictional society, it's not violence for the sake of violence (although, again, not that there's anything wrong with choosing to enjoy reading or watching that).  And one of the reasons I think some people like the third book less, is not that it's less interesting or less good, but two books worth of all this is taking it's toll on Katniss by book three, and much like New Moon in the Twilight series, you're viewpoint character is not functioning at top capacity, which fascinates me but is not a fast-paced read. 
But back to the first book/movie, I enjoyed this piece from HuffPo about why it matters and resonates with folks.  

TBR Challenge: Series Catch-Up

Despite my series junkie status, I looked through the TBR pile for a series I was behind on and couldn't find any.  Not that I am not behind on any series, but I was apparently all caught up on the ongoing series books in my possession, with the exception of series I hadn't yet started.  So, with this we have Sharon Draper's Battle of Jericho which is the story of a teen boy, who along with his fellow classmates is selected to pledge a club called the Warriors of Distinction.  This takes place in high school, so it's not a fraternity per se, it's a club that does service projects in the community and the high school and has been going on for some time, such the Jericho, the titular character's uncle was a member.  As you might expect, some of the pledging activities get out of hand and Jericho and his fellow pledges (which include the first female pledge) must look at how far they are willing to go. 
I have to tell you that I started this book back in October.  Normally a book that takes me this long to finish is not working for me.  In this case it was the opposite.  Draper did such a great job of displaying the warring tensions of what it's like to be in high school and try to fit in and find yourself and be the person your parents and teachers want all at the same time that I had to take breaks. And I put it down about two thirds done in November and then kept picking up other stuff instead.  They were all safe when I had stopped and I wanted to keep everyone that way, so I kept not reading, sort of the reader equivalent of sticking a blanket over my head.  Well, I finally started it back up and wow. 
So, now I'll have to get the rest of the trilogy. 
The book came out in 2005, but it only went into my tbr pile last year, so it hasn't been there that long really, but still progress.