lara croft 7.0

 
Computergame-heroine-turned-pop-culture-icon Lara Croft has a new likeness: ↑Karima Adebibe. Read the whole story at ↑Evolution Of Lara Croft. Just for the fun of it I raided the web's tombs and compiled the pics of all seven Lara-models. See pic above, from left to right and in chronological order: ↑Lucy Clarkson, ↑Rhona Mitra, ↑Nell McAndrew, ↑Vanessa Demouy, ↑Lara Weller, ↑Angelina Jolie, and ↑Karima Adebibe. Hint to the male audience: click the links if you'd like to have some sleepless nights—but do not forget to turn Google's "safe search" off beforehand. Ah, hell yes, ↑2R, ya know, liek ↵sex'n'stuff sells, rite? But this is research, as it clearly exposes how contemporary game icons are designed. For an emic discussion of this design-strategy read chapter 5 "And on the opposite side of the nipple coin..." of the brilliant ↑A Gamer's Manifesto.
via entry at mosaikum

volkskunde vs. völkerkunde?
kulturwissenschaftliche technikforschung and cyberanthropology
 
 
Since quite a time [the first entry is dated 25 May 2005] there is a weblog called ↑Kulturwissenschaftliche Technikforschung published by the ↑Institut für Volkskunde of Hamburg University. The blog's ↑about is quite enlightening, but unfortunately in German only. The about's main arguments are culled from the ↑startpage of the Forschungskolleg Kulturwissenschaftliche Technikforschung's website. There's an English version, too, and I take the liberty to quote from it extensively, especially as I second every argument given:
 

Now you may ask what is "Volkskunde" and how is it differentiated from ↵sociocultural anthropology? Allow me another quote, this time from ↑Alan Barnard's "History and Theory in Anthropology":
 

Doesn't match the above, huh? Well, in the terms of Henry Kissinger we are living in times of upheaval, meaning that academical disciplines are changing, borders and perspectives are redefined [no surprise, as those are manifestaions of intrinsic aspects of science and every academical endeavour—if you disagree with that go back to Epistemology I ;-]. And indeed since quite some years ↑Munich's Institut für Volkskunde has added Europäische Ethnologie to its name. This addition lured some outsiders, namely within the university's higher administration, to the following request: "Fuse those two things, they have converged to indistinguishability already!" The "greater vision" was to have the fusage manifested in one BA-course-of-studies, and pressure towards that end was executed upon us. For roughly the last one and a half years we had intensive talks with our Volkskunde-peers. In terms of envisioned structure the result of the talks indeed is a combined BA, but with two clearly separated MAs on top of it. The really worthwhile results of the talks are the vast clarification of indeed different methods, perspectives and approaches at large. Volkskunde and Völkerkunde of course are kin disciplines which share a lot—but there's a big heap they don't share. Herein lies the value of cooperation: mutual influence and benefit. Interdisciplinarity—still one of the biggest buzzwords flying around into every direction within the ivory tower and beyond—needs disciplines as a prerequisite. And it's not meant as a melting pot. The same is true for the respective sub-genres ↵cyberanthropology and ↑Kulturwissenschaftliche Technikforschung. There's still the naive, cliché-laden way of how to distinguish disciplines: Them guys are looking at Europe, and them other guys are looking on Africa; those two gangs are both looking at technology ... That way of defining and circumscribing academical endeavours is as dated as hat and helmet pictured above. They are a joke at best.
initially via entry at sblog