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Keep Your Drones At Home

December 14, 2015 by Museum Fatigue

A few days ago some students stopped by my office to ask me about an email that they had all just received from the Dean of Students Office. The message announced a ban on the use of drones on campus. The sudden appearance of the all-campus message suggested that there had been an incident that precipitated the response. The students knew that my Digital Anthropology class has been doing some unusual final mini-projects this semester and were curious if the […]

Categories: Books, Play • Tags: drones, email, safety, security

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Everyday Resistances: “Scrotumbank”

August 8, 2014 by Museum Fatigue

The scratchings of graffiti seem trivial and puerile on the surface but their tactical operations, often taken spontaneously on the fly with whatever writing implement might be on hand, offer an easily accessible lesson in everyday resistance. While ducking into a coffee shop across the street from the Royal Ontario Museum I caught a glimpse of this. The mind of a passerby thought of a creative way to add three letters and replace one in the name of the Scotiabank, the […]

Categories: Advertising, Play • Tags: everyday resistance, graffiti, Scotiabank, tactical operations

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Mystery Object #12: Flesh Crayon

September 21, 2013 by Museum Fatigue

Antique stores are useful repositories for objects that evoke memories of the past. Nearly every time I visit an antique store I am confronted with a few objects that evoke things long forgotten. Sometimes I find objects from a time before I was born that confound me with their alien common-sense assumptions. About a week before fall semester started, on the way back from a canoe trip, we stopped in an antique store in Lindstrom, Minnesota. While looking through the […]

Categories: Antiques, Mystery Objects, Nostalgia, Play, Race • Tags: antiques, Crayola, Crayons, flesh crayon

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Candy Crush Saga and the Hänsel and Gretel Economy

July 7, 2013 by Museum Fatigue

[I was going through some old drafts of posts-never-completed this morning and decided to delete the ones I’ll likely never complete. Others, like this one are parts of ideas or beginnings of drafts that never got finished but don’t deserve to be deleted because there is something there worth keeping. So I’ve decided to just post them as-is.] bout six weeks ago I started playing Candy Crush Saga. A few days ago I stopped playing it at Level 147, because after […]

Categories: Anthropology, Consumption, Games, Play, Social Class • Tags: Candy Crush Saga, casual games, economy, Hänsel and Gretel, iPad, pay-as-you-go

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Beating Snake and the Memory of Video Games

May 18, 2013 by Museum Fatigue

Jesper Juul has posted a fascinating GIF, Tweeted by Brendon Sheffield  on his page at the Ludologist. The GIF, “beating-snake,” is instantly recognizable to anyone who has played a variation of the simple game. In my case, I watched with rapt fascination as the game progressed to its conclusion. The GIF promised something that I had never seen—the end of a snake game. After the game ended, however, I realized that while watching it I had been actively recalling memories […]

Categories: Games, Memory, Nostalgia, Play • Tags: snake game

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Hardware and Games

April 26, 2013 by Museum Fatigue

It isn’t much of a stretch to say that the hardware store is a space that is primarily gendered as male—a place where men buy tools and materials for construction. Whether professional or weekend do-it-yourselfers, the stores promise encounters with physical labor—selling things for—designing, building and fixing. They sell hardware. So imagine my surprise when on a visit to my local Menards, I walked past a display selling software—”Value Video Games.” If there is a male that is configured as the inverse […]

Categories: Games, Gender, Labor, Play, Work • Tags: gamer, handyman, hardware, hardware store, Menards, software, video games

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The Playtime of Surveillance

March 23, 2013 by Museum Fatigue

“Types of machines are easily matched with each type of society—not that machines are determining, but because they express those social forms capable of generating them and using them.” —Gilles Deleuze “All play means something.” — Johan Huizinga When I was growing up, a boy in the upper midwestern United States in the final decades of the Cold War, I loved spies, secrets and the gear that when along with them. I locked what childhood secrets I had in a small […]

Categories: Gear, Play, Random Reflections, Surveillance, Toys • Tags: AR Drone, brookstone store, drones, johan huizinga, Jumping Sumo, Parrot Drones, Rolling Spider, Rover Spy Tank

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Performing Cultural Revolution Nostalgia

June 7, 2010 by Museum Fatigue

I have been mulling over and trying to make sense of what exactly took place at the Cultural Revolution theme restaurant that I visited last week. I have photos, video, and some notes I wrote after returning to my hotel room that night, but none of them help very much. I thought maybe some time to reflect would make a difference, but the past seven days have just made things seem even more unreal. It all comes back to one […]

Categories: China, Food, Play, Politics • Tags: Beijing, China, Cultural Revolution, memory, nostalgia

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