As one of the last official events of the semester, Dr. Sikorski will be holding an event tutorial of the data analysis program SPSS. Stop by and learn something new!
When: April 17th at 12PM
Where: UC 217
The event itself should only last about 30 minutes!
The main event is almost here! Join us in the Humanities Lab for the RRILH’s first Festival of Creative Work! It is a celebration of the creative talent we have on campus here at Texas A&M – Texarkana, so don’t miss it!
When: April 23rd at 12PM
Where: The Humanities Lab in SCIT 120
On the flier above you can see the individuals that are participating in this inaugural event – if you see them, tell them congratulations!
Join us in welcoming Henry Jenkins (Provost Professor of Communication, Journalism and Cinematic Arts and Author of Convergence Culture) for an online discussion of his work in Media.
When: April 25th at 1PM
Where: Texar Room
This will be a PLACE event held in association with the Red River Innovation Lab for the Humanities.
Whether you’re just starting your time at TAMUT or finishing it up like me, if you have an interest in Media then you won’t want to miss this. Dr. Drew Morton will be hosting an Alumni in Media Roundtable event!
Where: UC 217
When: April 11th, 3PM – 4:15PM
TAMUT Alumni with various jobs and experience in Media will be joining us on campus to talk about career paths in media and how to navigate your job search. For details on these individuals, please consult the flier above.
Dr. Morton is also seeking to gauge students interested in attending for what specifically they want to know. If you’ve got any questions you’d like to see answered, please leave your questions with the Red River Innovation Lab for the humanities in SCIT 120 or with me, the intern in the RRILH at aaron.caraway@ace.tamut.edu.
As usual, this event is held in association with the RRILH!
From a internal email by Teri Stover:
The Red River Innovation Lab for the Humanities is proud to announce our first annual Festival of Creative Work on April 23rd at Noon in SCIT 210.
We are seeking creative submissions from students, faculty and staff that showcase the abundance of talent and vision we have on our campus. Submissions might include: short films, graphic design work, documentary projects, photography, data visualizations, applications, podcasts, online lectures and learning supplements.
Drafts and works in progress are completely acceptable!
Please note that submissions do not need to have been made in the lab with lab resources.
We’ve only had our doors open for about a month now and we want to celebrate the creative spirit in an effort to inspire our community.
Submissions can be sent via Vimeo, YouTube, Dropbox or Google Drive sharing, or email attachment (depending on size) and should be submitted to Dr. Drew Morton by 5 p.m. on March 30th via email (dmorton@tamut.edu). Decisions will be made by April 9th.
As the month of February comes to a close, Dr. Drew Morton will be hosting the second campus event held in association with the Red River Innovation Lab for the Humanities – a Book Lecture on Lev Manovich’s “Language of New Media”.
Where: UC217
When: February 27th, 12:15PM – 1PM
No reading necessary prior to this lecture – just come eager to learn and ask questions about the new opened RRILH!
Dr. Drew Morton will be kicking off the first of many events held in association with the campus’ newly opened Red River Innovation Lab for the Humanities – starting from humble beginnings with a tutorial on importing DVD/YouTube clips into Adobe Premiere!
Where: The Computer Lab in UC323
When: February 1st, from 12:15PM to 1PM.
This will be the first campus event of the semester closely associated with the RRILH. Feel free to come to the tutorial with questions about what the Lab is and what it can do for you!
If you’re looking to take a quick breather from finals, how about taking some time to slay giant monsters?
Monster Hunter World is an upcoming action adventure game being developed by Capcom. It’s the next entry in a long-standing series about hunting down and defeating giant creatures which is now seeing its way to consoles – and is available to play now as a beta!
The Monster Hunter World beta is divided into three missions where you’re tasked with hunting down a monster of Easy, Medium or Hard difficulty alone or with friends. You’ll track and fight these creatures in ever-evolving boss battles across two stages from the full game – the Ancient Forest and Wildspire Wastes, pictured above. These stages also contain an Apex Predator monster, something you’d normally fight in its own mission which is instead just roaming the three missions available to be tackled as an optional boss.
None of these monsters are to be underestimated though – they’re fierce and unique, with styles of attack and characteristics unique to them that change the fight. An example is the above pictured Barroth, a monster with a rock-hard skull who coats itself in mud and muck as a sort of outer shell or armor.
You’ll be fighting these monsters using a plethora of tools and a wide array of weapon types to choose from, ranging from long-range options such as the Bow or Heavy Bowgun to more melee centered options such as the Longsword or Insect Glaive.
The beta is available to download on PS4 right now and the beta will last until 11AM Tuesday (12/12/17). Better get hunting!
The recently released trailer for Ready Player One packs some nice pop culture references! Here’s the trailer:
Ready Player One takes place in a world where the depletion of fossil fuels and global warming have led to a worldwide energy crisis. People now seek refuge from this harsh reality inside a virtual reality world called the OASIS, where anyone can be anybody and do so much more than the real world now allows. It’s founder announced in a postmortem message that he left a treasure within OASIS that when found would award wealth and control of OASIS itself to the person who discovered it.
Much like Wreck-It Ralph, Ready Player One is jam-packed with references to other people in pop-culture, namely games and movies. Here’s a couple I could spot myself:
There are surely more I couldn’t spot without rewatching the trailer a dozen times over. Ready Player One releases March 30th, 2018.
LA Noire is a remastered version of the original 2011 title released by developer Rockstar Games. This action-adventure detective game portrays all the glorious conventions of its namesake, even if it’s still very rough around the edges. You play as Cole Phelps, a veteran of the Okinawa campaign turned police officer turned LAPD detective. You play through many, many cases in Cole’s career through various departments – Traffic, Homicide, Vice and Arson – including all cases from the original release that originally existed separately as pre-order DLC.
Each case feels distinct from the other – although depending on your sleuthing skills, each case isn’t necessarily as satisfying to solve as the last. LA Noire’s cases play out through two primary ‘phases’ – gathering evidence and interrogating witnesses. Gathering evidence is contextual as Cole navigates crime scenes or locations of interest – your controller vibrates to show you’ve found something. While it isn’t all of value – you can interact with stray liquor bottles irrelevant to the scene itself – Cole’s dialogue about the items that actually are of import to the case conveys a sense of discovery the player is feeling in equal measure.
This evidence is catalogued in Cole’s notebook and used in the other distinct ‘phase’ of LA Noire – the interrogations. This part of LA Noire is what stands out from the rest – the game uses advanced facial mapping to represent real, emoting faces. This means that people look like and act like people, which the game means for you to interpret to properly progress in dialogue. This all works but only to a point – the technology was a little odd even back in 2011 and there are definitely signs of age in the remaster because of how almost experimental this technology was. It makes the other facet of interrogations – choosing how to interpret witness statements – a bit of a chore, and that’s before you factor in the game’s ever-changing logic. In the original release, you had three ways to react to testimony – you could Believe it, Doubt it (if you thought the person was lying but lacked evidence) or call them out on their Lie with gathered evidence. These options exist in the remaster under new names – Good Cop, Bad Cop and Accuse. It’s less a criticism of the remaster as it is the original but it’s very misleading as to which choice is the correct one. You may think because of analyzing the testimony and reading the dialogue that you can only play Bad Cop to a statement but in reality you were supposed to Accuse them and the game wasn’t giving you a clear picture of the situation.
A remaster is ultimately a rerelease of the original game – LA Noire is served well by a fresh coat of paint in the modern gaming era, even if it’s still bogged down by its original issues.