• "Twenty-one years later, an anonymous software engineer pulled together various digital artifacts to create a multiplayer game for his son.

    Tonight, while playing that game, I ran into my 15-year-old self."

    What magic smells like.

    (tags: games history internet networks timetravel magic )
  • "The value of the web is in its history. The value of the web is that it grows over time and that it spiders out making connections, just as often doubling back on itself to find previously unseen patterns and connections. It is not a linear progression through time and space always discarding the near past. Or if it is then I'm sorry for wasting everyone's time because that sounds about as exciting, and about as valuable, as any given season of canned television programming."
    (tags: archives history internet web )
  • "I have this colleague of mine who is an avid rock climber, and I’m trying to get him to play GIRP. He says that what I’m saying is like, “I’ve come up with this new formula of crack that’s ultra-addictive; why don’t you try this new crack I’ve cooked up?”" Wait, Bennett GIRP/QWOP Foddy was in *Cut Copy*?! Awesome.
    (tags: killscreen interview games bennettfoddy )
  • "…another Monorail Society Exclusive!" The decision, you might have guessed, is turning down a monorail. Does sound great, though, and easy material for writing alternate-pasts.
    (tags: losangeles monorail transport infrastructure )
  • "Unlike the movies that influence it, LA Noire takes place in a world where editing hasn't been invented yet." Really good writing from Tom Chick; this was perhaps my favourite quotation. I genuinely wonder how many people playing this game have never played a "proper" adventure game – be it an old Sierra point-and-click, or something from the Phoenix Wright/Hotel Dusk school. Chick's line about the matchbook is exactly the thing adventure gamers got fed up with in the *late nineteen-eighties*. We don't need the bad parts of Sierra coming back to haunt is.
    (tags: games lanoire adventuregames history historiography experience )

Coming to history anew

10 February 2011

The strangest affect of my possession of an iPad (I do not have an iPhone) is that I have become my own consumer. Each night after midnight when the daily page first announces itself I consult, somewhat furtively (even though alone), the Oracle that I have made. I am often surprised by pages made long ago and almost forgotten, as well as by the sometimes uncanny predictions they offer their maker.

The artist Tom Phillips on reading a book he made in app form. Or rather: reading the daily-page of A Humument, coming to it anew.

This isn’t about the technology of display – the Ipad. This is about the the way delivery changes the relationship a reader has with a text, be it one they wrote, or just one they’ve subscribed to.

And: having your own things returned to you, bit by bit, is always striking. See the Photojojo Time Capsule, or Twitshift, for examples of this in other media: your own history, trickling back to you.

books , , , ,
  • "Oregon Trail pioneering is basically the story of trying to get 500 pounds of jarred bison over the border before succumbing to necrotising poison from eating the wrong kind of strawberry. It’s the story of dying at Chimney Rock with bits of Conestoga wheels lodged in your skull. When you look into the Trail, the Trail looks back into you."
    (tags: games oregontrail sadness dysentry )
  • "If you were to rise before dawn on Christmas Eve, and walk down the empty Hackney Rd past the dark shopfronts in the early morning, you would very likely see a mysterious glow emanating from the workshop at the rear of number forty-five where spindles for staircases are made. If you were to stop and press your face against the glass, peering further into the depths of the gloom, you would see a shower of wood chips flying magically into the air, illuminated by a single light, and falling like snow into the shadowy interior of the workshop where wood turner Maurice Franklin, who was born upstairs above the shop in 1920, has been working at his lathe since 1933 when he began his apprenticeship."
    (tags: woodturning wood shoreditch history craftsmanship )
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