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"This TV is playing a built-in MPEG of static, instead of just displaying solid blue or solid black like they used to do. I think that's kind of awesome. The map has become the territory." Blimey.
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"When I started writing this post, I didn’t have a conclusion in mind, but now that I’ve got to the end, the thing I want us to remember next time is just that: all the scales matter. Every part is important. The two days Sarah and Brian spent moving small pieces of vinyl, Ivan’s 4am printing-and-cutting, FOUND’s jumping-up-and-down to see if crowd movement broke their tech, last-minute shopping trips for slightly larger balls, all the things. Worry about it all. Fix everything." Lovely write-up from Holly of the big thing we did in Edinburgh. Also: good about the nature of the huge, and good about the nature of work. Worry about it all. Fix everything.
20
January
2012
January
2012
Links
Tagged as:
fixeverything, games, hideandseek, hollygramazio, livinginthefuture, newyeargames, polish, static, tv, work.
15
October
2011
October
2011
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"This is a cross between Minesweeper and an RPG. You gain levels by killing weak monsters and win when you defeat them all. It's a bit different than Minesweeper in that the number you reveal when you click on a square is the total of the levels of the monsters in adjacent squares." Uh-oh.
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"His earliest revelation about how the TV medium worked—one that heavily influences Community—came courtesy of a Cheers board game he spotted at a toy store. He realized that the characters were so relatable and their dynamics so clearly defined that anyone could step into their lives—even in a board game." Brilliant interview with Dan Harmon – but this paragraph really leapt out at me.
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An unexpected place for a Le Guin interview, but it's great nontheless.
30
September
2011
September
2011
posts
Tagged as:
community, ingenuity, inspectorspacetime, stories, tv.
A quick guide to Inspector Spacetime
So: a new season of Dan Harmon’s marvellous Community has begun in the US. It’s a very, very funny sitcom. It’s also a very funny sitcom that frequently plays on the expectation that the audience is deeply versed in pop culture, with entire episodes that pastiche movies and genres. You should watch it.
In S03E01, which aired last week, Abed – the TV geek inside the show – is distraught that his favourite show (Cougar Town) has been moved to mid-season – “never a good sign“. Afraid it’ll be cancelled, his friends try to find him a new favourite show. And, eventually, they stumble upon “a British sci-fi show that’s been on the air since 1962“:
Inspector Spacetime.
This is already a fairly brilliant joke – the phone box! The reboot-pastiching title card! And, you know, I hope it’ll return to haunt the rest of series.
But: then, the internet worked its magic.
The thing that has been entertaining me beyond all measure this week is Inspector Spacetime Confessions.
This is a tumblr account of a popular format: the “Confessions” format, in which fans of TV shows, books, movies, etc, post “secret” confessions about their take on characters, episodes, or arcs (sometimes, secret crushes) as text written across images. Amateur photoshop at its best. It was huge on Livejournal, and it’s ideally suited to Tumblr.
Except: there are, currently, about fifteen seconds of Inspector Spacetime in existence.
This, of course, does not matter when you’re TV literate. What’s happened is: fans are just making it up. They’re back extrapolating an entire chronology based on fifteen seconds of “tone”, and their entire knowledge of the Doctor Who canon.
So, they’re diving into gags about former Inspectors:
They’re torn about Stephen Fry:
The Steve Carrell TV movie wasn’t well received:
And of course, they’re concerned about pocket fruit:
But there are more sophisticated jokes emerging. Like this one:
This presumes, in the form of a “fan confession”, that: the showrunner of Inspector Spacetime is also running another show – Hercule – which appears to be a modern-day Poirot reboot, and of course, because Benedict Cumberbatch is starring in Hercule, he’ll never be the Inspector.
This is sophisticated on a bunch of levels, but its elegance is in the way that entire gag is contained in one sentence and a photograph.
Or how about this:
which presumes Inspector Spacetime lives in that land of fictional TV shows, and thus a fictional actor (Alexander Dane) who starred in Galaxy Quest really ought, one day, to return to SF as the Inspector.
There’s a slowly emerging canon, thanks in part to the Inspector Spacetime forum. A lot of the canon is useful – the DARSIT feels better than the CHRONO box, everyone’s sold on Fee-Line – but it’s sometimes nice to see people buck it, or introduce new ideas (and Inspectors) in the most throwaway of Confessions. All this, from a fifteen-second joke that we don’t know will continue (or if it’ll introduce continuity we don’t know about yet).
And yes, Dan Harmon knows about it.
In the week between the two most recent episodes of Community, this has given me a vast amount of joy; I’ve been rattling the various configurations of Inspectors and Associates in my head, trying to remember my favourite episodes of a sci-fi show that never existed. And then giggling at the ingenuity and brilliance of some of the other confessions appearing – of the whole fictional history they bring to life, of Liam Neeson’s run in the 80s or the creepiness of the Laughing Buddas.
It’s really hard to explain the joy (especially as someone fascinated by the inner workings of serial drama) that this brings me. It’s a funny kind of magic – it’s unofficial, didn’t happen on TV, and just relies of fans’ understandings of not only TV shows, but how telly itself works. The results are just brilliant.
I’m off to write my own confession now. There’s always room for one more.
19
April
2011
April
2011
Links
Tagged as:
apple, architecture, art, cities, consumption, dungeoncrawling, eindhoven, epidemeology, games, interview, killscreen, media, metafilter, music, playerpiano, rogue, tv, viruses, worldofwarcraft, wow.
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"Apple has already built its TV. It’s called the Apple TV and that’s why it’s called the Apple TV. Because we’re supposed to be rethinking what a TV is. The TV is not the screen with seven different inputs for your players and boxes and game machines. The TV is the content and the buttons we touch to get to that content."
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" A physical model of Eindhoven rolled onto a drum and attached to a piano. A form of player piano with the city as the score." Just beautiful.
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MeFi thread spun out of my Roguelikes post; some great comments and insight, and what a cast!
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"There was one guy on the steps of a building and proselytizing the end of the world. My guess is that he was doing it for jokes, but if you’re in the middle of it with your friends exploring a world covered in blood, then there’s something in our understanding of the Black Death in the Dark Ages and people announcing the coming of the end that plays into the social fear." Kill Screen interview on the Corrupted Blood outbreak in WoW.
21
January
2011
January
2011
Links
Tagged as:
assumptions, bbc, brilliant, charts, computing, cowclicker, culture, diffs, fraserspeirs, games, gamification, ianbogost, ipad, maps, navigation, paper, socialgames, tv, use.
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Lovely trailer from BBC America for Law & Order UK. Sadly, it illustrates roughly what the British trying to make American-style procedural drama looks like. Lots of slamming things down. And tea. (Although: they don't know what "knackers" means, clearly.)
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"The iPad is an intensely personal device. In its design intent it is, truly, much more like a "big iPhone" than a "small laptop". The iPad isn't something you pass around. It's not really designed to be a "resource" that many people take advantage of. It's designed to be owned, configured to your taste, invested in and curated." On the assumptions built into devices, and what understanding them requires.
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"Ships will subscribe to the service through a third party, and receive the latest copy of the book when they dock at port. They tear out each page, and apply the relevant changes to their paper maps with a pencil and transfer paper. They’re paper map diffs, if you like." Awesome. And, as Tom said, it's a beautiful book.
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"Here at the Cow Clicker ranch, we've learned an important lesson about cow clicking: people don't just want one chance to click a cow every six hours. They want as many opportunities as possible to click a cow every six hours." And then Ian launches the API. And Connect. And everything else. And wins again.
21
May
2010
May
2010
Links
Tagged as:
cinema, discovery, film, geography, location, maps, psychogeography, serendipity, tv.
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"Thought experiment: what if tomorrow Facebook announced Facebook TV? Would their default UI — a stream of recommended items from your friends — be more or less compelling than Google's search box?" It probably would.
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"It’s an old “Para mount Stu dio map of California’s geo graph i cal facsimiles”—that is, places that can stand in for other places.<br />
<br />
Siberia! Switzer land! Africa! What a state!"
17
May
2010
May
2010
Links
Tagged as:
broadcast, chance, randomness, serendipity, television, tv.
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"When people talk about serendipity, they’re not always talking about discovering something that’s totally brand-new. In fact, I’d haz ard that they’re USUALLY talk ing about randomly unearthing some thing that’s comforting and familiar. This is ten times more true with television."
30
April
2010
April
2010
Links
Tagged as:
bash, bengimpert, bigdata, books, business, categorisation, clayshirky, data, find, games, internet, media, online, openlibrary, patches, press, shell, textextraction, tf2, tips, tv, unix, update, valve, video.
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And, with their 119th update, Valve helpfully included the list of all their previous patches, as well. Just look at the amount that's changed – and how swiftly. A proper, living game (unlike the stillborn 360 version). Can't wait to play it on the Mac; it's almost like a different game to the one I played at the beginning.
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"Ben Gimpert is a friend of the Open Library. He and I got together over lunch a few months ago to talk about big data, statistical natural language processing, and extracting meaning from Open Library programmatically. His efforts are beginning to bear some really interesting fruit, and while we work out how we might be able to present it online, we thought you might be interested to hear what he’s been up to." Answer: good things. Ben is awesome, and this work sounds great. (I can't quote a suitable passage, so George's intro will have to do).
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A few short tips on find; one of the bash tools I use least, and should probably use more.
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"Diller, Brill, and Murdoch seem be stating a simple fact—we will have to pay them—but this fact is not in fact a fact. Instead, it is a choice, one its proponents often decline to spell out in full, because, spelled out in full, it would read something like this: “Web users will have to pay for what they watch and use, or else we will have to stop making content in the costly and complex way we have grown accustomed to making it. And we don’t know how to do that.”"
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"The best way to explain the difference between Blink and these two episodes would be to say that I think the best conceived movie sequel ever was Aliens following Alien. It took the same monster into an entirely different type of film." I love Steven Moffat very much.
27
February
2010
February
2010
Links
Tagged as:
acting, blog, chrisremo, code, design, directing, gamasutra, gameplay, games, heavyrain, interaction, interactivedrama, markup, michaelabbott, narrative, panopticon, patrickredding, perspective, ruby, sass, security, sinatra, tv.
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"…let's not kid ourselves. If you sell a game that's a first-person shooter, then no matter how many RPG elements you shoe-horn into the game, the shadow that hangs over every character interaction that you have, no matter who they are, is the question in the player's mind of "What happens if I shoot this person?" And that's our own fault! We've sold the player that; we've made a contract with the player that says it's okay to kill people. Why would we then chastise them for exploring that?" Patrick Redding is brilliant. This interview, with Chris Remo on Gamasutra, is great – Remo asks some smart questions, and Redding gives some really smart answers.
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"The game insists that I focus, even for mundane activities like carrying groceries, on carefully following directions delivered to me visually on-screen. The simple act of carrying groceries is subsumed by the mechanical procedure of executing a series of prompts _for no apparent reason_. This, for me, is the primary disconnect in Heavy Rain. My mechanical game-directed actions don't amplify or add meaning to the in-game behaviors they execute. They don't pull me in; they keep me out. " Hmn. I've been thinking about something similar recently. Time to fire up the blogpostmatron…
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Lovely, lovely article explaining just how the PeepCode Blog works. The blog itself features unique layouts for every post. There's no CMS, no database, but what's going on under the hood is at least as clever – and the flexibility makes the beautiful and clear pages much easier to build.
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"…for reasons that baffle me, my TV can only receive the four terrestrial channels, plus a grainy feed from the building’s security cameras. Easy choice."
Links & notes for this month
- "...let's not kid ourselves. If you sell a game that's a first-person shooter, then no matter how many RPG elements you shoe-horn into the game, the shadow that hangs over every character interaction that you have, no matter who they are, is the question in the player's mind of "What happens if I shoot this person?" And that's our own fault! We've sold the player that; we've made a contract with the player that says it's okay to kill people. Why would we then chastise them for exploring that?" Patrick Redding is brilliant. This interview, with Chris Remo on Gamasutra, is great - Remo asks some smart questions, and Redding gives some really smart answers.
- "The game insists that I focus, even for mundane activities like carrying groceries, on carefully following directions delivered to me visually on-screen. The simple act of carrying groceries is subsumed by the mechanical procedure of executing a series of prompts _for no apparent reason_. This, for me, is the primary disconnect in Heavy Rain. My mechanical game-directed actions don't amplify or add meaning to the in-game behaviors they execute. They don't pull me in; they keep me out. " Hmn. I've been thinking about something similar recently. Time to fire up the blogpostmatron...
- Lovely, lovely article explaining just how the PeepCode Blog works. The blog itself features unique layouts for every post. There's no CMS, no database, but what's going on under the hood is at least as clever - and the flexibility makes the beautiful and clear pages much easier to build.
- "...for reasons that baffle me, my TV can only receive the four terrestrial channels, plus a grainy feed from the building’s security cameras. Easy choice."
- Strictly speaking, "The Best of *American* Journalism", but there's lots on here I'd like to read sometime.
- "You're not understanding, are you? You're refusing to deal with what I'm telling you. The brain does the thinking. The meat."
- "You're not understanding, are you? You're refusing to deal with what I'm telling you. The brain does the thinking. The meat."
- "The demo of Dante's Inferno provided absolutely the stupidest gaming experience I think I have had since possibly Ultimate Combat Mission on the Spectrum +2. I don't think God of War can meaningfully compete, because... well, because it isn't based on one of the most famous works of literature produced in the last thousand years. Dorothy L Sayers translated it, for God's sake. Kratos never really had to get past anything more culturally embedded than Clash of the Titans." Dan has been playing Dante's Inferno, and the end result is this lovely post, about classics, and living stories, and Just Plain Stupid Games. It's very good. "...there's nothing to stop an incredibly silly game being a very enjoyable game, but there's something about the abandon with which Inferno is being used art direction for a slash-em-up that is killing the joy of it a bit for me"
- "This is the S2H replay; an activity monitor/pedometer thing that does a similar job to the fitbit. Except it feels way more like the future than the fitbit because it's cheap, fashiony and simple. And you they'll actually deliver one outside the US." I like "fashiony" as both an adjective and a watchword. The S2H sounds pretty nifty, too, and Russell's write-up is great...
- "Get an accountant, abstain from sex and similes, cut, rewrite, then cut and rewrite again – if all else fails, pray. Inspired by Elmore Leonard's 10 Rules of Writing, we asked authors for their personal dos and don'ts." Huge, two-part article (presumably from Saturday's Review) with a great deal of advice - some sensible, some common sense, some insightful, some entertaining - on writing. And: much of it applies to other creative disciplines, too.
- "Schell took this game-life integration to the extreme, describing a world chock-full of sensors, where you could earn experience points from a toothpaste company for brushing your teeth, or points from health insurance companies for walking to work instead of driving. Companies and even the government would have a vested financial interest in engaging consumers and citizens through game-like elements. It would be a world fraught with "crass commercialism," Schell said, but it would also be a world of opportunity for game designers." Hmmmmn.
- "I'm imagining that Curling is project management: sweeping in front of the stone to both clear a path and influence the direction, but without touching it; a good curling strategy is to both knock the competition out of the way and get closer to the target, sometimes with different stones; ...plus you can drink and smoke while you play"
- "Magick is all about naming and control. So is journalism, and software engineering—related disciplines." yes yes yes a thousand times yes (the most wonderful sentence in James' write-up of a non-conference I didn't attend).
- "Quantic Dream's latest may not only be the best game you've ever played – it could even become one of your favourite films." I cannot think of a more depressing sentence.
- "I hugely prefer Windows ME to anything else. The problem is that it’s difficult to run on most of the hardware I have and no other Windows edition cuts it for me. So, I’m down to using a Mac..."
- "ASBOrometer is a mobile application that measures levels of anti-social behaviour at your current location (within England and Wales) and gives you access to key local ASB statistics... This app was created by Jeff Gilfelt and made possible by the data.gov.uk initiative, which is opening up UK government data for public reuse." What sensationalist rot; no number of pretty visualisations make this kind of fearmongering acceptable. It's nice that the data is open; it's a shame this is the best thing people can think to do with it. Whether you like it or not, this information is very, very loaded.
- "“Notput” is an interactive music table with tangible notes, that combines all three senses of hearing, sight and touch to make learning the classical notation of music for children and pupils more easy and interesting."
- "I had been studying this style of letters on similar buildings in Washington, D.C., and something about them always felt a little dull. But in the Claremount letters I found life in the charming way the awkward proportions and loose spacing came together. So I set about designing a Claremount typeface." Nice article on designing a typeface, and, I must admit, it's rather good-looking (especially for something named after me).
- EMSL dissect a classic Tomy wind-up semi-electronic game - in this case, a version of Pong. Amazing what you could do with mechanics (even if that included "making the singleplayer game entirely unfair").
- "Ibuki, Makoto and Dudley from the Street Fighter 3 series have all been confirmed as new characters in Super Street Fighter 4 by Famitsu magazine." And now it's a confirmed day one purchase for me. (Seriously, Makoto and Dudley were my two mains in SF3. This is going to be brilliant. Seichusen Godanzuki!)
- "How good is that?" It is super-good, that's how good.