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"There is a rhythm to hiking, as there is in walking. And once you find the cadence — after a day or two — your mind empties. All your social obligations related to work and friends and life are muted. They aren’t gone: they just no longer require your direct attention. There is a shocking beauty to this silence. It’s as if every day of our lives is filled with a white noise. And suddenly, in the presence of these unbelievable peaks, the noise is gone." Lovely pictures, but, more to the point, strong truth, from Craig Mod.
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"DOOM doesn’t belong in a museum, not because it’s not worthy, but because it’s rock and roll. It’s too fast, too loud, too hard, and too fucked up to be in a museum. There are some games that will work in a museum and some that won’t ever and that, by itself, doesn’t say anything about their value. We need both." Frank Lantz is right.
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"In this digitally distant world full of information that appears to only be moving faster and faster, you get to choose: how much will I consume and how much will I create?"
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Fascinating article on pseudo-3D graphics, and raster-based road graphics in particular; coders and gamers alike might enjoy this, although it's quite technical. (And: Racin' Force is just beautiful; I forgot how gorgeous voxels could be).
09
February
2010
February
2010
Links
Tagged as:
3D, creativity, doom, games, graphics, hiking, history, narrative, perspective, photography, programming, quiet, rands, raster, rocknroll, silence, walking, worthiness, writing.
20
November
2009
November
2009
Links
Tagged as:
ambient, animation, areacode, art, cataloguing, christhorpe, colour, data, design, edge, films, franklantz, games, geotagging, gps, hiking, illustration, interview, kevinslavin, lightroom, lists, mmo, online, photography, pixar, plugin, ralpheggleston, streaming, transport, uk, umbertoeco, walking, walle.
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"I did a set of four walks in Austria; two long ones, two short ones. I did some "daystreaming" where using bits of technology I was updating my location, status and pictures as I walked." Ambient information gathering, whilst taking in the outdoors, and all for charity. Lovely.
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And it just worked first time. Awesome!
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"The list is the origin of culture. It's part of the history of art and literature. What does culture want? To make infinity comprehensible. It also wants to create order — not always, but often. And how, as a human being, does one face infinity? How does one attempt to grasp the incomprehensible? Through lists, through catalogs, through collections in museums and through encyclopedias and dictionaries." Eco on lists.
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"Today, the UK government's Department For Transport unveils a new browser-based MMOG, created by New York-based developer Area/Code. Designed for early teenagers to learn principles of traffic safety, it's probably the largest 'serious games' project ever to be created for the UK. Code Of Everand is the result of over two years of work with the Department For Transport by Area/Code principals and designers Frank Lantz and Kevin Slavin, not only because of its size and ambition, but also because of the complexities of developing it for a government body… We spoke to Lantz, Slavin and Simon Williams, who led the project at Carat, the Department For Transport's media agency, about what Code Of Everand is, how they pulled it off, and why they think it could prove that games can be a powerful platform for learning." Edge interview.
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Wonderful, wonderful interview with Eggleston. So much care and attention in the work and the way he describes it; so many lovely illustrations. The "color scripts" alone are great, but really, it's all worth your time.
Where I’ve been
Up a hill, mainly.
First holiday in a year: hiking in the Five-Finger mountains in Northern Cyprus (the Turkish bit). Really excellent: sun and skies and outdoors and lots of photographs I am currently processing. Recharged batteries that were more run-down than I realised.
And, before that, I moved house again. Could have done without that, but on the plus side, the new place is lovely.
The links have still been chugging along, as you can see, and there’s been lots more stuff from me over at the BERG blog.
There should be some stuff here quite soon, though – something on loot and Borderlands (ah, Borderlands, how I love you), not to mention a few other things – so in the meantime, I hope you haven’t minded the cavalcade of links.
Onwards!
07
July
2009
July
2009
Links
Tagged as:
art, books, browser, chair, code, crowdsourcing, data, design, development, fonts, hack, html, ie6, installation, kevincornell, kidnapped, literature, manipulation, maps, media, michaeljackson, motioncapture, motiontracking, music, oops, physicalcomputing, processing, sculpture, software, southbank, standardscompliance, stevenson, themesong, thoughbot, timwright, tunes, type, typography, video, videos, visualisation, walking, web.
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I am not an expert in these matters, but that is rather lovely.
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That performance of Billie Jean. But with a Giant White Glove. Brilliant.
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"On May 4th, 2007, we asked internet users to help isolate Michael Jackson's white glove in all 10,060 frames of his nationally televised landmark performance of Billy Jean. 72 hours later 125,000 gloves had been located. wgt_data_v1.txt (listed below) is the culmination of data collected. It is released here for all to download and use as an input into any digital system. Just as the data was gathered collectively it is our hope that it will be visualized collectively." This is amazing. And what it leads to is even better.
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Thoughtbot discover their RFID door-lock system has an API. A short bash at some code later, and they now have theme songs when they enter the office.
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"From 30th June to 25th August, I'll be following a route across Scotland from the south western tip of Mull to the outskirts of Edinburgh, as charted in Chapters 14–27 of Robert Louis Stevenson’s ‘Kidnapped’." I remember talking to Tim about this at BookCamp; it's great to see it in-the-world.
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"Peter Newman's Skystation is a circular sculpture inspired by the form of Le Corbusier's LC4 chaise longue which encourages the user to lie down and contemplate the vast expanse of space above and beyond." I rather like that. Doesn't look comfortable, but I agree with the sentiment.
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"After years of observation and reverse engineering I am proud to say I have been able to reproduce the IE6 algorithm to break even the most standards-compliant websites." Hur hur hur.
18
June
2009
June
2009
Links
Tagged as:
advertising, augmentedreality, baking, billharris, bldgblog, bloomsday, bread, chess, cities, cooking, culture, description, design, destablisation, dollar, downturn, draughts, dublin, economy, games, genre, guide, howto, humour, imagery, interview, jasonrohrer, joyce, london, microsoft, money, music, natal, notsure, openframeworks, parody, politics, quipu, quotation, realism, recipe, recipes, revolution, stories, switzerland, tallstories, terminator, tours, uk, video, walking, zombies.
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"It was at that moment that I understood, more fully than ever before, why revolutionaries succeed and then fail. It's because they're switching genres. They take over the country in a third-person (or first person) action game, but then they have to play an RTS to govern the country."
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"Think about it: These two guys were carrying the gross domestic product of New Zealand or enough for three Beijing Olympics. If economies were for sale, the men could buy Slovakia and Croatia and have plenty left over for Mongolia or Cambodia… These men carrying bonds concealed in the bottom of their luggage also would be the fourth-largest U.S. creditors." Um, wow.
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"After a stint shuttling back and forth from his farm in upstate New York to LA, where he consulted on a project for Steven Spielberg and EA, Rohrer has now joined the roster of multimedia stars at Tool of North America, which produces high-end commercials and interactive campaigns for the top advertising firms in the nation." Hmm.
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"What if Ulysses had been written before the construction of Dublin? That is, what if Dublin did not, in fact, precede and inspire Joyce's novel, but the city had, itself, actually been derived from Joyce's book?" Geoff Manaugh expands on a comment he made at Thrilling Wonder Stories; the stuff about 'quipu' is also awesome.
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"I’ve always been interested in the relationship between gameplay and musical performance. Theres a remarkable structural similarity between certain game systems/mechanics and compositional ones. There is also a risk/reward/challenge aspect that is core to both practices. Anyway, for a short talk I took part in for the Leeds Evolution Festival I wrote a quick augmented chess/draughts app." And the result is a video-processing step-sequencer. Nifty.
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"It is easy to have fresh bread whenever you want it with only five minutes a day of active effort. Just mix the dough and let it sit for two hours. No kneading needed! Then shape and bake a loaf, and refrigerate the rest to use over the next couple weeks. Yes, weeks! The Master Recipe (below) makes enough dough for many loaves. When you want fresh-baked crusty bread, take some dough, shape it into a loaf, let it rise for about 20 minutes, then bake. Your house will smell like a bakery, and your family and friends will love you for it."
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"Explore London on foot with our suggestions for some great capital walks, including riverside rambles, architectural adventures, even the odd pub crawl." A useful page to bookmark.
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"I think in films, zombies are cyclical. They come around, they get reinvigorated. I think in games, they're a constant. In games, zombies just represent this thing around which you can construct a game. There's no morality to them. There's no worries about racism that games are having right now. If it's a zombie and it's a pure zombie, a stupid zombie like the ones we have, they're a game mechanic. They're fodder, they're whatever you want to put in a game, however you want to deal with it."
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"This is John Connor, leader of the Human Resistance… Microsoft’s Project Natal must never be completed, no matter what the cost. This machine, with its RGB camera, depth sensor, multi-array microphone, and custom processor running proprietary software, as well as its ability to track up to four human users for motion analysis, is clearly the precursor the killing machines of the near-future that haunt my dreams every night."
05
April
2009
April
2009
photography
Tagged as:
chilterns, photography, spring, walking.
Walking in the Chilterns
Also known as: “wot I did this weekend”. A spring countryside walk with friends; wonderful day, wonderful food, and wonderful company. I took my camera with me:
05
November
2008
November
2008
personal
Tagged as:
holiday, me, pembrokeshire, photography, wales, walking.
Back from Pembrokeshire
So I’m back from my holiday. As a reminder: I was walking around the Pembrokeshir Coastal Path, from St Ishamel’s, near Milford Haven, to St Justinian’s, near St. David’s. How did it turn out?
Pretty good, I reckon. Two grey days, one soaking (which came on the way home, with the wind behind me), one wash-out (which I mainly spent in The Bench with a book and a sofa), and three gloriously bright days. I walked about 70 miles, and managed to cover all the intended ground. I stayed in a variety of accomodation with some very gracious hosts and some incredible breakfasts.
Walking alone is an interesting experience. I can’t remember the last time I’ve thought about so little (in a good way) for so long. Days went by with sporadic thoughts – individual verses of songs stuck in my head for hours on end, and when my ankles were getting almost too painful to work on, I just focused on “one foot after another” for long periods of time.
The coastal trail is particularly beautiful, but at times it feels hairy – perhaps more so, on your own. There’s usually very little between you and the edge of the cliffs, and they do get higher and more sheer as you head north. It’s an invigorating experience, but it brought tinges of Vertigo back.
But pictures like the one above from Broad Haven sum up the real memories I’m going to take home; afternoons on cliffs with no noise save the birds and the sea, and no-one else for miles. It was refreshing, and invigorating; I ate well (remarkably well the night I went to Cwtch), and read a fair few books. It was wonderful to slow down for a week.
A week later, I took the train back to London, still going at the 33rpm of Pembrokeshire. Photos going up slowly admist the bustle, but I’m trying to keep a glimpse of what going that slow feels like. It was very, very refreshing, and somewhat needed.
(If you’re interested: I booked the trip with Celtic Trails Walking Holidays who, to be frank, were excellent. They sort out accomodation along the route, and transport your bag between sites whilst you’re walking. For someone like me, who doesn’t drive, it’s a lifesaver, and it’s nice to see different scenery every day. There’s a premium for the fact they arrange everything, and also for being a solo traveller, but frankly, given they arranged the whole thing in 10 days, I was more than happy to pay it. They also supplied a fantastic welcome pack – guidebook with lovely walking maps, OS maps to cover the entire route, bus timetables, tide tables, and a decent, personal itinerary. Would recommend, and it’s also a great way to find places you like so you can stay there the next time you go back, when you arrange it all yourself…)
What Tom Is Up To Right Now pt2: Holidays
The other pressing event on the horizon is a holiday. A much, much needed holiday. Hurrah, etc.
I am off to Wales. Specifically, I’m off to Pembrokeshire, to walk around the coastal path for six days, and then to spend a day recovering in St. David’s (many thanks to Meg for the winning suggestion in the where shall Tom go on holiday? competition). I am going armed with little other than an itinerary, some clothes, a camera, and a big pile of books. I will be very much off-grid.
I’m looking forward to it immensely. I’m going to be walking every day, which will be a bit of an adventure, and consistently in one direction. I hope to write a little more about the how and why of the trip when I get back, but it’s looking pretty good from this end.
Off tomorrow morning; back in a week. Infovore will be a bit silent in the meantime, but normal service will resume shortly.
Links & notes for this month
- "On this definition, obediently following a game’s narrative or challenge-reward structure is nothing but work. Only when the player does something that isn’t mandated by the system can she be said to be playing." Some good writing from Steven Poole on games and chores.
- "My talk was on building an application that rescued princesses. The goal was to give interaction designers some insight into how game design might be applied to the domain of more utilitarian applications." Some really good insight, presented in a very clear manner. DanC is, as usual, on fire. Need to digest this slowly, but it certainly overlaps with a lot of my thinking.
- "...the game tries to define a set of rules and an environment in which memorable experiences are likely to happen, and simply lets the player loose in its world -- a fascinating prospect." This captures a lot of the great things about FC2 well, and in an even-handed manner. The lack of handholding is jarring, but the possibilities it opens up are wonderful. For a tense, hectic, genre, it's interesting to see an entry that's by turns soothing and surreal, amidst the malaria, bushfires, and wholesale slaughter.
- Just like magic. Lovely.
- Spot-on, as you'd expect.
- "I’m really typecasting myself here. If there were an international “Person most likely to write a Spectrum emulator in Javascript” award, I’d have taken it for the last five years running. So here it is - probably the most stereotypical project I’ll ever come up with." Blimey.
- "Faker, a port of Data::Faker from Perl, is used to easily generate fake data: names, addresses, phone numbers, etc."
- "Losing is an opportunity that individuals deserve, and allowing the state to sweep in and save you from the consequences of your own actions robs you of a certain kind of agency." Fantastic article about the difference between win/lose and quit/finish. Lots of good stuff in here - a must-read.
- "An experiment I’ve been running for more than two years now is over: running two Macs is more hassle than it’s worth. I write not to praise synchronisation technology, but to bury it." Roughly what I'd always guessed, but Fraser is careful and detailed, and makes some sensible points. I just hope Aperture doesn't chug as much on the new MBPs as it did on the old ones, for his sake.
- "Yes people use the Internet to do bad thing, and quite possibly Twitter is one of those services that bad people use. But they also plan bad things in coffee house but for the last 300 odd years we’ve realised that trying to legislate against coffee houses is a bad thing for society." I recently finished Markman Ellis' book on coffee houses, and so Tom's post had a special kind of relevance.
- A neat summary of what's available out there; I use Blueprint for prototyping, but it's interesting to see what else is available - particularly the more stripped-down frameworks.
- "A whimsical riff on the bookmobile, Mr. Soriano’s Biblioburro is a small institution: one man and two donkeys. He created it out of the simple belief that the act of taking books to people who do not have them can somehow improve this impoverished region, and perhaps Colombia." Awesome.
- "Flaming Lips vocalist-guitarist Wayne Coyne brought with him what he dubbed the 'Guitar Hero guitar,' an Epiphone double-neck with the lower, six-string neck replaced by a five-button variant and wired to an oscillator. '[It's] because a lot of kids out there think this is actually the way you play guitar...'" Awesome.
- "Developing this site was very different from any other project I’ve worked on; there seems to be a new set of frontend rules for developing high-end mobile sites. A lot of the current best practices get thrown out the window in the quest for minimum page weight and fastest load times over slow celluar connections. Here are a few of the lessons we learned (sometimes painfully) while developing this site." Really excellent article from code.flickr on building their new mobile/iPhone site.
- Jolly good (and nasty) stick-figure assasination game; involves a lot of patience, but nicely executed.
- "Joyce Walks is a psychogeographical art project which generates walking maps for any city in the world based on remapping routes from Ulysses allowing users to create a mashup of their own walk to be shared with other users both on the Joyce Walks site and as embeddable maps on any site."
- Welcome to GPSTagr. Our service allows you to geotag your flickr photos using a track file from a GPS device in 3 easy steps.
- "We’ve just finished a project for Yahoo called purple pedals (a.k.a. the yBike). In a nutshell, it’s a bike that takes pictures and uploads them to flickr in real time."
- "This year, I have no apologies about any of my top five. Here’s my list of the cream of the crop..." Emily Short on this year's IF competition entrants.
- "This project installs menu items into the Adobe Lightroom interface that allows photos to be tagged with geographic information through the Lightroom interface."
- "# Find links to audio files on the Web. # Huffduff the links—add them to your podcast. # Subscribe to podcasts of other found sounds." It's like delicious for audio, but it spits out a podcast. Some really lovely work from Jeremy.
- Adam's a smart guy and all, but god, most of this just really rubs me the wrong way. He's correct about business (or rather, he's correct about many of the things I hate about Web Entrepreneurship at the moment); I don't really think his views on product design ring true, though.
- "Bandai will soon be releasing two new hybrid pedometer games to keep you entertained while racking up the miles as you go about your life. ... [The] idea is to set personal goals of exercise and achieve them in a fun way."
- Jordan Mechner is serialising - and backdating - his journals from making the original Prince Of Persia. This post is a corker, if only for one of the early videos of Mechner's brother running and jumping. If you've played the original game, you'll understand what I mean the second you see the video.
- "In this chapter I'll try to shed some light on the creative and technical decision-making processes that went into crafting the story and narrative elements of Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (POP for short). The team's approach was practical, not literary; our challenge was to find the right story for a mass-market action video game." Jordan Mechner on writing Sands of Time; well-crafted, and very pragmatic.
- "The Unfinished Swan is a first-person painting game set in an entirely white world. Players can splatter paint to help them find their way through an unusual garden." Beautiful.
- "We need a National Videogame Archive. Luckily, we've just started one. We're going to preserve videogames for the nation. For better or worse. Forever. It's going to be brilliant..." Oh, that it is. Jonathan Smith on *every single bloody thing* that's perfect about Micro Machines 2 on the Mega Drive is a highlight so far.
- Commander Keen on the DS. Heck yes. One of the first games I spent a *lot* of time playing.
- "DS brut is an open source hardware prototyping platform for the Nintendo DS, developed by and for electronics enthusiasts, artists and game developers. By connecting the Nintendo DS to the outer world, the game console can be easily hooked up to a variety of sensors (e.g. GPS receivers) and can itself control all different kinds of actuators, servo motors and others."
- "The tests are the program. Without the tests, the program does not work. Tests are not something that should be left for the inexperienced; tests are the hard part."
- "The analysis presented here explores word usage in the 2008 US Presidential and Vice-Presidential debates. The purpose is to explore the structure of speech, as characterized by the use of nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs, and noun phrases. The speech patterns of opposing candidates are compared in an effort to identify characteristic value and personality traits."
- "How I asked my GF to marry me in Little Big Planet. My (now) Fiancee was playing the level. She was so shocked she kept playing and knew i was filming. Afterwords we hugged, she cried, and I gave her an engagement ring." This is amazing in so many ways, not least of which that she wasn't the first person to paly it.
- "The suits took issue with every brave, authority-questioning page of our Meet the Sandvich script-specifically that there were supposed "similarities" between it and the 1987 action film Predator, and more specifically that it was word for word the 1987 action film Predator."
- "Each issue of this unique title is 3,840 half-inch-square panels of nothing but dots talking to each other. The concept is that everyone is drawn so far away that all you can see is a dot. And the dots do stuff. Like smack each other, or give birth, or die. It’s brilliant, it’s hilarious, and it’s mind-blowing."
- Future Platforms get a company blog, and give it a brilliant name to boot.
- Wilson Miner redesigns again, and it's _gorgeous_. The subtle transparency of the black text in RGBa values, to pick up a hint of the underlying green, is a lovely touch.
- Jaw well and truly on the floor.
- "Thus maintenance would become a punishment for delivery, which may be a hollow joke for some of us working in technology. And every now and then, when reading contracts, I would like to follow Henry VII's lead and pass a law against maintenance."
- "An object provides for [the wants we define ourselves as] through the lack it displays." Jyri Engeström on social objects and the way they create wants, fulfil needs, and they way that drives our behaviour around them. Jolly good.
- Detailed write-up from Alice of a presentation from Turbine - the stuff on where to draw boundaries between game and web is really, really interesting.
- Oh god, pets now have talent trees. Why does the game get complex just as I've begun?
- "Making games is easy! Well, okay, maybe it's actually kind of hard, but starting out is easy at least! Especially when you have Kongregate's shootorials (shooting tutorials) to guide you through the process." Tutorial on making a 2D shooter in CS3. Awesome!
- "So to recap, we have scraped some data from a wikipedia page into a Google spreadsheet using the =importHTML formula, published a handful of rows from the table as CSV, consumed the CSV in a Yahoo pipe and created a geocoded KML feed from it, and then displayed it in a Yahoo map." Wow, etc.
- "The dataspace of the well-tempered environment will soon be invaded by logos, credits, banners and offers. The financial temptations will, I suspect, be too hard to resist." Loads of excellent stuff in here besides this, though. Can't recommend enough.
- This is wonderful "wilfully fictional" advertising: an affectionate pastiche of the geek's love of unboxing videos, with some wish-fulfillment as to what unboxing ought to really look like.
- "And if all videogames could ever aspire to was being big, dumb, blockbusting escapism, does that even matter? Hasn’t every generation that ever lived created make-believe worlds to climb into and take refuge? I don’t know. I don’t know. I just wish we’d asked each other the questions a bit more fifty years ago." Too many quotations to choose from in this; wonderful writing from Simon Parkin.
- "The upcoming presidential election has seen record fund-raising by the candidates and a host of new donors. Now we want our users to be able to analyze and reuse some of the data we’ve been looking at while reporting on the campaign."
- "Do you really want them campaigning in your hobby? I don’t."
- Fascinating to see such emphasis on the manufacturing process, accompanied with wonderful footage of factories that takes me straight back to the documentary sections in Playschool and Sesame Street. The milling sequence is beautiful. (The product isn't bad, either, but I'm mainly interested in raising awareness of mass-production in an age of coming scarcity).
- "Alternate movie posters about film brand integration." Beautiful, typographically speaking, and definitely honest.