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Crazy flash-based cheesy trance machine. Far more entertaining than it should be.
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"Developed by Peter Chilvers, in collaboration with Eno, the app is described as, “Part instrument, part composition and part artwork…” The idea is that anybody can play with Bloom and coax gentle melodies and ambient soundscapes out of their iPhone."
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What a wonderful piece of a UI; two projections of a tunnel-boring machine, synchronized with one another, to help you visualise it in 3D. Lovely – not what you'd expect from a fairly niche company's site at all.
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"The future is terribly easy to predict. It’s predicting the instantiation that’s hard."
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"These travel posters by Steve Thomas, Amy Martin and Adam Levermore-Rich promote travel to exotic eras and destinations, such as the Crimson Canyons of Mars, Tranquil Miranda, or the Winter Wonderland of the Ice Age." Beautiful.
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Lots of sed-goodness here.
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Javascript demoscene craziness from Matt Westcott; 3D, music, and the most incredible editing tool I've seen in JS ever.
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"The rest of this article will be a tutorial showing you how to host and manage Git repositories with access control, easily and safely. I use an up and coming tool called gitosis that my friend Tv wrote to help make hosting git repos easier and safer." Nice guide to getting up and running with gitosis.
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"Turning the economic crisis into one of those clever internet memes." Lols.
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"The Mugen (infinite) series of toys from Bandai Asovision has now brought us the Mugen PeriPeri, a keychain toy that aims to replicate the pleasure of opening a package for the first time. Snacks, boxes, and other tear-open packages tend to reveal good things, so perhaps experiencing this sensation boosts endorphins and sends us into pleasure mode." Tear-off wrapping you can tear forver.
Gotye at Bush Hall, 2 October, 2008
08 October 2008
Some photographs from last week, when I went to see Gotye at Bush Hall last week, supported by the excellent Rod Thomas.
I love taking photographs of gigs; I think it might be my favourite genre to work in. I’ll never go purely for the photography, though; I have to enjoy the music too. It’s why I’ll always make an effort to indicate to any artist that catches my eye that I’m really enjoying what they’re doing – you’ll see me tapping my feet or grinning whilst I shoot, if only to indicate that I’m doing this for more than the images. I also find that I tend to take better pictures of artists I’m enjoying more.
I think I got some good pictures; the gig itself was great fun, too. I’m liking the new sensor’s low-light capabilities a lot.
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"The technology will probably improve, but in lieu of the promised emergent web AI, we need to build more small tools, more games to bootstrap datasets, and more simple ways of encouraging people to play their part in the semantic web without ever having to explain what it is." tt++.
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Fantastic presentation from Giles Bowkett, which is about generative music, art, shipping, Ruby, and building things for yourself.
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"Paine does have a descendent, a place where his values prosper and are validated millions of times a day: the Internet. There, his ideas about communications, media ethics, the universal connections between people, the free flow of honest opinion are all relevant again, visible every time one modem shakes hands with another." Fantastic article
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"At its core, what should this product be best at? When users think of this product, what is the central feature(s) that should spring to mind? Everything else is distraction, clutter, cruft."
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"I think this vision of artistic expression as a form of collaboration is a truer description of the nature of game design than of any other medium, because video games are inherently interactive." Pliskin on Steve Gaynor, and the gap between the screen and the gamepad.
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Portal-inspired homebrew game for the DS. Looks rather sweet, although not keen on collect-em-up mechanics.
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That they are. Got to love the type on these.
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"Cosmovox is a unique and innovative musical instrument for the iPhone and iPod touch." Nearly a theremin. Nearly.
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"Tim, or perhaps T.J. (we were at the pudding stage), began talking about the experience of editing Cliffhanger (the edition we were going to print), and about some of the material that had to be changed or cast away – characters’ names, a lesbian sex scene, the ending itself – and we wondered whether, in a born-digital text, these sloughed-off palimpsests acquired an existence of their own, beyond the shadows of an HFS hard drive; in a library run by Veet Voojagig, perhaps." Picador publish both the final version of the book in print – and the urtext as a separate digital product. Fun.
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"The time comes again. Here’s the first five pages from the first issues of PHONOGRAM: THE SINGLES CLUB. Not only that, but we include seven sample B-side pages, plus a little introduction about what they’re all about, like." Looking jolly good, and am rather excited by the B-sides.
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Wonderful pastiches of popular US newstand titles to promote the new season of Dexter. The New Yorker pastiche is particularly superb.
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Now the NDA is gone, this looks like a good starting point. Honest.
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"Content is an expensive, messy business and fraught with quality risk. Network resources like minutes and texts are an attractive commodity and one where the wholesale price is falling all the time." Interesting analysis of Blyk.
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"Ladies and gentleman, Hello World 2.0 uses no fewer than 7 messages queues, three command line applications (which can be executed on physically separate machines), and two Inversion of Control frameworks (but I’m fixing that tomorrow)." Huddle look at moving towards message queues.
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Web Inspector gets an overhaul; it's looking pretty nice, now.
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"The Pencil Project's unique mission is to build a free and opensource tool for making diagrams and GUI prototyping that everyone can use." Hmn.
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"Here is a video which gives some insight into how Little Big Planet ( and Media Molecule! ) evolved from next to nothing into what it is today!" MediaMolecule put the LBP repository into codeswarm, and then published the video. Lovely.
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"Rososo shows you which bookmarks have updated, and hides the rest. It is a good alternative to newsreaders, which, like your email inbox, tend to accumulate obligation and guilt." Not sure about only showing sites, rather than content, but I like the idea of peaceful software a lot.
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"The Geoblogomatic is little machine that turns blogs into maps. It's in beta" "If you have a blog about places, or things in places, the Geoblogomatic can make a map of your blog posts." Awesome. Another fun thing from Tom.
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"This is the funny thing: appreciation of Mega Man music is a microcosm for the kind of snobbery you see in indie-music-loving white people. It's also a microcosm for the popularity of the series as a whole." Definitely exhaustive, and quite sweet. (Also: Michael's blog's tagline is pretty much spot on).
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"this portion of moby.com, 'film music', is for independent and non-profit filmmakers, film students, and anyone in need of free music for their independent, non-profit film, video, or short… the music is free as long as it's being used in a non-commercial or non-profit film, video, or short. if you want to use it in a commercial film or short then you can apply for an easy license, with any money that's generated being given to the humane society." Moby is smart when it comes to licensing his music. I think this is a really good move, and not something you'd expect from a major recording artist.
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"For one, there's an undercurrent of a siege mentality in journalism right now, with newsrooms cutting staff and print operations frozen stiff in the headlights of the internet. The focus on narrative and story gives a softer edge and an escape valve, though – this group is not primarily a tech-driven community, but they catch on to new developments quickly and bend them into the service of storytelling." Interesting round-up from Mike, particularly with respect to the NYT's election coverage.
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“You know what a sign of love is, in this family? It’s if you come home and the elevator is on the ground floor,” says Linda. “Because that means whoever came home before you walked up twelve flights of stairs.” Fantastic article about Jay Maisel's house.
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"When NASA's last scheduled Space Shuttle mission lands in June of 2010, the United States will not have the capability to get astronauts into space again until the scheduled launch of the new Orion spacecraft in 2015. Over those five years, the U.S. manned space program will be relying heavily on Russia and its Baikonur Cosmodrome facility in Kazakhstan." Wonderful pictures of spaceflight, Russian-style.
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"Journalist Kareem Shaheen was attending at GAMES 2008 convention in Dubai, and asked us if we fancied writing anything about gaming in the Middle East. And we said HELL YES, as we like capitals." A nice, if brief, piece from Shaheen about a sector of gaming I know nothing about.
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Make Iced Tea!
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"Now noisy makers can assemble and modify their own light controlled analog noise friend!" I want an analog noise friend.
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"Over the weekend, students from NYC's Parsons School worked for twenty four hours continuously with LittleBigPlanet. Their challenge? To create a level from scratch using early copies of the PS3-exclusive.. one level stood out as the single best level — one created by Team Sportsmanship. We've lovingly dubbed the level "Shadow of the LittleBigColossus." Watch the video and see why." Amazing. Intensive, over-difficult, but still impressive.
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"Well-designed games make us forget the technical impediments to the enjoyment of art, and this is more than half the battle."
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Yes.
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"KeyCue gives you an instant overview of the overall functionality of any application, plus lets you automatically start working more efficiently by making use of menu shortcuts." Awesome. Really, really awesome. I might well end up registering this.
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Jos Buivenga's font foundry, with many free faces (usually in a few weights – other weights are paid-for). Some beautiful stuff in here.
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Beautiful, free, sans-serif font. Gorgeous – especially at 900-weight.
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"His advice for those attempting a project like this, is to get people who understand the web. DICE hired a web development director, and a web producer. "Without those people, we would have never made it as far as we have," he says. He also recommends a web tech director, which DICE did not need to hire "because we had a team in DICE who were pretty strong."" Excellent article about building games for the online age; the section on the socially-driven BH website is very incisive.
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"Bandcamp isn’t Yet Another Place to Put Your Music. We power a site that’s yours. So instead of our logo plastered between banner ads for Sexy Singles Chat, your fans see your design, your music, your name, your URL. You retain all ownership rights, and we just hang out in the background handling the tech stuff." Via Waxy; looks really excellent, and some wonderful stat-gathering tools for bandowners.