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Craig Mod on his long walk; his descriptions of the nature of all-encompassing boredom remind me of hiking the Pembrokeshire coastal path, alone, and how your thoughts change as you slip into walking as your primary focus.
Boots
20 April 2019
I hadn’t properly cleaned my boots last time I put them away.
When I unbagged them and sat on the back of the car in the Lakes, a few weeks ago, they still had mud on them from a previous walk. Mud, from snow melting into earth, and white chalk, from the North Downs.
And now, that mud and chalk was translated a few hundred miles north, to be trodden into ground near Derwent Water.
A smile on the inside: how much mud and soil and who knows what else have I moved around the county, mixing tiny samples from one place into another?
My last pair of boots had taken me up hills in France, Cyprus, California, Australia. I didn’t clean the Australian soil off them for a few weeks after I returned. I couldn’t bring myself to do it; it was a final memento of a huge trip, a little piece of something alien, brought all the way home. I finally replaced those grey synthetic boots with these leather ones around 2016, when the old pair were just no longer waterproof. I was sad to do so; they had so many travels trodden into their soles; the new ones, stiff and clean, didn’t feel like they could match up.
But now, a few years later, these ones have really started to get their miles in, slowly – and highly inefficiently – redistributing soil and dirt around the world.
They’ll get a proper clean and wax in due course. In the meantime, I still like the tingle of all the previous journeys I see in them in moments like this.
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"In contrast to the human-scale of the prototype, the Clock in the mountain will be monumental, almost architectural in scale. It will be roughly 200 feet tall. Located under a remote limestone mountain in the Sierra Diablo Mountain range in Texas, it will require a day’s hike to reach its interior gears. Just reaching the entrance tunnel situated 1500 feet above the high scrub desert will leave some visitors out of breath, nicked by thorns, and wondering what they got themselves into." Beautiful; not only that they're building it, but that pilgrimage is practically built into the design. "You wind the clock by walking", as it were.
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This is a nice little route, and a great hill for messing around on in the middle of it.
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Ben Benvie hiked all 2000miles+ of the Appalachian Trail, and took his camera. These are his pictures from Maine, the final state of the trail, and it just looks brilliant. I am not sure I could do this, but the appeal is enormous.
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(in the Brecon Beacons).
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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).
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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
08 November 2009
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!