Amazing glitch music visual tracker:

Open source, runs on Linux with PS2 pads. More details over at Planet Damage, he doesn’t seem to link the project website, but it’s fijuu.com.

(via The Day They Tried To Kill Me)

I used to have something called a “league of greed”. It detailed every single thing I wanted, and put them in the order I wanted with the price next to everything. At the bottom was a total, which at times was unattainable, and at other times just represented a hell of a lot of potential credit card debt. I never took that plunge because it didn’t seem wise, especially as many of the things were electronics or transport, both of which tend to depreciate much faster than debts.

A side effect of having league of greed was that it made me unhappy when it reached into the unattainable - either I was looking too many years ahead, my income had just gone down for a while, or I was putting things on the list that were a little bit crazy. Eventually I tore it up, forgot about most of the things on it, and found that I was much happier as a result.

At several points in my life I’ve learned that having a comfortable income means being able to easily buy shit I don’t need. That lesson needed hitting home a lot harder in my late teens, nowadays even a t-shirt I don’t wear often makes me think about it. I like to travel very light nowadays too (i.e. a change of clothes, money and a camera phone if I can get away with so little), but used to carry large heavy bags everywhere and have trouble closing them.

In the past few months I’ve been on a major stuff purge, because the less I have, the happier I get. Owning stuff has cognitive overheads, mainly in various ways of remembering and maintaining it. Even getting rid of things is difficult unless you just dump them in the bin. I basically still have 1.5 cubic metres of stuff that has to be apportioned to charity shops, ebayed, given away, and chucked. Getting rid of things properly is effort, though luckily I’ve never been over the event horizon some hoarders I’ve known have passed, where getting rid of stuff seems like more trouble than living with clutter.

I’m becoming the exact opposite of a hoarder.

In the era of the web, being able to look at something online is often enough for me. The existence of something as media can be sufficient. To have and to hold is not something I require of most things, and this has drastically changed my buying patterns over the past few years. Every time I consider buying a thing, I contemplate the overheads of owning it. I wonder if I really want it. I wonder if I’ll still want it in a month. Like a window shopper, I repeatedly go back to look at it, but each repeat visit is more likely to reduce my desire than increase it.

There are of course still things I want and will have to save for, and it’s not like I never make impulse buys or have indulgences. I don’t keep track of unfulfilled material desires with a “league of greed” anymore though. What I do have is a constantly shifting “league of contemplation”; bookmarks for things I might buy but probably won’t waste my money on. The things I do buy are tending to be a small number of things I love, rather than more things I like or many I just find acceptable. Things are much better this way.

(CC image by Holla, It’s Jillian)

I went to the Hide and Seek Festival last weekend. It was great and I’ll be writing about it soon, both here and at Pixel-Love. It’ll be a little while yet though since I’ve been laid up with a fever for the past few days.

For now, here are the photos I took there.

“This feels like the climax of Act 1 of the internet.”
- Torquill, Neogaf forums.

We may not have found the Citizen Kane of games yet, but this is definitely their Plan 9 From Outer Space.

Limbo of The Lost is a point and click adventure game developed by Majestic, an outfit of three English geezers. Definitely geezers. After it was published by Tri Synergy, it didn’t take long for anyone to notice that many of the backdrops were screenshots from Bethesda’s Oblivion… along with more from Silent Hill, Diablo, UT2004, Thief 3, and so on.

GamePlasma broke the story, then this Neogaf thread catalogued the different games ripped off. Many of the screenshots are photoshopped with assets from other games, such as this screen from Thief: Deadly Shadows that includes skulls from Diablo.

As this trailer shows, the game itself is appallingly poor:

It was quickly withdrawn from sale after the lifting was noticed, but copies have of course been showing up on ebay and torrent sites. In the run up to its release and just after, Majestic ran an astroturf campaign of fake reviews and forum posts. Of course, the internet turned over every stone, with some hilarious results.

Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve been sceptical of CDs and optical media since I last moved house and had to carry them. I’m purging my possessions of extraneous stuff at the moment, and last night ripped and tagged all of my remaining CDs. The pile came out to about 4 gigabytes of MP3s, which is the size of the USB key you can see in the photo.

If my entire digital music collection was turned back into CDs, it would fill about 4 square metres of wall space with one layer of CD shelves. I’d rather have a hard disk or three and paint something nice on the wall.

As far as I’m concerned now, CDs are an inconvenience, like floppy discs, VHS tapes and packaging. I don’t even know what to do with all of these except give them away. The last second hand CD shop in my city closed down over a year ago, and tended not to need much stock from anyone. Ebaying them would be more hassle than they’re worth, even if I was on minimum wage.

These are going to friends who still love CDs. I certainly don’t. I’m finding that the less stuff I have, the happier I get.

While 3D printing will remain the territory of geeks and tinkerers for quite a while to come, an impressive step was achieved with the RepRap last week: It can now print its own components. Not quite full self replication, in the sense of a second, fully assembled printer appearing end on out of a first, but an important step on the way there. I’d like to know how durable their components are.

After the jump there’s a written version of the keynote talk I gave at Under The Mask, Perspectives on the Gamer on Saturday the 7th of June. You can find slides to go with it here, an embedded version with image credits here, links to most of the things I’m talking about here, the conference website here, and slides with transcript on the Pixel-Lab site.

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Here are the slides for the Game Culture Talk I did last Saturday at Under The Mask:

These are also mirrored with transcript on the Pixel-Lab site.

If the embed doesn’t work for you, here’s a link to the slide page.

Photo credits after the jump. Most images were used under creative commons, others I “stole”, some were taken by me, and most others were screenshots, etc. I also unfortunately lost the links for about 8 of the creative commons ones from Flickr - if you see your image here uncredited, let me know and I’ll fix it. The section on my social network is redacted from the slides, as I’m not sure all those people would want their images displayed *this* publicly.

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I’ve been asked to deliver a keynote at Under the Mask: Perspectives on the Gamer. Provided everything goes to plan, this post will be automatically published while I’m giving the talk.

Slides and a written version of the talk can be found at the Pixel-Lab site or a few entires on in this blog. For now, after the jump there are links to most of the things mentioned:

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Trying to watch TED talks is like standing in front of a firehose. I like it when people point me to a particularly interesting one, and this 10 minute one by Joshua Klein on crows is fascinating:

Among the more startling things in the talk:

Crows can figure out a problem and create a tool to surmount it. An example given is crows in a particular area dropping nuts onto roads so traffic will crack them, then waiting for the green pedestrian signal before going to pick up the bits. Apparently, every pedestrian crossing there now regularly has crows at the side waiting to go pick up a meal.

Crows learn from each other. This means that in the most basic sense, they have cultures; bodies of shared motives, knowledge, and actions. Joshua set out to make a device that trained them to perform a simple task. As he says:

We can find ways to interact with other species that don’t involve exterminating them.

(Via Boing Boing, of course)

(CC licensed image by Roadsidepictures)

I ran an event for work a few nights ago, and one of the things that came up in discussion was this blog entry by Ste Pickford. He raises an interesting question:

I’m playing GTA4 right now but I’m not very good and shooting / aiming games, so I’m struggling with some of the missions. I think the story is great though, and I want to play it through to the end and see where Niko ends up. The game itself doesn’t have any of the traditional mechanisms to help weaker players described above. You need a minimum level of gaming skill to beat the missions and thus follow the narrative to its conclusion.

Is this right? They’ve made a story - a narrative - that cannot be experienced without gaming skills. If I get stuck on a mission at 50% of the game should I be able to demand to experience the rest of the story, despite my inability to aim a gun? Should I be able to get my money back from the shop if I can’t see the end of the story, as I would with a DVD that got stuck half way through?

I’d say no. The first response that came up from the audience, made of game developers and games programming students, was “cheat then” and I agree. That may be because I’m on the ludologist side of the fence though: the primary thing I’m looking for in a game is challenge and fun, narrative is secondary to me.

I have 499 of the 500 agility orbs in Crackdown. I got roughly the last 280 of those using a map I found on the internet, and was frustrated to find I’d missed one when I got to the end of it. I spent about 3 hours jumping around the map looking for it, but then gave up. If there were a cheat that would reveal it’s location, I’d be straight back on it.

I don’t think it’s a design flaw that I’ve ended up at this place with the game. There are many ways to experience all kinds of media now, and the way I choose depends on my motives.

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There’s some interesting work being done at Playing Together. Talking about social gaming and the Wii in particular, they quote a few kids/teenagers:

“I was addicted to Unreal and i knew all the cheats.”

How often did you play it?

“All the time!”

And why did you stop playing it?

“I grew up! [laughs]”

[Male, 19, Yorkshire]

It goes on:

I do wonder, how much peer pressure comes into the equation. And if not pressure per se, but influence. How much influence does his peer group have? Is the Wii considered more grown up because his friends think so? Does the pure existence of a peer group game network almost make you want to play the game even more?

I think that’s a vital distinction. Peer pressure is always a snarl word, only applied things viewed as negative influences, whereas influence by itself is a value neutral term. It seems that common value judgments one applied to games are migrating to some interesting age groups.

There are a few things I once hated and reactively avoided, but now grudgingly accept as mud from which I can grab occasional nuggets of precious metal.

Celebrity gossip:
I still steer well clear of most of this. It is utterly irrelevant to me that footballer X, pop star Y or model Z have cancer, are giving each other reacharounds, etc.

However, even minor celebrities are at the forefront of privacy and identity issues. If there’s a problem, for instance, with privacy on facebook, often a popular figure/juicy target such as even a local celebrity will be at the brunt of it. Once you start to ask questions about what celebrity is and what it does to us, it becomes fascinating and causes you to ask questions.

Fashion:
About half of the people I’ve met who were doing fashion courses are superficial idiotic wankers. Led by peer pressure and inclined to judge on appearances, these are the cultural base that creates the club owners who stand outside saying things like “Hah! Last season’s Paul Smith? You aren’t coming in in that“. &c. Their faith in such judgments is a sealed system, trying to shake them out of it is like trying to argue with a Jehovah’s Witness on your doorstep: You will go in circles, most likely big, slow ones.

The other half of the fashion people I’ve met are incredibly switched on people. I like these people a lot. Fashion with a big “F” is one of the points where mainstream culture mingles with the fringe, where trends solidify and interesting things happen.

I also like dressing nicely, and when you know what you’re looking for with clothes, you get what you pay for (and sometimes what you can find heavily discounted). Even if shops are full of unpleasant or slimy staff, learn to ignore them and you can find some nice things there without your blood pressure spiking. Style and fashion are very different things, and only a minority of eminently forgettable people judge on seasonality. Even expensive clothes work out cheap if you love them and will wear them often.

Fine Art, Live Art, Contemporary Art:
I have a continual love hate relationship with these three. Paraphrasing a William Gibson character, “all the most interesting things turn up in art galleries and on battlefields first”. Art in the UK has an institutionalised system of dicks and peer pressure fed by an easily abused public funding system: use the right buzzwords and you can get your art project funded to the hilt, at the cost of your integrity. Nevertheless, art is yet another point of intersection between the cathedral and the bazaar.

All of these things exhibit a fringe-centre progression, and often the most interesting things happen at the anarchic fringe rather than the institutionally approved centre. Unfortunately, this is also where there is naturally the most noise.

Just tried to sign up for the last round of tickets for BarCamp London 4, and they ran out in less than a minute, before I’d even got down the reg form. Friends who were trying to register didn’t even get to see the form.

I went to BarCamp London 2 in Feb 07, and it was one of the best events I’ve been to (photos). There’s serious demand and not enough supply: It’s an opportunity for large sponsors to create massive goodwill among geeks.

This is interesting. Our brains conserve energy on a very basic level, much like emotionally driven motivations that (ideally) impel us to seek the highest value for the lowest investment of energy and time, and reflexes automating things that first require much practice.

Monotonous duties switch our brain to “rest mode”, whether we like it or not, the researchers report in Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences.

They found mistakes can be predicted up to 30 seconds before we make them, by patterns in our brain activity.

“To our surprise, up to 30 seconds before the mistake we could detect a distinct shift in activity,” said Dr Stefan Debener, of Southampton University, UK.

“The brain begins to economise, by investing less effort to complete the same task.

“We see a reduction in activity in the prefrontal cortex. At the same time, we see an increase in activity in an area which is more active in states of rest, known as the Default Mode Network (DMN).”