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Geek Love
2008-05-06 23:21:00
You know you've truly arrived when you're cited in a flame war on a geek forum:The offending geekdom and forum
More About: Love , Geek

A bank holiday weekend with no Internet
2008-05-05 22:12:00
What I learned:I can finish an RPG in two days vs the initial week and a half it took the first time around:The Internet was developed with the sole purpose of satiating my need to know about any infinite spectrum of subjects whenever the mood takes me.The longer you go without connectivity the choices of what sites/services you would have used had Virgin Media been less shit shrinks.Reading a book is great but painful for your arms if its 1221 pages long.Watching three generations of fish in a pond isn?t as lame as it sounds.Coffee in Crouch End is silly expensive. There?s no world shortage of beans, its rice you?re thinking of.Everyone can carry on playing GTA4, I?ve got my DS and it loves me:Face to face interaction still trumps MyFace and Twit tweets.
More About: Holiday , Weekend , Bank

The Pie Hole
2008-05-02 19:31:00
A world experienced narrator, check.Airy, orchestral soundtrack, check.Cast of naive, troubled, grumpy, eccentric but ultimately good-hearted people, check.Saturated colours and backdrops, check.Consolations on love, loss and pie, check.All these things made Amelie a charming tale, (except maybe the pie factor) but who would have thought you could stretch out the same, painfully whimsical tone and theme for an entire series?Easy, simply replace France with the U.S, a romance that can never be and all the elements above and you have Pushing Daisies. It loses its charm and wit after the first couple of episodes but this isn?t the Wire or Battlestar we?re talking about here.
More About: Hole

Two extremes of blogging
2008-05-01 17:11:00
I read a lot of blogs. Not as many as I used to. I just culled three today. It was hard, but I?m sure farmers go through the same thing.Butchery:I didn?t raise the people who were writing these blogs. Most I haven?t even met. I simply stopped buying their rss feeds (the feeding troughs of blogging) and no longer consumed them as intellectual food. Err, wait, I?ve lost where this analogy is going. Suffice to say, they either stopped being entertaining, informative or ritualistic.What can I say? I can say I am one of the OCD/ADHD, too many screens generation. I?m conscious of this, often I?ll give something a week but if it falters, chop or maybe tzzz (that?s the sound of a bolt gun)Anyway, the trends I noticed from perusing this veritable cattle market of blogs:1) Some blogs are too long. This isn?t a newspaper or magazine. I don?t want some rambling stream of consciousness. Ultimately it depends how much you care. If you know someone has got something worthwhile to say, you will ...
More About: Blogging

This my patch
2008-04-29 16:20:00
In the World of Warcraft, patches are huge. They go far beyond simple tweaks to the game's infuriatingly addictive reward mechanisms. Often revamping or creating entire new areas, sufficiently original enough that they could warrant release as stand alone expansion packs.Each patch gets the cinematic trailer treatment, ensuring there's enough geek hype upon its release. Why not give the fan boys and girls what they want? For the sake of sanity, it?s a good thing that some people don't take the WoW Lore too seriously:
More About: Patch

Douglas Rushkoff for life
2008-04-29 13:21:00
Thanks to Richard for the link. I remember reading Douglas Rushkoff when I was about twelve or so. A lot of it went over my head at the time but I do remember going around calling myself a 'child of chaos.' That didn't help my social standing much. Enjoy:
More About: Life

Overclocked
2008-04-23 16:40:00
Apologies for the lack of blogage, I've been silly busy and due to this unheard of level of busyness my inefficient immune system has let me down. I have THE plague. Still, its not as virulent as the WoW plague:

Digital Dynasty
2008-04-21 15:14:00
Check out Richard's 'Change This' manifesto:"It is a common theory that successful people live their lives like a project plan, so we struggle to shape our lives along a pre-determined path. Instead, Oliver asserts that that the majority of people, many of them very successful, make it up as they go along. This smart manifesto offers a convincing and well-researched argument encouraging us to do a little drifting."
More About: Digital , Dynasty

Damn you IKEA, damn you!
2008-04-21 12:57:00
I've tangled with IKEA before, here. I thought there was an armistice. I felt safe knowing their malfeasance was limited to the physical boundaries of each shop. But now, they're particular brand of evil is on the move. IKEA have infiltrated the Kobe train in Japan! Check mate.
More About: Damn , Ikea

Search and ye shall plant
2008-04-21 12:36:00
Hmm, take old plastic bags to be reused at Sainsbury's, check. Remember to turn off all appliances when leaving a room, check. Baths are made for two, check.What other eco practices can I incorporate into my everyday? Well, I search. I search for the truth. I search for information. I search for stupid things to send to people so that they can LOL and therefore associate me with their laughing. But now this egomania can be offset with knowing I've done something selfless for no effort at all.Ecocho is a search engine that will plant two trees for every 1000 searches made. It uses 70% of its income for the tree planting! Search it up tree huggers.
More About: Plant

Living in a Luddite revolution
2008-04-17 14:45:00
Wow, no updates for two days! You must think the title of this blog is a bold faced lie. Well, to all the haters, I?m not dead but merely injured, technologically speaking. The Old Gods (or Virgin Media) have seen fit to take away both cable TV and broadband goodness. I don?t know what I could have done to offend them, except maybe skip on the virgin sacrifice a couple of times.It?s difficult to comprehend how much I?ve come to rely on the interweb. For most of my life its always been there, like a benevolent deity granting me the power to plan journeys, check the latest televisial messages, stay connected to friends thousands of miles apart. You are everything interweb, so say we all.If there ever were a Luddite revolution I?d have to go guerrilla partisan on their collective asses. Forgive them interweb God, for they know not what they do.
More About: Living , Revolution

Comparison radar 5 or something
2008-04-14 16:56:00
The latest 'we've finished the game but need to keep reminding you about it' video from Rockstar, satirises gun control in the fictional, Liberty City. It reminded me of a viral Amnesty International did about the same subject. How much of the intended GTA4 target audience will clock the satirical tone is debatable and in terms of raising 'hype' for the game, moot. Ratatatat.
More About: Comparison , Radar

Correlations in Chronos
2008-04-14 15:50:00
My dad's always going on about Chronos vs Kairos, and no, that's not a reference to a Greek God grudge match. I was reminded by this obsession, that no doubt was the inspiration and influence for Memex Trails, by the Muji Chronotebook:"The Chronotebook allows you to plot your day as a series of tasks that radiate outward from a circle that's sort of like an analog clock. Each set of pages start with two circles representing AM and PM, and users are invited to draw in their events as they see fit."It might well replace the default Moleskine diary as the new media person's notebook of choice.

Brands and the yoot
2008-04-11 16:27:00
We the young people are incapable of thinking for ourselves, often times falling flat on our collective greasy faces at the first hurdle of peer pressure. We really do need to be told what to aspire to. Sometimes, if you throw enough buzz words and slang, that's getting a bit too ripe, you might just fool us into buying into whatever you've got to sell.I?m constantly amazed by the ?down with the yoot? campaigns out there which are so convulsion inducing in their wrongness, to wit, lack of understanding of that audience, that I?m surprised no one has said, wait, that dude over there has no clothes on.Something from a youth community (old but annoyingly gold):Once the advertisers got to it:If you want to know what the young people are thinking, ask one. Actually, ask one who can articulate why something works rather than simply fire off a series of slang and or grunts.The sort of insight you?ll gleam by holding a focus group or asking someone in the office who has a young person at ...
More About: Brands

Drink Robo
2008-04-11 14:16:00
When I was younger I used to love going to Yo Sushi. The Yo Sushi in Soho had a drink-serving robot, reminiscent of R2-D2 on Jabba da Hut?s sand cruiser. It was insultingly exciting. The restaurant of tomorrow, today! Or so my juvenile mind thought.Waving your hand in front of ?drink robo? would make it stop on its circuit round the restaurant. If someone was foolish enough to block its path it?d say, ?get out the way? in a synthesized voice that was electro music to my ears. Yo Sushi have since abandoned ?drink robo? probably because he demanded a pay rise or possibly attempted to form a robo union with his fellow drink dispensers. I love you drink robo.
More About: Drink , Robo

I've gone geek at the knees
2008-04-09 16:51:00
I don't think Lego could ever get old:
More About: Geek , Knees

Mad digital skillz
2008-04-09 16:33:00
I really like the Tiny Gigantic guys. I'm a big fan of their PDF guides and their Replate project is in a similar vain to something I'm developing. Anyway, they're finding it hard to find young digital talent with more than one skill set. Yikes:"So a few weeks ago, we participated in the CCA Career Expo. They gave us a booth alongside a shitload of other local creative shops and set the students loose on us. I never went to any of the job fairs when I was in school, but I assume that they?re kinda like this: students or recent grads come by, show their stuff, and talk to you about what you do and how they might fit into it, and you spend all day repeating your story. That?s where it got sticky."
More About: Digital , Skillz

The Million Word Project
2008-04-08 16:50:00
I once had this idea to make a website for fictional stories like Flickr is to photos and YouTube is to videos. The main objective of the ?Million -Word Project ? was to enable the creation of one thousand stories in one thousand words.The stories themselves could be of any genre as long as they contained one thousand words exactly. I tried writing a couple stories just to see what the difficulty would be like. Hard, basically.The rating system for the MWP would be known as ?championing.? A user would have the option to champion a story, which would then appear on their user page as a badge or symbol (like a dug on Digg or thumbs up on StumbleUpon).The badge would be created/submitted by the author of each story (hopefully you?d build up a network of fans who might design one for you). If the author could obtain ten champions (start small) for their story, it would be submitted to the Library of Fame (this is all starting to sound a bit too RPG land).The author could then see which us...

ProtestR
2008-04-07 19:56:00
What a bizarre Sunday. I woke up to the BBC?s live coverage of the Olympic torch marathon. Images of Konnie Huq being accosted coupled with her own disembodied commentary of what was happening was a strange way to gauge my view of the world that morning.I had intended to go down and protest somewhere along the route but feeling ridiculously comfy in bed, I was warming, both in body and mind, to the idea of pouring my outrage, joy, hunger and cat attack updates via Twitter. I felt capable of doing as good a job as the current BBC reporter who was essentially mouthing what appeared on screen.It was about the time the torch reached Trafalgar Square and I saw two pro-Tibetan protestors being carried away seemingly for doing nothing but waving a flag in the fountain which was a brave act two fold: it was snowing that morning and there was a sea of red flags surrounding said fountain.This ignited my soppy, liberal, dual-core processor, which is embedded somewhere near my heart and I, if n...

Attention, attention. May I please have your attention.
2008-04-05 13:29:00
Steve Rubel says:"We are reaching a point where the number of inputs we have as individuals is beginning to exceed what we are capable as humans of managing."Speak for yourself. With tools like Friend Feed, you can organise and keep track of a veritable plethora of online social interactions. I found it a pain to keep having to log on to Twitter in order to post my madness but using a Twitter client like Twhirl or simply texting when out and about makes it a breeze. Now I can annoy people with my pointless goings on all the time. Maybe it?s a generational thing. Being brought up interacting with several media devices at the same time, I think, has hardwired my generation with the ability to deal with several streams of, in this case, social media and handle it very well. There is no exertion, its still fun. I was talking to David of Imagination land, about getting people outside of the geekosphere into all this RSS business.My girlfriend can see the benefit in terms of having a Flic...
More About: Attention

Allowing communities access to copyrighted stuff
2008-04-04 00:21:00
I was once tasked to conceive and develop an engaging gaming site for a well-known chip manufacturer to highlight that their processors made games run really, really fast. As part of a ?community? building plan they wanted to give away some ?hardcore gaming rigs? as you do and will when you generate the GDP of a small country.We had the idea of hosting a video game mash up competition. However, our site was a new comer to the gaming community and we didn?t have enough dedicated fan boys/girls to make it happen at that early stage.Gametrailers on the other hand, had and has a massive community that they have built via traditional routes like enabling forums, the ability to comment on videos, exclusives and they often have mash up competitions too.The creator of a popular mash up video, or rather a series of popular videos, submitted his works outside these competitions, seemingly for the sheer love of it or maybe it was just for the ?bragging rights? of his fellow Gametrailerites, wh...
More About: Stuff , Access , Communities

Where's FDR and the New Deal at?
2008-04-03 14:32:00
Richard just sent me this: | View | Upload your own
More About: Deal

Spore studio story
2008-04-02 16:41:00
Maxis sounds like a interesting place to work:
More About: Story , Studio , Spore

Advertising idiocy
2008-04-02 02:51:00
When watching anything on surfthechannel you can expect, in the bottom right corner, your typical asinine flash ad. I?d usually avoid having to look at ?tickle the fat kid till he laughs to win an i-pod? or ?dunk cupid? or some other gank by either shrinking my browser or going for the full screen option.The problem lies with two other flash ads that randomly reside in the bottom right corner of doom. Said ads make an annoying error noise every few seconds, seemingly to try and draw your attention. This would be fine, well no it wouldn?t, but I could at least understand the peon thinking behind it if it wasn?t overlooking the fatal floor that this is a video site! People come here to watch videos and inherently these include sound, as in people talking, errrrrrr.So with much irritation and a swift refresh, you pray to land on a flash ad that?s slightly less evil on the roulette wheel of shit.
More About: Advertising , Idiocy

Grimey
2008-04-01 13:17:00
I was stumbling the other day when I came across the poetry of Joe Dunthorne. It?s urban and topical in theme and wouldn?t be out of place on say, an episode of Skins but, oh wait, they?re all stage school kids, d?oh. Therefore the most grime they will have seen is under a fingernail.Apart from the poems, Dunthorne has bizarre sketches littered around his site. The artist is someone called Alastair O?shea. I did a search for O?shea and came up with Fatking Productions. It turns out he designs web games. Its weird how the web works.You might not be a fan of the poetry or the sketches but I?d challenge anyone to ?gats? at dawn if they don?t find this particular puzzle game simultaneously sickeningly cute and finger bleeding addictive.

That was scary
2008-03-31 21:08:00
I met a friend today in (achingly trendy, thanks a lot Simon Pegg, you?ve ruined it) Crouch End. We went for tea at Hot Pepper Jelly, one of the last bastions of non-smugness left in the area. Apart from nearly exploding after drinking, what was advertised as a ?large pot? of green tea but turned out to be a bladder and half worth?s, we reminisced about stuff we?d watched as mere amoebas.I confirmed I'd watched Dark Crystal by involuntarily shouting ?Gelfling? really loudly, in what is a fairly small café. The Storyteller with, (how many fingers am I holding up?) John Hurt and sibling rivalry taken to the extreme with Labyrinth. What have they all got in common? That?s right, nerd herd, twas Jim Henson.The Dark Crystal is still a pretty scary film even now but Jim Henson?s works are darker than the endless dark that occupies the void under the garden decking. You can discount the Muppets obviously, unless you have an irrational fear of talking animals and who doesn?t, have you ever...
More About: Scary

Darren Almond, Fire Under Snow, Parasol Unit
2008-03-27 15:45:00
Two pieces at Darren Almond ?s new show transfixed my philistine mind: ?Tide? and ?Bearing.? You encounter the first as soon as you walk into the Parasol Unit . A completely bare room greets you with large white walls, in a gallery? No way. Taking up one of the vast walls is a sea of clocks. Not the friendly clocks with hands but those evil ones that clack. They?re not intrinsically evil but fill me with the horror of being forcibly pulled from a pleasant dream or the soul-destroying nature of working at some large corporation as a temp.This ?Tide? of clocks sound off every minute with a near deafening ?clack.? 600 clocks clacking in unison is one of the more disturbing noises you?re likely to hear off Hoxditch. Almond has succeeded in managing to isolate abstract time but whether it was his idea to put the receptionist in the same room facing this ?sculpture to inevitability,? is uncertain. Probably a sadistic curator was involved.?Bearing? takes naming to a new level. You sit in a d...
More About: Fire , Snow

Homemade Jelly
2008-03-26 18:26:00
For the last few months I?ve been freelancing and whilst this does have some benefits: not getting on the evil tube crush, being able to work in a dressing gown, popping out to see friends for tea etc there are some serious drawbacks. The lack of (during the day) social contact comes top.I?m lucky to have the opportunity to meet friends for lunch, as they live near by, but if they didn?t, I?d see no one?for days.I have no illusions that I will become Jack Nicholson in The Shinning after a day or two, but other ?workomers? and their psyches might yet be saved via Jelly :

Hungry eyes
2008-03-26 14:06:00
Ever get the feeling that eyes in an image are following you? This is the next step in that creepy evolution: http://cubo.cc/
More About: Eyes , Hungry

For the love of Skype
2008-03-25 20:57:00
Love and relationships can be tricky at the best of times but with the advent of SMS, Skype , social networking etc completely new levels of love ratdom can be achieved. Below is a pod from Current TV:
More About: Love