Vex Appeal

I’m gonna be on the fourth plinth in Traflagar Square as...

Tue, 07 Jul 2009 09:42:00 +0100

I’m gonna be on the fourth plinth in Traflagar Square as part of Antony Gormley’s One & Othe r project. Exciting times. Specifically, for an hour, on the night of Friday 31st July, at midnight, when I expect there’ll be many a drunk passer-by.

I figured the whole point was to stand there looking vaguely noble and statue-like but when I told my girlfriend about my participation her first question was “What are you going to do up there?”

“Not much,” I thought, only to discover the One & Other site posed me exactly the same question when I went to confirm my participation. Bugger. Still it seems like a good opportunity to do something jolly, even if the majority of participants so far have thankfully opted for the “stand about” option, lowering the bar for everyone else. On the livecam (good ambient viewing, if only you could turn the sound off) I’ve seen a guy with a proper camera and tripod, someone called up Radio 5 Live from up there, and I saw someone else on Twitter passing out the mobile number of some participant. In the newspaper I read that someone is going up there dressed as a poo. Nice work.

Lazyweb crowdsourcing suggests the following:

reading something out (in an hour you can read 7,500 - 9,000 words, so would need to find a good piece, although one could do a setlist of shorter things)
embroider a sampler (I don’t really know what that means)
a pro-smoking protest (as a counter-protest to this sanctimonious fuckwit, I’m not sure how enthusiastic I can be but perhaps “having a cigarette or two” will do)
pilates
“tasteful nudity… perhaps with an amusing cactus” (sounds like a recipe for a spiky accident)
plinth tennis / plinth twister

So “naked stretching while reading poetry with a cig hanging out the corner of my mouth” is perhaps the order of the day. I will continue to muse on this, as it seems like what with the live stream, my phone (Twitter! Internet! Interactivity!) plus anything else I want (megaphone! signs! guitar! ~~tiny horse!~~) I could do something cool. Run some kind of game? Or maybe I’ll just eBay my slot and someone can pay me to do whatever they want for an hour, then excuse it as a commentry on the tension between commercialism and art.

Or you can leave your idea below :-)

Loose Tweets Sink Fleets [from WWIII Propaganda Posters]

Tue, 07 Jul 2009 04:52:37 +0100

Loose Tweets Sink Fleets

[from WWIII Propaganda Posters]

Happy Indie Pendants Day, y’all.

Sat, 04 Jul 2009 17:55:39 +0100

Happy Indie Pendants Day, y’all.

“Arming Eritrea” - Future Of The Left (download...

Tue, 30 Jun 2009 18:01:28 +0100

“Arming Eritrea” - Future Of The Left (download MP3)

(taken from their new album Travels With Myself And Another)

Absolutely one of my favourite bands. Wit and noise deployed with lethal precision, acid contempt sliding into mad-as-hell-and-not-gonna-take-it-any-more, an exasperated anthem for patience lost and selves deluded.

FOTL tends to evoke the sense that the singer simply cannot tolerate this bullshit a moment longer, and has finally been driven to splutter the hypocrisies of his antagonists back in their unthinking faces, a hopeless attempt to demand intellectual honesty, an attempt whose inevitable failure requires every last drop of catharsis to be wrung from the outburst in order to seize an emotional consolation prize. (In “The Hope That House Built” he sings ‘come join, come join our hopeless cause / remember there is a cause for incredible wealth - incredible luck’) The mood is deeply 2009, as we collectively shake our fists at the insanity of the bankers and the greed of our politicans, swirling outraged acres of newsprint fluttering uselessly against an impenetrable wall of indifference.

It’s torches-and-pitchfork music, shot through with suspicion of the reactionary horde itself, a kind of noughties Rage Against The Machine that’s come to realise the machine lives on is us all, we are damned-to-hell hypocrites, and not only will there be no bullets in any heads, it’s gravely unclear whether we should be shooting ourselves or everyone else anyway.

But, for all that, it cannot and does not give up, not as long as there is bass and guitar and a microphone to vent into.

Buy Future Of The Left songs on iTunes

Listen to Future Of The Left on Spotify

Portrait of a Problem When you take a photo on an iPhone,...

Tue, 30 Jun 2009 02:12:20 +0100

Portrait of a Problem

When you take a photo on an iPhone, it’s pretty natural to take it in portrait format - the whole UI of the phone is based around holding the phone vertically. Taking portrait videos is equally natural for the same reasons.

Unfortunately this ends up being fairly useless. iMovie can’t really understand portrait video. It generates the thumbnails in iPhoto (which handles orientation info) but doesn’t understand orientation information itself. This means that although the thumbnails are the right way up, the video isn’t, and you have to go through them all and rotate them manually. (You can’t batch rotate which is also annoying.) And because the thumbnails were originally correct, it’s out of sync and they then appear all the wrong way around.

Once you’ve done all that it can’t export portrait video anyway, and even if you could most video sharing sites (AFAIK) don’t adjust their player size to match.

It’s a shame because for web-based video, which will rarely meet a full-sized screen, portrait is perfectly cromulent. It’s the obvious way to shoot iPhone video, fun to experiment with, and the best option for shooting things like people, faces and tall things. And like photos, they actually allow you to display “bigger” videos in column-based formats. For instance, a 2:1 portrait photo in a 500px column can be 1000px tall for a total area of 500kpx, whereas in landscape it can be only 250px tall, giving you 125kpx or just 25% of the area.

Cracking storm over London the other day. Everyone likes a good...

Mon, 29 Jun 2009 05:24:00 +0100

Cracking storm over London the other day. Everyone likes a good storm and the tolerable chaos they create, and although we rarely choose to venture out into the rain, being unintentionally caught in a truly torrential downpour is one of life’s great pleasures. In mere moments the niceties of being well-turned-out are cast aside, and our inner bedraggled heroes instead stride grimly forth through a temporarily unforgiving world. “Bring on your cold and dark and be damned.” And of course it’s just a bit of rain and hail so you get home and survive and in so doing demonstrate your superiority over the impotent sky gods.

A similarly transformative moment occured when, driving along the M1 and skirting the edge of the storm’s aftermath we reached a surprising impasse, in the form of a road-spanning puddle four foot deep. A minute previously (we surmised) a couple of cars had failed to ford this obstacle and found themselves stranded, preventing any further attempts from those behind. All seemed lost as cars sat five deep between us and the water and five-deep-and-climbing behind us. A motorway is a mechanistic sort of environment and it seemed like a long wait was in store while drainage, pumping or perhaps mere evaporation took place. But one brave soul (who of course I dismissed as a crazy fool, at first, the lot of all true visionaries) used the shallows to turn around in and pointed himself the wrong way down the motorway. It seemed too ambitious and frankly a little cocky, but suddenly the ranks of formerly anonymous speeding metal machines revealed themselves to be nimble and co-operative things with thoughtful and generous people inside with good hearts inside of those, and somehow with gestures and meaningfully flashed headlights we all reconfigured ourselves sliding-puzzle style and made our way a bit back up the motorway to an exit.

In this way a bit of drama warms the heart. Blitzless spirit.*

Afterthought - different kinds of weather speak to different human needs…

Sunshine: lazing about, peace

Snow: mucking about, play (see also)

Storms: running about, risk

and of course..

The cold, gusty drizzle of the British winter: losing all hope, crushing existential despair.

- - -

*i think a definition for blitzless spirit could be “an atmosphere that allows strangers to make meaningul eye-contact, communicating a sense of mutual understanding and appreciation of the situation.” “Check it out, right?” “Right!”

why chinese is so damn hard

Fri, 26 Jun 2009 00:00:00 +0100

why chinese is so damn hard:

I had some idea, but…

I happened to have a cold that day, and was trying to write a brief note to a friend canceling an appointment that day. I found that I couldn’t remember how to write the character 嚔, as in da penti 打喷嚔 “to sneeze”. I asked my three friends how to write the character, and to my surprise, all three of them simply shrugged in sheepish embarrassment. Not one of them could correctly produce the character. Now, Peking University is usually considered the “Harvard of China”. Can you imagine three Ph.D. students in English at Harvard forgetting how to write the English word “sneeze”?? Yet this state of affairs is by no means uncommon in China.

At first I thought it was just written Chinese, but the author goes on to address the tonal nature of the spoken language:

Every person who tackles Chinese at first has a little trouble believing this aspect of the language. How is it possible that shùxué means “mathematics” while shūxuě means “blood transfusion”, or that guòjiǎng means “you flatter me” while guǒjiàng means “fruit paste”?

When you say the sentence with the intonation that feels natural, the tones come out all wrong. For example, if you wish say something like “Hey, that’s my water glass you’re drinking out of!”, and you follow your intonational instincts — that is, to put a distinct falling tone on the first character of the word for “my” — you will have said a kind of gibberish that may or may not be understood.

Interesting article on a truly hardcore language.

the “blue” and “green” whirls are, in...

Thu, 25 Jun 2009 22:58:00 +0100

the “blue” and “green” whirls are, in fact, the same colour. illusionary craziness.

[from discover mag]

I have this idea of making a squiggly line out of my life. When...

Thu, 25 Jun 2009 00:00:00 +0100

I have this idea of making a squiggly line out of my life.

When I was a kid I used to wonder about the chances of wandering by the same stranger more than once - for any two lines, what are the probabilities they would intersect twice? I could almost see them veering towards each other by chance but not quite meeting, and then going their seperate ways again. I was weird.

Location-based stuff is rather hyped-up, but I’m not really interested in “sharing my location” or “finding great nearby restaurants” or any of those ‘useful’ things. What I really want is a map with a zingly blue dot (me) pinging about, leaving behind a pretty contrail of past activity. And you could probably zoom in and out for varying levels of detail, and control the length of the contrail, but it’s basically a map, plus a time scrubber, plus points on a map displayed/connected sequentially.

Now, clearly we’ve got the tracking sorted, what with Fire Eagle and Google Latitude and so on. It’s all about finding the right visualisation for the data. I’m playing with Dopplr and it’s quite nice to use although not exactly what I’m looking for - it’s a bit fancy-European-business-trip-I’m-reading-Monocle-and-pretending-to-enjoy-it, and I’m more going-to-the-greasy-spoon-then-off-to-london-to-see-my-girlfriend-and-then-to-a-pub-in-a-different-bit-of-london-then-back-to-my-commuter-belt-town. But at least they seem to have an appetite for doing interesting visualisations.

So, I’m looking for some kind of service I can update using a location tracking tool, and then displays these points in space & time in an interesting visual way. iPhone app + intermediary + web app, I expect… any suggestions?

Two Weeks Of Hip Hop (Dead Prez vs Grizzly Bear) - The Hood...

Wed, 24 Jun 2009 10:29:58 +0100

Two Weeks Of Hip Hop (Dead Prez vs Grizzly Bear) - The Hood Internet

[download MP3, 8.2 MB]

A big, big tune. Love it. And here’s a little something else by The Hood…

nothing to declare (except $134bn)

Wed, 24 Jun 2009 00:00:00 +0100

great news story: two japanese guys stopped at the italian/swiss border with $136bn in U.S bearer bonds. how much is that?

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. It almost fits with the surreal nature of today that a couple of travelers have more U.S. debt than Brazil in a suitcase and, well, that’s life.

Now, there’s been some debate as to whether the bonds are real or fake, although I’ve seen it reported that if they are fake it’s rather worrying as they are rumored to be “indistingushable” from the real thing. However, this guy points out that bearer bonds are serialized which means you can check if they’re legit and therefore not good candidates for faking.

And indeed the possibility that they might be real is even more bizzare. Aforementioned ‘guy’ also notes that “bearer instruments haven’t been issued by the Treasury since 1982, when they became illegal to issue” and considers that possibility that, therefore, “previous administrations were issuing “off-book” Treasury debt in this fashion to sovereigns.” One also wonders how the Italian border police just so happened to search the suitcase of these two particular gentlemen… (the author has a second post here)

It’s got all the makings of a modern-day credit crunch thriller. Throw in an erstwhile statistician analysing and blogging the numbers, a bit of Twitter, some Italian mafia, and entire foreclosure-wracked towns across the Mountain West being bought up wholesale by a shadowy conglomerate - towns whose total value may come to, ooh, just over $100bn. How does it all fit together? Only one man can find the answer, and that man is Paul Krugman, on a quest to earn his second Nobel Prize… for Ninja Skills.

[via infovore]

Sticks and stones may break my bones but taunts will OH GOD OH...

Tue, 23 Jun 2009 00:00:00 +0100

Sticks and stones may break my bones but taunts will OH GOD OH GOD RUN LIKE FUCK

Rather enjoyed the turn-based strategy 1066 Game from Channel 4 and Preloaded. I played it through pretty much as standard at first, sending my troops barrelling towards the enemy and trying to sword them in the face.

As well as troop strength, you also have ‘morale’ which, if it reaches zero, ends the game. It’s mostly affected by your troops being killed, but you can also ‘taunt’, which uses up a turn but boosts your morale a little and decreases the morale of your opponent.

So I was used to taunting occasionally when morale got dangerously low, but only as a last resort, for the real business of war is killing the enemy with swords and arrows. (I did try the “all-archer” attack - not much cop.) It wasn’t until a couple of days later when I read the comments on Kotaku that I discovered you can win the game *just* by taunting. Not in the same way that you can (allegedly) play Deus Ex without killing anyone, but just by putting all your units at the far edge of the map and then getting them all to taunt on the first turn. In theory, I quite like the idea that you can get your army to make such a terrifying racket that the enemy just shit themselves and run off before their archers have even reached for their quivers, but in practice it makes the multiplayer a leeeeetle bit dry.

At least the taunts are amazing. I plan on using “ill-born fen rat!” more often in conversation.

thoughts on my new iphone 3GS and the damn plane game and...

Mon, 22 Jun 2009 10:04:33 +0100

thoughts on my new iphone 3GS and the damn plane game and barcelona and samuel pepys, not in that order:

I got my old iPhone 3G pinched last month in Barcelona. I wasn’t aware it was a particularly dodgy city, but while I was there my friends also had their van broken into and cleaned out, another friend had their wallet lifted and we saw a guy on a moped snatch someone’s bag, which is 4 more thefts then I’ve ever experienced or witnessed in London. I Googled this phenomenon when I got back, and it turns out Barcelona is the place to go if you want to see beautiful architecture and decrease your number of possessions, a city where ‘tourism’ meets ‘Freecycle.’ Alternatively you can hide all your possessions up your bum, but then some guy will be like “ohhhh hey there i totally heard your bumhole is green” and you’ll be all “that’s a preposterous slander, senor!” and he’ll be all “no smoke without fire” and you’ll be all “i shan’t stand for this nonsense uno momento* longer!” and get your bum out to disprove the allegation when, suddenly, YOINK, and now you don’t even have 80 euros to pay the fine for exposing yourself.

But I digress. The very faint silver lining to this cloud of thievery was that I now had a legitimate reason to go and get the new iPhone…

Paying off my old contract cost about £50 less than I expected, although I’m not sure why, and didn’t like to ask.
It is quite a lot faster, but I don’t know how much of that is down to the new OS and the fact the install on this phone is cleaner. On my last phone the camera got slower and slower over time - by the end, it took 12 seconds to capture a photo from the moment you clicked the camera icon. Now it’s more like 5.
Talking of the camera, the tap-to-focus on the camera is nice and the video quality is pleasing (I was thinking of buying a Flip but shall pass now) but the most important improvement is the tap-to-expose. For instance, taking photos of people on a sunny day was really difficult before, and I usually resorted to funky diagonal angles and awkwardly high camera positions to try and minimise the amount of sky in the shot. Now it’s just tap… and boom, as Steve would say.
I only had graphically simplistic iPhone games, but as this new hardware is meant to be whizzier, I downloaded Fleet Air Superiority Training (pictured) which was pretty smooth and perfectly cromulent for a couple of quid.
However, you know how playing a lot of Tetris makes you hallucinate falling blocks when you close your eyes? Hallucinating pitching and wheeling through 3D space is much, much worse.
More on F.A.S.T - the final few levels are HARD. You might be able to down a plane at the beginning as you spawn at a distance from your opponents, but after you’ve converged it’s difficult to compensate for your numerical disadvantage. The best strategy is to max out your throttle, dive like an absolute motherfucker and stay no more than 100m from the ground. Find some nice mountains to weave between (you can use the yaw controls to make nice gentle movements) and pray. If you’re lucky, most of the missiles will hit the hills instead of you, and eventually your pursuers will try and close in on you and end up closing in on the side of a mountain instead. Winning a round without firing a missile is satisfyingly passive-aggressive.

In conclusion, the internet is not made of lies, the new iPhone is somewhat faster, the camera is much improved, you can win dogfights by circling mountains, and don’t take anything expensive to Barcelona.

- - -

*I like how Samuel Pepys uses random bits of other languages when he writes about sex - for a famous diarist it’s fantastically naff, like Del Boy’s mangled French. “And thence to the Abbey, and so to Mrs. Martin and there did what je voudrais avec her, both devante and backward, which is also muy bon plazer.”

Excerpt from Track 78 - “World War Z” by Max...

Mon, 22 Jun 2009 05:37:08 +0100

Excerpt from Track 78 - “World War Z” by Max Brooks

I don’t usually listen to audiobooks, but World War Z is “an oral history of the Great Zombie War” so it suits the medium nicely. It’s a series of interviews with various people telling their stories of a global zombie outbreak and the eventual human fightback. I enjoyed it a lot, thanks to the combination of nerdy attention to detail and testosterony battle stories.

World War Z on Wikipedia
The book on Amazon

digital inequality

Mon, 22 Jun 2009 05:06:36 +0100

Food for thought.

This is the best thing from Seth Godin’s Tribes talk at...

Fri, 15 May 2009 13:10:42 +0100

This is the best thing from Seth Godin’s Tribes talk at TED.

Right, another thing I’ve played recently (previously) ...

Thu, 14 May 2009 13:04:03 +0100

Right, another thing I’ve played recently (previously) also from the Macheist pack, is Introversion’s Multiwinia.

It’s basically a good old minimalist chunk of realtime strategy. You have a bunch of little pixelly dudes who you must order around the place and get to kill the opposing force of differently coloured pixelly dudes. Probably a biting critique of the inhumanity of war, anonymous cannon fodder sent to fod the cannons of other differently coloured people.

Anyway, it’s nice and simple, apart from you get the impression they discovered it was a bit too simple/boring so they threw in a bunch of “crates” which are (more-or-less) random powerups that, while having entertaining effects, can nonetheless devastate your efforts completely when the area around your spawn zone becomes a Forest Of Death, rapidly converting all your freshly minted warriors into ghastly Multwinian zombies who promptly seize the territory for their own.

Also the gun turrets are hideously overpowered, especially in combination with unfavourable geography, and therefore all the Assault/Defence maps seem like a lost cause - unless of course you’re defending in which case you can go and have a cup of tea and check your emails because you’ll never ever lose.

Moaning aside, there’s a good few hours of fun to be had with it, it’s only ten quid, and it’s tempted me to play some more strategy games by reminding me of a middle ground between the FPS fun of shooting people in the face and chess, my other gaming obsession.

Speakin’ of Introversion, (I’ve got back into their previous game Defcon lately, and at long last have enough game to beat the AI fairly reliably, although I had to buy a second license for the Mac version!) their company blog features a series of remarkably depressing posts looking back over their 2008 (part 1, part 2, part 3)…

Later that night at the pub after demoing our game, some of the writers from PC Gamer came clean with us. You’ve really fucked up the controls, they told us…

The game finally shipped on PC (on sale on our website, on Steam, and in the UK high-street through Pinnacle) and we celebrated with a launch party at our house. Tom had always fantasised about building a sales counter that would sit in the corner of the office and tick up whenever we sold a copy of a game. This time around he actually did it, building the device out of second hand parts bought from Ebay and writing custom driver software for it that linked directly to our Multiwinia sales counter. During our launch party dinner and celebrations that evening, what was truly amazing about this counter was how little it was actually going up. I’m not kidding when I say that we actually checked the connections and the software several times to make sure it was actually working, only to find out it was.

We blamed the marketing, then they blamed the game. Then we blamed the magazines for not reviewing the game, then we blamed Microsoft, then eventually we came to our senses and started thinking about how to survive.

It’s hard for me to look back, because I see Subversion on hold so much of the time, and I see my major time sinks (Chronometer, Defcon DS, Multiwinia) all as failures, not even projects I wanted to work on, and now have to live with them all going sour. To cap all of that off, 2008 was a truly incredible year in gaming and especially in Indie Gaming, with Braid, World of Goo and others rightfully grabbing the attention of the press that we used to command with ease.

So, not terribly unusual circumstances for an indie game development shop, but to put it all out there on your blog is a brave decison. Kind of makes me want to give them all a hug. A problem shared…

Oh dear, my iMac is a bit ill. Actually it’s been giving...

Wed, 13 May 2009 21:16:29 +0100

Oh dear, my iMac is a bit ill. Actually it’s been giving me this error for ages, and the other day I finally got around to asking the internet if I could just ignore it…

Get the drive replaced asap.

Replace it immediately. I hope you are doing religious backups.

If your drive has started failing it is possible that you have already corrupted data.

And so on and so forth as everyone told me to pull my head out of my ass and fix the damn thing. Appropriately enough yesterday the sporadic-clicking-noise has become a constant-clicking-noise, Skype won’t open, iTunes can’t play music without stuttering and (somewhat distressingly) Time Machine has stopped working. It also asserts that less than 80GB of the available backup space has been used which strikes me as odd considering a single copy of all my files alone should be 110GB.

Oh well, off to the Apple Store it is. Trying to take my iMac all the way into London on the train should be an adventure in itself…

The Thermals - Here’s Your Future (download mp3) Some...

Tue, 12 May 2009 15:35:32 +0100

The Thermals - Here’s Your Future (download mp3)

Some scratchy guitar pop for your Tuesday. “Fear me again, know I’m your father, remember that no-one can breathe underwater…”

Dizzee Rascal / Tom Hanks mashups

Sun, 10 May 2009 09:38:26 +0100

You Got Mail In Da Corner
Fix Up, Cast Away
Roll Deep-less in Seattle
Catch Me If U Can’t Tell Me Nuffin