There is a palatable sense that the anti-war movement is gaining momentum. Anytime Bush has to take time off from his vacation to travel and sell the war it means that public sentiment is changing and moving against the war. Beyond the media attention to Cindy Sheehan's vigil, I assume the new momentum is due to that fact that things in Iraq look worse today than they did 6 months ago.

While looking through my massive bookmarks used for class stuff, I came across this and wondered what it'd look like now.

Wired Magazine has a number of articles today about the intermingling of virtual and non-virtual worlds. They are interesting in that the underlying theme seems to be that there is some therapeutic effect of virtuality - whether it involves an immersive Falluja-like world used to cure Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder or just hanging out with an artificial puppy.

Following a link from the PTSD article, it is a bit disturbing to continue on to USC's Institute for Creative Technologies and view the project list.

If you ever maintained any doubt that the entertainment industry and the defense industry were co-dependent, you will be complete disabused of that thinking. An example is The Concept Development and Visualization group that pairs concept or production designers with military folks to think up wonderful new ways to kill and mame people worldwide!

Maybe I am being a little harsh. But there is hope as I think Deuce Bigalow would make a great non-lethal weapon!

I thought I could avoid it this year but it is back: the 'sunday before school starts' blues. Luckily, someone recommended this for a few laughs and it is very spamusing. It might just do the job and cure this funk.

Slate has an article about Islamic video games.

Although I have known about Machinima for several years, I never really gave it much attention. Machinima (pronounced ma-shin-e-ma) is a type of filmmaking using game engines. What does that mean? Well, individuals record their actions within a video game environment such as Doom or Quake or Halo and edit the 'footage' later to create a story.

My prejudice has always been that the engines used are often 1st person shooter games and I couldn't understand how you could have a very interesting story made from the prefab components.

Recently, however, I've come across several sites and projects that are pretty interesting. The classic, really, is Red vs. Blue. It is funny because the writers give the normally hyper-stoic warrior characters silly personalities. The disjunction is often funny but wears thin with multiple viewings.

Today, I've seen a lot of blogspace dedicated to This Spartan Life. This Spartan Life is a talkshow created in Halo.

Sounds ridiculous but don't think that. Give it a chance. The interview with Bob Stein is not only subtly funny but very thought provoking as well. The segment, to me, is a great exercise in making explicit the possibilities inherent in the medium.

I have to admit that seeing Red vs. Blue and other machinima films I have been completely consumed by the idea that game engines really are a spectacular if only nascent tool for storytelling. The physics, lighting, character movement, and, perhaps most importantly, often unlimited camera movement (a unique feature of games, if you think about it) are all preprogrammed allowing machinima directors a certain level of freedom.

I think we will continue to see a lot more convergence of filmmaking and gameplaying in the future. I am consumed by the desire to create an engine add-on for some of the new next gen game engines allowing for a more elevated level of cinematic production. Imagine directing your own Godfather flick....

Cat porn?

(Thanks to Mona from Seattle for exploiting her cat. Photo from Flickr)

(BTW - Mona explains: "It's a she and that is not Lilo's hoo hoo dilly.")

I have learned more in the past few minutes from Jayme's wonderblog Visual Perception than I have all year. Check it out!

It's nice to see when professionals mess up. But it really messes with my mind, man. Case and point...

I visited a news site (whose name I will not say other than it starts with a 'C' and ends with an 'N' and has another 'N' somewhere in the middle) and went to find out more about the earthquake in Japan.

This is what I found:



I had never heard of 'rof' before so I did what any concerned citizen would do I googled it. I mean, if rof is so dangerous could it possibly kill me? Does rof attack only during earthquakes? Or could it happen, say, during a tense barbeque or mildly foggy day perhaps? I want to know.

The search results yielded little unless, of course, it was the Registre des Ostéopathes de France that fell and injured people in Japan. But more clues were uncovered. Look:



Apparently, you can buy rof (or used rof anyway) on Ebay.

To solve this once and for all, I did an image search and this is what I believe fell on those poor Japanese:

Here is some interesting Japanese propaganda from WWII.

The views of Asia pre- and postwar are informative. The additional pamplet directed at US soldiers, less so (but no less entertaining).

In an earlier post I talked about Jules Verne and Paris in the Twentieth Century. One thing I failed to mention as being off in Verne's prediction is that transportation in his vision is primarily through elevated pneumatic tube trains.

Well, although this may not quite be pneumatic it got me thinking about PITTC again. Looking at the concept more closely, I wonder if it'd really work? It's wacky but if someone told me that you could propel a car with an machine that, when fed dead dinosaur juice, makes little explosions a number of times every second...

I'd be curious to see a critique of the system. I, for one, don't really get excited by travelling in an airless tube at 4000 mph. But, hey, New York to LA in less than hour without having to eject myself from atmosphere, hmmmmm, I may have to think about it.

(photo credit: Carole N., image found at stockXchng (sxc.hu) a free stock photo community website)

An interesting little tidbit about website appearances highlights how certain designs are more "masculine" than others. Glean from it what you will.

Why not spend quality time at work watching the earth from one of the many satellites circling the planet?

Thought: Remember the iconic image of Earth from the moon? It seemed for a while that the image spoke loads about how we are stuck on this planet together and that we desperately need to take care it. Then the Hummer was created. Sigh.

On a cold and blustery day last fall I was driving to work when I noticed something odd downtown. Every 3 feet or so there was a traffic cone placed in the middle of the sidewalk. On my way home I made sure to stop and see what this was all about.

Well, simply put, the town's walk of fame sidewalk plaques were, when sprinkled with frost and snow that had melted, extremely slippery. I had seen these little squares and had always thought of them as embarrassing bad design but it never crossed my mind that the design was so bad that it could hurt you!

Let's break it down. First, the aesthetics:

- The original design had two fonts (the rounded sans and a serif) that did not work well together (the serif - part of a logotype I believe, is now covered)
- The mark at the top is difficult to decipher (I think it is a representation of an artesian well. Either that or a picture of It from the Addams Family)
- The black granite is reflective often making it difficult to read the sandblasted lettering

Secondly, one should consider these other factors:

- The granite is extremely slippery when wet
- The walk of fame is a block away from a retirement home and the sidewalks are used often by people who have a difficult time walking especially in icy weather
- The solutions, so far, have rendered the original concept moot. The cones sit on top of the plaques and the no-slip safety tape obscure much of the writing

It seems that this is either something done by committee or by an individual who didn't think about these factors. The result is dangerous.

As usual I left renewing my car tabs until the last possible minute which meant I had to visit the local licensing office. Oddly enough, in this town, it means a visit to an old train station.

With a name like 'Pullman' you can imagine there'd be a number of train stations laying about and that some (if not all) would be repurposed. Anyhow, I walked into the station to get my new tabs when, lo and behold, the place was decked out with pictures of old trains, the original schedule board and seating area, a huge clock, and even a mannequin dressed as a conductor. The windows for the DOL are the same ticket windows used for fifty years at the beginning of the last century.

I was standing there when the little wooden window shot up and the gentleman asked how he could help me. I responded, "I'd like a ticket for the 12:30 to Chattanooga." Then I proceed to laugh at myself while the bloke stared at me completely straightfaced. To save face I said, "oh, that's right. I am 60 years too late." He still didn't crack a smile.

Come to find out the gentleman owns the place. As you can see from the picture above he must have a love affair with trains. In front of the station you can see an actual passenger car and in front of that you can see a wooden engine that was built recently. Wait! A wooden train engine?

As with previous entries, design in a small town often mean lack of restraint (and building codes apparently). It is one thing to have the interior of place dressed to one's fetishes but to impose a large and awkward wooden structure that has little use is another.

But, as usual, the deeper significance is that little strange things like this structure are oddly what give small towns quirky charm. The best thing to do, then, is to sit back, wait, and see what other craziness pops up.

Me thinks these are strange times in the art world. Works that shock, works that don't, and old favorites such as ab ex and pop, while ever present, have transmogrified but don't seem to be cutting it. Whitney's biennial a few years ago questioned what could be considered art and found a chaotic breadth of work as an answer.

So, what is new? What is *ack* 'fresh'?

Take a bit of humor, a dash of bravado, a pinch of activism and you get...Banksy.

This link (thanks to Robert for sending it along) has some of Banksy's latest work in Palestine on Israel's 'security barrier'. It is very much a comment on the wall. The NEWS section of his website has more images of the project and Banksy is not afraid to add little transcripts of his discussions next to the images. Those discussions speak loads. An example:

Old man: You paint the wall, you
make it look beautiful.

Me:Thanks

Old man:We don't want it to be beautiful, we hate this
wall, go home.

His other work includes hanging his own pieces (of a stuffy 18th century royal who has just finished spraypainting graffiti, no less) in the National Gallery in London. His graffiti is so well designed that it'll make you laugh.

For more Banksy check out Banksy's homepage.

The Old Negro Space Program is a very funny mockumentary that simultaneously takes the piss out NASA, academia, the formulaic nature of the contemporary documentary, and American bigotry.

It sometimes treads lightly on uncomfortable ground but that is what makes it smart. Watch the whole thing - especially the part with the letter home.

Dennis sends this one along. Funny and, oh, so perfect.

Simple yet very compelling story

For those of you that don't know me well, I am writing a book about the intersections of design culture, free culture, and creative production in 21st century - a little topic. Writing, as we can all remember from term papers and essay tests, is hard work. And, in the past 2 months, for every word I written, I have erased four.

Tonight, I was reminded why I started writing the book: people are doing some remarkably cool things and, in my opinion, changing the world (insert sinister laughter here).

I am not talking about something as piddly as eradicating polio or forgiving 3rd world debt. No, I am talking about makin' FREE SOFTWARE!

Let me explain. Tonight I found two new applications that are freeware or open-source projects. One is a painting application similar to Corel Painter unfortunately called Artrage. The other is an SVG production package called Inkscape. Although they may not have all the features of Painter or Illustrator or Freehand they are creative productions that simply give to a wider audience the tools for creative production. The result is a unique cultural system (that is the real brilliant design project) that encourages others to engage in creative work of their own.

The system is all about sharing, gift-giving, reputation, and doing things because we love to do them. The interesting thing is that as the technology advances it seems the quality of the products and the resulting productions (from those products) is not that far off from the big name commercial works (think Linux as opposed to Windows as an example). The coming storm is a time when the open source design projects compete directly with or that flavors of idiosyncratic products make redundant bloated commercial wares (think the Podcasting versions of game design, for instance).

The resulting changing to society could be significant. But more on that later....

BTW, the image above is a work done in Artrage by Duncan Pond (another unfortunate name. I certainly hope his parents didn't give him the middle name of Drowninda) Click on the thumbnail to see the higher resolution image.

There are instances when big-city life and small-town events are just as dull as one another. This perhaps highlights a deficiency in the way a technology is used to present place and event. Web-cams, for the most part, be they in New York or wherever pretty much fail to actually give us any real sense of place or feeling of presence.

I would like to see webcams that record nice high resolution images that are crisp when displayed (especially on large monitors). It will be a great day when we can actually see the paint drying as we watch it from 5000 miles away.