Posts by matt

If:book presents a fun, intelligent metaphor for thinking of Wikipedia: it’s the “ask the audience” lifeline from “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?”

PS: I never saw this NY Times graphic before, but it’s my new favorite thing.

Check out this gallery of incredible sculptures by Ron Mueck — uncannily lifelike depictions of people at their most vulnerable, all scaled to smaller- or grossly larger-than-life dimensions. His work’s currently on exhibit at the Fondation Cartier in Paris. More Mueck. Google image search.

In honor of the mindnumbing cuteness of this story (via Boing²), please again make appropriate obeisances to Cute Overlord. Er, load. Overload. (Awww!)

Also via B², Joss Whedon cracks me up.

Here’s hoping 2006 turns out less tragic than 2005.

And to that end, the 2006 Edge.org question of the year is What is your dangerous idea? New respondents this year include Helen Fisher and Douglas Rushkoff. Step to it, Snarketeers. What is your dangerous idea?

Fresno Famous has been redesigned and Drupalized and is a wonder to behold.

Best previously-undiscovered Bloglines feature ever: At the bottom of the Bloglines menu, on the ‘My Feeds’ tab, you’ll find a link that reads “Create e-mail subscriptions.” Click on that link, and you will be taken to a magical place where Bloglines will generate a random e-mail address for you. Any e-mails sent to that address will show up as an RSS feed in whatever Bloglines folder you specify. Excellent.

A post by Douglas Rushkoff about Hanukkah and a Slate article about Kwanzaa each make the same point: call them made-up holidays if you want, mock their dubious origins, but recognize the very valid role each holiday plays for its culture by asserting “distinctiveness in the face of the forces of assimilation.” And speaking of holidays of dubious origin, I’ve taken to answering “Merry Christmas!” with “Io, Saturnalia!” although my family does celebrate a pretty traditional Christmas. So far, I’ve only gotten smiles in response. Next year I may try “Blessed Solstice!”

What’s wrong with this photograph? (Answer in the extended entry.)

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I started reading this post by Chris Bateman about theories of play and got sucked in despite the jargon, and I’m quite happy about it. It ends up framing a very interesting discussion about games in a light I’d never considered before.

Imagine that “play” is a continuum stretching from freeform, imaginative anarchy (“paidia”) at one end to rules-based order (“ludus”) at the other. As children, we start out with a natural tendency towards paidia — we play nonsense games with dolls, we build worlds out of Legos, we bat about aimlessly with sticks, with no rules or direction in mind. (Although one theorist mentioned in the post argues that the unspoken cultural ‘rules’ underpinning these games are stricter and more elaborate than those you’d find in an instruction manual.) Paidia tends to be short-lived, generally evolving into ludus. As we play with our dolls and our Legos and our sticks, we start developing more and more rules and logical structures for our play. The dolls start acting out a scenario. The sticks find a target and a purpose.

As we age, we tend to skip paidia altogether and head straight for the ludus. Adults play card games and sports and board games with rulesets that are complicated from the outset. And the geeks among us prize those games with incredibly Byzantine engineering — turn-based role-playing games, for example. These are games that have been carefully designed to incorporate many different patterns of play — strategy, chance, competition, mimicry — into a seamless whole.

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Grant McCracken riffs on three models for how the Net is changing the world: 1) It’s cutting out the middlemen. 2) It’s allowing microcultures to flourish. 3) It’s reforming the idea of the idea. The post isn’t really dense or light, but slightly abstract and pretty interesting. McCracken doesn’t necessarily contend that all or any of these models is actually true.