The murmur of the snarkmatrix…

Jennifer § Two songs from The Muppet Movie / 2021-02-12 15:53:34
A few notes on daily blogging § Stock and flow / 2017-11-20 19:52:47
El Stock y Flujo de nuestro negocio. – redmasiva § Stock and flow / 2017-03-27 17:35:13
Meet the Attendees – edcampoc § The generative web event / 2017-02-27 10:18:17
Does Your Digital Business Support a Lifestyle You Love? § Stock and flow / 2017-02-09 18:15:22
Daniel § Stock and flow / 2017-02-06 23:47:51
Kanye West, media cyborg – MacDara Conroy § Kanye West, media cyborg / 2017-01-18 10:53:08
Inventing a game – MacDara Conroy § Inventing a game / 2017-01-18 10:52:33
Losing my religion | Mathew Lowry § Stock and flow / 2016-07-11 08:26:59
Facebook is wrong, text is deathless – Sitegreek !nfotech § Towards A Theory of Secondary Literacy / 2016-06-20 16:42:52

Open-Source Star Wars
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Clive Thompson links to what he calls the most impressive piece of fan art yet, a 40-minute Star Wars, downloadable online, created with $20,000 and a lot of love. Check out the trailer.

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Is It Possible to Un-Jump the Shark?
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Robin’s boss really gave ’em hell today, and it was wondrous to behold.

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E-Paper's Here
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JKottke brings us the best look I’ve seen so far at the new technology. His reaction?

What you can’t see from the photo is how insanely crisp and clear the text on the “screen” is. It was book-text quality…it looked like a decal until you pushed the next button and the whole screen changed. It was *really* mind-boggling and you could instantly see how most books are going to be distributed in the very near future. Despite looking like a computer, when you were reading, it felt like a book because of the resolution (a very odd sensation). And it’s not only for books…I was told that there’s e-paper that’s capable of full-color 24 fps video. Can’t say enough about how blown away I was by the Librie.

Update: No, wait, actually, here’s the best look. Here’s a pretty good one.

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Random Mongolian Genetic Trivia Item of the Day
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Recently, a geneticist at Oxford University, Dr. Chris Tyler-Smith, and geneticists from China and central Asia took blood samples from populations living in regions near the former Mongol empire, and they studied the Y chromosomes. These are useful in establishing lineage because Y chormosomes continue from father to son. Dr. Tyler Smith and his colleagues found that an anomalously large number of the Y chromosomes carried a genetic signature indicating descent from a common ancestor about a thousand years ago. The scientists theorized that the ancestor was Genghis Khan (or, more exactly, an eleventh-century ancestor of Genghis Khan). About eight per cent of all males in the region studied, or sixteen million men, possess this chromosome signature. That’s a half per cent of the world’s population. It is possible, therefore, that more than thirty-two million people in the world are descended from Genghis Khan.

— from Ian Frazier’s story “Invaders,” in the April 25th New Yorker.

More on Genghis Khan, playa, from the Guardian.

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Homeless By Choice
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I don’t know how this is so fascinating, but dagnabit, I couldn’t stop reading. It’s a blog about how to rock homelessness.

I’m sitting here in my temperature-regulated apartment, eight feet away from my washer and dryer, twelve feet from a hot shower and two feet from my bed. I imagine stowing away in my car for the night on a residential street, hoping no thieves or police disturb my sleep. I imagine waking up, driving to an unfamiliar gym, and feigning interest in a new membership for the hope of free access to the bathing facilities. There’s a perverse twinge of romance in all of this. Or is it perverse?

It is a well kept secret that homelessness can be freedom and comfort can attend it. The secret is well kept because revealing that you are homeless in this society is dangerous. There is stigma. There are even laws prohibiting it. Imagine that. There are laws against being homeless. Let me say that one more time. There are laws against being homeless.

I don’t know if you can help reading this site and wondering if you could do it. Then again, I could also be really strange.

Let me give you an example of a successful bloodless conflict. I was packing up a storage unit one day, and I had only that day to finish. In the same facility a man was screaming at his soon-to-be-ex-wife on a cell phone, and creating an atmosphere that I found intolerable. I decided to stop this guy from yelling. I yelled at him forcefully, Hey! Shut the hell up!

Well, predictably this brought the man’s wrath toward me. He started yelling at me and making aggressive gestures, and at that moment I did something he could not have expected. I submitted. I wimped out. I apologized and said I should mind my own business. I backed down.

Now, the soon-to-be-ex-wife was no longer on the phone, so he couldn’t yell at her. He had no way to yell at me, or continue to bring a fight to me, because I had backed down. He grumbled and muttered and hurled a few insults at me, but he stopped yelling and I got back to work in blissful quiet. Understanding the nature of winning, the precise goals I was trying to achieve, allowed me to give my opponent the illusion that he won while I got everything I wanted.

And no one got hurt. Always seek the scenario in which no one gets hurt.

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Someone REALLY Wants the Oil
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This is my new favorite thing. Also see: The Daily Show’s GayWatch. (Via my 2nd favorite thing.)

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… And Another Thing
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Having just fired off two ranty e-mails to Robin, I thought I’d just go ahead and take the rants public. My beef was these three reports/manifestos/speeches that have been setting the hearts of the likes of Jay Rosen and Jeff Jarvis all a-flutter.

If you haven’t read them, they all make essentially the same point — old-school journalism’s in trouble. Shorter Merrill Brown: Young people don’t read newspapers. Shorter Tim Porter: And it’s the fault of backwards-thinking journalists. Shorter Rupert Murdoch: No, seriously. Young people like never read newspapers.

I’ll take my rantings past the jump, so you can continue unassaulted, if you so prefer.

Read more…

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Attention Must Be Paid
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As we await the posting of Robin’s 24-Hour Comic — entitled M — we can tide ourselves over with actual jpeg evidence that Saheli‘s gone insane. In a good way, natch.

Updated to say: ToastyKen is totally right.

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Spore Now
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I finally gave in and looked at Processing.org, the programming language for artists, and spent a good few hours today agape at the beauty and creativity on display in the exhibitions. Then I encountered Moovl, which stopped me in my tracks.

Remember the Soda Constructor? Well, they’ve taken that and made it mindblowing.

Moovl applies the laws of physics to your doodles. Remember that Gamespy article about Spore, Will Wright’s new game? The article describes character creation in Spore thusly:

The 3D version of the creature editor was amazing, in that the creature was totally configurable. You could stretch and pull and tug or fatten it any way you liked, almost like working with clay. More importantly, you could add functional elements, like heads, mouths, eyes, tails, fins, claws, even legs and feet. Wright proceeded to add not two, but three legs to his creature. Then he let it loose.

Now, suddenly, his creature could walk. And he did so — he walked right out of the sea and onto the land. This incredible moment in the history of evolution was made even more remarkable by the technology behind it: the game had figured out, procedurally, how a creature would walk if it had three legs (it was a kind of lopsided gait, if you’re curious, with three steps: left, right, then middle.) No 3D modeler created the creature, and no 3D animator was required to make it move around — it was all created out of a gamer’s whim and a computer program smart enough to make it work.

Moovl can basically do that. Not in 3D, but it’s cool enough in 2D that I don’t mind that right now. Draw a hilariously simple doodle of a three-legged blob, train three of the feet to move, and voila, you’ve got a creature.

The official site is targeted to children, and the examples there aren’t very inspiring, even though the applet’s slightly better. I prefer the pared-down version and its examples over at Processing, especially “lovehurts” and “fistycuffs.”

Part of what’s amazing to me is how much those simple doodles in motion seem to suggest narratives. The story and the interactivity unite in these very logical rules and relationships which you have the power to build on or alter.

Something tells me that’s going to be the storytelling model that ultimately turns video games inside out.

Read more…

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When Kids Used to Play Video Games
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I was going to post a link to Steven Johnson’s excellent NYT Magazine article called “Watching TV Makes You Smarter.” Now I’ll up the ante by also posting a link to a thought experiment on his blog where he asks what today’s video game detractors would have said if video games had come before books. Both well worth reading.

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