digitaldust

Is sounding very good. I thought on hearing some of the tracks off it previously it might sound very same-y. Doesn’t though. Will have to listen to some more.

This is mind bendingly good. I’ve read that many of my favourite authors liked Borges, people like Gibson and Noon. So I bought a copy of Labyrinths and let it languish on my shelf for a couple of months. Just started reading it and it’s blown me away. I have to sit back and think about every short story for at least as long as it takes to read it. Subtle blends of philosophy, mathematics, psychology and fantasy.

I read the Library of Babel last night. (Complete text and CG piccie here) Very trippy, a (possibly) infinite library containing books with every permutation of 25, more or less unspecified, characters.

So there is always a silver cloud to every airline… I don’t get to go to Norway this weekend but there’s always the London Sci-Fi film festival to keep me happy.

You can go and see Soylent Green and Farenheit 451 in a row… Soylent Green is books! They burn people don’t they!

Or malice@doll, computer generated anime about a robot prostitute.

I stumbled across this new housing development whilst reading the Guardian. Its an enivromentaly friendly, zero carbon emmision, bright, friendly, live/work oriented block of maisonettes on the outskirts of London called BedZED.

I want one. I love the space, the concept, the colours. It fits in with my desire to live and work communally with a bunch of other people in a space like this.

The rest of the site has some cool looking environmentally friendly designs by the architects Bill Dunster.

Just read a few reviews of the Sims online. It’s not getting much good press. Seems like the Avatars are not especially individual. Not enough ability to differentiate. After the experience of the offline version people expected more.

PC Game Review
Amazon

Will try and read some more and post a bit more to this.

This flash thing put a smile on my face at the end of a long friday afternoon. Warning: Do not go there if you are not up for a bit of personal abuse.

This also appeals to my sense of humour

The BBC reports on the new Alliance for Digital Progress. A lobby group to fight stupidity in the US congress, to fight the strangle hold of old grey-haired business on the media industries. They want to promote innovation, which the likes of Disney, BMG, etc are so clearly trying to beat into submission.

And on the same note an article on wired about the Civil War in Sony, between their entertainment and electronics division. One being very US and committed to making a profit at the expense of all around, and one being very Japanese and having a 50 year legacy of innovation and market dominance.

Perhaps Sony will kick off the stagnation their entertainment/media division is helping to perpetuate and kick the new digital media industry into full gear.

Go Sony… You can do it!!

When you tell someone to go to hell you can tell them where the entrance is and how to get there

Why did push technology fail in the late 90s, yet email delivered newsletters are incredibly popular, even if they are just link proliferation designed to drag you to a website.

I think it’s something to do with the place, with the application you use (or did use) to access these.
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My father sent me this link to the Center for Ludic Synergy. It’s reawakened some of my interest in word and mind games, which apparently Ludic Synergy is about. Great sounding but meaningless name.

Anyway… following some links I ended up at some interesting games. Firstly the Game of Kennings, or Konnexions. Also an older game I had heard of before called Nomic, probably heard of it via Hofstadter’s Metamagical Themas. (I’ll have to buy a copy and read it or add it to my half read Mind’s Eye and GEB.)

I’m quite interested in Nomic to do with the online community thinking I’m doing at the moment. Nomic is a game of changing the rules, a game purely about that. There are an initial set of rules and players take turns voting to change them. The game seems to me to be a good archetype (probably not the right use of word) for gaming the rules in a community. It could be a good game to play with that would model, on a fast timeline, these rules and their changes.

The Kenning Game I think would be a nice SMS game to play. The designer calls it a game, but to me it seems more like a method to create small poetic puzzles or riddles; a cross between symbolic mathematics and poetry. Beautiful and cunning in their simplicity. The Kenning Chain Idea though is the only one that approaches a true game. That would be nice over email, IM or SMS.