Clubberjack's Unfocused Ramblings

A New Home for Clubberjack

2007-02-28T23:47:00.000-05:00

This blog is now located at www.clubberjack.net. Enjoy!

Art I would like to collect

2007-02-02T12:25:00.000-05:00

I have a small collection of artwork, some pieces made by artist friends, some bought at various street fairs or shows (and some of my own work as well). I would like to expand my collection, and there are a few artists whose work I've seen online that I would love to purchase from. Here's a few of my favorites:

Mike Libby's Insects
I like the spiders, cicadas, and beetles.
Lockwasher Design
Beautiful retro robots and rayguns made of recycled parts.
Audrey Kawasaki's Paintings
I really like the one with the octopus arms.
El Rey
I've bought work from El Rey before, but never for myself. His krylographs are pretty cool.
James Jean
I came to Jean through his work on the covers for the Fables series. His Recess prints are quite striking.

Getting it Wrong (the price of security)

2007-02-01T17:50:00.000-05:00

Perhaps you've heard about the brouhaha surrounding the bomb scare in Boston. You know, the one set off by magnetic LED graffiti that was part of a marketing campaign (and so on...).

What I think is lost in all of the rush to assign blame (on all sides) is that this is the cost of having a bomb squad. Bomb squads get called in on false alarms all the time (like this). Sometimes you get it wrong. What happened in Boston was simply a false alarm; someone mistook an object for a bomb. Everyone clamoring for lawsuits against Cartoon Network or decrying the overreaction of Boston officials needs to step back and remember that there's no point in having a bomb squad if they're afraid to get it wrong some of the time.

Of course, that assumes that you believe in the relative merits of having a bomb squad...

... and that the security response is timely...

... which, in this case, it wasn't (the "bombs" had been up for 2 weeks prior to this incident).

Then, of course, there's the two actual fake bombs that were found the same day (with no arrests made yet).

[UPDATE] Here are a few more interesting comments on the situation:

Guitar Hero: What exactly are you doing?

2007-02-01T17:38:00.000-05:00

Jesper Juul made a smart little post about Guitar Hero over at the Ludologist. He makes the distinction between playing music and performing, and identifies GH as the later (as opposed to Singstar for example). This seems like a pretty good way of thinking about games like GH, they let you feel what it's like to perform, which is what the fantasy of being a guitar god is all about anyway. GH isn't about the skill of actually playing guitar. Singstar on the other hand is about the skill of singing.

On the flip side, completing a difficult section of GH does feel a lot like some of my memories from Middle School band, struggling through difficult measures of music on my trumpet. The elation of getting to the end without screwing up (much) is the much the same.

Game Design Link Dump

2007-01-31T00:32:00.000-05:00

Not quite done with the link dumps for today (I guess this is what happens when I let them build up over time). Here are some lovely links to interesting game design tidbits:

Danc's overview of one Project Horseshoe workshop
Jane McGonigal's thoughts on the opportunities of the Wii control scheme (we agree on a lot; she puts it a little more eloquently)

The next few are all from Raph Koster's blog. I've been reading a lot of his posts lately and finding his writing to be very insightful. Or maybe he and I have a similar set of interests... In any event, in the future, I'll try to post links to Raph's writing only when I have a full reaction to log (and not just a "wow, cool"). This should keep me from posting a link to everything.

Creative Process

2007-01-31T00:29:00.000-05:00

As an artist, I enjoy looking into the processes and spaces that other artists work out for themselves. Here are a couple of articles in that vein that I've enjoyed recently:

Inside Bungie
Guillermo del Toro on Pan's Labyrinth (highly recommended)

Update: Here's another one from EDGE...

Why Oddworld's Lorne Lanning gave up games for movies...

Link Dump

2007-01-30T23:57:00.000-05:00

Here's some links with minimal commentary:

Draw a stick figure and then see it dance!
Billboards address Mini owners... by name
A comic that explains my relationship to the internet
Our need for useless information... (but it always seems so important)
Cyberpunk here we come (data cable made of nerve cells)
The link between Children of Men and Half-Life 2
Brilliant musical ode to the bugs in Saints Row ("...at least from down here I can shoot at that guy...")
Get a first life
Sweet shoes (moebius strips)
Jeff Han's awesome multi-touch screen (be sure to check out the video too)
Some guy's personal annual report (well designed and humorous)
Bruce Schneier explains when security theater is good
Tyra helps some guy "quit WoW" (Damion at Zen of Design says "The guy’s look in the second video, as Tyra is shredding his WoW disks, is priceless. It says, 'These idiots don’t realize that I don’t need the disks anymore after install.' ")

Process Intensity

2007-01-30T23:25:00.000-05:00

A concept that I've been trying to understand lately is process intensity. Here's a few links (mostly for my own reference):

Chris Crawford's original article on Process Intensity
Greg Costikyan's updated thoughts on the matter
Noah Wardrip-Fruin: Introducing Process Intensity and Media Machines

I should have something intelligent to say about this soon.

The Importance of Movement

2007-01-05T00:01:00.000-05:00

Recently, a couple of articles reminded me of one key part of virtual character development: movement. Whether it's the creator of the furby miming the movement of a dinosaur or Savion Glover dancing in a mo-cap suit, the motions that are injected into each character serve to create those moments that we, as viewers (or players or interactors) recognize as true.

Clockwork

2007-01-04T23:51:00.000-05:00

These are too cool!

Insect Lab (particularly the beetles)
Really cool watch

Creative Link Dump

2007-01-04T23:46:00.000-05:00

Here's some more links relating to creating great experiences:

Link Dump

2007-01-04T23:29:00.000-05:00

Here's a pile of random links from the last few weeks.

September 12th

2006-09-11T12:38:00.000-04:00

It seems like today is a good day to remember.

Here's a game.

Net Neutrality: Save the Internet

2006-05-23T22:39:00.000-04:00

This video explains the concept of Net Neutrality better than I could (and this ninja does too).

After you watch the video, do something.

Link Dump

2006-05-23T22:32:00.000-04:00

I've got links building up that need to be linked... No time for deep commentary, just links, links everywhere:

Battlestar Galactica characters drawn like Simpsons
The Metaverse Roadmap Project
Pics of the $100 laptop (project site here)
Half-Life 2 Ass-kicking Machine
Oblivion Domino Day
Clint Hocking on the Wii and PS3 (Wii good; PS3 bad)
The Myth of Superman (he's like a modern god)

Enjoy.

Animations Galore!

2006-05-22T19:39:00.000-04:00

...or two animations anyway. Nina Paley is posting clips from her feature length piece "Sita Sings the Blues," which is a rendition of the Ramayana set to old blues songs. In her FAQs, Paley talks about the combination of Indian myth and the Blues:

These songs - Mean to Me, Am I Blue, Daddy Won't You Please Come Home, Moanin' Low - tell the same story I found in the Ramayana. Woman loves man, man does her wrong, woman loves man anyway and suffers horribly. They're the Blues; they're Sita's story, and mine. It seemed a natural fit.

Brilliant.

Another interesting project, Elephants Dream is an "open source movie." I haven't watched the whole product yet, but it looks very strange. Conceptually, this fascinates me in the same way as the Swarm of Angels project. Grassroots cinema.

Privacy

2006-05-19T14:12:00.000-04:00

Bruce Schneier has a nice piece over on Wired.com talking about why privacy is important... even if you have nothing to hide.

Privacy protects us from abuses by those in power, even if we're doing nothing wrong at the time of surveillance.

We do nothing wrong when we make love or go to the bathroom. We are not deliberately hiding anything when we seek out private places for reflection or conversation. We keep private journals, sing in the privacy of the shower, and write letters to secret lovers and then burn them. Privacy is a basic human need.

A future in which privacy would face constant assault was so alien to the framers of the Constitution that it never occurred to them to call out privacy as an explicit right. Privacy was inherent to the nobility of their being and their cause. Of course being watched in your own home was unreasonable. Watching at all was an act so unseemly as to be inconceivable among gentlemen in their day. You watched convicted criminals, not free citizens. You ruled your own home. It's intrinsic to the concept of liberty.

For if we are observed in all matters, we are constantly under threat of correction, judgment, criticism, even plagiarism of our own uniqueness. We become children, fettered under watchful eyes, constantly fearful that -- either now or in the uncertain future -- patterns we leave behind will be brought back to implicate us, by whatever authority has now become focused upon our once-private and innocent acts. We lose our individuality, because everything we do is observable and recordable.

Super Mario Galaxy

2006-05-17T17:33:00.000-04:00

This snip from Penny Arcade has my mouth watering for a Wii and a copy of Super Mario Galaxy:

Visually bold and reminiscent of The Little Prince, you will find yourself sailing from world to world, with and controls that actively reinforce that your hands themselves are floating in space as well. Mario is controlled with the analog attachment, and the pointing device in your other hand essentially "helps" him in various ways by manipulating the environment. A platform game where tiny worlds are the platforms while boundless space fills in the cracks essentially feels amazing.

Just lovely.

E3 Games

2006-05-11T01:20:00.000-04:00

I'm not actually at E3, but that's not going to stop me from commenting on a few games that have piqued my interest...

Nintendo's Wii offered quite a bit of excitment with the new controller taking center stage. I'm particularly eager to get my hands on Super Mario Galaxy. Seeing Mario walk around the tiny planets reminded me pleasantly of the Little Prince. Of course, the Twilight Princess on Wii looks pretty sweet too.

From Microsoft, I was deeply excited by Halo 3. However, the news that GTA IV was going to include episodic content delivered over Live warmed my episodic-content-loving heart. Alan Wake looked interesting as a potential breakthrough into more literary genres. I'm no longer caught up in Molyneux hype, but if Fable 2 can begin to live up to the hype of Fable, then it's worth keeping an eye on. As someone who briefly played the paper RPG, Shadowrun was pretty exciting to see in game form. Finally, it's not a game, but the demo of Live Anywhere was quite heartening. It was bound to happen, and I'm happy that it's happening around games. Oh yeah, that Gears of War game doesn't look too shabby either.

For some reason, I was less than excited by Sony's showing. There were a number of crowd pleasers, but to me, they mostly looked like current-gen gameplay. Notable exceptions include the dragon-flight sim Lair, which looks pretty bad-ass, and what I can only guess is a safari game, Afrika. Finally, the Eye Toy demo, Eye of Judgement made me smile as the augmented reality concept is one I've actually worked on in the past. It's certainly nice to see that Sony has embraced a concept that is so near and dear to my heart.

Wow, I sound like some kind of Microsoft fanboy... maybe I am... hm.

E3 Press Conferences... Impressions

2006-05-10T10:25:00.000-04:00

I've finally absorbed all 5 or 6 hours of the big pre-E3 press conferences (via GameSpot's streams). I've come away feeling most excited by Ninendo. While I saw very little in terms of what I would consider to be next-gen gameplay from anybody, I did get the sense that Nintendo is most focused on broadening the market in a serious way. They also seemed to be enjoying themselves the most. Microsoft seemed to be focusing very much on what they are doing for gamers. And Sony, inexplicably, seemed to be presenting themselves as computer science gearheads. They showed tech demos and trumpeted the PS3's specs and widgets. It is for this reason that I think they will lose market share in this round.

What Microsoft and Nintendo seem to understand is that it's now all about what you do for people. Technology is only a means to an end. Sony seems to be stuck on the shiny newness of the Cell processor. And then there's the issue of price...

Of course, given the developer support for PS3 and Sony's own track record for putting out amazing games (witness Ico, Shadow of the Colossus, and God of War), I'm sure PS3 will still be a huge success. I just don't think that Sony can maintain its market dominance in the face of competition that is so clearly focused on making the consumer happy.

All in all, I think this is going to be a great generation for gamers. There will be a widening of the market that will only spur demand for innovation. At any price point, there will be a quality experience to be had, from the Wii at about $200 to the PS3 topping out at $600. Between Nintendo's indie-friendly stance and Xbox Live Arcade (not to mention PC), there will be plenty of opportunity for studios with something new and different to bring to the table, and the big boys (I'm looking at you EA) will continue to bring big budget sweetness to the hard-core masses.

I can't wait.

Bush's Reaction to the Helen Thomas Video

2006-05-06T13:54:00.000-04:00

Click here to watch the president's reactions during Colbert's "Press Secretary Audition" video.

Totally Sweet NASA/ESA Video

2006-05-05T00:34:00.000-04:00

What a wonderfully information rich video... Imagine if you could see this sort of thing in real time...

A Sense of Wonder (and a Large Mechanical Elephant)

2006-05-05T00:28:00.000-04:00

A theatre company is staging a massive piece of street theatre in London this weekend. Already, a mysterious spacecraft has crash landed near Waterloo Place and sits, smoking, causing passersby to stare.

Said the leader of the theatre company, "One of the main things in art in general is to create sights and images that remain printed in people's minds."

I agree.

More pictures on Flickr.

Speaking Truthiness to Power: More on Colbert

2006-05-04T23:55:00.000-04:00

Sadly, "Speaking Truthiness to Power" isn't my line. I saw this lovely image on Boing Boing.

Apparently, the video that was posted on YouTube isn't there anymore, thanks to copyright holders C-SPAN complaining. The video is probably available on their website (if you can deal with streaming clips), but you can also get a copy at Crooks and Liars or via BitTorrent.

Predictably, it sounds like the routine didn't go over so well with Bush and his aides. Shouldn't they learn to take criticism?

Finally, a couple stories at Salon elucidate the beauty of Colbert's routine and skewer the tepid or non-existant media coverage afterwards.

The City of Galvez

2006-05-03T10:17:00.000-04:00

[via Clive Thompson] I haven't had a chance to digest this entire gallery, but these images by Oscar Guzmán are quite haunting.