Spoiling a good walk

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My Newtonmass present to myself was an Xbox.

I’ve not been immersed in Xbox culture up till now, so any must-have game recommendations are welcome (I have Halo…)

Reading an Xbox mag, Links 2004 got my attention, not because I’m a big golf fan (my dad always loved Leaderboard on my Atari 520STfm, though) – but because of the Xbox-Live enabled side of the game.

I haven’t seen it or played it; but I imagine, like most golf games on computers or consoles, that you are ‘teleported’ between the holes. That is, you don’t have to wander between the last hole and the next tee-shot.

I wonder if Links does away with this to bring the Xbox-Live social connection to life. Would the golf game just be the activity that the social exchange is centred around, like real-life golf. The walk between the holes together would be the really pleasant bit of the game.

Most online gaming concentrates on clan or p2p chat, not proximity interactions. I’d hope that having a private p2p chat on a golfcourse might have to be enacted through a complicated series of rituals to carve the privacy out of the group situation:

“Excuse me, chaps, my broker is on the phone… Sorry, I really have to take this… you know how it is…” *thumbs joypad, scampers away down the fairway a little* “hello aSTRObabe88. a/s/l??”

If not, get rid of p2p chat (or at least chat-at-a-distance) all together. Distractions such as birdwatching, admiring each others plus-fours and humming tunes, or telling jokes might come into play.

Ambling around as a group admiring all that wonderfully-modelled landscape that is boasted about in the marketing. Lovely – the game of golf itself would wind-up being just the bothersome bit with the clubs that spoils a good walk?

TwentyTenements

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metropolisfuturetube.jpg
The latest issue of Metropolis is focussed on the city of 2010:

“Forget the flying car, the personal jet pack, the bubble condo on the Moon. It’s not going to happen–not for the vast majority of us, anyway. Here’s what is going to happen–what’s already happening–in controlled design experiments around the world. Trains are becoming a lot faster. Information technology is telling us more about where we are and what’s happening around us. Skyscrapers are getting crazier looking. Green technology is making places cleaner and healthier. Builders of monolithic structures are figuring out that their designs need to be flexible, that today’s forward-looking design is tomorrow’s aesthetic hangover. The city of the near future is closer than you think.”

I keep thinking how timid we were in projecting CarFreeLondon as being achieved in 2020…

“Too much Zeit, not enough Geist”

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Says Richard Sennett about neoconservatism/liberal capitalism as the spirit of our age, in this excellent edition of “Thinking Allowed” on Radio4. Anthony O’Hear, and Marina Warner also debate the big idea of “The big idea”. “Mythographer” Warner also touches on what the internet has done for the spread of ideas and its effect on the zeitgeist. I’ve never read any of her books, but they sound my cup of tea. Any views?

Thought for oh-four

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From Jeff Noon’s new book “Falling out of cars”:

“Noon has taken the idea of signal-to-noise (the ratio of useful information to background static), turned it around and made a viral disease of it, creating a world in which information is still contained in road signs, books, television shows and on radio, but the static in the human brain has become so strong that few people can now process the signal which offers that information.

In this world, mirrors suck out your soul and words disappear from the page as soon as you’ve read them; events repeat endlessly and shops feature simple signs like “Food” for those whose minds are still virus-free enough to read. Only government-supplied drugs can keep you sane, and every sight, every coincidence has such significance that, paradoxically, all the meaning has been bled from life.”

More thoughts for 2004 over at DiePunyHumans.

Lightcone as cultural interface and memory

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Wow. What a pretentious title for a post! Let me explain myself a little. I’ve been playing around with Webb’s excellent little Lightcone thing, in the hopes of incorporating it somewhere. I’d been thinking about our “cultural lightcone” a couple of years back when I joined the BBC again.

Cultural lightcone?

If you remember the Carl Sagan book / film “Contact”, it plays with the idea of a cultural lightcone: that the alien intelligences have encountered our radio waves as they travel out at the speed of light towards them, and let us know by playing us back video of Hitler.

This from the nicely old-fashioned the offical movie site:

“Humans have actually been sending messages to the stars since the discovery of radio almost 100 years ago and the first television broadcasts earlier this century.

This means that among the first interstellar notices of our existence were the original episodes of I Love Lucy, first broadcast around 40 years ago. By now Lucy and Desi have travelled 40 light years into our surrounding neighborhood, an area inhabited by roughly 100 stars.”

I quickly sketched a little screen of a cultural lightcone, based on the BBC’s archive:

Here we see a 1975 episode of Dr. Who gliding by Vega.

The idea I had in my head was that this starscape would be simulated on a interactive (maybe flash-based?) client screensaver, which was grabbing and displaying the stars, media objects as they got located in the lightcone, and comments of others who had downloaded the connected-screensaver: memories of the programmes or other stuff that had happened that year. A kind of grid-blogging effort with the media as a mnemonic device to unlock people’s recollections of those years: a bit like a giant distributed version of the BBC’s I Love… series; and the starfield as a nice, vaguely poetic and attractive organising glue to the whole thing.

Other cool effects would be that as you got closer to our home, Sol; then stuff start to get really hectic, as the media output I guess has grown an awful lot over the 75 odd (light)years of BBC broadcasting; and the grid-blogging would start to resemble real time commentary on media…

Also, if it was truly decentralised, ie. the BBC just released the client and the initial media nodes and clips it would be fantastic – people would weave their recollection of Auntie between them and upload their own encodings of lost episodes or shortform clips that meant something special – and it would exist as long as someone had one of the client running… copying an un-burnable library ad infinitum…

Kashmir / LazyGadget

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This should probably be in /play, but whatever. They just played all 8mins of Kashmir on 6music. If you’re familiar with the overblown Zep epic, then there’s a really, really good breakdown in the middle with Bonzo’s drums, some strings and Plant mumbling and wailing a bit. They work it for a while, but just as it’s getting funky, they swerve back into the chugging riff that is the song’s trademark.

Which is a longwinded intro to making a LazyGadget request.

I’d like a small amount of sampling/looping/effect generation capability on my iPod/personal music device which I could access and manipulate with one hand. Just to muck around and extend bits like the breakdown in Kashmir long enough to ruin them for myself…