“If Filmmakers Were Web Designers”

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From Zeldman:

“Dear Mr Antonioni:

I recently screened your classic film, The Red Desert, starring Monica Vitti and Richard Harris. I have a problem with the way you used screen space. My theater’s screen is big and wide. It is capable of handling many actors at the same time. For instance, crowd scenes and battle scenes work well. But in your movie there are only a few actors — and many times they are pictured in one corner of the screen or another, against a stark minimalist background. This is a terrible waste of screen space.

Funny stuff. But then I don’t go to the cinema to pay my gas bill. Horses-for-courses. I have a feeling that my “If Post-Offices where like Cinemas” essay wouldn’t be nearly as amusing.

Plink’d-in

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I’ve been plink’d.

Not really sure what to make of it. Being a thick designer, and despite numerous patient explanations by Foe; I’ve never really understood the “why” of FOAF. What it’s use or ornament actually is. What the point might be, beyond the usual quilt-making, that is.

I visit Plink after reading a couple of things about it this weekend, and by chance saw the name of someone I knew: Muttley, who also looked like he’d been dobbed-in* by others. In what sounds like a likely new-age tagline for the service – I found myself in a few clicks.

I felt unease, and a certain lack of control.

I was there not by my own choosing, but by dint of featuring in the FOAF of others. Good folk and good friends to be sure (Betteridj, Hammo, Phil… thanks I think!), but I still felt a bit funny about it. There didn’t seem on a quick inspection to be any information which would lead to immediate trouble, like email, but there was a picture of me (looking younger and skinnier, so that’s okay) so I guess it’s mostly harmless.

I still feel uneasy about it though – aside from getting onboard and embellishing my page or ignoring the thing, it seemed like I had few options. I know that some other social-quiltmakers offer little control ultimately; but I was invited to join them by my friends.

Which is the root of my unease I think. It felt like my friends 0wn3d my name.

Which I guess might be the point.

—-
* ‘dobbed-in’ erm… I dunno: squealed on I guess. Ask a brit.

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.