Into the uncanny valley of Xbox360…

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Junior/Senior
Junior/Senior

I bought an Xbox 360 yesterday as a companion to getting a nice big HD flatscreen – so far haven't really done anything more than been a UI nerd about the 'blades' interface, downloaded a trial of Viva Pinata (which Foe seemed to get into, but looks like a lot of hard work to me), enjoyed a bit of Boom-Boom Rocket (but not sure it will have that much longevity – esp. with Foe shouting about how much it pays 'homage' to the fireworks minigames in VMK!) and gotten beaten a lot by the computer (console?) in Rockstar Table Tennis.

RTT really is my first gaming experience of the uncanny valley as has been described by Clive Thompson with reference to hidef gaming. I wonder however if the valley can be escaped by getting the high-polygon-count NPCs to be possessed like puppets from afar.

Which is a long winded way of saying: can get I get your gamertags?

Mine is moleitau.

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On having a really long notice period in the gelatinous cube

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I gave my notice at Nokia in March, and my contract stipulated a three month notice period. I love the team of people I work with directly, there's no bad blood I'm aware of with my boss, and I'm not going to go work with a competitor.

So, I asked to work for all of the notice period, as opposed to taking it as 'gardening leave', which is normally the default for large organisations.

I'm about to enter the last month of my notice period, and I'm starting to become more peripheral – partly through my own engineering, partly through the engineering of others, and partly through some kind of weird autonomic self-healing capacity of large, slow-moving corporations.

It's like slowly escaping a gelatinous cube.

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Joy vs Authority

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Master and Commander
Master and Commander

"It is odd – will I say heart-breaking? – how cheerfulness goes: gaiety of mind, natural free-springing joy. Authority is its great enemy – the assumption of authority. I know few men over fifty that seem to me entirely human: virtually none who has long exercised authority…

…Pomp, an unwholesome diet,  a cause of choler, a pleasure paid to late and at too high a price, like lying with a peppered paramour."

Master and Commander, Patrick O'Brian, Chapter Six, P173.

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Has twitter displaced liveblogging at Etech?

moleitau1 Comment

Another blogpost about twitter… yawn.

but – as Trevor says:

"I'm not seeing the frantic, multimodal ETech blog coverage as in past years. Has it jumped the shark or am I just unsubscribed?"

Even the most prolific conference liveblogger I know, Alice, has just been spooling flickr pics with the occasional contextual paragraph.

Chris and I (neither of whom are at Etech) were talking about this yesterday over lunch. I have a different theory – Twitter has given people a backchannel that doesn't require a laptop – which means less time in a blog writing environ.

'Context Spooling' has displaced blogging…?

Discuss!

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