To Do List

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Reposted from Bruce Sterling’s Viridian List, BP’s Lord Browne in Fortune magazine on why humanity better start with it’s GTD:

“Build 700 nuclear stations to replace fossil-fuel-
burning power plants, or increasing the use of solar
power by a factor of 700, or stopping all deforestation
and doubling present efforts at reforestation. Achieve
all three of these, and pull off four more equally
large-scale reallocations of capital and
infrastructure, and the world would probably stabilize
its carbon emissions.”

Ay yi yi.

Let us begin.

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Brain switched on fully this morning.

Woken by, like a bell ringing backward from tomorrow, this headline – heralding the terrible, wonderful material future:

Fullerene Super-Armour

Let’s have that again.

Fullerene Super-Armour

Along with the rollicking arphid-blistered-rollercoaster of a ride that’s been “Shaping Things”, I’m getting just-enough medicinal futureshock to crank the year into the gear.

More Rolf

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The more I read, the more I think he is the Magister Ludens.

From a profile in sunday’s Observer:

Now 75, he is able to say: ‘I know who I am and what I like to do, and all I ever wanted was to splosh around with my brushes and palette and show people that painting can be fun. My advice is to just do something you love to do.

‘You need to do something that means you wake up with a smile on your face, and look in the mirror and say, “I really love you, son. Good on ya. Get on with it!” I just feel about 20, still.’

Oh, and George – he’s Welsh-born.

Flickr impacts consumer-culture: “It’s Playtime”

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Still from Canon EOS350D advert: "It’s Playtime", originally uploaded by blackbeltjones.

Above is a still from Canon EOS350D advert: “It’s Playtime”

I’ll wager it is both directly inspired by, and deliberately targetted at ludic Flickr users and the visual culture they have built.

Here’s the quicktime of the ad on Canon’s site.

Can you see what it is yet?

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I was very fond of Rolf’s Cartoon Club when I was younger.

For those not familiar with it – national treasure Rolf Harris hosted a show of cartoon clips, tied together with his instruction on how to draw you favourite cartoon characters and tricks of the cartoonist and animator’s trade.

Through encouraging the young to copy, trace and build upon the works of others, he encouraged a generation to draw and illustrate their own characters and stories.

Latterly, Rolf presented the much-pilloried “Rolf on Art” where he painted pictures in the styles of the great masters to explain painting to the masses. Again, building on works of others, from the past – to explain and excite.

So, can you see what this is yet?

Yes – it’s a thought I had a while back (I think I might have mentioned it to some over pints): Rolf should become figure-head/president/ambassador for the Creative Archive / Creative Commons UK.

He could extend the reach of the concept of the commons to the mainstream, and continue what he started with our generation back at the Cartoon Club in the 80’s.

Perhaps the Beeb could even turn it into a show.

“Rolf on Remixing” anyone?

Happy new year.

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Stilts and grids

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Two pieces from yesterday’s Guardian evocative of the post-North-Atlantic Conveyor context of future design.

First, Jonathan Glancey on Alison Brooks’ ‘Salt House’:

“The origami-like geometry of the Salt House’s roofs and walls fold and unfold through the interior, creating a surprising, beautifully lit flow of domestic space as if this was some kind of enclosed seaside landscape to explore, play and relax in rather than the disjointed maze of a conventional new home. The important thing about the Salt House, from a technical point of view, is that it is designed to withstand the floods that will surely come this way, and with some force.

The house stands on stilts, not that you would notice them. Decking spreads out across the site, hiding the fact that the house has been raised up so that surge tides will pass beneath it. The ingenuity of the plan; the commonsense approach to the fact that south-east England is increasingly prone to flooding; the spirited yet subtle energy of its design – all this make the Salt House one of the best new out-of-town houses in Britain today.”

Second, Ruaridh Nicoll’s recollections of growing-up offgrid in Scotland, and the rhythms of life generated by their family generator:

“Until the pylons came, the beast in the shed would dictate the rhythms of our existence. The expense meant that the machine would be turned off when it wasn’t needed, giving my father an extraordinary power over our lives. In Sutherland, in winter, the sun sets at 3.30pm. It was two miles to the nearest house. The darkness was absolute once the generator was off.

The pylons arrived in the mid-1980s and the generator turned from master to slave, a luxury to be used smugly during power cuts… The wilderness itself was pushed back, to reside weakly in the lead pipes and the failure of a television signal to penetrate the deep glen.”

This has been a post in the style of Dan Hill

Future Platforms for play

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I’ve got a big old post almost done on the project, but Tom has procrastinated slightly less and beaten me to it – writing about a prototype that Future Platforms built for me early in the year.

“We all like to play; whether we’re trainspotters, online gamers, old or young, we all take pleasure from playfulness. It can be solo activity, a social exercise, investigative, educational or just plain fun. In a mobile context, play is usually associated with simple downloadable arcade games – but this needn’t be the whole story.

So we built a mobile toy for Nokia, called Twitchr.”

Don’t know if Tom is going to talk about it tomorrow at MoMoLondon, as I think his talk will be concentrating on Flirtomatic. If you’re going to MoMoLo – see you there I hope.

» Tom Hume.org: Selling New Mobile Phone Features

LazyWeb: tag to print spooler

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If you are anything like me, (a) how are you finding it? and (b) you probably have a lot of entries in del.icio.us tagged “toread” or “to_read” etc. etc. which you have not got round to actually, y’know, reading.

Yesterday I made the effort to actually print out some of the things I had tagged to read, and – read them!

What I’d like, LazyWeb, therefore – is a site/script/widget/thing that would

  • grab the URLs of what I have tagged “to_read” (or an arbitrary tag, of course)
  • goes and gets the text found at those URLs (this doesn’t have to be pretty)
  • then smooshes them together into a file I can then print or save for later printing.

How about it?

Almost guaranteed fame on lifehacker/43folders would be yours, as well as my undying gratitude.

UPDATE:

Matt Biddulph contributes this:

OK, you need lynx installed to get a nice dump of html to text file.
For a mac, http://www.osxgnu.org/software/pkgdetail.html?
project_id=226&cat_id=211 might have what you need.

Paste this in a terminal window on any mac or unix machine:

for a in `curl http://del.icio.us/rss/blackbeltjones/toread | grep
'<link>' | cut -d\> -f 2 | cut -d\ toread.txt

and it’ll make reading.txt with a html2text concatenation of all your
toread links.

Excellent – will try this on the weekend and report back…

Cheers,
Matt.

Deathmatch in the stacks

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Ah to be in NYC…

DEATHMATCH IN THE STACKS
Celebrating the launch of The Game Design Reader: A Rules of Play Anthology
Edited by Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman, published by MIT Press

An evening of impassioned discussion and playful debate with game critics,
game creators, and game players about the past, present, and future of games

Friday, December 9th, 7pm-9pm
Tishman Auditorium, 66 West 12th Street, NYC
Free Admission

DEATHMATCH IN THE STACKS marks the launch of The Game Design Reader, a groundbreaking collection of essays that spans 50 years of game design and game studies. Eight contributing authors to the book, including many of the most influential figures working in the field of videogames and play scholarship today, will share short selections from their essays and engage in spirited exchange with game players, game designers, and game critics. Also featuring a panel discussion on game design with the creators of Half-Life, Paranoia, and Adventure for the Atari 2600.

DEATHMATCH players include Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman in discussion with:

Ken Birdwell, game designer
Greg Costikyan, game designer and writer
Gary Alan Fine, game sociologist
Linda Hughes, playground folklorist
Henry Jenkins, videogame scholar
Warren Robinett, game designer and programmer
Richard Rouse III, game designer and writer
Brian Sutton-Smith, play scholar and theorist
Stephen Sniderman, game and puzzle designer

Plus: appearances by New York City game players and luminaries
Ze Frank (designer), Tami Meyers (LARPer) Karen Sideman (designer),
and McKenzie Wark (theorist)

KATIE SALEN and ERIC ZIMMERMAN are game designers, theorists, writers, advocates, and educators. Katie is the Director of Graduate Studies in Design and Technology at Parsons School of Design. Eric is the co-founder of the experimental game development company gameLab. DEATHMATCH IN THE STACKS follows in the tradition of STORMING THE PLAYGROUND, a raucous and thought-provoking event in 2004 that marked the launch of their critically acclaimed book, Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals.

DEATHMATCH IN THE STACKS is sponsored by gameLab, the Design and Technology Program at the New School University, and Games for Change

Unfortunately it looks like the sort of thing that will be too much fun for anyone there to take any notes…