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infovore + culture   140

Instagram for webpages (22 May., 2012, at Interconnected)
"We'll know we're doing it right when half of the pages are ugly."
web  development  media  culture  business  creativity 
2 days ago by infovore
Rands In Repose: Hacking is Important
"Hacking is disruptive, and whether you code software, write books, or film movies, I believe bringing anything new into the world is a disruptive act. By being novel and compelling, the new is likely to replace something else and that something else isn’t being replaced without a fight." Great stuff from Rands.
business  hacking  development  culture  disruption 
10 weeks ago by infovore
Lucy Prebble: 'Gaming is an artform just like theatre' | Technology | The Observer
"...a whole art form has developed in my lifetime. I remember for the first time reading: "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." I remember the first time I heard: "I believe in America. America has made my fortune." And I remember standing in an open field, west of a white house, with a boarded front door. There is a small mailbox here." This is quite baggy and in places unfocused, but every now and then, there are moments of sharp focus. Most notably: the relation of the impulse to write to the impulse to play games (an escapist impulse in Prebble's mind, but that's not a bad one), and the understanding that 'culture is culture'.
games  culture  writing 
february 2012 by infovore
Ian Bogost - The Virtues of Long Compiles
"The point isn't nostalgia, that things were better in simpler times, but that the conditions we create (deliberately or accidentally) for and around the practices we pursue have a tremendous influence on the ways we carry out those practices. In the case of computer programming in particular, the apparent benefits of speed, efficiency, accessibility, and other seemingly "obvious" positive virtues of technical innovation also hide lost virtues, which of course we then fail to see." Culture as a byproduct of conditions.
culture  programming  trends  downtime  compiling  ianbogost 
december 2011 by infovore
[REDACTED] The Dominant Cultural Form of the 21st Century - Click Nothing
"Film and television are in many ways a technological enhancement and hybridization of older broadcast media, such as the novel, the play, or the album, but they are still fundamentally part of the broadcast culture paradigm. Games, I believe, are not part of the same paradigm. Games belong to a different paradigm that includes the oral tradition of storytelling, improvisational music, sport, dance, philosophical debate, improv theatre, and parlour games (among many other cultural forms)." A tiny fragment of a great post from Clint (which is really, really wanting to make me return to Far Cry 2 soon).
games  culture  media  clinthocking  interactivity  authorship 
november 2011 by infovore
Agile Software Is A Cop-Out; Here’s What’s Next | Forrester Blogs
"Software development is not pure coding, engineering, architecture, management, or design. It is cross-disciplinary. Better yet, it is its own discipline. It is more akin to making a movie than to building automobiles on an assembly line. The studio revolves around talent. Great software talent means renaissance developers who have passion, creativity, discipline, domain knowledge, and user empathy. These traits are backed by architecture, design, and by technical know-how that spans just knowing the technology flavor of the day. Process is the studio; it has structure but is flexible enough to optimize talent and tools." This post is as dogmatic as what it rails against, but it's good at finding flaws in dogma and then pushing towards a more sympathetic view. And this paragraph is the best bit.
software  development  culture  technology 
october 2011 by infovore
Novels are digital art too « Alex McLean
"A great deal of what is called `digital art’ is not digital art at all, and it seems many digital artists seem ashamed of the digital.  In digital installation art, the screen and keyboard are literally hidden in a box somewhere, as if words were a point of shame.  The digital source code behind the work is not shown, and all digital output is only viewable by the artist or a technician for debugging purposes.  The experience of the actual work is often entirely analog, the participant moves an arm, and observes an analog movement in response, in sight, sound or motor control.  They may choose to make jerky, discontinuous movements, and get a discontinuous movement in response, but this is far from the complexity of digital language.  This kind of installation forms a hall of mirrors.  You move your arm around and look for how your movement has been contorted."
art  literature  novels  digital  culture 
october 2011 by infovore
[this is aaronland] the unbearable finality of pixel space
"I've long held that all media transit from being "functional" to "art" when they are no longer economically viable. It is that transition which dampers the cost and the consequence of failure and makes the space necessary for people to experiment and play. Think of lithography which was born of purely utilitarian needs and sherparded the arrival of the mass-produced image only to become capital-O objects as soon as the offset press was invented." I love Aaron.
art  design  maps  aaronstraupcope  culture 
october 2011 by infovore
How Vimeo Lost Me
"And all this time I can’t help thinking that this was because I’m working with games. If I was a fimmaker, this is issue would never crop up. But games have to constantly defend their status as a way of creative expression. When creating games, you are by default suspected of either selling out or producing nothing of value what so ever. Or both." Seriously, Vimeo need to sort this out: it's embarrassing, and contrary to the messages they send out.
vimeo  games  culture  art 
october 2011 by infovore
Why Debates About Video Games Aren't Really About Video Games
"It's not enough to hope that games might be redeemed as fine art or to be played by people of all ages and backgrounds. Instead, video games' cultural future depends on a rich, diverse, magical ecosystem of weird games of all shapes, sizes, and purposes helping multitudes of people pursue a variety of goals and passions. It's not that games need to "rise to the level" of books and films and the like, but that they need to spread like those media into all the nooks and crannies of human activity. The more deliberately creators populate such an ecosystem, the harder it will become for games to become pawns in the debates of others."
games  ianbogost  rhetoric  culture 
august 2011 by infovore
Animated GIFs Triumphant - Anil Dash
"But to my eye, GIF is the most popular animation and short film format that's ever existed. It works on smartphones in millions of people's pockets, on giant displays in museums, in web browsers on a newspaper website. It finds liberation in constraints, in the same way that fewer characters in our tweets and texts freed us to communicate more liberally with one another. And it invites participation, in a medium that's both fun and accessible, as the pop music of moving images, giving us animations that are totally disposable and completely timeless."
culture  gifs  animation  internet 
july 2011 by infovore
Song And Vision No. 2: "The Power Of Love" and Back To The Future | The A.V. Club
" I think Zemeckis and Gale knew all the timely accoutrements signifying "the present" in Back To The Future would inevitably look like 1985 within just a couple of years; in fact, they were banking on it. Zemeckis and Gale were trying to create an archetypical representation of 1985 just like they did for 1955, with its soda fountains, social repression, and subjugated black people. In this way, Back To The Future only gets better the further we get from the '80s. Everything that defines Marty McFly—how he walks, talks, acts, and dresses—acts as instantly recognizable shorthand for the year he comes from." This is great.
films  movies  backtothefuture  culture  period 
may 2011 by infovore
Week 13: Too much is never enough | Urbanscale
"[Mayo is] making a dummy RFID-reader surface for us to mount on a subway turnstile, as well as a companion piece for the MetroCard vending machine. The challenge here is to avoid imposing our own designerly tastes on these artifacts; if we want them to be convincing at that all-important subliminal level, we have to try and imagine them as an extension of the MTA’s existing graphic vocabulary.

And that, in turn, means capturing a certain kind of municipal badness in the design of type and signage: inapposite font selection, clumsy kerning and so on. It’s an odd and demanding kind of discipline — especially for us, with our marked preference for the Vignelliesque."

Realism channeled through suitably ropey implementation.
design  simulation  badness  quality  culture 
april 2011 by infovore
W. Brian Arthur Vs Silicon Roundabout, ‘Start-Up Britain’ and other shake-and-bake approaches « Magical Nihilism
"Deep craft is more than knowledge. It is a set of knowings. Knowing what is likely to work and what not to work. Knowing what methods to use, what principles are likely to succeed, what parameter values to use in a given technique. Knowing whom to talk to down the corridor to get things working, how to fix things that go wrong, what to ignore, what theories to look to. This sort of craft-knowing takes science for granted and mere knowledge for granted. And it derives collectively from a shared culture of beliefs, an unspoken culture of common experience." Craft / scenius / place / knowledge. The W Brian Arthur sounds great, and Matt's point - that building strength in a sector is building culture, and that requires investment in something that won't see immediate returns (rather than "five-year plans" and "strategies") is acute. Very good stuff.
innovation  technology  culture  learning  london 
march 2011 by infovore
More Than a Craze
Totally marvellous: photographs of New Zealand arcades in the eighties. Lovely they're online, as well as in the world, and must get around to that essay at some point.
games  arcades  culture  photography  exhibition  nz 
march 2011 by infovore
YouTube - Law & Order: UK - Lessons in British Justice
Lovely trailer from BBC America for Law & Order UK. Sadly, it illustrates roughly what the British trying to make American-style procedural drama looks like. Lots of slamming things down. And tea. (Although: they don't know what "knackers" means, clearly.)
culture  tv  bbc 
january 2011 by infovore
potlatch: Britain's Richard Curtis years: a (belated) obituary
"If Love Actually (2003) is of any worth whatsoever, other than to help DFS sell leather sofas every 5 minutes on boxing day evening, it is as the full stop at the end of an era in British cultural and political history that we should probably not mourn. I would suggest that the era in question lasted from 1992-2003, between John Major's General Election victory (and immediate capitulation to the foreign exchange markets) and the Iraq War. John Major originally coined the phrase to define this era: "a nation at ease with itself". Richard Curtis erected its most banal and characteristically saccharin monuments." This is great.
willdavies  richardcurtis  nineties  politics  culture  eras 
december 2010 by infovore
Flavin and Viola light works ruled “not art” | The Art Newspaper
"In an astonishing move, the European Com mis sion (EC) has reversed a decision made in a UK tax tribunal, and refused to classify works by Dan Flavin and Bill Viola as “art”. This means that UK galleries and auction houses will have to pay full VAT (value added tax, which goes up to 20% next year) and customs dues on video and light works, when they are imported from outside the EU. The decision is binding on all member states." Very sad.
art  culture  danflavin  billviola  absurd  eu 
december 2010 by infovore
The Smart Set: How Do You Say... - November 12, 2010
"Words in other languages are like icebergs: The basic meaning is visible above the surface, but we can only guess at the shape of the vast chambers of meaning below. And every language has particularly hard-to-translate terms, such as the Portuguese saudade, or "the feeling of missing someone or something that is gone," or the Japanese ichigo-ichie, meaning "the practice of treasuring each moment and trying to make it perfect."" Lovely little article on the untranslatable.
language  communication  translation  culture 
november 2010 by infovore
Music from Saharan Cellphones. This is amazing.... | intercourse with biscuits
"Sahel Sounds rounded up music salvaged from the discarded mobile phone memory chips in West Africa." Wow; the after-life of dead electronic media made real.
music  culture  media  data  storage  africa 
october 2010 by infovore
50 years of cyborgs: I have not the words. | Quinn Said
This is all great.
cyborgs  culture  quinnnorton  prosthesis  essay 
september 2010 by infovore
Kanye West, media cyborg « Snarkmarket
"We’re all Jamie Madrox now." (This is so good).
media  cyborg  mediacyborg  culture  identity  augmentation  prosthesis 
september 2010 by infovore
Technology and the novel, from Blake to Ballard | Books | The Guardian
"I know which side I'm on: the more books I write, the more convinced I become that what we encounter in a novel is not selves, but networks; that what we hear in poems is (to use the language of communications technology) not signal but noise. The German poet Rilke had a word for it: Geräusch, the crackle of the universe, angels dancing in the static."
writing  technology  culture  novel  tommcarthy 
september 2010 by infovore
Never sell out | Five Players
"But we have got the resources to save ourselves. General perception of games is jammed as masturbatory power-fantasy, sure, but the talent is hardly lacking. So let’s plea to them: we need a Joyce, or a Waste Land, or something you have to play with an abridged notes guide over your knee as you rip through it, something hardcore in its modernism that wants to make you work, make you sweat for its charms. We need cultural elitism to save ourselves." I am really, really enjoying Five Players at the moment.
games  culture  elitism  modernism 
september 2010 by infovore
CABINET // A Timeline of Timelines
Brilliant.
history  historiography  timeline  culture  science 
july 2010 by infovore
Kon + Amir Present: The 50 Greatest Hip-Hop Samples Of All Time
Great list: interesting selection, well-justified, and lovely to have all the original songs to listen to as well. That's this afternoon's listening sorted, then.
music  sampling  hiphop  culture 
may 2010 by infovore
Joe Moran's blog: The comfort of things
Joe Moran on Daniel Miller's "The Comfort Of Things", which has gone straight onto my wishlist.
joemoran  society  newcross  writing  culture  books 
april 2010 by infovore
Joe Moran's blog: Get your kicks on the A57
"The history of roads is the history of ourselves: our desire for community and our fears about its fragility; our natural instinct to expand the possibilities of life set against our premonitions of death, destruction and loss; and our fierce arguments about what is valuable and beautiful about the world. But this history, like the road itself, is full of loose ends and detours, unfinished stories and stalled narratives."
culture  society  joemoran  roads  uk 
april 2010 by infovore
ASBOrometer - Measure UK anti-social behaviour on iPhone and Android
"ASBOrometer is a mobile application that measures levels of anti-social behaviour at your current location (within England and Wales) and gives you access to key local ASB statistics... This app was created by Jeff Gilfelt and made possible by the data.gov.uk initiative, which is opening up UK government data for public reuse." What sensationalist rot; no number of pretty visualisations make this kind of fearmongering acceptable. It's nice that the data is open; it's a shame this is the best thing people can think to do with it. Whether you like it or not, this information is very, very loaded.
data  government  society  culture  fearmongering  infononsense 
february 2010 by infovore
Mule Design Studio's Blog: The Failure of Empathy
"As an industry, we need to understand that not wanting root access doesn’t make you stupid. It simply means you do not want root access. Failing to comprehend this is not only a failure of empathy, but a failure of service."
culture  service  design  ipad  products  computing  generalpurpose 
february 2010 by infovore
Why playing in the virtual world has an awful lot to teach children | Technology | The Observer
"...it's high time we began to understand games on their own terms, with all the potentials and dangers that entails: as arguably the most powerful models we have for connecting and motivating, and understanding those vast, disparate groups of people a digital age throws together." Short interview with Tom Chatfield in the Observer.
games  culture  society  learning  education  tomchatfield 
january 2010 by infovore
Bruce Sterling: The Hypersurface of this Decade | ICON MAGAZINE ONLINE
"I have to print my bed, so that I can lie in it." Lovely BruceS fiction; not just futurism, but hyperlocal futurism at that.
fiction  brucesterling  technology  culture  futurism  design  fabrication 
january 2010 by infovore
The Escapist : Gaming Isn't Brain Surgery
"I wonder what Tulon Ethabathel the Dwarf is doing right now." A US brain surgeon talks about his interest in gaming, the amount of time he gives it - very little - but the nontheless-important role it plays in his life. Lovely article, really; well-crafted and thought-provoking.
games  lifestyle  life  culture  medicine  pasttimes 
december 2009 by infovore
kung fu grippe : Making the Clackity Noise
"Little stories are the internet’s native and ideal art form." Yes. This is a good one.
writing  creativity  stories  storytelling  culture  online  merlinmann 
december 2009 by infovore
Lost in the Filth Simulacrum | h+ Magazine
"4chan is, I contend, the most interesting angle we have on the evolution of human consciousness. It is a shamanic experience, a bardo of becoming, where the soul is detached from the body, set free to wander in the wilderness of banality until it encounters the epic lulz of meeting itself... and finding that it, itself, is the most disturbing thing on 4chan." o_O. Just worth linking to for the eyeball-expanding prose; there may be something in there, but I'm not sure.
4chan  internet  culture  society  people 
december 2009 by infovore
Leapfroglog - Jane Jacobs and London’s Old Street area
"Perhaps the Shoreditch startups are more effective than their Dutch counterparts not just because they do more with less... but because they are in London. A city at a different scale than Amsterdam or for that matter the greater Amsterdam area, the Randstad as we call it around these parts. A city with a more diverse ecosystem of services and things, smaller services, more specialised services, ready to be employed by companies like BERG and RIG and Tinker, enhancing their abilities when needed."
cities  startups  karsalfrink  london  berg  culture 
december 2009 by infovore
Why must grown adults whinge about TV spoilers? | Television & radio | The Guardian
"But we are spoiled. Spoiled to the core. As a kid, when I skipped to the Odeon to see Watership Down, popping back via my granddad's house, if he asked me what I'd watched, I'd recount it in glorious detail. It was the 70s. He didn't do spoilers. He was a grown man. He'd spent two years in a trench during the Battle of Monte Cassino getting his hair parted by bullets, so whether Hazel the cartoon rabbit got squashed while out hunting cartoon carrots wasn't really his concern." I am largely spoiler-immune; I always argue that *how* something happens is more important than *what*. Apart from, you know, the massive ones that are at the core of things. Anyhow, Grace Dent doesn't care either.
spoilers  culture  media  tv  tootrue  gracedent 
december 2009 by infovore
Three Cultures - there is a lot to say, of this we are sure
"On the contrary, the quick wins of some big ticket consulting sessions sell our discipline short by pretending that design is some magical elixir that can be poured into a situation and zammo everything is fixed up. Like accounting, medicine, and just about every other profession, design is a practice which is persistently useful at regular intervals. If anything, during this transitional period where business and government are slowly coming to terms with the potential yield of having design as an integral part of the conversation it behooves us to collectively seek longer engagements, not shorter." Some excellent stuff from Bryan Boyer.
design  architecture  bryanboyer  designthinking  culture  education 
november 2009 by infovore
Fullbright: The middle child at peace
"...maybe this is the best of both worlds. An audience that, having crossed the barriers to entry, is by its nature more invested in our work; a public profile by which we have the means to occasionally reach into the mass consciousness, but which affords us the freedom to continue experimenting with subject, form, and style; an industry which is truly international; which is capable of producing both multi-million dollar blockbusters and single-creator labors of love (and releasing both on the same platform); which manages to be neither too big nor too small, and is the more vital, unique and exhilarating for it. We are a medium for us, and while there are more and more of us every day, we'll never be for everyone. In a way, that's beautiful." I think Steve's about right.
games  criticism  comics  culture  stevegaynor 
november 2009 by infovore
Revenge of the nerds | Andrew Martin | Comment is free | The Guardian
"...he and his brethren were plotting a future in which all writers and musicians would be at the mercy of the mathematicians and the electronic and numerological world they have created. Art is now content. It merely embellishes a "platform" of the kind I struggle to read about in the media pages which are now indistinguishable from the technology pages." I like Andrew Martin's writing a lot, but this article is both rubbish and angry-making. Grr.
journalism  nonsense  andrewmartin  guardian  geeks  art  culture  education 
october 2009 by infovore
chewing pixels » Best Thing I Saw Today #49: Three Frames
"...the ongoing charm and usefulness of the animated .gif lies in this very economy. Like a good one-liner, the animated .gif can tell a joke with the impact of a one-inch punch, trimming away the fat of unnecessary frames to deliver its message with streamlined effectiveness." All too true. And Simon gives me my own discovery of the day
simonparkin  internet  culture  animatedgif  threeframes 
august 2009 by infovore
List of gairaigo and wasei-eigo terms - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
"This is a selected list of gairaigo, Japanese words originating or based on foreign language (generally Western) terms, including wasei-eigo (Japanese pseudo-Anglicisms)." One of my new favourite Wikipedia pages; there is some fascinating stuff in here.
japanese  language  english  portmanteau  waseieigo  culture  gairaigo 
august 2009 by infovore
100 Things Your Kids May Never Know About | GeekDad | Wired.com
A little bit of nostalgia, a little bit of fact, a few reminders of the past. Especially the old Kit-Kat wrappers.
history  culture  technology  children  kids  list  nostalgia 
july 2009 by infovore
Ridiculous Life Lessons From New Girl Games | GameLife | Wired.com
"The weird thing is that you can view these “wholesome” games as being just as bad for girls as Grand Theft Auto’s random bloodshed and rampant criminality is for young, impressionable boys. And while GTA’s influence on boys has been dissected to death, what about the Nintendo DS’ upcoming avalanche of games for tween girls? What kinds of values do preteens learn from these titles? Valuable life lessons, or bad habits?" As bad as GTA? Many, many times worse, if this sample is anything to go on.
games  gender  girls  culture  trends  fashion  imprinting  depressing 
july 2009 by infovore
russell davies: straight lines and the man
Russell on Joe Moran's new book, which I'm clearly going to have to read.
roads  culture  joemoran  books  writing 
july 2009 by infovore
GameSetWatch - Opinion/Round-Up: The State Of Social Gaming
"I think that there are really obvious reasons this isn't currently happening. Tech-oriented, web-trained, fast-paced, hard-nosed Silicon Valley culture is not really that similar to game developer culture. Outside of GDC Austin... I haven't seen a lot of opportunities for the two industries to mix. Most crucially, everybody's too damn busy trying to get their jobs done to really spend a lot of time or thought on the issue." That gap in culture is something that still fascinates me.
games  social  facebook  platform  culture  web  socialsoftware  gaas 
june 2009 by infovore
Scope (Schulze & Webb)
"Design, culture, scale, space, superpowers. Key concepts: design and contributing to culture; ourselves as individuals and the big picture; taking action. ...other topics covered include million mile tomatoes, President John F Kennedy as a yogic master, superpowers and the tools of production." I am very lucky to work with smart people. I do not know what to do with my 100 hours.
mattwebb  reboot  talks  scope  superpowers  macroscope  culture  design 
june 2009 by infovore
GameSetWatch - GameSetInterview: Throwing A Zombie Doublesix With Mummery
"I think in films, zombies are cyclical. They come around, they get reinvigorated. I think in games, they're a constant. In games, zombies just represent this thing around which you can construct a game. There's no morality to them. There's no worries about racism that games are having right now. If it's a zombie and it's a pure zombie, a stupid zombie like the ones we have, they're a game mechanic. They're fodder, they're whatever you want to put in a game, however you want to deal with it."
zombies  games  culture  interview 
june 2009 by infovore
Dear Dustin Curtis | Dustin Curtis
Dustin Curtis didn't like the American Airlines website, and complained on his blog; a UX architect from AA gets back to him and explains how things are; Dustin responds. I need to write something longer on this, but in a nutshell: I understand Dustin's position, but it feels naive, and I think he confuses corporate culture with business practice. I want my airline to have a corporate culture of conservatism and fustiness, just like I want my bank to be severe and serious. That doesn't meant their website has to suck, but it also doesn't mean that their sucky website is their CEO's fault.
design  usability  interaction  americanairlines  business  corporations  corporateculture  culture 
june 2009 by infovore
Gamasutra - News - G4C: Gee, Jenkins Talk Game Communities For Change
"Gee says he's been struck by the lack of age grading in successful communities -- people of all ages are participating. Another feature is the lack of distinction between the "mentor" and the "mentors," within the community. "On one day you'll teach and another day you might learn... everybody is in one role or the other all the time and there are no fixed statuses in that regard."" James Gee in conversation with Henry Jenkins.
jamesgee  education  games  gamesforchange  culture  learning  wgrtw 
june 2009 by infovore
Nick Sweeney · the spoken word, written down
"They preserve them as best they can, perhaps without even knowing that’s what they’re doing, but in the understanding that no archives may be kept, no histories written, and that what sustains their digital lives is the lived-out, written-down, spoken word." Reminds me of the "what five pages would you print out" conundrum, and the end of Fahrenheit 451; walking the woods, chanting entries from Encyclopedia Dramatica
internet  history  archive  writing  nicksweeney  culture  historiography 
may 2009 by infovore
Gamasutra: Greg Costikyan's Blog - Twiggy Game: Will Videogaming's Future Look Like Boardgaming's Past?
"The Twiggy Game is a charming cultural object from a bygone era; it's also a stark representation of what went wrong with boardgames, and a stark warning for what can go wrong with games as a whole -- at least, if we fail to inculcate, in ourselves and in others who love games, an aesthetic that prizes something beyond the brand." Costikyan on the dangers of games having a 'lack of culture'.
culture  criticism  gregcostikyan  games  writing  history 
may 2009 by infovore
BLDGBLOG: How the Other Half Writes: In Defense of Twitter
"Now that suburban housewives in Missouri are letting their thoughts be known via Twitter, it's as if writing itself is thought to be under attack, invaded from all sides by the unwashed masses whose thoughts have not been sanctioned as Literature™. In many ways, I'm reminded of Truman Capote's infamous put-down of Jack Kerouac: "That's not writing, it's typing.""
twitter  writing  bldgblog  society  people  literature  microblogging  notetaking  culture 
april 2009 by infovore
russell davies: blog all dog-eared pages: notes from walnut tree farm
"The Whole Earth Catalogue, our bible as self-builders of our residences in the hippie-ish days of the 1970s, was subtitled ‘access to tools’. ‘With tools,’ ran the editorial preface, ‘you can do more or less anything.’" Lots of good quotations, including this, and also on fires.
books  culture  tools  nature  outdoors  rogerdeakin 
april 2009 by infovore
Palindrome Semiotics
"The genre of the palindrome, playful and ludic as it is, nonetheless has a strong implication of violence. In the work of its foremost practitioners, Velemir Khlebnikov and Vladimir Nabokov, as well as some of their postmodern successors, the palindrome is closely linked to death, cannibalism, beheading, and murder."
language  semiotics  russian  palindromes  criticism  culture 
april 2009 by infovore
re: diverselessness (tecznotes)
"I think issues of power and governance are going to swiftly rise in importance on internet communities, as they expand to include more different kinds of people. It's interesting that some of the best, most resonant ideas on these topics that I've encountered over the years has come from political writers and may have been produced even before the internet." Mike has read lots of books, and his quotations/sources here are great.
mikemigurski  culture  monoculture  groups  community  balance  elites  invisiblecolleges 
april 2009 by infovore
Gamasutra - Features - Persuasive Games: Familiarity, Habituation, and Catchiness
"...let's end the era of Bushnell's Law, not because it's useless or base, but because it's wrong. It doesn't explain the phenomenon we have assumed it does. Or more precisely, let's excise the first half, and keep the rest: 'A game should reward the first play and the hundredth.' How? By culturing familiarity and constructing a habitual experience. By finding receptors for familiar mechanics and tuning them slightly differently, so as to make those receptors resonate in a new way, and then coupling those new resonances with meaningful ideas, practices, or experiences." A rather good - and certainly thought-provoking - Ian Bogost piece over at Gamasutra.
games  familiarity  culture  playability  mastery  ianbogost 
april 2009 by infovore
Versus CluClu Land: I Went to the GDC and I Learned How to Make Broad Cultural Generalizations
"...after spending this weekend fighting Resident Evil 5's grabasstical interface I am somewhat persuaded that there's a real divide when it comes to eastern and western design sensibilities, and this divide has everything to do with the design-centric and productivity-centric tendencies of North American tech culture." Which is an interesting way of looking at it; I'm going to hold my thoughts until Iroquois has written more on this. Manveer Heir (of Raven Software) leaves an interesting comment on the post.
games  design  culture  programming  development  eastwest  iroquoispliskin  productivity  interaction 
march 2009 by infovore
Dave Gorman: When Twitter Gets Weird...
"Which I think meant they were telling me they'd be happy if I pretended to follow them but then used technology to ignore them in favour of other people. What? So not only would they rather I pretended to follow them they wanted to explain to me how this dishonest artifice could easily be achieved." Dave Gorman on a kind of pretend-following, usage patterns of Twitter, and keeping tools useful for yourself (amongst other stuff; this is very good).
davegorman  twitter  culture  mores  etiquette  socialsoftware  manners 
march 2009 by infovore
CR Blog » Blog Archive » Meet Mr Chicken
"You may not know his name but you will certainly know his work: Morris Cassanova (aka Mr Chicken) designs and makes signs for most of the fried chicken shops in the UK." That's a good market to have sewn up, I'd imagine.
design  uk  food  culture  branding  signage  friedchicken 
march 2009 by infovore
Wax on the Arm | Gamers With Jobs
"I smile. I didn't fool him in the slightest. But it doesn't matter. I didn't fall. Wax on the arm." Lovely.
games  music  writing  culture  marriage 
march 2009 by infovore
Hit Self-Destruct: Domestic City, Part One
Wonderful, delightful, charming writing from Duncan Fyfe; this, and the eight chapters that follow it, are pretty essential, and they're nice and brief. Speculative fiction about games, culture, and the future. And fandom.
games  writing  culture  society  lovely  speculativefiction  duncanfyfe 
march 2009 by infovore
What were arcades like? - RPGnet Forums
"I was reading about arcades and how you'd have to queue to play popular games as well as follow rules like no throwing in fighting game or the others wouldn't let you play. This seems rather strange. The money cost must have gotten expensive pretty quickly as well. I'm not old enough to have been to them when they were around so I'm curious about what they were like." And then, 18 pages of wonderful gaming oral history; you'll be smelling the aircon and the chewing gum by the time you're through with this thread.
games  history  culture  society  oralhistory  arcades 
march 2009 by infovore
Hit Self-Destruct: Domestic City, Part Three
'A morose-looking guy stood at the bar talking to his friends, wearing a Flashbang Studios t-shirt. Emily leaned across the bar next to him, and shouted giddily over the music: "hey, I like that developer."' A lovely piece of speculative writing from Duncan Fyfe.
games  popularity  culture  society  rock  speculative 
february 2009 by infovore
Goodbye Dubai | Smashing Telly - A hand picked TV channel
"Dubai threatens to become an instant ruin, an emblematic hybrid of the worst of both the West and the Middle-East and a dangerous totem for those who would mistakenly interpret this as the de facto product of a secular driven culture." Which puts it nicely, but god, this is depressing.
culture  recession  cities  business  economics  building  dubai  collapse 
february 2009 by infovore
Kevin Kelly -- The Technium
"One Amish-man told me that the problem with phones, pagers, and PDAs (yes he knew about them) was that "you got messages rather than conversations." That's about as an accurate summation of our times as any." A wonderful quotation in the midst of this dense, fascinating article.
technology  culture  society  communication  network  amish 
february 2009 by infovore
Pint of gold top and an eighth of hash – milkman who also delivered drugs | World news | guardian.co.uk
"He probably thinks he is doing a community service but he is blatantly breaking the law and has to be dealt with. I would call him an eccentric." Community service yes; blatantly breaking the law, yes; 'has to be dealt with', really not sure about that. It's not like he was causing harm. Sometimes, the world is a funny place. Oh: and definitely, definitely "eccentric".
culture  society  drugs  arthritis  medicinal  cannabis. 
february 2009 by infovore
S/FJ: who is on twitter
A pretty comprehensive list, I think.
list  humour  twitter  culture  sashafrerejones  accurate 
february 2009 by infovore
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/1543/persuasive_games_how_i_stopped_.php?print=1
"I still have nothing but respect for my more traditional industry colleagues, but I’ve stopped worrying about impressing the games industry and its pundits. Or at least, I’ve stopped worrying about impressing them first. Instead, I’ve started focusing more on the people who might be interested in different kinds of game experiences. People who fly for business more than three times a month, or people who read all of the Sunday newspaper, or people who have kids with food allergies, for example. I am sure these people read magazines and watch television and listen to the radio. But it would be short-sighted to label them ziners or tubers or airwavers. They are just people, with interests, who sometimes consume different kinds of media." Bogost is right, and I'm concerned I'm always going to be ashamed I chose to use that word.
games  culture  casual  ianbogost  pervasive  gamer  langauge 
january 2009 by infovore
white on white - By Lorenzo Wang
"So why not embrace it? That's why You Have To Burn The Rope is fantastic... for games to become art there must be an awareness and a conversation with its own history. Film, music, and literary critic call this allusion, but for the creators, this isn't just a word, it's a dialogue. Which means it should invite participants. For me, I'm far more intrigued by stop-motion artist Patrick Boivin's attempt at turning a linked sequence of videos into Youtube Street Fighter." I'm not sure I agree with Wang on YHTBTR, specifically, but this paragraph is reasonably sensible.
games  criticism  culture  historiography  dialogue 
january 2009 by infovore
S/FJ: not only with orange
"It is from the era when people were all 'we will not know if acid is dangerous until we test it on THE FOXIEST GIRLS IN ENGLAND.'" Too right.
interview  video  culture  lsd  acid  hotness 
january 2009 by infovore
Near Future Laboratory » Blog Archive » Isla Lyddle End 2050
"Isla Lyddle End lies on the far east of the British Archipelago. It is the largest of the eastern islands in what was once the continuous land mass known as Hornbyshire. Isla Lyddle End celebrates the Golden Jubilee of The Grand Iman of Britain HH Patel bin Windsor with a minaret clock tower, constructed of hard-pack, molded synthetic carbon nodules in full compliance with the Rock and Soil Conservation Act of 2038." Julian's Lyddle End 2050 entry is excellent.
design  futurism  culture  prediction  flooding  apocalypse  julianbleecker  lyddleend2050  britain 
january 2009 by infovore
ihobo: The Casual Players Aren't Coming to Your Party
"Here's the most important thing to understand about the mass market for videogames: these players – the ones who aren't even remotely interested in the kind of videogames the hobbyists want to play – have very specific tastes, and when something takes off with them it continues to sell, and sell, and sell. But these players don't buy many titles – when they find the game they want, they generally just keep playing that."
games  culture  marketing  casual  sales  massmarket 
december 2008 by infovore
GameSetWatch - COLUMN - Chewing Pixels: 'The Nightmare Before Christmas'
"I am a terrible gaming evangelist. Every time I think I’m onto something my mind’s invaded by Marcus Fenix and his sweaty, homoerotic pecs, by Cloud and his implausible sword and cod-philosophy and, most poignantly, by me, in my pajamas aged nine playing Tetris on the toilet and by me, in my pajamas aged twenty-nine, playing Tetris on the toilet." And Simon powers straight into /my/ favourite games writing of 2008. Bravo.
games  play  writing  culture  videogames  excuses  evangelism 
december 2008 by infovore
LRB · John Lanchester: Is it Art?
Lanchester writing about games, from the point of view of a smart person who's actually played the games he described. I certainly don't agree with all his points, but I don't disagree with them all, and he's not mouthing off: he's making smart connections and indicating more than a passing familiarity with the medium. Might write a tad more on this.
games  writing  culture  criticism  art  lrb  johnlanchester 
december 2008 by infovore
Changing the Game
"Changing the Game (order via Amazon or B&N) is a fast-paced tour of the many ways in which games, already an influential part of millions of people’s lives, have become a profoundly important part of the business world. From connecting with customers, to attracting and training employees, to developing new products and spurring innovation, games have introduced a new level of fun and engagement to the workplace.

Changing the Game introduces you to the ways in which games are being used to enhance productivity at Microsoft, increase profits at Burger King, and raise employee loyalty at Sun Microsystems, among other remarkable examples. It is proof that work not only can be fun--it should be." I shall have to check this out.
games  play  business  culture  communication  learning  education  simulation  book  productivity 
december 2008 by infovore
Keith Tyson's History Painting print offer | Culture | guardian.co.uk
"The artist Keith Tyson is offering 5,000 Guardian readers the opportunity to own a free downloadable artwork by him. The costs you'll have to bear are those of printing out the work on A3 photographic paper – and framing, if you so choose... You will be asked to enter your geographical location – which forms part of the unique title of each print."
art  culture  online  guardian  printing  generative  analogue  keithtyson 
december 2008 by infovore
Who Stole My Volcano? Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Dematerialisation of Supervillain Architecture. « Magical Nihilism
"[The modern supervillain's] hidden fortress is in the network, represented only by a briefcase, or perhaps even just a mobile phone.... for a “4th generation warfare” supervillain there aren’t even objects for the production designer to create and imbue with personality. The effects and the consequences can be illustrated by the storytelling, but the network and the intent can’t be foreshadowed by environments and objects in the impressionist way that Adam employed to support character and storytelling." The network as fortress and ideology all at once.
design  architecture  comics  culture  kenadam  mattfraction  gobag  network  infrastructure  mobility 
november 2008 by infovore
zengestrom.com: Social objects, power, stickiness, and love
"An object provides for [the wants we define ourselves as] through the lack it displays." Jyri Engeström on social objects and the way they create wants, fulfil needs, and they way that drives our behaviour around them. Jolly good.
srs  web  socialobjects  jyriengestrom  socialsoftware  sociology  culture  needs  wants 
october 2008 by infovore
chewing pixels » Death of a Gamesman
"And if all videogames could ever aspire to was being big, dumb, blockbusting escapism, does that even matter? Hasn’t every generation that ever lived created make-believe worlds to climb into and take refuge? I don’t know. I don’t know. I just wish we’d asked each other the questions a bit more fifty years ago." Too many quotations to choose from in this; wonderful writing from Simon Parkin.
games  culture  play  writing  simonparkin 
october 2008 by infovore
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