Being in the midst of ↵“Accelerando” by Charles Stross the above amazing picture immediately strung a chord when I first saw it. The picture shows “the solar transit of the International Space Station (ISS) and Space Shuttle Atlantis (50 minutes after undocking from the ISS, before return to Earth), taken from the area of Mamers (Normandie, France) on september 17th 2006 at 13h 38min 50s UT.” See the pic in full ↑at astrophoto.fr. via entry at infocult … Continue reading
The noble art of ↵trickjumping is not necessarily a pure means to its own end, but there are ways of substantial application. Of course most of the techniques are downright counterproductive when playing deathmatch, as they would rapidly lead to suicide under the conditions of those rules. But beyond out-of-the-box ↵Q3A there is the discipline of ↑DeFRaG runs, stemming from the modding community. If you care for mindboggling speed and amazing camerapaths through astounding gamemod architecture, grab ↑“Lags the Movie” [07:27min | .avi | 219MB] freshly made in 2006 by Lags himself. … Continue reading
The paper I presented at the workshop ↑Understanding media practices at the ↑9th EASA Biennial Conference which took place from September 18th through September 21st 2006 in Bristol, UK, now is online at my own server: ↑“The online nomads of cyberia” [.pdf | 337KB | ↑mirror—see ↑Jenny Ryan’s short review]. At the ↑Media Anthropology Network’s events page there are already some others to download, among them ↑“Game pleasures and media practices” [.pdf | 160KB] by ↑Elisenda Ardèvol et al., which I ↵mentioned earlier. … Continue reading
… then we take Berlin Just noticed that when I walked the streets of Munich this morning. A quick search turned up the picture below showing yet another one ↑sascha spotted in Berlin. Is there an archive of these tesselated murals retro-revitalising the 8-bit era? For more spottings in cities around the world go to the ↑Public Space Invaders‘ website. Munich is not yet on their list—I observed the invasion here first! For a complete picture of the scene ↑Reclaim Your City is a great place. Those completely not in the know, visit ↑The ultimate Space Invaders shrine. … Continue reading
the beginning of … ↑“Genesis: The beginning of …” (2005) [18:11min | .avi | 349MB] ↑by Quan-Time is a hilarious ↑Q3A-trick-stunt movie which teaches you about ↑DeFRaG and a wealth of trickjumping techniques from the basics up. The movie contains the best trickjumping-tutorials I have seen yet—the extensive ↑tutorials at TrickingQ3 are in the same league, accompanied by a wealth of ↵demos and highly recommended as well. Like playing the piano, Q3A-tricking is very demanding in respect to eye-hand-coordination and timing. Trickjumpers are in possession of complex embodied knowledge which is hard to communicate and maybe downright impossible to … Continue reading
The notion of ‘Barlowian cyberspace’ is no news, I know, but nevertheless worthwhile to clarify. ↑Jakub Macek summed it up nicely: The term cyberspace was coined by the American writer ↑William Gibson at the beginning of the 1980s [mind how careful Jakub is with the dating—he doesn’t attribute the first appearance of the word in print to “Neuromancer” (↵Gibson 1984) as so many do. Actually, to my knowledge the word first appeared in “Burning Chrome” (↵Gibson 1987 [1982])]. Gibson described it as a shared data hallucination visualized as an imaginary space made up of computer processed data, accessible to … Continue reading
↑William Gibson‘s comment on academia’s appropriation of the word “cyberspace”: Just a chance operator in the gasoline crack of history … Assembled word cyberspace from small and readily available components of language. Neologic spasm: the primal act of pop poetics. Preceded any concept whatever. Slick and hollow—awaiting received meaning All I did: folded words as taught. Now other words accrete in the interstices. “Gentlemen, that is not now nor will it ever be my concern …” Not what i do. I work the angle of transit. Vectors of neon plaza, licensed consumers, acts primal … Continue reading
BizoO in S3DF4 Another one, ↑“Lepus” (2005) [18:39min | .ogm | 440MB] by fei of ↑Shaolin Productions—he says: Movie was done in a few days, it’s not a 1 year project like Get Quaked 3 but this was a real joy to make, no pressure and one of my favorite game types: CPMa defrag runs. (with some vq3 thrown in.) This movie is not made for the fans of Speed trail or even Cetus the Movie, but more for the likes of KOS-RUNS :P fast and pretty! This was a nice coffee break vid, inbetween GQ3 and my next … Continue reading
amazement is our natural state of consciousness ↑Shaolin Productions are tremendously active in creating Q3A-tricking movies [mind, this is 2006, and the game was released in 1999], just about a week ago, on 06 September 2006, ↑“Catutthaj Jhana” by mrks and cristal was released, featuring buDDha and umeK from Team Qiang Shi. Like ↑“Tricking iT2” before, “Catutthaj Jhana” as well features multiple audio streams—this seems to become a signature trait of Shaolin Productions’ movies. The music remixes are done by people from within the community and truly worthwhile to listen to, with and without the visuals. Speaking of the … Continue reading
deathmatch is to tricking as kumite is to kata Just recently ↑Cory Doctorow voiced his fondness of “Tricking iT2” [see below] by ↑Team iT: “Even if you’re not a Quake player (I’m not, particularly, though I live with a retired member of the UK national Quake team) this is every bit as engrossing as any parkour video or Olympic demonstration sport.” Very well said, but, I am afraid, I have to mention that this is not simply a “20-minute video of a virtuoso Quake III player doing the most amazing “rocket-jump” acrobatics”. Rather it is the audiovisually most impressing … Continue reading