2007 January | xirdalium

thousand

Posted on Tuesday, 23rd January 2007 by zephyrin_xirdalJuly 12, 2012

Ca c’est magnifique. In respect to stunts’n’such this, just like ↵mine and ↵more, definitely beats the silverscreen. Remember, once there was a time when the quality of action flicks was measured by the sheer number of cars partaking in chases. Some directors went for lengths and had several dozen cars wrecked on the set. Several dozen, that’s all very well … but now be honest and confess your innermost desires. Isn’t it true that you would be delighted to watch a thousand sports cars racing through a beautiful mediterranean setting, French Riviera style? Behold, speaking of “a thousand” in … Continue reading →

further trails of sources

Posted on Monday, 22nd January 2007 by zephyrin_xirdalJuly 6, 2012

A follow-up to ↵trail of sources, dealing with Henry Lowood’s ↑Wikipedia, sources, machinima: “But these questions do raise issues about research on “consumer-created content.” It seems we are dependent on consumer-created sources, as well.” In principle I wholeheartedly agree, but would like to try to grasp the issues at hand conceptually different. First of all, when talking about gaming culture I shy away from the term “consumer”, as in my view it somewhat implies passive consumption, usage of artefacts as intended by the latters’ creators. With machinima and the practices of game modding this definitely is not the case. Seen … Continue reading →

gutterflower

Posted on Thursday, 18th January 2007 by zephyrin_xirdalOctober 1, 2012

Yesterday, in meatspace, ↑KerLeone told me about it, now it is official—he has launched a new community weblog called ↑Gutterflower [in German]. Much talk about transgressive gaming, alternate reality games, etc. is flying through academia, and I guess the new weblog constitutes some kind of game which may well fall into these categories. Roughly put the idea goes like this: Take an everyday object and attach an URI pointing to an entry of Gutterflower to it. Then ‘set the object free’, meaning: leave it on a table in a bar for instance. When someone finds the object and picks … Continue reading →

diamond series

Posted on Wednesday, 17th January 2007 by zephyrin_xirdalJuly 12, 2012

Faithful readers know that I am tremendously fond of Neal Stephenson’s “Diamond Age: Or a Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer” (1995) [see ↵hard rock phylum, ↵dojo, and ↵diamond culture]—now George Clooney makes it into a ↑six-our television mini-series for the SciFi channel—franchise culture. via entry at cyberpunkreview.com … Continue reading →

planet of the arabs

Posted on Tuesday, 16th January 2007 by zephyrin_xirdalJuly 12, 2012

This, Ladies and Gentlemen, definitely is a piece of art! “↑Planet of the Arabs“ [08:58min | .mov | 30MB | also ↑at YouTube and ↑at Google Video] by artist ↑Jacqueline Salloum is a fulminant remix of scenes from Hollywood movies and mainstream television—drawing from sources as diverse as cartoons starring ↑Bugs Bunny & ↑Daffy Duck, ↑CNN‘s ↑Larry King show, and “↑True Lies“ starring the 38th ↑Governator. Every single piece of the footage used depicts clichées of ‘Arabs’ which until today make ↑Edward Said—peace be upon him—revolve in his grave at tenthousand rounds per minute, and above. Salloum’s movie is … Continue reading →

touchy

Posted on Monday, 15th January 2007 by zephyrin_xirdalOctober 1, 2012

Definitely I won’t repeat all the hype—if you are out for that, watch Steve Job’s Macworld keynote and the animations at the ↑iPhone homepage. What indeed strikes me is the usual Apple understatement, clear-cut physical design, and of course the multi-touch interface which promises to be intuitive to the max. And more than that—judging from the animations, the interface lets all our visions and dreams derived from countless science fiction and cyberpunk phantasies come true. If it really will work like illustrated above, enabling us for instance to push a row of album covers, neatly set up vertically on … Continue reading →

embodiment

Posted on Sunday, 14th January 2007 by zephyrin_xirdalOctober 3, 2012

The subpage ↑embodiment of the website ↑the green fuse is quite interesting and resourceful. Also there: ↑Adrian Harris‘ “↑Notions of embodied knowledge.” Additionally see, from the Department of Anthropology and Sociology at SOAS: ↑The transmission of knowledge. … Continue reading →

doomed ipod

Posted on Saturday, 13th January 2007 by zephyrin_xirdalOctober 1, 2012

F00 foo from ↑Acidmods ↑said: “Heres a little side project I’ve been working on. Playing doom.wad’s on my iPod with a NES controller,” and pointed us to the according ↑video at YouTube. This earned him a ↑story at hack a day—and he, who wrote it! ↑likes it, too. … Continue reading →

trail of sources

Posted on Saturday, 13th January 2007 by zephyrin_xirdalJuly 6, 2012

At the blog ↑How They Got Game 2 ↑Henry E. Lowood reflects about the issues I pondered in ↵defrag wikipedia. Here’s an excerpt from his ↑Wikipedia, sources, machinima, which also goes well with ↵wikipedia on cyberanthropology and ↵embeddedness of subcybercultures: This blog post raises a number of interesting issues about historical research and web archaeology. The fundamental issue (at least in the paragraph cited) has to do with the Wikipedia’s unique position in covering the recent history of web technologies and new media, along with related popular culture. Even when one is nervous about citing Wikipedia, what do you do … Continue reading →

games science

Posted on Saturday, 13th January 2007 by zephyrin_xirdalOctober 3, 2012

Three years ago ↑Anja Rau wrote: “Look at your map of European Game Studies. Is there a white space south of Denmark? There needn’t be. Over the past two years, game studies initiatives have sprung up in Germany, too, and the rate of activities is accelerating.” (↵Rau 2004) Just last year ↑Klaus P. Jantke founded a group called ↑Digital Games Science at ‘Xing’ (formerly known as ‘OpenBC’)—now there is the start-up of an e-journal called ↑games science as well. My fear is that an overview of all the German academical endeavours concerning computergames will very soon be quite difficult to … Continue reading →