… it seems that I have succeeded in cramping the necessary feedback-loops into my inner cybernetic system responsible for controlling my motor functions. Now I can perform a circle jump and come out of it with 500+ units per second (ups), and yesterday night I reached 1012 ups by single-beat strafejumping on cos1_beta7b’s red track. That’s one small step for a trickjumper, one giant leap for Teh_Lamerer.
from biology to culture
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
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.
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.
… 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.
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 verbalize. A plethora of means is used by the community to nevertheless teach the skills: written and illustrated tutorials, movies, and demos, and more sophisticated tools like DeFRaG’s Head-Up Display (HUD) and the additional CGazHUD, especially designed for helping to learn strafe-jumping. The latter is ↑discussed controversially inside the community. Personally I take it to be a good teaching-tool, also it renders the HUD closely as complex as that of a tactical aircraft. Alas, that again is an indicator for the demanding nature of the practices in question. To sum it up, methodology and didactics of “Gensesis” are chosen and honed in order to teach the embodied and hardly to verbalize knowledge of trickjumping. Apart from that it’s a wealth of gaming-culture riffs and not a few good jokes. Download it if you want to have yet another glimpse into actual gaming culture. And again I have to ask ↵where has all the violence gone?
The notion of ‘Barlowian cyberspace’ is no news, I know, but nevertheless worthwhile to clarify. ↑Jakub Macek summed it up nicely:
For precision’s sake I hunted down the according quote:
And now for something completely different. Barlow, who ↵describes himself as “a retired Wyoming cattle rancher, a former lyricist for the Grateful Dead, and co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation,” displays an impressive humanistic stance in his writings. He succeds in attempting the equilibristic feat of treating even the tragical imponderabilities of life with a kind of adequate humour which never makes me feel that injustice is done to the subject. His recent blog-entry ↑“Alas, Vince Welnick” on the suicide of his friend, late Grateful-Dead keyboarder Vince Welnick, is just wonderful. Within this entry there is an austere paragraph, by far the best I have yet read on a particular phenomenon:
↑William Gibson‘s comment on academia’s appropriation of the word “cyberspace”:
In the same short text I found proof that Gibson indeed makes use of Burroughs’ cut-up-and-paste method ;-), as there is a whole paragraph stemming from ↑Rocket Radio (↵Gibson 1989), containing the eternal sentence “The Street finds its own uses for things—uses the manufacturers never imagined.” (↵Gibson 1991: 29).
Another one, ↑“Lepus” (2005) [18:39min | .ogm | 440MB] by fei of ↑Shaolin Productions—he says: