truck-canoe hybrids

xirdalium Posted on by

Water-Taxi in Bangkok
 

One of the key moments along my path ‘through’ sociocultural anthropology was when several years ago I listened to ↑Kurt Beck‘s presentation on the cultural appropriation of the diesel-engine in the Sudan (meanwhile published as ↵Beck 2001). Diesel-powered pumps finally replaced the saqiya, an ox-driven pump used for irrigating the fields located on the banks of river Nile. Later on followed ↵bedford’s metamorphosis: hotbeds of creativity—the appropriation of the truck in Sudan (↵Beck 2004), which inspired Gabriel Kläger’s website
↑Africars—the latter includes an ↑online version of the
hotbeds of creativity featuring a ton of insightful pictures illustrating the inventions and the whole process of reworking undertaken by the blacksmiths-turned-engineers.

The diesel-engine is not only culturally appropriated in Africa, but quite naturally around the globe. In his weblog-entry
↑Improbable engineering James Gosling describes Bangkok’s water-taxis, true truck-canoe hybrids:
 

One of my favorite hacks is the rather improbably piece of engineering known in Thailand as a longtail boat. They function as taxis and tour boats in the many waterways of Bangkok. […]

When you look at them when they get closer, you see a truck engine mounted on the stern with a long piece of pipe stretching out toward the bow that the boatman holds on to. There’s another piece of pipe welded onto the transmission pointing out toward the stern [.]

When the boatman pushes on his piece of pipe, it rotates the engine left, right, up or down. When he pushes down, it rotates the tail upward and you get to see the business end of the beast: a naked propeller just hanging out there.

Safety is not a real concern here. Balance is pretty dubious too. These boats are pretty narrow, 4ish feet at best. They’re really just evolved canoes. It must take an amazing amount of skill to stay balanced, navigate, and not kill anyone. At speed …

The engines are just regular truck engines, mounted on a U shaped yoke, bolted to the stern. Some of the engines are very large—they wouldn’t look out of place in a large Fruehauf tractor. Not a lot of standardized rigs—lots of welding fun. A truly glorious hack.

The story was made known widely via an
↑entry at boingboing by Cory Doctorow. A boingboing-reader furnished some
↑background on the water-taxis:
 

It’s not well known that those boats originate from a change in the British government’s motor vehicle Construction and Use Regulations in the late 1960s. What with the new motorway construction programme well under way, the (largely old) truck fleet had begun to get in the way. So the then Ministry of Transport introduced a minimum power-to-weight ratio.

This meant that a ton of trucks with Gardner LX 105hp (mostly) or Perkins P4 engines suddenly became obsolete. Exporting second-hand trucks to places that would accept them (essentially, the third world) was not great business, so they were either scrapped or retrofitted with more wallop. Hence a mass of very reliable, very user-serviceable diesel engines going begging.

Some sly fox saw a chance, and went round the country buying the engines and shipping them to Hong Kong and Singapore for sale to chandlers. As the engine arrived complete with the reverse box and the end of a propshaft, they just put in a length of shaft and a prop. Local boat builders came up with the rest and a new, unmistakable craft was born.

They still have (even brand-new ones with much later power units, radar and GPS) the traditional eyes on each side of the bow, a custom recorded everywhere from the Mediterranean to Japan and back into pre-classical antiquity.

initially via entry at boingboing | picture by James Gosling

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infinite trajectory

xirdalium Posted on by

trajectory_01
 

It happened at the Fighternight #5. At some indefinite moment during nighttime I took my headphones off, leaned back in my chair, and allowed my gaze to wander around aimlessly. Suddenly my eyes locked on the screen of a guy sitting behind me. There was ↑Q3A-gamespace, not uncommon, but an avatar cruised along a wall, through midair, following an unbelievable trajectory, the latter marked by a blue-glowing sequence of blasts from the plasma-gun—for the first time in my life I watched a tricking movie. My reflections on tricking are already jotted down (↵piling up—playful appropriation of gamespace and ↵appropriation by mastership)—have no fear, I won’t rephrase and repeat them here & now, but I feel the urge to appropriately hint to the two tricking-movies I like most. Yes, there’s a plethora of other excellent tricking movies, they are legion within the Q3A-community already. But the following two are my favourites. What I saw at the Fighternight #5 was
↑The Art of Tricking [19:30min | .avi | 469MB] by haZe and cyrus. My all time champion is
↑The Art of Tricking II [13:57min | .avi | 325MB], again by iT.haZe (Patrick Chita) and iT.Roffo (Jordan Roff). The cast furthermore includes iT.Dynam1c (Ryan Williams) and Meph1sto (Mario Weber). The prefix iT. stands for ↑team infinite trajectory, a Q3A-tricking clan.
 

trajectory_02
 

Here are some emic voices from a discussion on trickjumping which took place in September 2003. I won’t repeat the whole discussion, which consists of several strands of different topics and arguments, but only some selected parts which illustrate the trickjumper’s perspective on trickjumping and computergames, as well as the opinion of an opposed faction. The thread was triggered by iT.Roffo:
 

[iT.Roffo]

Trickjumping capabilities?

Hi,

Coming from a quake3 trickjumping community I myself and many others are dying for a new game with a high level of ‘trickability’…

We don’t hold too much hope in ↵doom3 or ↑quake4 but i heard a rumour that ↑painkiller [see also ↵world’s greatests] will have these capabilities? if so I thank you already

Its not just trickjumpers that want these settings, but every fragger, considering ↑strafejumping adds a level of skill to the game just not possible with the convential standards of map / item control etc…

A bit later a contradictory vision was voiced:
 

[Maniax]

Trick Jumpz like in Quake are not good at all IMO [in my opinion]. I play a game called ↑Gore, and it has stamina, so it stops those jumpz, because your stamina will go down if you try to do it. I think Painkiller should insert a Stamina system, it makes games alot better IMHO [in my humble opinion].

This led kr33p to jump in and emphatically defend the case of trickjumping:
 

[kr33p]

nah, trickjumping is ADDICTIVE! Not necessarily used for DM [Death Match], but more for just messing around and seeing what you are capable of. If you could join a jump server you would see. I used to compare it to going to a virtual skate park where you and the other players sit around and talk about different tricks, explaining to each other how to do them, attempting them several times and then when you finally are able to complete the trick on a regular basis you actually feel good and feel like showing everyone else how to do it. It promotes an extremely friendly gaming community when it’s not about competition, rather about fun and helping each other out. And i’m not even a tricker!

kr33p immediately got supported by iT.Roffo:
 

[iT.Roffo]

:-) @ kr33p

Games that use stanima systems kill it imo. Strafejumping gives the game that extra skill thats easy to learn but hard to master, such as cs, bunny hopping was possible but now it isnt, and its a whole lot less fun now… (not that i play cs at all :P)

In order to have the most fun trickjumping maps need to be high with a lot of ledges etc :-)

Trickjumping just adds an extra aspect towards the game (meaning more reasons to buy it), believe me there are a LOT of q3 trickers even though the game is 5 or so years old.

If you want to see an example of a trickjumping video (quake3) download my clan ‘iT’s first video from here: [meanwhile dead link] go to download page and choose a mirror :-) (sadly im not in the vid as i wasnt tricking then :P)

Inserts and hyperlinks by me. I placed them to enable the occasionally dropping by anthropologist to follow the somewhat far-distant topic ;-)
 

trajectory_03
 

screenshots from The Art of Tricking by haZe and cyrus

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time machine cuba

xirdalium Posted on by

poster by charles whiteside
 

Within every human individual there is a personal eclectic conglomeration of ambiences and narrative content built from a lifetime of experience, assimilating information, and digesting popular culture. When this conglomerations are shared by a group of people, we deal with the metaphorical and symbolical web which we call ‘culture’. The latter is constituted, built and rebuilt by ever-changing, interlocking feedback loops of the associative kind. William Gibson not only “has tapped right into our collective cultural mainline”, but delivers a personal account of how ‘culture’ is generated within the individual. Here’s a quote from his essay ↑time machine cuba—I learned of science fiction and history in a single season:
 

[…] I found only a few faded lithographs (as I now imagine they were) of airplanes. But these were airplanes unlike any I had seen, and they held my attention in a peculiar way. They were old, clearly of some other era, but exciting, and somehow frightening as well. Squatting there, staring at them, I felt as though some enormous wedge of information was being driven into my head. Various bits and pieces of half-knowledge were coming together, forming some new and utterly unexpected whole.

The following snippet reminds me very much of how ↵Stephen King experienced the cold-war era:
 

Sirens were tested regularly, along with something called “the system”, and the dial of my first transistor radio was marked, twice, with that same symbol, indicating the two frequencies set aside for Civil Defense.

via entry at william gibson | poster by charles whiteside

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animac

xirdalium Posted on by

ANIMAC danceress
 

The picture above is a “photo montage featuring a dancer with body mounted sensors controlling real-time animation on the ANIMAC, 1962, Denver.”—another pre-cyberpunk cyberpunk-image.

Weird coincidence—provoked by my entries on Tron and the interaction with SFAM, I remembered that there was a student-project in gamedesign which culminated in writing a full-fledged 3D-engine. The final product was a racing-game based on the solar sailor seen in the movie Tron. Unfortunately I couldn’t find anything about it on my HDD, so I went on searching the Internet. During the search I stumbled over ↑A Critical History of Computer Graphics and Animation, which is a tremendous resource. As I am prone to get lost in resources like that, I saved the link and for now refrained from diving into it. About half an hour later I checked the ↑Anthropology Newspaper and discovered Seapixy’s ↑Consumption—Tales for a modern anthropology … modern anthropology, commodities, consumption, cultural appropriation—all right, that’s a blog to read! Et voilà, there’s an entry on ↑Computerized Visual Imagery. And within this entry there is, you guessed it, a hint to Tron (“I saw Tron, marvelling at this early CGI attempt.”) and a link to ↑A Critical History of Computer Graphics and Animation at Ohio State. There is ↵voodoo on the net. Seapixy hints to ↑Section 12:
Analog approaches, non-linear editing, and compositing, which indeed carries an amazing story:
 

Perhaps one of the earliest pioneers of this analog computer animation approach was Lee Harrison III. In the early 1960s, he experimented with animating figures using analog circuits and a cathode ray tube. Ahead of his time, he rigged up a body suit with potentiometers and created the first working motion capture rig, animating 3D figures in real-time on his CRT screen. He made several short films with this system, called ANIMAC.

Wikipedia is at a loss concerning this topic, but the second part of the catalogue accompanying the Ars Electronica 1992 has some substantial information:
 

↑VASULKA, WOODY AND STEINA VASULKA. 1992. ↑Eigenwelt der Apparate-Welt: Pioneers of electronic art. ↑Endo Nano [Part 02]. Santa Fe, NM: Burning Books.
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lightcycle

xirdalium Posted on by

Lightcycles
 

SFAM
↵reacted at the speed of light, and moved his
↑review of the 1982 movie Tron up at
↑cyberpunkreview.
And as I already mused on the
↵recycling of cybercultural topoi … if you are more deeply interested in the computergame ↑Tron 2.0, have a look at
↑Gamasutra’s
↑Postmortem: Monolith’s TRON 2.0 by Frank Rooke. Here are two quotes from it:
 

From the start, it didn’t take long for many of us at Monolith to recognize that a TRON project was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, not simply because we believed the film would lend itself to great gameplay, but also because of the movie’s status as a
cultural icon. As a high school student at the time of the original theatrical release, I remember it piquing my interest in computers and videogames. Whether at the time I fully realized the film’s impact or not, it certainly planted seeds that flourished later in my life. Since the start of the project, I’ve spoken to many people about TRON, and I repeatedly get the same kind of story: “It’s why I’m into computers,” “It’s why I’m into 3D graphics,” “It’s why I’m into gaming.” […]

We asked ourselves, what were the core elements that provided TRON with its unique identity? Not surprisingly, we immediately isolated the disc and light cycle as iconic elements from the movie and marked them as mandatory features for the game. However, once we started looking past the obvious, we were a taken aback by the sheer quantity of other essential TRON components. To compound the issue, it became evident that different people—meaning various people on the team, at BVG, in the press, and at TRON fan sites—all isolated different elements or events from the movie as true TRON moments. What began as a simple checklist became a forum of discussion that never really concluded until the completion of the game.

↵Lightsabers, lightcycles—that seems to be the stuff that moves us …
 

Lightcycle Race
 

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cinema was yesterday

xirdalium Posted on by

… today is ↵machinima! Be sure to get ↑the other movies by ↑Snoken Productions, like Battlefield Double Dash, The Biggest and the Best, and Ya Rayah. They simply are hilarious. I hereby award the ↑Tex-Avery medal for outstanding accomplishments in the art and science of cartoonesque-absurdity and -stunts to Noken and friends.
 

car
 

car2
 

jet
 

skydiver
 

boat
 

crate
 

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mine

xirdalium Posted on by

Mine 2
 

This piece of ↵machinima features insane surreal humour inspired by Monty Python, Finding Nemo, Madagascar … creatively and congenially staged in ↑BF2: Snoken Productions’ (↑Official Forums) ↑Mine [12:05min | .wmv | 68MB—many other sizes and formats scattered all around the net]. I mean, like, that’s cyberculture! And ↑there’s more by producer, director, stuntman, and clan leader Marcus “Noken” Johansson [who obviously has gathered quite a team around him] … even things to come—the screencap above was taken from the ↑Mine 2 trailer [01:41min | .avi | 21MB]. With all this development of the machinima-scene—who still wants to go to the cinema? The Sergio-Leone flavored cap below stems from the Snoken Forums.avi
 

Once upon a time ...
initially via e-mail from 2R—tnx!

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cyberpunk review

xirdalium Posted on by

Avalon
 

No, that’s neither ↵Teh_Masterer, nor ↵him—it’s a character out of ↑Mamoru Oshii’s 2001 movie Avalon. I took the screencap from ↑cyberpunkreview.com, a blog and “The most complete cyberpunk movie site on the net”. It’s nicely organised, decently looking, and the reviews are in-depth. Everyone with an inclination towards cyberpunk will find movies there s/he desperately wants to watch. And there’s more—beyond reviews—there. Cyberpunkreview.com goes directly into my blogroll.

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protest

xirdalium Posted on by

Yesterday the students of ‘my’ institute, the ↑Institute for Sociocultural Anthropology at the ↑Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München launched a weblog called ↑protest. The blog is meant to be a platform for the organisation of measures against the current state of teaching at ‘my’ institute. To set matters straight: The students are not protesting against the teaching of my colleagues and me ;-) but against the structural ‘weaknesses’ concerning number of personnel and finances. Good luck gals’n’guys!

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