September 29, 2004
Games you should know about...
Well, today Justin gave me...the look. The look that says: why aren't you updating your blog!
The reason? When I'm not doing absurdly crazy things like writing my own soundtrack for my movie or doing freelance music work to earn a quick buck, I'm playing KATAMARI DAMACY (DAMASHII for you Japanese purists out there). If you have a PS2, get this game. Best 20 bucks you'll spend this year.
That is...if you can find it. As you can probably tell by the link, it's sold out. That's the way it is everywhere. Slashdot even linked me to this article from intrepid acquaintance Chris Kohler talking about how no one on the retail side of things accounted for how insanely popular this game would be at launch.
SO! If you need a game to play while waiting for KD to come out of backorder, check out ABA Games, where they have fantastic shooters and action games (all made by a single person, even) that are extremely fun (and difficult) and add all sort of neat tricks to what many consider a very tired genre. (I've been sitting on this website for more than a year now, and I'm still surprised that I didn't get any of the other guys in my classes in on this.) My personal favorite game would have to be one of the very latest, TUMIKI FIGHTERS, which lets you grab hold of the enemies that you shoot down and use their firepower to your benefit. There's a great balance of aggressiveness/defensiveness that plays into this, since the more things that stick on to you, the harder the game gets.
Everything else on the website is also worth checking out. Many of the games use something called BulletML... a markup language for describing bullet patterns! How cool is that?
Posted by diamante at 09:13 PM | Comments (0)
September 18, 2004
Visualization...
Just a couple of links right now...
Yet another way of visualizing spam: http://weblogs.asp.net/oldnewthing/archive/2004/09/16/230388.aspx
And another way of looking at...recipes? http://www.cookingforengineers.com/
I think the second link is just fascinating; the conciseness of the recipes confined within graphs combined with the straightforward, text-book approach describing the processes. Part of me thinks that it's just absurd while part of me wonders why I haven't seen something like this before.
It makes me think more about how I should change my approach to video game review writing...
Posted by diamante at 10:37 AM | Comments (1)
September 09, 2004
QR Codes
After looking at the use of barcodes in Perry Hoberman's Workaholic and barcode hotel, I was reminded of just how much information you could store in the NEXT GENERATION OF BARCODE. Yep, you've seen them on UPS packages, and they have a name: QR Codes. Two dimensional barcodes.
NFG Games has a great little tool for creating QR codes out of any text data you want to store. Seems to be a very Japanese thing, moving photos of these things around between cell phones, and it's pretty darn nifty. 30% of the code can be obscured and the data will still be properly parsed. Wonder why guys on this side of the pond don't use it more...
Posted by diamante at 01:04 AM | Comments (2)
September 07, 2004
Tomorrow, Perry Hoberman (installation artist extraordinaire) is in town to talk about: Recycling Post-Consumer Media Content.
Also tomorrow, Vincent Diamante (myself) is dragged into town to: facilitate discussion between students and this frighteningly interesting topic.
Being the good student I am, I googled (verb, transitive) his name a bit and found: Hey! I’ve seen this guy’s stuff!
A little more than a year ago, I ran across a Slashdot article featuring Perry’s work. And then there was the article in the Daily Trojan, of all things, talking about a man that was saving all of his spam and turning them into art. It’s all rather fascinating STUFF, making me look at my own collections of STUFF (of which I have copious amounts) and prompting me to start work on cleaning out my inbox of the 13427 spam messages I was so quickly endowed with…
It’s all very timely material.
The latest work on Perry Hoberman’s website shows off his 2003 collection, ACCEPT, that looks at some of the latest issues to hit the tech community. End User License Agreements, spam, and even the OK/Cancel dialog box do not escape his touch. (wrath?) The absurdity of it all is both laughable and scarily close to reality.
Nowadays, Perry (artist and interactive culture commentator) is working on: wormholes. Awfully cool looking stuff, but more reminiscent of a computer distribution TV commercial than previous exhibitions, with their POWER DRILLS and BAR CODE READERS and OLD COMPUTER TERMINALS.
The thing that throws me (myself) (yes, I’m forcing it. Chalk it up to pomo. I know, it’s SO 1980s…) for a loop for this lecture tomorrow is the title: Recycling Post-Consumer Media Content. Okay…Post-Consumer Media Content. Stuff that has exhausted its original consumer usage.
And now I wonder about how one should judge this exhaustion.
(Maybe Post-modernism isn’t so 1980s…)
His Faraday’s Garden takes lathes and lights and blenders and let’s the resounding din grow out of it all. Here all these instruments lie, unattached to what is needed to let them fulfill their initial consumer purposes; they’re here to make music. This was 1990.
Cathartic User Interface gets into the utterly purposeful world of computer feedback and reappropriates it with the similarly purposeful art of venting; fastballs into computer keyboards buffer the strike of those ubiquitous application errors quite nicely, I’d imagine.
I think the problem with the title is my inability to think of anything as losing its use. Old paper that I can’t write on? Crushed up aluminum cans? I can understand recycling those into newer, leaner, meaner, more useful things than what they’ve degenerated into. On the other hand, the tools of interactive media: scanners, physical interfaces, displays…I can’t think of them as losing their usefulness. Somehow, for these things that are built with the indelible mark of their own timeliness, their timeliness suspends their own obsolescence from emerging, thanks to this nearly neo-post-modernist understanding of awareness and absurdity that has emerged in the increasingly savvy world of interactive technology.
At Siggraph ’95, Hoberman is quotes as saying: “We live in an age in which technological paradigms shift about every half year. Almost every month seems to offer radically new media. Overnight, new standards are created and, suddenly, what was once exotic becomes merely commonplace (if it isn't totally forgotten).” I can’t help but disagree, that commonality breeds familiarity, not forgetfulness…or perhaps I’m so out of touch with the general consumer that you can’t help but think about how VERY WRONG I AM.
(We’ll find out!)
Here are some questions that I have, and perhaps they’ll inspire your own questions for our esteemed speaker tomorrow:
Is the art of his immediate future an art of control or one of resignation by the viewers/listeners/appreciators, etc.?
Does Wormholes fit into an art of empowerment between individuals or one of separation? Is it a play on awareness or simply a series of play?
Where is society moving to in its constantly evolving view of technology in art, and just how restrictive is installed technology in creative uses?
How are the technological paradigms shifting in this world increasingly burdened with technological restriction? Lightened with progress?
And...just for those interested in my blog... why do I have a category named: "Cheese"
Posted by diamante at 06:13 PM | Comments (1)