Ecletic interesting links and articles collected by an animator, writer, and ex-PhD student
Nick Adams took some brilliant images of Burning Man in 2008. Click here to see them. Even if you don’t go past the first photo from the Burning Man 2008 file, go visit to see that one.
Don’t know what the Burning Man is? It’s an amazing performance-involvement art festival that I’ve written about it before, check out some of my earlier posts for more information.
Do you remember those intensely annoying ‘wassup’ adverts from a few years ago? The cast have got together to try and get you to vote (for Obama, in their preference). You know, that’s actually redeemed them in my eyes. Wassup 2008 video here.
(Link found via the ever-curious William Gibson Blog.)
Fancy being nosy? Here’s a selection of photos from cameras that were lost at 2008’s Burning Man festival.
General trends:
Everyone seems to be good looking
Face paint never goes out of fashion in the desert
Furry leg warmers might be impractical in 40 degrees C temperatures, but that doesn’t stop people wearing them.
Go, browse, enjoy the guilty pleasure of looking at things that were never intended for public viewing. They’re posted with big codes on them in the hope that the owners will see them and get them back, but it’s weirdly fascinating for the rest of us!
Don’t know what the Burning Man is? I’ve posted about it before. Have a browse of those posts here.
It does exactly what it says on the tin link. Random computer game name generator creates weirdly believable game names and is almost gauranteed to amuse you for twenty or thirty seconds, or longer if you actually try to imagine how ‘Medieval Jazz Jihad’ might work.
Before we get going, here’s an intro for anyone new to all this:
Spore is a computer game recently released by EA and made by the same people who did The Sims.
DRM stands for Digital Rights Management. Essentially this means systems that limit the ways in which a customer can use things that they have purchased. The main idea is to prevent piracy.
DLC stands for DownLoadable Content. This usually refers to extra things that can be downloaded for games, often for a small price (e.g., a more powerful gun, or a different track to race on).
That’s the basics out of the way…
Spore has been getting a lot of attention recently from the gaming press and public. The game consists of five sections that fit roughly onto a wide view of evolution, starting with your creature as a microscopic lifeform and following it all the way up to becoming a race of space-faring beings, at which point you can go off and conquer the galaxy (which has been populated by the creatures belonging to other players).
You can create your creature to look and move in many varied ways, with some incredibly clever animation technology making almost anything capable of walking around. Needless to say, the first things that many people attempted to create were walking penises. That’s gamers for you. Will Wright, the main and most public creator behind the game, said to the AP that some of them are “amazingly explicit, especially when those creations are animated”, but does go on to talk about making sure these don’t spoil anyone else’s fun… No screenshots are attached, before you go looking!
Reviews of the Spore have been generally approving, but player reactions have been more mixed when they are discussing it. Many players have had issues with the DRM on the game. This software, provided by SecuROM, installs itself on your machine without asking for your permission and attempts to ensure that the software is not installed more than three times before a new copy is required to be purchased. Many players have said that they frequently clear their harddrives and would be annoyed that after a year they would be expected to buy a new copy of the game.
Some people have been driven to piracy by DRM: I’ve not had this confirmed about Spore, but I do know of other DRM-heavy titles where people have purchased legitimate copies of a game then downloaded illegally shared and hacked copies from the internet to install on their PCs. Why? The hacked versions don’t have the DRM on it. Clearly, this is an issue that some people feel very passionately about.
I can’t help but wonder if the games industry is setting itself up for trouble here. For how long will people be prepared to do the honest thing and purchase a copy of a game when they intend to download a hacked version to install? Will it take much longer before they get frustrated with persistent DRM issues and decide to not spend the money at all? With the international market and instant online price comparisons, some people in Europe are getting understandably angry about paying twice the price that American gamers pay for the same product.
From the perspective of the games industry, especially companies specialising in PC games, DRM seems essential. When Crysis was released earlier in the year it was reputed to be one of the most pirated games released for a PC, forcing the company into deciding to not make PC exclusive games in the future. Estimates range between 4 and 7 times as many copies of the game were downloaded illegal when compared to legitimate purchases. Yikes!
What can the games industry do about this? Consoles such as the Xbox 360 and Playstation3 provide some part of the answer. Their operating systems are less customisable (exceedingly so for the 360) than a PCs, so pirated games are harder to get working, but there still remains the second-hand market on eBay and through high-street retailers, where a single copy of a game can make the retailer £100+ during its shelf life through sale, exchange, and resale, but the manufacturers only get a percentage of the initial sale.
The best current answer is DLC. By selling small downloadable items for games that can’t be transferred between systems or user accounts, the manufacturers can continue to get revenue from games, even if they have been pirated or sold second-hand. Advertising in games is downloaded to online consoles and computers. When you drive past a billboard in a game you might notice that it’s changed since the last time you played: that’s a new image downloaded onto your machine, and a tiny bit of money added to the bank balance of the game maker. DLC has many advantages for the manufacturers, but the balance isn’t so equal for consumers, who end up with limited use of the things that they have paid for.
While DRM on games like Spore is reacted to strongly (even provoking one unwise moderator on the game’s forums to threaten to disable people’s game accounts if they don’t stop discussing it), it doesn’t seem to be denting the popularity of the title among people reviewing it online. Both expert and user reviews still rate Spore highly despite the problems, and EA claims that a lot less than 1% of the game’s owners will be likely to encounter a problem with the DRM. It could be the usual case of a few people on the internet shouting loudly about views that don’t reflect the majority of the population, but I do wonder where it’s going to end…
Recently I was trying to put CDs onto my mp3 player, something which I am legally entitled to do, but I could get the disk to rip to my harddrive. I tried all kinds of things, and eventually discovered that the software refused to rip because of DRM restricting the use of the CD. I know my rights, but I couldn’t use the disk the way I wanted. I still wanted the music, so I downloaded an ‘illegal’ copy of the music I already owned because it was the only way to use it the way that I wanted.
I think that some form of DRM is going to have to come into place eventually because people will always try and take things for free if they can, but we’re a long way off from it being a solution that is beneficial for the manufacture and sufficiently flexible for consumers.
There’s a whole bunch of images from this year’s Burning Man festival filtering onto the main website.
Click here to go to the 2008 Burning Man photo gallery (some nudity is likely to be in the galleries, although no sexually explicit images are probable). If I see any really good personal galleries I’ll also be linking to them from this blog, so why not add it to your RSS feed using those links on the left.
For those who don’t know, The Burning Man festival is a art and improvised living… Thing. It happens in the Black Rock desert in Nevada, just around the corner from the famous ‘Death Valley’. The ticket says that ‘you voluntarily accept the risk of death in attending this event’ and they’re not kidding about. The desert can kill you, and the only thing provided by the organisers is toilets. Strictly speaking, they also provide a layout for the city, some vague safety nets, and naturally the man himself. The man is a huge structure of wood, around 5 stories tall, which sits in the middle of the city and that is burnt in a huge party on the last night of the week-long festival. During that time you see and, importantly, participate in bizarre and wonderful works of art. Check out the pictures for a taster!
I went to the festival in 1999 and 2002, and I’m going to go back there next year. I can’t wait! The theme for 2009 is Evolution: A Tangled Bank. Read more about it over here. The design for the eponymous man also looks fantastic. I’m excited already! Only 357 days to go! Woohoo!
Excellent use of space… But I didn’t notice a letter box. I swear I’ve lived in worse places than that. Smaller ones too.
In case you’ve blanked news out for the day, the Large Hadron Collider, the LHC, was turned on today. It’s taken 30 years and some silly number of billions of pounds to make a really big ring so boffins can make streams of protons hit each other at light speed then see what happens. I did write in with a suggestion that they shine two torches at each other, but they never wrote back. I would even have supplied the batteries.
Anyway, apparently the amount of energy used is likely to create a Higgs Boson particle, which somehow gives all other particles mass (although exactly how or why I really don’t know). Then again, it might not. What this boils down to is that a load of guys underground in Europe are going to perhaps make a very small black hole. They insist that this is completely safe, which it probably is, but that doesn’t stop everyone else wondering if they are about to destroy the world, which brings me to the point of this..
In case you need to check if the LHC has destroyed the world, there is now a convenient website that is monitoring the situation and allows you to check:
http://hasthelargehadroncolliderdestroyedtheworldyet.com/
It’s a good joke, but the real comedy will escape 99.9% of viewers. Check out the source code for the page:
[script type="text/javascript"]
var gaJsHost = ((”https:” == document.location.protocol) ? “https://ssl.” :
“http://www.”);
document.write(unescape(”%3Cscript src=’” + gaJsHost +
“google-analytics.com/ga.js’ type=’text/javascript’%3E%3C/script%3E”));
Comedy gold for web techy people.
[I removed the email address from the code to try and prevent him getting spammed by bots that may scan this page, but it's there in the page's code if you want to find it yourself.]
Apparently, not much at all. I’ve always thought that many cables are ridiculously overpriced, and so this article really cheered me up!
Shear genius by the underpaid workers over at the 2008 Olympic gardens. ‘Shear’… Geddit? Like ’shears’… Used on hedges…
Woah. Tough crowd.
Did any of you ever flick through the awesome book of Japanese street fashion called Fruits? (Incidentally, there’s a sequel, UK link
As I’ve mentioned on here before, I’m a regular visitor on the LOLcat website Icanhascheezburger. I found out today that they’ve got a related website for politcal and social satire called PunditKitchen, although I think LOLpolitics is probably a better name. Anyway, it’s got a decent ratio of smiles per picture and updates every few hours, so give it a try.
In the UK, we’ve had an advert for ‘New York Deli-style’ mayonnaise. The idea of the advert is that the mother, who is making sandwiches, has been transformed into a male New York deli owner by using the product. Get ready for the shock - s/he kisses goodbye to her/his husband! On TV!
Beware. This advert may signal the beginning of the apocalypse.
I’ve got no problem with this whatsoever, but it’s rather funny reading the comments of people who do… Or perhaps it’s a bit tragic? Or maybe people on the internet all have their react-o-meters instantly set to eleven. My favourite response? It’s tricky, I’m torn between two:
The first time I witness this advert I shall be complaining loudly to the appropriate authorities, and will certainly not be buying the product.
That wins points for deciding in advance of seeing the advert to ‘complain loudly’ afterwards. It’s good that they’re keeping an open mind until they’ve seen it.
Second up we have a wonderful bit of hyperbole:
This is what the word boycott was invented for!
Err… No, I don’t think getting in a flap about a mayonnaise advert was what the word was intended for. I also like another comment that describes the leader of the Christian Anglican Church, Rowan Williams as a “liberal druid”. Priceless.
For UK readers, you’ve probably already guessed that these delights come to us courtesy of the Daily Mail. (In fairness, there are a fair number of sensible people on there too, who can’t see what the fuss is about.)
What a fantastic set of creations he’s left us, and what an inspiration to future effects artists.
Here’s the tribute from Ain’t It Cool, and in case you need reminding of all the things he’s done, here’s his IMDB page. He made The Terminator, the Predator, and was instrumental in making H. R. Giger’s designs for the Alien come to life. He’s a great loss to special effects.
If you’re reading this, then you probably already know what’s happened. You know what’s going on. Just start running now.
There’s a great article in the New York Times today about the difference between US and other nations in respect to the laws on freedom of speech. (You might have to log in to read it, but it’s free and quick to do.) In particular I liked the quote from Jeremy Waldron, who is rather interestingly described as a ‘legal philosopher’:
It is not clear to me that the Europeans are mistaken when they say that a liberal democracy must take affirmative responsibility for protecting the atmosphere of mutual respect against certain forms of vicious attack.
Many people argue that any infringement on freedom of speech is, by its nature, wrong, but I strongly believe that the leaders of a society have the duty to ensure that an ‘atmosphere of mutual respect’ is maintained and defended.
Harvey A. Silverglate, a civil liberties lawyer, defends the American system (where you are allowed to be as offensive and lie as much as you want) by evoking the old chestnut of Hitler:
The world didn’t suffer because too many people read Mein Kampf.Sending Hitler on a speaking tour of the United States would have been quite a good idea.
Given that there was some support for the doctrines of Hitler around the world, I think the idea of giving him the opportunity to gain a greater following in the US could have been a very bad idea indeed… Which just goes to show once again that lawyers don’t always think through what they’re saying, and that hyperbole can land you in a lot of trouble.
Back in 1919, Justice Holmes adjudicated on a case that set much of modern law’s attitude towards freedom of speech, and hate speech in particular:
The best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market.
… Which is cobblers. That’s like saying that watching adverts allows you to make an informed decision about which products you need to buy. There are always people who will be swayed, or who will find encouragement for existing predjudices, by the dissemination of decietful or biased material. Even a racist can sound charming if they want to: learning to be persuasive is easy, and there are always people who are happy to follow anyone who sounds like they know where they are going, which is why I think that the UK’s and other countries legal approaches to hate speech are an improvement on the US system (albeit sometimes with flaws, but they are a step up).
If you don’t already check by the LOLcats website then I advise you to do so very regularly - it updates every few hours and provides smiles and sometimes laughs on a daily basis.
One fan of the site decided to take things a bit further, reproducing the classic ‘invisible bike’ LOLcat as a mural on the side of his building in San Francisco. If you fancy going an seeing it for real it’s on a tiny street called Quincy, between Grant and Kearny.
I was asked today by a friend who is studying about how to get homework done. There are loads of tips that will help, but here are my biggest ones:
Tip 1: Get into a routine of doing your homework regularly
Spend an hour doing it immediately when you get home from school/college. There’s usually rubbish on the television at that time anyway! When I was sixteen I used to always work hard for an hour when I got home and kept well ahead of all my home work. These days I make my lunch for the next day and then go an do some exercise - learning to set beneficial routines makes your life and work a lot easier in the long run.
Tip 2: Turn off the internet connection and use books for your references
Don’t ever check your email while you are in your set study period. Turn off your messanger software. Don’t check facebook, myspace etc. Don’t even stream music you’re unfamiliar with. Don’t reply to text messages. No-one will be sending you anything so important that it can’t wait an hour for a response. Get rid of all distractions and force yourself to work every. single day. Whether you want to or not, get your work done. Set yourself realistic and useful targets and don’t stop until you’ve achieved them. Do all this and you’ll find it a lot easier to get the grades you want.
If it’s really impossible to get away from distractions then try working in the school/college library. They’re usually open for at least an hour after school.
Tip 3: Get ’studying music’
This is a personal favourite of mine - whenever I have to work hard I’ve got an album I listen to which I know helps me focus. Find something with no lyrics that you can basically ignore very easily, because lyrics tend to distract you from what you’re trying to write. There are loads of good electronica albums out there, so I’m sure there will be ones that you’ll like. As a starter, try Lifeforms and Dead Cities by Future Sound Of London, Amber by Autechre, Takk by Sigur Ross (unless you’re Icelandic and will sing along!), or anything by Global Communications (all the albums are superb studying music).
Tip 4: Follow my other essay and exam tips!
Learn to organise your ideas - the way that they come to you the first time isn’t always the best order to make your argument. More tips on organising ideas for essay, dissertation, or PhD thesis here.
When you need to write under pressure then you need my top exam tips. They helped me for many years and really work, even if you’re just trying to write your homework.
This advice works no matter what level you are studying at, from school up to finishing a doctoral thesis. If you have any questions then add a comment and I’ll do what I can to help!
Sorry my worldwide chums, this one will only work for people in the UK:
An utterly lovely 1min 30sec film ‘about’ a very unusual penguin colony.
I get so much spam that it’s lovely when I occasionally get something with entertaining random text. Could this be the old Digital Shakespeare trying it’s virtual hand at prose?
Hohe hoholulu
Much better after coffee and eggs and bacon. Murder pleasantly,
that anything you say will be taken and i’m perfectly certain
that he drinks. He’s her an examination, then sat back in
his chair not a year older than her friend, looked like
in the stocks to dry. John swore to revenge horribly but
you must realise that this murder is very led me to a little
wooden frame which hung against would be out of place. When
the millionaire spoke, nodded. What do you think, my little
one? He inquired, she doesn’t understand violence.’ ‘carrie
louise the ‘tempest’? I hope not to continue in the ‘tempest,’
against the dead, resumed mrs. Percy rapidly, countries.
that was the stage to set. But behind so that the roses
in her large hat almost brushed.
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