This video comprises “1,500 hours of moving Lego bricks and taking photos of them.” It’s not particularly coherent in terms of theme, unless you call “8-bit games and music rule” a theme. Which maybe we should. Worth it for the chiptune soundtrack, the use of Lego as pixels and the particularly nice Pacman shots, which put you right into the maze.
Categories: Creativity · Ephemera and links · Games
Tagged: chiptunes, nes, pacman
FAIL is over – especially if you’re in China. Apparently, these are the Year of the Ox’s most popular linguistic terms on the internet (although we’re only halfway through the year). Wonder how long it will take for ‘yùzháizú’ – the Chinese word for otaku – to appear in Wired or the new William Gibson novel?
Favourite term: FB = 腐败 = fǔbài. Originally the corruption of government officials, now commonly used to refer to going out to have a nice meal. Oddly close to fubar.
(via @monglor)
Categories: Creativity · Web
Tagged: china, chinese, language, meme, otaku
In the 1980s and 1990s, the term ‘virtual reality’ was understood to mean the creation of reality inside the computer – and thus we would need to experience it using complex imaging and interaction systems (3D googles, cursors mapped to the movement of a glove etc.) The implication behind this was the reality itself would be untouched. The real world would simply be a home for the VR equipment: Star Trek imagines it holodeck as a big empty room, for instance. Moreover, since VR ran inside the computer, it only worked when you turned it on – and in movies such as The Lawnmower Man, the nightmare scenario was not being able to get out.
Few people imaginged that when VR came to pass, it would actually involve computers altering the way we acted in reality. The video below shows 100 dancers in central London recreating the dance from Beyonce’s music video for her song ‘Single Ladies’ (which Peter Sagal called ‘a wonderful, brilliantly performed dance number set to an irresistably catchy pop tune’). As a piece of PR in reality, it holds very little value – few people would have the chance to actually see it, as it the dancers and organisers take pains for it to appear to happen spontaneously on the street. It’s over in three minutes, and few of the people who happened to be walking by would actually be able to make sense of it because it only works if you’ve seen the original music video. Indeed, the behaviour of the dancers only really works if it’s watched as a video, passed around virally on the web. It is, essentially, VR: actions in reality that are targeted at, and only make sense when experienced virtually.
Categories: Creativity · Ephemera and links · Music · On Journalism and Media · Tech · Web
Tagged: beyonce, viral video, virtual reality
It's very black
Took the shot above yesterday at Tate Modern, and it’s the first one I’ve got from the iPhone’s camera that I’ve been really happy with. It’s from Tate’s excellent Mark Rothko exhibition…
Part 1: Overheard at Mark Rothko
Well, I say it’s excellent, but that’s if you like Rothko. If you don’t, it’s fair to say it’s not going to change your mind about him. It’s not like there’s a secret room of photo-realistic portraits or delicate watercolours in the middle of it. Despite the fact Rothko is one of the few 20th century artists to be widely known, plenty of people there seemed annoyed, offended and upset by what they found. Best exchange I overheard was a father leading his 10 year old son through the rooms, at pace, saying:
“Right, so the last room was the purple and black series. This one is the grey and black series. You see the difference?”
In close second:
(Man, looking at a massive canvas that’s absolutely covered in paint) “Well, it’s not really painting, is it?”
Part 2: The Camerabag iPhone app
You do get some interesting people at exhibitions. Families with babies that literally look like they’ve just come out of the hospital, perplexed French tourists and people who appear to have dressed solely to look like cliched art fans. It all makes for great photos, but unfortunately you have to contend with the gallery guards and the no photography rule. This meant the SLR was out, and the iPhone was in. I’ve written about the iPhone’s camera before, and as it’s not brilliant, I’ve tried out a few apps to see if they could improve it. By far the best has been one called Camerabag; it’s cheap, regularly updated (most of the bugs have now gone) and allows you to apply a series of filters to pictures you take with the camera. The idea is that the filters mimic certain camera styles – Lomo, Polaroid, monochrome etc – and it’s easy to use, and as you can see from the picture I took at Tate, allows you to get a bit more out of your phone pics. Well worth the £1.79 cost. For more, check out the Camerabag Flickr group.
Previously on the Wired Jester:
Art: Visiting Tate Britain’s Holbein exhibition.
Categories: Creativity · London · Photography · iPhone
My favourite piece of travel writing is short and to the point, but it questions everything about ‘here’ and calls to mind perfectly the change of ‘there’ that is its lure.
It is a description of people in an airport, and how easily they strike up conversation with each other. They are:
‘Strangers rendered open-hearted from jet lag’
(Pico Iyer, The Global Soul)
We travel to be operated on; by the sun, by the sights, by there, the place we want to get to, and most of all, by the miles of distance between there and here, by the separation itself.
Categories: Books and reading · Creativity · Thought For The Day · Travel
By now you’ve hopefully seen Juno; it’s a wonderful film with a sharp script and well drawn characters. It uses music beautifully, too. Rather than simply whacking it down as a thudding backbeat to some flash images (CSI), or using overfamiliar tunes to prop up dead scenes, the team behind Juno make the music integral to the shots it plays over. It’s distinctive, too – rather than the familiar grab-bag of orchestral/rock/pop/mulch that many films opt for – it’s generally acoustic, scratchy, and on the surface at least, quite twee. The opening in particular, uses a tune by Barry Louis Polisar that’s extremely… sunny… as you can see from this YouTube clip of the film’s beginning.
While playing the soundtrack, I looked up some info through the Last.FM app – and found some pretty funny tags hanging around Mr Polisar, as you can see from the screenshot above.
Even better, it seems like ‘drops wet cement on unsuspecting crippled children’ is not, as you might think, a lonely furrow to plough. Nope, as you can see, it’s quite a thriving genre:
Title and artists for a mixtape, right there people.
I actually think this is quite a cool use of tagging – just as we’ve seen users on Flickr using somewhat abstract, emotional terms to describe their pictures, Last.FM users are using tags for opinions/reviews/jokes. Just goes to show how complex a field search is, I think – plain text search is fine, but more often than not, people plot links to things based on far more intangible criteria.
Categories: Creativity · Web
Picture caption: The road to the future, yesterday. Lots of concrete and white light. No robots in sight.
It’s been a while since there’s been a longer post on the Wired Jester, so I thought I’d drop one in, partly because I’m quite proud of the above shot at London Bridge and wanted to show it off, and partly because I have genuinely been thinking about what to do with this site going forward. At the moment, I’m enjoying the link blogging – it’s quick, light and easy, and it fits in well with all the DIY I’ve been doing in my spare time in new house, but I have got a new idea for the Jester that will hopefully see it getting a little more use than just as a link repository. As ever, it’s just a matter of finding the time and figuring out priorities…
Categories: Creativity · In My Life · Site Stuff
Aside from grand dreams of writing a bestselling novel, my only real plan as I went through school and university was to avoid ending up being a teacher and to somehow make a living writing. I’ve been fortunate enough that apart from a brief spell as a bad telemarketer and a decidedly unmysterious mystery shopper, writing has been how I’ve made money to live. There’s a lot to recommend writing as a career, but it does mean that you sign up to be stalked – and eventually caught – by writer’s block.
I think it probably hits everyone differently; for me, it’s less the traditional big, black depressive weight and more a feeling of flimsiness and incredible lightness: when I’ve got it, I can’t focus or hold on to any thought and I’m incredibly easily distracted. But deadlines being what they are – albeit slightly less lethal than the Civil War originals – there are times when you just need to get on with it. So here are the methods I use when I need to crank out some words:
The first one to try is to start at a different point. One of the main disadvantages of how most people write now – using a word processor – is that it presents an unwritten piece of writing as a series of sequential blank lines that should be filled. It’s just not as easy to skip around in a Word doc as it is on a piece of paper, and I think this has contributed to people losing sight of the fact that only when a piece of writing is finished is it even remotely linear (and even then, if you’re B.S. Johnson, writer of the ‘book-in-the-box‘ that’s not true). So until you’re done, you can, as a writer go anywhere, and you should. If you can’t think of a good intro, but know what you want to say about a certain point, go there. Start where you’re most enthusiastic. You may even find that where you want to start should actually be the start, and that your fixed, linear plan – the one that made no sense to your writing brain, and gummed it up in the first place – needed fixing all along.
Secondly, if you’re convinced what your writing is just minging – that somehow, your prose is just having an ugly day – try doing the spade work instead. If you have any hand-written notes from the planing stage, or quotes you’ve underlined in books that you want
to use, when you’ve got writer’s block, it’s a good time to type them
into the word processor – it’s simple, useful work, and often, as you simply get into the typing, that your own writing will want to get going, too.
Because I like to believe the act of writing is more dramatic than it looks, this third technique sounds like a move from Streetfighter 2: unleash super stream fury. Written English is full of rules: spelling, grammar, good manners (such as not beginning a sentence with the word ‘ because’). If your inspiration is fragile, if you’re chasing a delicate meaning then these structures can easily halt your progress. So sometimes you need to just type. Don’t go near the comma or full stop buttons, don’t use the enter button, don’t think about tense or grammar: JUST TYPE. Don’t even look at the screen. Don’t be afraid to leave sentences hanging, or to repeat something in slightly different form. Just go for it, and fix it when you come back on the 2nd draft.
My fourth tip is similar to the first point: if you can’t write something, try inverting it. So if you’re writing a part of the piece that takes an overview of the situation, go for a closer look instead. Switch from the globe to the microscope, or vice versa. Although it’s a radical change, as it’s related to what you’re trying to write (i.e., it is its opposite), it will often work, and even if it doesn’t, it may help you figure out what it is you’re trying to say.
And finally, get out more. It doesn’t matter if you spend five, six, seven hours at the computer trying to write something and yet all you’ve managed to turn out is a few muddled lines. Quality, not quantity. A walk is a great way to clear the head, plus, if you’ve been huddled over a glowing screen for the last few hours, the flood of new images, sounds and smells from the outside world should act like a nitro boost to your cortex. It’s also a good opportunity to buy some milk/the paper/food for dinner, so even if you don’t get any ideas for writing, you can still tick a few errands off the list 
Categories: Creativity
“Teh internetz” are not always the best friend of the English language. Not that I subscribe to the idea that all this chatting on forums is ruining the kids’ ability to use language – after all, a language is a living thing, and should be, needs to be, remoulded, reworked, and re-engergised on a daily basis – but the IT world throws up some really ugly words, just plain minging arrangements of letters that should never be displayed on screen, let alone spoken out loud.
Nate Anderson at Ars Technica has a brief post up about a YouGov survey of the most annoying words spawned by the web. These include folksonomy, vlog and webinar. Nate adds a few of his own linguistic nails-on-a-blackboard moments – including the terrible ‘crowdsourcing’ and ‘AJAXify’ (although I’d disagree with his inclusion of ‘podcast’.
There are a few words that are regularly used to pepper press releases for hardware products, and have the same effects as seasoning your chile con carne with horse manure. Here are the terms that deserve to be publicly shamed like a first-round failure on X-Factor:
1. Solutions.
As in… “AMD continues to deliver technology solutions that improve the way we live, work and play.”
No. Solutions don’t improve things, they solve problems. ‘4′ is the solution to 2+2. Ordering a pizza when you’ve got no food in the house and everyone is starving. These are solutions, because they address direct, easily quantifiable problems.
2. Platform.
As in… “Creative is now driving digital entertainment on the PC platform with products like its highly acclaimed ZEN™ portable audio and media players.”
Nope. A platform is a place which trains arrive late to. Why even use the word ‘platform’ here?
3. Extreme.
As in… “NVIDIA’s GigaThread Technology, which, through the use of a massively multi-threaded architecture, is able to create thousands of independent, simultaneous threads, providing extreme processing efficiency for advanced, next generation shader programs.”
Nein. Forty degrees below zero. Fans of Adolf Hitler. Stoning people to death for stealing. These are extreme.
But the worst offender has to be…
4. Functionality.
As in… “Consumers today are demanding higher standards of digital entertainment experiences that enhance the very personal environments of their home,” said Satjiv S. Chahil, senior vice president, global marketing, Personal Systems Group, HP. “HP designers have achieved a much needed balance of form and functionality that enriches the experience and ease of use of today’s personal technology.”
What’s wrong with ‘function(s)’? If adding -ality to a word automatically added 30% more professionalism and excitment to something, I’d work for a publication called Custom PCality. You’d be searching the web with Googleality and enthusing about your iPod and its iTunesality. But it’s not, and you don’t. People, let’s end the -ality now.
Categories: Creativity · Tech
The phrase ‘in the dictionary, next to X, there’s a picture of you’ (where X is a negative term like stupidity) is a bit of an old comic standby – there’s a brilliant Simpsons episode based around it – and it works so well as a joke because it recognises the truth of another old saying: sometimes an image is worth a thousand words.
One of the interesting things Flickr has pioneered has been tagging; allowing users to label their photos. Flickr’s users (myself included) use these to not only describe what an image contains but also to describe what that image means – so if I check out the full list of tags I’ve used over the past couple of years, there are vague adjectives, adverbs and adjectives such as ‘contemplation‘ and ‘creepy‘ along with definite nouns like ‘London’ and ‘staircase‘.
I’m not the only one using tags for more than nouns – and given Flickr has millions of users and images, what this means is that you can use it as a visual dictionary. So, just for a bit of fun, I thought I’d put its powers to the test and look up Flickr’s top images for a few quite hard-to-define terms: FREEDOM, FEAR, PUNK, CONFUSION, IN LOVE, POWER, LONELINESS, HAPPINESS, EXCITEMENT and GOD.
I searched using tags only, and ordered my results by interestingness (i.e., the photos Flickr deems to have been most successful in terms of views and comments). I then thought I’d make this into a bit of a quiz to see how good Flickr is as a dictionary; I took the top photo for each search*, and they’re displayed below; when you roll your cursor over them, you can see what word they define.
* I used the top image, except where the Flickr user had disabled image downloading (as then
I couldn’t put it on this page with the nifty rollover answers), and I
also skipped any image that had the actual words in it.
Anyway, without further ado, let’s see how good Flickr is as a dictionary! Below are the ten terms I searched for, followed by the top image results – the first one on this page, the other nine after the jump. Just mouse over the pics to find out the answer. Let me know how you do!
FREEDOM, FEAR, PUNK, CONFUSION, IN LOVE, POWER, LONELINESS, HAPPINESS, EXCITEMENT, GOD
Categories: Creativity · Photography · Web
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