Internet theory. Jim Killeen googled himself and visited people all over the world, that got the same name like him. The name became a tool – an orientation subset vast global network. (via)
Thanks Vague Terrain! Otherwise I hadn’t noticed the Glitch Studies Manifesto, Rosa Menkman released at the end of January 2010. The cool thing is, that you cannot only download that stuff as a pdf, bit I can also embed it here into my blog. So I do:
“The Glitch Studies Manifesto is now ready to be read and destroyed!”
Queue
Increpare Games has an interesting slogan: “Let’s try something out here…“. If you expect experimetal works now, than you are absolutely right! The stuff I tried so far on the site are explorations of narrative forms, somehow in between storytelling, classical writing and game interaction. If you got 10 minutes of time, checkout for example Queue.
Mixer – Strelka
Fil – Fil2
I recently found this cool Spectrum ZX fan website, with lots of content about the Spectrum ZX. This small homecomputer was quite successful in the early 80ies, and still today, we can learn something meaningful from it. For example “achieving more with less“.
Look at this gallery-page. It contains pictures from artists, mainly from Russia, Slovenia, Poland – some are very well executed. Due to the limited palette of the ZX (and the strange colors as well), the paintings strongly concentrate on lighting, instead of pure form or textures. Also look at this game-screenshots. Some gaming scene are made by one color + black! Totally pragmatic and ill looking as well. Definitely like it! (via)
Lately I was having the “fun” of customizing a website for showing up nicely on the browser, but also on the iPhone / iPod Touch as well. I wanted to do this job without supporting completely new views or html for the mobile device. The solution was, to do some tight customizing of the css-files, in order to show custom portions of content on regular browsers or on the mobile phone. One thing that helps is thinking css-class-definitions just like objects you know from OOP (object orientated programming). Each class got it’s properties, and you can select to show them or not, depending on the device, that is browsing the site. A little bit like adding informed behavior to your plain old html, depending on the browser, that visits the site.
Ok, let’s start! We first need to find out, if the site loads on a mobile like iPhone or not and load custom css, that contains css-data only for the mobile. Follow this tutorial to get a healthy start. It provides a standard-technique to do this task. It’s really simple, it loads a css-file only if the browser-width is smaller than 480 pixels in our case.
Type in
<link media="only screen and (max-device-width: 480px)"
href="iphone.css" type="text/css" rel="stylesheet" />
The Global Game Jam 2010 also started in Cologne. I attended the kick-off, which was more like a gentle breeze of air. The project-brainstorming and the forming of groups was absolutely accurate and on time. The games that are going to be created as part of the Global Game Jam 2010 have to stand under a certain topic: “deception”. I personally did not liked the topic that much, but nevertheless it lead to more or less robust project-results. There were also another constraint: the game had to include minimum one of the following: key, monkey or donkey. I had the impression, that monkeys clearly dominated the show. Anyway… first thumbs up for the organisation-team from the Cologne Game Lab and all participants. Let’s hope, that also the game-submissions will be in between light air and stromy winds.
The “Graffiti Research Lab” progresses with their self-set goal: to explore new possibilities with graffiti. Technology also plays an important role for them. Their latest work is the so called “EyeWriter“. It is an open source eye-tracking system, that allows to “draw graffiti with your eyes”. In order to so so, they use a webcam and some LEDs, to light the pupil and track it. The technology is low-cost. The idea of starting that project came from a real-life event. They teamed up with Tony Quan, aka TEMPTONE, who was diagnosed ALS in 2003. Since then, he got problems moving his body – except for his eyes. The EyeWriter now brings back the joy of doing graffiti again to him.
The research lab is progressing also in other fields as well. They established the “Graffiti Markup Language (GML)“, an XML-based language, to “exchange motion data of graffiti-tags”. They also opened up the “000000book (read: blackbook)”, a social platform for exchanging works, based upon GML.
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