“Okay, I’m a little bummed. I didn’t learn anything.”
Best blog comment on my panel at SXSW this morning, above.
A good time and great discussion. Diverse panel, mosty sober audience (and panelists). Crappy interweb in the room though. Not sure it streamed into SL. Anyone know?
A few more thoughts here:
Note: lots of smart people at SXSW. Lots of good insights. Proficiency using microphones: not so much.
The truth hurts, don’t it?
Transcript (ish) on 3pointD here. More soon …
Digging in the virtual sands
It seems like just yesterday that the Eternal Egypt website debuted. In fact it has been over three years. Image content has steadily been added since launch, but the most popular experience on the site remains the Virtual Environments, 3D recreations of important places in Egyptian history. On the website these environments are panoramic slices of fully-modelled locales. In 2004 there was no good way to put a 3D world into a browser (still isn’t, come to that) so we rendered off static QTVR’s from dozens of vantage points. Compelling, but clearly a step down from the actual, navigable models.
Ah, but there’s more to that story. The Eternal Egypt Kiosk was developed as a freestanding unit that displays the full environments, arcade game-style. These kiosks have been donated to museums around the world and are quite a hit, especially as Egyptomania has resurged of late.
Here are some screenshots from the three environments: the Tomb of Tutankhamun, the Great Pyramids and Sphinx, and Luxor Temple.
With a joystick and a few buttons you move about the world learning as you go with the help of text and image overlays. It’s a lot like a MMORPG, without the MM or the G. And that’s the thing, the kiosk is great fun, but it is utterly devoid of others. Like you’re the last archaeologist living. Gee, if only someone were creating a truly collaborative cultural heritage MMO …
SXSW Screenburn panels in Second Life
The good folks at Electric Sheep will be streaming the SXSW Screenburn track of panels onto Sheep Island starting on Saturday. If you can’t join us in Austin, how about visiting there? Who knows if the kinks will be worked out by Saturday morning for the first panel (mine), but we’ll be in there if all’s well. Nothing like sniping at panelists from the metaverse.
Sheep Island this-a-way.
A bit more.
Dude, where’s my car?
Some people misplace their car keys. I misplace my car. Often. See, I don’t drive very much, commuting to work by train as I do. And I park on the semi-anonymously gridded streets of Chicago. Add to that the frequent dustings and dumpings of snow and loaning it to friends in the neighborhood and it can be damn hard to find.
Enter Twitter. I’ve been wanting to do something with this much-buzzed, nanoblogging tool, but I really didn’t think my daily minutiae interesting enough to submit. (And I still don’t.) Hell, this blog is boring enough.
But as a mini-blog of my car’s location, it is absolutely perfect. I give you …
Don’t steal my car please. Oh, and someone add geotagging to Twitter. That’d be nirvana. (Update: thank you very much.)
Shudder
Yesterday I watched two extremely disturbing movies, Open Water 2: Adrift and Jesus Camp. One was infinitely more troubling than the other.
Open Water 2 is a sequel only in that it uses the same premise as the first which is simply and completely this: people stranded in the water at sea. Horrible, of course, but this one tries to up the ante by plopping the bobbing humans into the drink right next to a yacht that they cannot climb back onto. Whoops, forgot to put the ladder down! Panic ensues. People die. But wait there’s more. Did I mention that there is a baby who’s been left on board the boat? And a monitor on deck that faithfully transmits her hungry, neglected wailing to the stranded floaters (including her parents) boatside? Sound awful? It is. Most movies of this ilk ask for a generous suspension of disbelief, but Open Water 2’s premise manages to be completely unbelievable yet still disturbing. I don’t recommend this movie if you are a poor swimmer, afraid of the water or being alone, a parent, or if you’ve ever been a child.
But the stomach-churn caused by Adrift pales in comparison to Jesus Camp, last year’s documentary about an evangelical summer camp for young Christians. I actually had to turn away a few times. Simply couldn’t watch as little kids trembled and cried and threw themselves to the ground for God. The adult organizers of this camp are truly scary as they prompt the kids into ever more ridiculous shows of their faith. The implicit — and a few times stated — impulse is that if the Muslim world is creating armies of mindless devotees in madrasas then Christianity best do it too. What’s so troubling is how mature these little kids act. Like they are reading from a script. There’s absolutely no shred of free-thinking or even childishness. And that’s the great shame: to be raised in an environment of such unquestioning dogma that the wonder and curiosity of childhood is not even an option.
I’d rather be the kid trapped on the boat, frankly.
Ghana@50
Today, the nation of Ghana and its sizable diaspora celebrate fifty years of independence from colonial rule.
My family, while not Ghanaian, feels a special affinity for the country. About six years ago, we first met Margaret Kumi, an experienced nanny looking for a new family. In short order she was part of ours, and we part of hers. She introduced us to the Twi language, Ghanaian foods, authentic kente cloth and a world much beyond our own. Margaret is no longer our nanny. She’s more like a grandnanny, a Poppins-esque treat for the kids.
Seems like just yesterday I was getting emotional for a country I’d never been to as they marched further into the World Cup than anyone thought.
And mark your calendar Chicagoans. Ghanafest 2007 is right around the corner.
Paleocomputing
Anybody out there sitting on vintage computing hardware circa 1972? (If so, why?)
Coudal Partners is creating a great short film (for which I am an Executive Producer) and they need some help for their set. We have a few options, but could use some more.
Not familiar with Coudal’s film work? Well, the Copy Goes Here.
Head south, then southwest, then split the difference
SXSW Interactive is a little over a week away. I’m excited to be leading the first panel of the festival on virtual worlds called Terraforming the Internet. Even happier to announce the confirmed speakers.
Ben Batstone-Cunningham, Alt-Zoom Studios
Jan D’Alessandro, Meez
Eric Rice, Slackstreet Studios
Bill Victor, Halcyon Worlds
Talented, experienced, articulate, all of them. I am told they are mostly well-groomed. But don’t let grooming be an issue. If you’re in town for SXSW don’t let a Friday night hangover be an excuse not to come to our panel Saturday morning. Makes for a better discussion.
If you’ll be in town and want to meet up, drop a line.
And if you won’t be in town, why not? How can you pass up a conference with panels like Web Hacks: Good or Evil (or: Welcome to Web 2.666) and
Game Perverts: A Robot, a DS and a Dot Matrix Printer Menage a Trois?
Or for that matter film screenings for Hostel 2 and Helvetica and music performances by Girl Talk and Hoodoo Gurus. Something for everyone!
Move it, sugar!
Remember the Urban scar tissue post? No, of course you don’t.
Well, it was about the way cities have of slowly assimilating unused infrastructure and how this becomes visible when you scale out, looking at the city macroscopically. The earlier post showed the way the buildings have been shaped by the tracks that are no longer there, a ghost-limb of transportation past.
But the very southern edge of the line is still in use. Twice weekly. It is called the Sugar Train and it delivers sugar to a confectionary. The tracks, embedded nearly flush with the pavement sans sleepers, slice through private backyards and parking lots. My gym prohibits parking on the tracks tuesdays and thursdays because of the delivery. Up until last week I had never seen this mythical train.
Turns out this delivery route is a fantastic pain in the ass for everyone involved. There’s a small army of engineers that walks with the engine and single car as it creeps through the north side. Gates have to be unlocked, backyard equipment pushed aside, and — in the case of my gym — owners of cars have to be found. Seems that twice a week the train comes to a stop at the club while the management goes elliptical-to-elliptical asking people if they parked on the tracks.
I stood outside with clearly-irritated trainmen as the massive engine belched and growled, mere inches from a car parked directly across its path. I struck up a conversation and urged them to exercise right-of-way, crushing the pathetic vehicles like matchbox cars. They declined. In fact, they eventually gave up and backed the train down the tracks to who-knows-where.
I love that this throwback train exists, but you have to wonder: wouldn’t it be easier to deliver the sugar by truck at this point? The train basically spends a full day inching through roadblocks that the city inadvertently lays across its way. I’d love to know what the actual story is. Why the train is still a better option for the candy factory.
Mission Elapsed Time: 20:00:21:06:42:40
I went back through it this blog (and my Flickr account) on its 20th anniversary, retracing digital footprints made on what feels like a different planet. Here are some highlights.
The Terror Tourist
A roughly monthly exploration of places in horror fiction — real or imagined, geographical or psychological — culled from The Heavy Leather Horror Show.
Subscribe to the podcast or the email newsletter or just read through the archives posted here.
The Ampcamper
How I hauled myself, two teens, an 80 lb dog, and a whole load of crap 4000+ miles across six states in twenty days using an electric vehicle. And survived to tell the tale.
