You remember Space Quest, don't you?
Or, at least, that’s what I expect to hear soon enough, now that Apple is in the battery business.
It’s hard to tell if there’s such a fragmentation of visual culture that the post-ironic, repurposing crowd exists at a convex location from the materialist/idealistic crowd or if they’re right next to each other but, because of how we project them, they get split in half and floated away on an imaginary ocean. You know, like Greenland when you run a Lambert Asian Conformal Conic.
To muddy the water a bit, I offer this piece of <3000 viewed Youtubedness:
What’s going on here? Is it an attempt to show how absurd dancing is, or to show how absurd arguments are? Or is it just playing a game with highly responsive digital tools (that’s about the only excuse I can imagine for the Brendan Frasier clapping meme) and the actual message isn’t a message at all, other than, “Look, I did something cool with Final Cut!” which is, ultimately, so idealistic as to be childlike, and hence the exact opposite of the ironic implication of much of these memes. I think there’s a serious schizophrenia in modern underculture media production, to the point where I’m no longer sure if anyone is reflecting at all about what they’re producing and how it’s communicated.
I took the liberty of updating Apple.com’s woefully out-of-date description of its Adobe Flash Player for Mac.
Now includes information for iPad and iPhone owners!!!
There’s such an insidious breakdown in the quality of a story after you write it down. It’s not even the writing, it’s that people read it and they just accept. Like they’re listening to old-time mystics, like these things happen because they were meant to happen, no matter how terrible the fight or touching the makeup. In reality, they’re so much more emotional. You lose that in writing because you can’t express to the reader the uncertainty. To them, we make up because it says, on page thirty-three, ‘They make up’.
But there are forms of storytelling that have been able to avoid that.
There was this old computer game, Zork. You run around solving puzzles and fighting, but you could mix something up, do the wrong thing at the wrong time, and it didn’t let you know. You keep playing, oblivious to the fact that you can’t win.
It’s simple, really. You run around collecting treasure—platinum and jewels and… stuff. Well, one of the treasures is this Faberge egg, all covered with jewels and gilt. But the egg isn’t the treasure, it’s what’s inside: this little bird, made of gold. No matter what you do to open it, the bird always gets broken and ruined. Like in life, there’s no warning and, just like in life, there’s nothing you could do to fix it. Video games nowadays, they’re determinist, derivative or just plain porn. But those old games, they were like life.
Life, not random but not determinist, not like a book. Why does every linear work need conflict, suffering and pain, why can’t it just be a happy story about love? Because it follows a pattern, it has to: because linear narratives can only do so much.
In Zork, there’s this thief, he prowls around while you’re playing, and if you’ve got something valuable he takes it, that’s why when you find the treasure, you have to lock it up. If you let him have the egg, he’ll open it. Turns out you can get the egg back, later, and next to it is this beautiful clockwork canary.
But I don’t know if it sang, because I always broke it.
Not the kind you’re expecting, but rather watercolor interpretations of AGDI’s remake of the classic Sierra On-Line 16-color sequel to the only briefly named Hero’s Quest: So You Want to Be a Hero. Now, before you scoff, I know the artist and she’s eminently capable of producing more detailed work, but the goal here was to recreate the sense of 320×200 resolution with limited colors in the style of Persian miniatures.
Having Tea with the Enchantress Aziza
The ending scene with the sultan
The marketplace around the fountain in Shapeir
. . . . . . .
. . @. . D
If . . . . . makes you quiver in your boots, but maybe you’re no longer so worried about suffering Yet Another Stupid Death and instead you wish you could get together some friends to assemble a ballista and shoot the damn dragon, then you’re Dwarf Fortress material.
As an aside, if you have no idea what that @ symbol is supposed to be up there, then there’s not much I can do for you. Back to Dwarf Fortress.
Dwarf Fortress is a Rogue-like virtual life simulator wherein you make a small society of midget alcoholics dig wells. And tan hides. And forge copper goblets. And it has aquifers. If you really feel like you need to know about the game itself, do what the Internet does and look it up on Wikipedia, because what it does isn’t nearly as exciting as what naturally occurs as the result of the interaction between simple rules-based elements. The goal of Tarn Adams, the game’s creator, is to build a functioning world that creates emergent narrative. While this kind of thing has been hinted at in various sandbox and world-domination games, Dwarf Fortress is the first to my knowledge that has built-in structures for creating a long-tailed history of a living world. Your dwarves will engrave important events on their walls, and they’ll leave behind an abandoned hall (a la Moria) that an adventurer can later explore. The world is built not only through realistic geological and environmental processes, but populated by rules-based ‘legendary’ people and states.
It’s currently a .28 release version, and while you’re menaced by rather moronic goblin sieges (Adams is as critical of them as anyone) you can still have an amazingly good time harnessing the killing power of magma, mining ore, smelting it, creating alloys and using that to fashion goods (And everyone knows I’m a big fan of ancient metallurgy, even the fantastical kind). It’s not any one individual activity that makes Dwarf Fortress interesting, though, it’s that they’re all running together, to create the semblance of a functioning society that goes beyond a glorified ant farm and becomes almost (still not quite) like a story. It’s quite an amazing thing.
Carl Jung, Joseph Campbell and the Unknown Troper? Yeah, maybe.
Because while you’ve been desperately trying to keep up with the mind-shattering connectedness of Facebook and Twitter, an entire culture based on shows, books and, well, tropes you’ve probably never heard of has sprung up, organized itself and managed to co-opt the very classics you’ve neglected to read. Didn’t realize the Epic of Gilgamesh has elements of a Zombie Apocalypse in it or that the Anenid has anything in common with The Blues Brothers? That’s because you don’t get it. Somehow, while we weren’t looking, the Internet soup finally managed to get that Cthulhu, Dungeons and Dragons and All Purpose Cat Girl Nuku Nuku really do make up a common culture with Daoism, Lando Calrissian, 西游记, Final Fantasy, hip hop, the Lolrus and, well, everything.
It’s all tied together with a common understanding of comic book superhero powers, video game mechanics and memetic mashups. Even the academics recognize that there’s something that ties together all these strange, seemingly dissimilar cultural artifacts. Don’t know what a critical existence failure is or the tripartite model of videogame space? Would you be able to recognize a 30 Xanatos Pile-Up? If you’re sure by now that I’m making this up, put yourself in my shoes, I have to live here.
California, that teetering, bankrupt, furlough-doling entity that was once the swaggering bully of these United States…
I have it on good authority that the California Arts Council so badly wanted a hokey, hipster, digital art piece for their California Arts Day Poster competition, that they’ve decided to eschew traditional art as too stodgy and not have any poster at all. It’s hard to find the original call, but it had such warning signs as the use of the word “mash up”.
And then, of course, there’s something like this:
MMORPG, oil on canvas
Thanks to Wikipedia’s tech-blog we can see how Michael Jackson’s death looks from the perspective of server load and traffic:
Wikipedia Load Spike - MJ RIP
Traffic Spike
This kind of epiphenomenon is the bread-and-butter of research that tries to interpolate social causes from digital reverberations. Not that any such research is going on, but once we’ve all grown sick of mining vulgar Latin textbooks for word preference, we’ll develop procedures to handle stuff like this.
Updated to note that the second-order epiphenomenon related to this is the crash of Wikipedia’s tech blog due, I assume, to the massive amount of traffic I’ve sent it. In 30 years, I imagine some poor PhD student will be trying to track the traffic-related crash of tech blogs to the death of pop icons.