So, there’s this video going around of a robot band playing the B-52′s “Rock Lobster”. Read all about it here.
Uh, right, okaaaaay. Let’s compare that to the original, recorded live in 1978:
(It’s a Youtube video, but embedding is disabled for some reason. Click the picture to make some noise.)
Which one did you think was better? I rest my case.
———-
Bonus video! Radiohead’s “Nude” covered by machine band BUT DONE RIGHT:
Some people have taken to describing the Internet’s current state as “the attention economy”, where it’s the attention of the casual reader or browser that is the main earner. The logic states that where we spend our attention is where we will spend our money.
This accounts for the popularity and success of boingboing, digg, and reddit – websites where you see a curated collection of things that you might find interesting. The downside of this is that nearly everything on those websites isn’t something new, but rather something that is on the internet in an easily consumable form. The person version of this could be called attention philanthropy. It’s a form of information that you can slurp down whilst sitting in your easy chair, browsing the internet.
I’m not saying I’m browsing the internet from a chakra-enhancing spike, but it’s important to get out and do real stuff occasionally. Not everything should be something that comes in webpage-sized chunks.
This is one of the reasons I like magazines. Magazines are very much like those attention economy websites I mentioned early, except that they are not bound by the drive for new stuff that can be linked to, and that they can create new things. That’s why I’ve been subscribing to a few different magazines this year, looking out for new and interesting things – the sort of thing I won’t hear about on my favourite online hangouts.
One of those magazines was Aesthetica, a magazine based in the UK which covers a high-end cultural remit. I had some big hopes for Aesthetica, but I ended up cancelling by subscription to it today. I couldn’t work out why, but every issue that I picked up wasn’t that engaging. It just seemed to end up buried under a pile of other stuff. It wasn’t until the most recent issue’s article about a show at the MoMa that I realised why – because the author took the time to describe the concept of a readymade.
I’m not going to waste my time describing what a readymade is to you. You’re smart. You already know what a readymade is, and you’d just be bored by my description. But if you were writing an academic essay, you’d throw that description in for context. In the context of this article, however – in an expensive, high-end cultural magazine? It’s not fun to be dragged back to the classroom. Academic writing isn’t entertaining writing, as Paul Graham pointed out recently.
I’m still keeping my eye on the magazine market. I got the new issue of Coilhouse recently, which seems to have a lot of interesting things in it, and The Believer’s collected essays
As the following post shows, I’ve been messing around with my iPhone a bit. I left a huge comment on a Guardian article on Jailbreaking, relating my experiences, and I thought I’d republish a tweeked version of it here.
I don’t do anything that weird with my phone normally, but in the past few days I got so fed up with iOS4 on my old 3G iPhone that I decided to roll back the operating system to 3.1.3 using the howto on Lifehacker. This took two pieces of software (one program and one download) and it made my iPhone much quicker.
And I mean really frustrated. I used the new operating system for at least two weeks, and I thought I was going to have to buy a new phone. The damn thing was useless – slow, laggy, bad at doing the things it used to do par excellence. I don’t think it was some sort of high-level Apple plan by evil men in turtleneck sweaters to force me into buying new phones, I just don’t think they properly tested it on the older generation of iPhones.
Above: Youtube user Adam Burtle‘s parody of the new operating system. As several people have noted, including Daring Fireball, it’s pretty accurate.
Several times, I reached such a point of frustration and anger that I had a mental image of ripping the phone apart with my bare hands, shattering glass and bending metal. Prior to the iOS4 update (the new operating system that goes hand-in-hand with the new iPhone 4) my iPhone had been a gadget that I never failed to be impressed by. To go from loving a gadget like that to picturing it’s demise is really weird, and perhaps a sign of some internal imbalance in me… but what can I say? I followed all of Apple’s rules, and ended up with something worse when they promised something better.
This breaks an implicit contract that Apple make with iPhone users. “Let us control your computing,” Apple says seductively, “and you’ll have a fantastic experience.” With the new update, I feel like they broke that covenant, and in fixing their mistake I had to go and download software that is semi-legal.
Having done this, it occurred to me that I should now Jailbreak the phone. The new method (released this week) seemed easy, and I had little to lose because I’d just wiped my phone in the process of downgrading the operating system. So I did it, it worked first time (over 3G) and I logged into the Cydia store with mounting excitement…
… to find a load of useless applications. Change the font of my iPhone? Have five icons on the bottom instead of four? Have a different background? Install an SSH application? Hungarian spellchecker? NES Emulator? No wonder these applications can’t be got via Apple, as they are either useless or worthless (depending on how much Hungarian you speak).
There do seem to be three useful applications, only two of which are legal: a tethering app (to use the 3G connection when out and about – of which I think O2 might have something to say), a wireless syncing app, and a bluetooth keyboard app. None of these applications are free, and seeing as they aren’t mission critical for me I don’t think I’ll chance paying for dodgy software.
Am I glad I jailbroke my phone? Not really, it was pointless. But I am glad I rolled back the OS to the last generation – that really made a difference. Of course, by making it so hard for me to do that, Apple pushed me into a state of mind where I no longer want their “curated computing”; I just want something that works. Maybe Jailbreak will grow up and be something useful in the future, but right now it’s just for the nerds.
And frustrated Hungarians.
I sat down few days ago and made a concerted effort to watch Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind. It’s a long, slightly flawed movie, but in the third act something interesting occurred to me. It wasn’t the fact that the alien spaceship was very cool, in that pre-CGI filmmaking way, nor anything else to do with the craft that Spielberg put into the film.
Instead, it was the fact that most of the new media artists I know would give their left tit to to make something that looked as kick-ass as the alien communication device. Which was made in 1976, but looks equal to Jenny Holzers latest.
In fact, the scene where they finally communicate with the alien spaceships has a lot in common with most new media gigs, shows and festivals I’ve been to. There is the epic lightshow with some minimal music (which isn’t really meant to be understood), there is a king-sized MIDI controller at the centre of the action, and everybody on stage is a man who is old enough to know better.
Also in common with most of these new media events is the crowd: it’s always a lot of men, standing around. Looking cool.
I was a bit concerned that the main character, Roy, decides to leave his family and run off to hang out with the aliens (it seemed unrealistic) but he had driven his wife and children away by building a large-scale model of a mountain in their front room. I actually thought the model was quite cool though, but perhaps the previous decade of living with artists has prepared me for living with batshit insane people. Hey, coming back to find a scale model of Devil’s Tower in the living room would be a pleasant surprise compared to some of the things I’ve seen flatmates drag back.
For anybody like me who made it to the end of this movie, I’ve created an iPhone ringtone of the five classic tones. Now you can use your iPhone to make peaceful contact with beings from another planet, show your appreciation for classic sci-fi that depicts a hopeful vision of humanity, or simply nerd out in an audible way. Simply right-click close encounters ringtone and select your operating system’s version of “save to disk” in order to download it as a hand-crafted* m4r file.
* it really is a hand-crafted ringtone, by the way. I spent about five minutes in Garageband making it. I have no idea what other devices an m4r file works on, so anybody not using an iPhone is on their own if they want to use this.
I had Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars on my iPhone for about 72 hours before I deleted it.
GTA:CW is supposed to be one of the best games out there for the iPhone. It offers an immersive world, with full sandbox features, and it’s a continuation of one of the best game franchises around. So why is it so terrible on the iPhone? It’s not a straight port of it’s earlier incarnation on the Nintendo DS, but a well-crafted rejigging of the game for the iPhone’s particular aesthetic.
What it fails to do is to take into account the situation it will be played in. The most successful iPhone games offer the chance to step out of whatever mode you are in (say “waiting for the bus” mode) and indulge in some frantic button-bashing. Nobody can resist the simple charms of Canabalt (also available online as a free flash game), but GTA:CW is a far more complex affair. And, as a more complex affair, it suffers from needing more complex controls.
It’s been mentioned in other reviews that GTA on the iPhone suffers from control issues. This is true. It’s almost impossible to control the game “in the heat of the moment”, and I struggled to drive cars around corners when not being chased by the police. It was like playing whilst wearing gloves, and led to a lot of aggravation when trying to complete some of the missions.
This game cost me six pounds, and unlike nearly every other game I’ve brought (on any platform) I realised it was a lemon. I think what really did it was the inclusion of mini-games, something I’ve always found annoying. Why would I want to break the flow of one activity I’ve committed to to play another, smaller game? This was an essential flaw in all of the later Final Fantasy games following FF7 – if I wanted to play cards, I’d play a card game. Quit wasting my time. Similarly, if I want to buy molotov cocktails, I will resent any time spent playing the “make molotov cocktails” game. Particularly the little stroking motion required to stuff the rag into the bottleneck.
This is a game that demands attention, but this is the wrong format for that. iPhone games are about distraction, not immersion, and GTA:CW requires you to log in some long hours, focusing on a (simulated) life of crime. If it had an adequate control system, allowing you to rampage across the city (as the earlier console versions did) then I could forgive it and utilise it as a cathartic release. But it doesn’t, and I can’t.
GTA Chinatown Wars might be the iPhone game most likely to appeal to hardcore gamers. For everybody else, it’s a bad introduction to what gaming can be.
Way back in the eighties, there was a program called the “Why Don’t You…” Club, which generally encouraged people to get up off the couch and do something. This something was usually illustrated by some people demonstrating it on TV.
Today – actually, as I write this, today, not the more generalised contemporaneous version of ‘today’ – people across the UK are being told that they should write to their MP to stop the Digital Economy bill. This is a bill that has created a lot of impression with people who usually don’t care about any form of politics, because it intends to criminalise the act of illegal downloading. The bill also makes a lot of other things stupider and shittier too, but it’s the illegal downloading thing that seems to be motivating most people to write to their MPs.
In general, I think the bill is a bad idea, but I’m pretty discouraged that this is a topic that is getting people involved with politics. It’s being sold as a simplistic one-note idea, when in fact there are a myriad of factors that mean that we should reject this bill. For starters, you don’t get to choose when your preferred business model stops being relevant, but on the other side of the coin you can’t continually pander to those who only want free things all the time. It’s a big bill though, and there are a lot of problems with it – as this piece by Charles Stross shows, when he talks about the issues faced by creative people working across national boundaries.
But here’s the rub: the people who are most opposed to this are people under forty, who are most involved with online culture. At the same time, it’s become almost impossible to buy a house for anybody under forty across most of the UK (currently, first time buyers are creeping up to the age range of 35-37). Renting a home is a minefield of dodgy landlords, little or no protection from the law, and totally bastard letting agencies.
And everybody knows this.
It’s not something that boils down to a single issue though. If the same amount of effort was put into the housing market as the continued effort to save the current status quo of the internet, you bet we’d see some improvements. But until this becomes a hot topic, until it becomes something so urgent that it can be compressed into a single soundbite, we won’t be pressuring our MPs on the subject.
We shouldn’t need to have somebody saying to us “why don’t you… become politically involved in a subject that directly affects you, and everybody you know?”, should we?
(SuperAmazingDoesItForYou video link)
After a morning spent tussling with installing, then uninstalling Zotero, I’ve finally had it with those instructional videos that software designers create. I think that nothing beats the written word for communication of information, but I’m consistently finding that complex software is being explained by the use of an instructional video.
And usually, that video sucks. Seriously, what’s up with programmers making videos? Are they bored of typing all day?
So, in the spirit of the age, here’s a video for my new, forthcoming product, SuperAmazingDoesItForYou. I haven’t actually got round to writing any of it yet, but I’ll let you know as soon as I do.
I hate and love the way we browse the web.
I’m almost certainly somebody with a high degree of addiction to the written word. It’s not an internet addiction; I was raised in a family that has an unholy veneration for the written word, and the advent of the internet just allowed me a greater access to a wider range of subjects. More often than not, it’s the next link to the next interesting thing that keeps me stuck in my chair. I can get stuck into a subject, and emerge with my eyeballs throbbing and the front of my skull feeling weirdly disjointed from the rest of me. I’m sure you know what I mean – hotels in Berlin? Patagonia? The Russian space program in the pre-perestroika eighties?
Hey, we all have our foibles.
For me, this love of words is so strong that I don’t bother to watch explanatory videos. If you can’t write a few paragraphs of text to explain your project, software, or website, then it’s likely that I won’t watch the video. I tell myself that the reason is for this is that my reading speed is so high, I would deal with text better – but it might be that I just love reading.
But what I dislike about the way we browse the web, this hopping between different sources, is the lack of depth that it encourages. Not in the writers, authors, and creators, but in the reading of what we see online. If a particularly good, well-researched article is published online, you’ll see a flurry of links to it within the first few days, gradually dying off over time. There’s also a major “bubble” effect, where people on the internet write about people they know on the internet, and claim that it’s important.
(Sadly, this is also part of our economy as well; it’s ludicrous to think that any of the dotcom businesses are not incredibly overvalued at the moment, including the larger companies such as Google and Yahoo! If you disagree, look at Yahoo!’s rapid fall from grace after last years attempted takeover. These companies are still as overvalued, as they have been for more than a decade.)
It’s this bubble that causes the lack of depth. Our system of search, our way we hunt out interesting things on the internet, is based on the recommendations of such a small and narrow-minded set of interests that we see only a fraction of what is available. Compare typing into Google to walking through a large bookshop, or a library; you’ll never get distracted by an interesting title on the way to your email. You’ll never linger in the economics section because you caught a glimpse of an attractive person browsing around there. And you’ll never pick up a copy of Borges’ Fictions because it has a great cover.
And that’s what I hate; the narrowing down of accidental discoveries. Because without that, we’re all reading from the same page.
Further Reading
