Another SAKE reference point — National Novel Writing Month is an annual writing challenge. It isn’t about the quality of the writing, it’s simply about getting to 50.000 words in 30 days. I guess a large part of the fun comes from the knowledge that many others are doing the same thing as you are.
Prior art for Pig Chase that I was reminded of yesterday during Kevin Slavin’s talk at Playpublik. In Sharkrunners, human players try to intercept sharks with a digital boat. The digital sharks are controlled by GPS-tagged live sharks.
(via blog: A Friend in Need)
The previously blogged Vengeful Tiger, Glowing Rabbit post lead me to this painting. Pulling this from a blog where it is accompanied by the following reflections:
Most of them appear to have their own separate personailities. The one on the far left is a chuckling son of a bitch(literally), he’s just there to have a good time and pretend he’s people, then we go into the more serious players like the one in the middle. He’s not there to fuck around, he wants your dog money so he can go and gamble it away on the people races. That’s what dogs would do in this parallel universe, right?
The writer of Vengeful Tiger… has a different perspective:
Cassius Coolidge’s famous painting of dogs playing poker, “A Friend in Need” (circa 1903 and still going strong), typifies the retrograde consciousness that a more enlightened cultural public will, perhaps, someday transcend.
Coolidge’s weird image has been reproduced endlessly in cigar ads, on calendars, on throw rugs, and in velvet. Dogs cannot sit on chairs around a card table in the way that Coolidge depicts; they would not want to. But Coolidge has made them.
The punch line of this painting, and the ethical harm of it, is the disjunction between what is depicted and our realization that dogs do not smoke cigars or gamble. Dumb dogs. But we have made them do so. Clever us. It reminds me of the Web site that suggests that if a cat could talk, what she would say is, “I can has cheezburger?” (LOL!) Coolidge reifies the fantasy that ours is the best of all possible worlds, and that other species could do no better than to emulate humans, however ridiculous they might seem in so doing, and however foreign our humanity may be to their animality.
I would be less offended by Coolidge if he, or other artists, also created art that involved human animals in the guise and context of nonhuman animals (and did so without casting aspersion on the “swinish,” “beastly” humans so represented)—that is, if there were a reciprocity that bespoke a sincere desire to broach the species barrier and see how the other half lives. But that wouldn’t sell many cigars.
My perspective? I’m not taken in by the painting. It does, however, remind me of this observation in Ecce Canis:
…the dog was often taken as the ideal test subject not just because of the relative similarity of its internal anatomy to ours, but also because its expressions of pain or displeasure are for us so easy to read and understand.
Which is to say: painterly experimentation on dogs like this works, because a naturalistic rendering of canine faces still allows us to interpret the intended character.
Love the subtle change of background color in the last panel. It’s also easy to forget that livestock have no idea of what fate awaits them.
A clever web-based tool for making interactive stories. That is to say: stories with branching paths. Although there are some options for rudimentary logic, which I imagine might enable experiments that diverge from the typical Choose-Your-Own-Adventure mold.
A collaborative storytelling site that encourages users to write short bits of fiction. Others can react to those stories with sequels or (the neatest part I think) prequels. There is also the possibility of posting challenges, which are just that — challenges to users to write something according to some kind of theme or other constraints.
An interesting example of a play-by-post (aka forum) RPG that is heavily slanted towards storytelling. This means: no experience points, skill checks and that sort of thing. In stead, it features mechanics (some quite clever) that control who gets to say what about the storyworld. Points are awarded for participation in stories, which in turn can be spent on describing new creations. It is, however, heavily reliant on game master oversight, as not all rules are fully described.
A quantified coffee system by Perceptor. Mostly tracks amount of consumption. Would be interesting if they also tracked taste.
From Banksy’s Banging Your Head Against a Brick Wall. A perspective I can to some extent relate to, although I have to say I consider myself sickeningly well-behaved. As a model for society however, it falls flat, of course.
It’s becoming an all-too-familiar dynamic: artist uses dead animal in work, gets enormous amounts of attention from press.
In this case, Bart Jansen has converted his deceased cat Orville (who was run over by a car) into a remote controlled quadrocopter…
(via Vliegende kat is kunstwerk met explosief potentieel — musea en galerieën — VK)