Entertainment and Places Archives - Page 5 of 8

Heavy metal in Baghdad

8 April, 2010 by sky Leave a Comment

I’ve never gotten seriously into heavy metal, but on occasion I pig out on grunge music for a few hours, and today I was listening to an NPR Music Fresh Air podcast where Dave Davies interviewed the musicians of a heavy metal group Acrassicauda who started playing heavy metal music in Baghdad and are now in the US.

This movie/video Heavy Metal in Baghdad (85 minutes—the entire film is available online) really gives you an understanding of what life has been like in Baghdad for a few years now. Machine guns being fired a block away while the crew is recording… mortal shells exploding during a concert in a hotel… getting stopped on the street… the feeling that they can only stay 5 minutes in one spot or something bad will happen. And it makes you think about the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis who have left the country for other parts of the world. The band escaped Iraq and ended up in the US – via Syria.

By itself the movie wouldn’t have sparked a blog article, but I had a conversation last week with some consultants who are studying the sociology of hacking and are doing some thinking about whether the talent that’s going into the creation of malware might be refocused on more productive enterprises. What you’ll see in this movie is the frustration and anger that wells up in people living under conditions of war year after year. It somehow sparked in me a feeling of where many hackers must be coming from these days! These guys were “living with death and fear every day.” From that standpoint, let alone the images of heavy metal way out of its element in Iraq and Syria, it’s worth watching.

Differentiating “geeks” from… whatever

27 March, 2010 by sky Leave a Comment

Have you ever noticed that sometimes when you are described as a geek it’s not exactly a compliment? (I always mean it as a compliment, comeon!) That’s because people don’t fully understand the words nerd, dork, dweeb and geek. Here’s the explanation as a cool Venn diagram.

Thanks to Xeni at BoingBoing for pointing it out. And click the diagram to see how the terms relate.

Also see Traveling Geeks. Not Traveling Dweebs, Traveling Nerds or Traveling Dorks.

And here’s an interesting bestiary of geekdom, listing many different types of geeks. I know a few who fall into some, but not all, of the categories.

Previously, on Mixed-Reality Games

21 January, 2010 by sky Leave a Comment

I just completed a new page at Red7.com that describes the major mixed-reality games I’ve run since 2004 — take a look.

Since I speculated (a few years ago) that we could create really great mixed-reality^[1] games (or learning experiences, for that matter) that would utilize all sorts of real-world media including SMS^[2], video, telephones^[3], FAX, email and web, I’ve been working to develop more of these games and get them played. I started by developing a scenario-operating-system that could run on a server, “listen” to incoming SMS and email messages, and react appropriately to move “players” through the game. This system is in place today, and listening for certain key words in incoming messages the set players off on a chase through the game of their choosing.

While experimenting with the scenario system, the team and I learned a lot. We learned that people have trouble with SMS messaging. We learned that email works (now that smartphones support email) better. We learned they’ll call a phone number, but they’ll hesitate because they don’t know for sure that the number is in-game. We learned that they like certainty more than experimentation. And we learned they ultimately will be creative if given the right opportunity.

Oh, and there’s a new game being planned right now.

[1] Mixed-reality means combining game play in such a way that it plays out in real life but uses digital media either in or to control parts of the game.

[2] SMS (also called TEXT or TXT in the US) messaging is the first method we used to get messages to and from the players. To avoid certain technical difficulties with SMS, including charges, we used email gateways, which are provided by mobile system operators. These did not work well because many people were unfamiliar with the ways they could send and receive email from their phones.

[3] We used call-in phone messages in almost all of the games. These are answer-only phone numbers where a simple message is played for each caller. Each message describes the next step in the game. I thought it would be fun to customize those messages for the players, but we haven’t gotten around to doing it… it’s a technology challenge that involves call-director, voice-response, XML-controlled systems.

Rock on, rock on, Bill Dan

14 September, 2009 by sky 2 Comments

It’s been a few years since I saw Bill Dan in action, delicately balancing rock on rock on rock at Crissy Field. And then I noticed his absence. A year or so later, I spotted him on the street one afternoon (near my home) and asked if he was still balancing, and (my recollection is that) he said the National Park Service had asked him not to balance rocks (at Crissy Field) for “insurance” reasons, but that he was teaching “classes” in rock balancing. Don’t know what he is doing today, but his work had certainly become one of those things that you’d visit Crissy Field just to see in action. [the photo is from Bill Dan’s blog.]

Bill’s blog holds a gallery of really inspired balanced-rock sculptures that you have to see to believe.

Bill’s work inspired Aaron [in the photo, 2005] and me (a few years ago) to create some balanced-rock sculptures in the High Sierras. This was a ton of fun!

The trick in our case was to use granitic rocks that contained lots of hard particles – rather than the “pointy end” of a rock being a needle-sharp point, it is actually a whole bunch of flinty points, and you know that since 3 points define a plane, this makes it easy to find a way to balance each rock on to of its supporting partner below it. You find the center of gravity of a rock by hefting it, then you roll it around until you can get that center of gravity above the point (which is pointing down) and you gently set that point on the supporting rock below. Some delicate shifting, and walaa(!) you have added another rock to the growing sculpture.

It surprised me that I could build sculptures that would hold up even in the face of strong winds. I left a couple of these towers standing while I went away on a day hike and they were still there when I returned. Lots of fun – try it yourself.