On Web Culture

I’m going off the grid for two weeks. DB and I are going to see some of Aotearoa, which is pretty brave of DB given prior experiences.

Plans include a rendezvous with Mr. nsu and a visit to Stewart Island.

See you in September.

The title of this post is lifted directly from the pages I link to below. As someone who never has time for gaming anymore but loves the idea of free games that don’t suck, I link to the following in the hope that one day I will join you galloping in the lush meadows of free time.

Page 1 - Free Games That Don’t Suck!
Page 2 - Free Games That Don’t Suck!
Page 3 - Free Games That Don’t Suck!

LINKS
Top 100 Independent Games [gametunnel.com]

UPDATE (29/11/2007): Alas, they stopped hosting the embedded video I was linking to. However, if you can still check out Flight of the Conchords - Video.
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According to the NZ Herald, HBO has gone ahead with a second season of the Flight of the Conchords show indicating the first season must have gone down well with American audiences. Salon.com said:

Bret McKenzie and Jemaine Clement are both hysterical, and while the brilliance of the musical numbers has waned a little since the heady thrills of that first Prince-inspired melody (”Lookin’ ’round the room, I can tell that you are the most beautiful girl in the room — in the whole wide room!”), I loved the ridiculous David Bowie sequence a few weeks ago, in which Bowie appears to Bret and tells him that an eye patch will enhance his look, all the while singing songs that span his evolving musical style, one minute sounding a little bit like “Changes,” the next evoking “Diamond Dogs.”

LINKS
Read a Salon.com interview with Flight of the Conchords
Listen to the Salon.com interview with Flight of the Conchords (.mp3) (I found this more interesting as the podcast includes a bunch of questions that didn’t make the writeup)

This is worth watching. Even if it’s hard, stick in there until 37:00 when the documentary covers four Chinese university students being asked what the image of the Tank Man means to them. The first time I watched that segment the alarm bells started clanging in the back of my head “No man! That is not cool, not cool at all…”

Or perhaps in the words of db, “Somebody do something, that is f—-!”

Source: Irintech.com

As one of the unwashed, or one of those without an iPod, Shuffle, iPod mini, iPod nano, etc, I feel like I get the short stick of podcasting. Whenever a website says download our podcast I read that as “download our .mp3 which is probably huge, served from a slow server and then put it on your mp3 player” which I decide sounds like a lot of effort for something that might suck. So I don’t bother.

Even then, once the mp3 is on my mp3 player my fast forward/rewind just spins along until I tell it to stop. So if I listened to 23 minutes of a 40 minute podcast it’s no quick thing to get back to 22 minutes 50 seconds to start listening where I left off.

I’ve listened to some good podcasts and some boring ones. I like Authors@Google but that’s on YouTube, how do I get that onto my mp3 player quickly?

This is what I want so I can embrace podcasting with vigor:

1. The online podcast market, where a user feedback system allows me to sort by genre, topic, country of origin, most popular, most downloaded, newest, most downloaded in last 24 hours/6 hours/1 hour, etc. A way for the system to make good recommendations “If you liked this podcast you might also like…” Selling podcasts is fine but don’t force them upon me. If a podcast is good, give it away the first one for free and then if ratings and reviews by users are good then it will become popular in spite of.

2. Here is my mp3-playing gps-driven personal-details-embedded iPhone in my pocket. I click podcast on screen, podcast is transferred to iPhone.
3. Pull up podcast on iPhone. Meta data describing podcast, user reviews, jump-to-this-point-in-time bookmarks with description of what is happening at each bookmark. The ability to jump quickly between bookmarks and also stop the podcast with the option to return to that point easily.
4. Let me send portions of the podcast to my friends easily “Export bookmark 3 to bookmark 5 > send to friend with this comment: …”. Let me send it to my blog, back to the podcast market, etc.
5. This podcast sucks. Let me tell the world from my iPhone by feeding back to the podcast market my ranking and review. Is there an option for the content creator(s) to open/close responses on their podcast? So if they wanted my review is limited to the podcast market or I can feedback commendations and criticisms directly to the content creator(s).
6. Downloading album art for podcast ala iTunes. What if I want to add my own custom album art? What if I want to share my custom album art to the podcast market? What if I want to transcript the podcast for aurally impaired users and upload that?

rock and roll could never hip hop like this

Zune Theme (.msi) [microsoft.com]
Double-clicking the .msi will install this theme. You might want to change that wallpaper though…

Royale Noir Theme - Download .rar file [istartedsomething.com]
Extract the .rar into the Themes folder usually found in the following location on standard Windows XP installs:
C:\WINDOWS\Resources\Themes

Going to a Film Festival is a bit of a luxury. And not a luxury I think I will always be able to afford. I don’t know…I’ve always found them invigorating, inspiring for whatever projects or ideas I have in mind. Sometimes though… at Four Minutes the audience was made up of mostly seniors and I sat there in the darkness with them wondering if it wasn’t inspiration then what was it? The lights go down…

I’m taking a cue from db here. The films I saw at this year’s Film Festival:

Still Life
Still Life could be memorable just for where I was seated…front row - extreme right. That’s a unique cinema experience right there. Still Life follows the stories of several lives in the modern context of China’s Three Gorges dam. By turns surreal and then poignant, I enjoyed the slow pace of the film which unfurled at the same pace of the dialogue.

China is so huge that a film like this seems to say “You have no idea…” I liked the scene when a reunited husband and wife share a tender moment while in the distance an apartment building is demolished to a dull thunder.

Radiant City
Set to the unique guitar soundtrack by Joey Santiago of The Pixies, the reality of planned suburbia on the fringes of the USA’s cities is terrifying. I could feel the cellphone waves in my teeth. Do they really call shopping malls “Power Centers” over there?

This was one of those films where you come away indignant at the West’s greed and opulence but at the same time with some pity those trapped in soccer-work-ballet-shopping cycles. Your wife wants a new home. In the suburbs. With a new kitchen. And she really wants it. And why don’t you want it? And don’t you love her? And the children? Don’t you want the best for the children? How can you be so selfish!

A Guide To Recognizing Your Saints
A Guide… radiated intensity, I said to my mate David when we were leaving the cinema that every scene seemed poised to go really bad at some point and you just kind of held on wondering at the karma of it all. The hot sticky tension of New York City in the 1980’s. It was not hard for me to identify with this film, to just leave it all and go live somewhere thousands of kilometers away. What do you take with you? What do you never leave behind? Where do you go? Does it matter as long as it is anywhere but here?

My Best Friend
So don’t go to this film expecting a comedy. This film is a bitter pill wrapped in a glossy French wrapper. It pokes and pries at friendship in modern Western society, what real friendship means and our expectations of our friends. How many people would come to your funeral? I sat there squirming, I thought of Radiant City and these self-contained boxes for people to separate themselves from each other, hide from real friendships that hold each other accountable and lift us all to greater things.

Four Minutes
I also saw Four Minutes, a German film about a violent troubled prisoner in a woman’s prison who was once a child prodigy on the piano. A old woman who was alive during the Nazi regime is trying as her piano teacher to revive her talent and ambition. Both characters wrestle with their pasts, weaknesses, hopes and desires in what turns out to be a very human story of the capacity to act out good & evil. Some of the scenes are very dramatic but the film swings away right until its strong conclusion. The main character’s self-expression through playing music was an interesting meditation on the power of music to change us and transport us.