Dr. David Levy musing about whether scientists should have a say in how their research gets used and the imminent robot takeover:
Our 2008 session at the Allied Media Conference with Dean Jansen last month covered the use of open source tools to create professional-level multimedia content. We explored the benefits of shooting in the RAW file format if you're printing a 'zine, used Audacity to create an audio podcast, put together a stop-motion slideshow from photos taken at the conference using command-line tools, and created some video to share on the AMC site. Then, Dean showcased Miro and explored different ways to distribute your content.
Most importantly, though, we all got to know each other. Depending on the audience, I like to pass my camcorder around during my sessions so that the audience can interview each other (the AMC audience is fully and completely awesome, as always). Here is the video that we all created so that you can get to know us too. Spread the word!
Here is a short slideshow from the 2008 Allied Media Conference.
Music: Flobots - We Are Winning
Hi everyone, meet Stoly. He's a humanoid biped carnivore who likes to dance:
Embed:
He was created using the free Spore Creature Creator Trial, for Windows and Mac.
Spore is one of those upcoming games that I'm a little conflicted about. On the one hand it was developed by Will Wright at Maxis, one of my all-time favorite gaming shops. On the other hand, Maxis is now owned by EA / the Walmart of game publishers. I won't go into the reason why Electronic Arts sucks - all you need to know is that together with Ubisoft, they are the worst thing to happen to digital entertainment innovation since someone gave Hideo Kojima a computer.
Anyhow, in the vein of games like Black and White, SimCity and, well, pretty much every other other Maxis game, what's unique about Spore is that it will give you near-complete control over the game experience, and lets you design your own race of super- (or sub-) creatures, all the way from being a single-cell organism to establishing an interstellar civilization. In that sense, it's as much a toy as a game (the creature creator being a good example of this), and one of the few games out there that I would encourage young kids to play.
If you're on Windows or Mac you can download the trial and start making your own creatures. Even cooler, you can create videos (duh) and photos of your creations and share them with the Spore community market base. There's also tight integration to directly upload your videos to Youtube, though that's useless to me since I don't have a Youtube account.
I'm split between pre-ordering what could be a very inspiring game, and refusing to give monopolistic companies more of my hard-earned cash.
For now, though, you can enjoy my video of Stoly - and I swear promise assure you that he wasn't named after a favorite brand of Vodka... 
WAYS (the World Association of Young Scientists) and PYRN (the Permafrost Young Researchers Network) are two projects among many other science-focused social networking initiatives I work on. They are featured in this video (German only) on wisskomm.tv. On one hand it's great to see our networks start to gain some critical mass and exposure, and on the other it's mostly just fun for me to hear my buddy Hugues speaking German...
This is already a year old, but somehow it fell through the cracks and I missed it until now.
It's a brilliant little musical number that pokes fun at the whole "Support Our Troops" yellow sticker sickness, masterfully done by the Asylum Street Spankers - great fucking name.
During one of my trips to Cuba just over a year ago, I recorded several hours of interviews, scenery and other footage. Along with the web project it was supposed to complement, it was a casualty of prioritization. It got left on the backburner, a victim of someone's attempt to do too much by himself.
... he was a damned fool - arrogant, ambitious, and very much in need of seasoning.
Doing some more video work now, I unearthed some of the footage that I had taken, and rather than let it collect dust here, I've put it up in three slightly edited clips over on my Cuba blog.
You can also download the full (captions are deprecated now, though) version over at the Internet Archive.
Finally, unlike the rest of my blog, I've decided to put all of it not under a Creative Commons License, but straight into the Public Domain. You can take the video, remix it, edit it, use it for your own purposes, etc. It belongs to the Public Domain. It would be cool if you could drop me an email or a comment if you do decide to use it for your own work, though - just to satisfy my curiosity.
National Conference for Media Reform - Owning our own Media Infrastructure introductions. (Right-click to download - 13MB)
Extremely, unforgivably late, here's the session introductions from the Owning our own Media Infrastructure in Memphis this past January, that Josh kindly invited me to be on (and moderated).
The sound's too low and we had some technical difficulties with the camera, but it's still awesome to go back and watch this and recognize people from the session.
I'd love to think I'd invented the whole "pass-your-video-camera-around-to-the-audience" shtick - but I probably didn't. 
It's a whole lotta fun though.
From the 2007 Game Developers Conference
Sony announces PS Home
Right-click here to download the trailer
Apparently, this is what everyone is getting so excited about - "Best of Nintendo's Miis, a few Xbox 360 Achievements, Second Life, and the Sims".
Let me break that down that equation for you - take the atrocious animation, pointless wandering and ridiculous interface from the failed experiment that was Second Life, add the customization and interaction features from Nintendo's Miis (without the fun and cuteness), copy The Sims (except that now you have to pay to decorate your place), and slap invasive, real-world advertising all over the place.
Sounds like hours of fun! Or... minutes.
My favorite part is when they show what happens when you "add" a sofa chair - it basically drops from the sky and bounces around a little. I'd love to try that on the hardwood floors of a Sony exec's $5M home.
The only good thing are the graphics, which Sony has always excelled at. It doesn't make me want a $700 Second Life clone any more, though. Especially when the people I meet online are very seldom people I'd actually want to interact with, and that Gamepad interfaces are incompatible with my clumsy hands.
And seriously guys - we've reached a plateau in developing our online 3D applications. It seems the culminating effort of all the billions of dollars and sweat and tears has been to "create a polygonal 3D environment where users can stand around in a circle, type to each other instead of speaking, perform absolutely ludicrous animation gestures, and dance".
Because that's all I do in real life when I hang out with my friends.
technorati tags:pshome, playstation, playstation 3, Second life, sony, miis, nintendo, virtual reality
