Ride Forward Into Linky!

Samurai vs. fired air gun pellet. Holy cow.

Crazy new tech from German engineering visionaries Festo: robot flying penguins?
The Tone Matrix – construct your own music out of a grid of sound.
Chewbacca befriends a chipmunk. This photograph series gets weirder the more I think about it actually. See also: Baroque Star Wars.
Haaretz, Israel’s smartest newspaper, on June 10 switched out all its reporters for poets and novelists. Brilliant.
Debz reflects on fun, and what that meant at different stages of her life, and what it means now that she’s a busy mum. A great read.
And finally… Macs finally demonstrate their superiority to PCs

Marie Antoinette Project

(This is a repeat of a post from last week that got mysteriously lost.)
One of my sekret projects has been announced. I’m the writer and interactivity guy for a co-production between the St James Theatre and Eklektus, Inc.
The Affair of the Diamond Necklace: an evening with Marie Antoinette in the Gardens of Versailles is an interactive theatre experience being presented in August 2009. It’s going to be awesome.
Also, will be interesting. I haven’t found anything quite like what we’re doing, and I’ve done a lot of looking. It isn’t quite a murder-mystery type dinner theatre or dinner party, it isn’t a live roleplaying event, it isn’t a conventional performance, it isn’t like any kind of improv I’ve been able to find out about… We’re carving our own path here, and that’s great fun, because I’m convinced there’s lots of unexplored space in the interactive experience realm.
You probably won’t see it advertised through normal channels, because the St James Theatre will be offering the tickets first to their corporate clients and expect to sell them all that way. However, if its successful (and we hope it is!) it will be offered again. Other such events are also in development.
I’m pretty excited!

Hot Wheels: Battle Force 5


Local computer game company Sidhe Interactive have announced one of their projects: a game called Hot Wheels Battle Force 5 based on a toy/TV license. I did some dialogue work on this game earlier this year. Can’t give any more details than what’s already been released, so to quote the article:

Activision says each episode of Battle Force 5 puts kids in a fantasy world where they will meet an elite team of teenagers in five ultra-fast vehicles who must work together to save the Earth from the most outrageous galactic predators.
In the game, fans will be able to live out these adventures with pedal-to-the-metal combat-racing in numerous Battle Zones, where they car-battle with The Sark and The Vandals dangerous aliens from another dimension.

I can say that I’ve read a bunch of scripts and watched some pre-viz materials and, man, this thing is gonna be catnip. Writing dialogue for all the characters was really fun but also pretty challenging – there’s a lot of careful effort that goes into this stuff!
Here’s some photos of the toys from the New York Toy Fair earlier this year. And here’s a few more as a short video. I feel like I’ve bonded with all these crazy vehicles and their drivers while working on ths game, so I might have to buy one of these…

Real Hot Bitches doco

I would normally save something like this for a Friday linky, but I just watched it and now I want to share the love. Here is a ten-minute doco about Wellington’s finest 80s cheese-rock dance troupe, the Real Hot Bitches, as they head down to Christchurch to break the world record for synchronised dance. You’ll be punching the air and dancing in your chair.
I hope the mormon boys they speak to half-way through were in the crowd at the end.

(This is a segment from digital TV show The Gravy, one of whose presenters this year is a Real Hot Bitch.)

Iran Continues

The angry stalemate continues in Iran, with numerous subtle developments that make it hard to draw any conclusions from the outside about where things are heading. There are reports that the police have stopped repressing protest; that they may have been ordered to do so by no less than the Supreme Leader; that the numbers at the protests have been plummeting; that outside of Tehran the movement is close to over… I don’t know how accurate any of these claims are but I’ve read all of them in multiple venues over the last few days.
In any case, it is clear that protests are continuing, the Iranian regime is not making any concessions of substance, and that the resistance/”reform movement” is not just the wealthy, Westernized people of north Tehran but a wider movement that cuts across class boundaries. My instinct is that the regime will be able to wait out the protests, but that this run of action will not be forgotten in Iran – that there will be no immediate change but the political landscape will have shifted as a result. That’s just a guess.
The resistance in Iran has also been a case study in the value of the new media. Twitter has come of age during this run of events. It has been fascinating to watch Twitter used not just as a reporting tool but also an organization and identity-creation tool, and even more fascinating to watch in real time as government-supporters (or government employees) try and insert disinformation into the converation and get quickly exposed and denounced. It is certain that the dissident youth and the authorities in China have been taking careful notes.
Twitter coverage of Iran has also been bouncing around the celebrity Twitter-net; frex, Eliza Dushku (45K followers) has been pushing this a lot thanks to her recent visit there via Global Exchange (I love this inadvertantly hilarious pic: can you possibly guess which one of these people grew up in Hollywood?) and Twitter’s uber-celeb Ashton Kutcher (nearing 2.5M followers) has been passing on street resistance techniques to Iranian protesters. This petition to the UN has been circulating on Twitter too. I’m still unconvinced about the long-term viability of Twitter – I don’t like how it scales at the personal level, the difference in experience between following 20 people and following 200 people is massively negative – but it’s certainly making an impact. (That said, Google Wave will change the paradigm again. Anyone want to guess what the Iranian crisis would look like if Wave was up and running in the digital wild?)
My pick of the reportage has to be Robert Fisk’s coverage. He puts it together smartly.

Fridinky Balinky

Today Friday linky can has:
homeopathic antimatter
Google video of early 80s nuclear threat films inc. Day After, Threads
British Library’s 19th century newspaper archive, scanned-in and searchable. Wow. BBC article saying wow.
World’s first hip-hop video that is a documentary-style film about a LARPer:

Prehistoric oddities
What happens when a Twitter celeb is not actually that celeb but instead some dude
And finally… the ten best drug experiences on The Simpsons

How karma works

It’s really good that I didn’t tease stronger for locking herself out last week, because the very next day I lost my own keys. That’s karma! No wait, that’s not right – the karma wasn’t that I lost the keys, it’s that they were returned to me so quickly.
The quick return was because of this:


This keyring tag was a gift on my 21st birthday, waaaay back in ’97, from the redoubtable Rob Moon. I’ve carried it with me ever since, all over the world. When my keys slipped out of my pocket at a conference, they were handed in to the woman co-ordinating everything. She thought to herself “there’s only one person who would have that on a keyring tag”.
So thanks Marie, thanks Rob, and thanks karmic principles. That could have been an annoying turn of events but it turned out just fine.
Related: got the Facebook username to suit. http://www.facebook.com/morgue. Just fancy, no-one else had taken it!

Assorted notes

Got Filament issue the first in the post. It’s really nice! Well-put together physical artifact = awesome. Content is smart and has a good rhythm. We liked it very much. Can get your copy here.
It was Bloomsday yesterday! Here is a comic of Ulysses with neato notes and guides. Related: Ulysses as a Twitter feed.
And here is the meal Dan of Freshly Ground made for me and Cal. OMG NOM NOM.

Ghost Posts

Esteemed leader is conducting some fixin’ backstage, and it has made two of my posts go all ghosty. Like, they don’t show up in my blog owner super secret list of posts, and they don’t show up on the blog, but I can direct linky ’em just fine. Can you?
Principled, in which I second guess calling Ahmadinejad principled – see also Stephen’s comment to the Iran election post, and follow the link he gives for a great overview of the Iran situation.
Marie Antoinette Project, in which I reveal the cool sekret project I’m involved in!
I’ll probably make those posts exist again when the fixing is done. But right now, they can sit in the phantom zone for a while. Play spooky music while you read them…