As YouTube was mentioned in the Guardian on the weekend it can only be a matter of time before all the excitingly copyright infringing content is removed, leaving the site to deflate Napster style as thousands of anime remixing teens flee back to their password protected forums and shady Bit TorrenAs YouTube was mentioned in the Guardian on the weekend it can only be a matter of time before all the excitingly copyright infringing content is removed, leaving the site to deflate Napster style as thousands of anime remixing teens flee back to their password protected forums and shady Bit Torrent cabals. So anyway, before that happens I’d better get on with doing a run down of my favourite music vids.
Let’s start with this:
Da Mystery Of Chess Boxing
Obviously great videos are about the music and visuals working closely together. There are plenty of clever videos with $$$ spent on them that don’t get the match as right as this lo-fi master piece. The whole thing feels genuinely dangerous and outside the mainstream in a way that’s incredibly rare these days.
The setting up of the whole Wu Tang mythology (there’s loads of them, they’re all dead good at kung-fu and chess).
“Introducing the Ghost. Face. Killahhhhh! (No one could get illa)”
Apparently chess boxing is actually a real thing these days though mysteriously no one aknowledges the Wu’s pivatal role in popularising the “sport” (apparently it was invented a year earlier by french cartoonist Enki Bilal).
‘This scheme could have an advantage over straightforward quantum computing. “A non-running computer produces fewer errors,” says Hosten.’ … file under ‘things that make my head hurt’. [EDIT] here is a good explanation including a cute puppy.
Winge, winge bloody winge. Hint: stop advertising “disneyland memorial orgy posters” and “1000 beautiful girls for only 5 bucks a month” and I may have some sympathy. Seriously it’s this kind of OMG their stifling our free speech crap that really annoys me, coupled with their attitude that if something’s possible it must be morally defensible unless it interferes with us consuming our favourite entertainment and about a billion other things which just aren’t up for discussion in their zealots echo chamber. (though obviously the UAE isn’t the nicest regime and putting people in jail for looking at fairly innocuous, if annoying, internet sites isn’t something that should happen)
“There are mountains of rules in the terms of service that tell you that you shouldn’t do things that you totally can do in the game if you want. Why they don’t just alter their design and code so you can’t do these things is beyond me”. [EDIT] Also seeThere is art and beauty in the world, but you can’t be responsible for any of it..
New feature alert!
These links are going to be generated every day from my del.icio.us bookmarks. They’re generally a combination of stuff I need to know for work, and other stuff that might actually be intereting to other people (though probably only quite geeky other people). This probably means the site will get automatically updated EVERY SINGLE DAY from now on allowing me to be even lazier than I have been recently.
Hmmm… well Shadow of the Colossus looks lovely until you start moving. Seems the developer didn’t realise that what made Ico so great was that the design and simple geometries worked together to make a truely tangible and seamless game world, the odd level of detail and frame rate glitches seem to indicate that in the case of Colossus the art director got free reign. I’d have been happy to wait another year to play this on a platform which could do justice to the game’s looks. Also the addition of energy bar and other on screen clutter, the slight fussiness fo the control detail, the overblown score and over long narative expositions… I know they’re just niggles but inevitably I’m comparing it to Ico and so far (4th colossus) it doesn’t match up.
Anyway it’s still beats more currently available games (shooting games, driving games, shooting and driving games etc.) but it’s sitting on the shelf at the moment because it’s literally impossible to stop playing the new Katamari Damacy for more than 45 minutes at a time. It’s like the team at Namco have dipped intio the past and found an entire new genre from the primordial arcade sludge before everything got nailed down, like scientists finding a whole new phylum in a cave on top of a mountain somehow untouched since the cambrian ‘explosion’. It’s simple pure joy, like asteroids or pac man except rolling a huge sticky ball of junk around. Buy it this lunchtime.
PS. Just one more thing about Shadow of the Colossus: It comes in a lovely cardboard slipcase so it matches my copy of Ico (L@@K first edition RARE!!!!) but unfortunately the people at Sony chose to stick a big ugly sticker on it that’s LITERALLY IMPOSSIBLE to get of without in someway despoiling the lovely eggshell-matt surface of the box. If you know me, you probably know how I hate labels with OCD like intensity so you can imagine that this put me in quite a bad mood. I mean seriously I allready bought the fucking game why do you need to advertise to me after the event. ARGH!
OK, so it’s that time on Friday when I’ve stopped working, starting something new now would be pointless, i’d just have to leave it halfway through. Also, I’m distracted because Shadow of the Colossus is hopefully waiting for me at home. Apparently it’s essentially a series of boss battles* with long sections in between where the player rides a horse around a hauntingly beautiful mist covered land wondering if killing these creatures is morally justifiable before either a) carrying on the slaughter b) putting the game on the shelf and never playing it again. Anyway I mention this because there’s some recent research out which says…
During conscious deliberation, people only consider a subset of the relevant information and might inappropriately weight it […] In contrast, the human unconscious can integrate wider swaths of information, which may lead to more satisfying results when decisions are complicated.
Which would perfectly explain why, as noted here, the tactic of taking a break for half an hour and then coming back so consistently works when it comes to triumphing in boss battles (and tough sections of video games in general). When you return your brain has been spending time on the problem without you knowing about it. Hopefully as I’ve been resolutely not thinking about it for a while, my brain is soon going to come up with a way to make enough money that I can have a nice holiday this summer and get a DDR arcade machine installed, and also a way that the latter can happen without Emma noticing.
Also it ties in with another thing I saw the other day which is about how brains replay stuff you’ve just done, reinforcing learning.
As the rats ran along the track, the nerve cells fired in a very specific sequence. This is not surprising, because certain cells in this region are known to be triggered when an animal passes through a particular spot in a space.
But the researchers were taken aback by what they saw when the rats were resting. Then, the same brain cells replayed the sequence of electrical firing over and over, but in reverse and speeded up.
So I suppose this all sort of gives lie to my theory that there’s no point starting anything new because I’d have to take a (2 day long) break. Actually I’m just starting my break early so I have even more time for some super subconcious problem solving and high efficiency learning.
*an excellent example of terrible Wikipedia writing.
First off, the film U-Turn is atrocious, don’t watch it. Has Oliver Stone ever made a good film?
Secondly, I was going to write about how great the smoking ban is and how nice it is to see such a rational and well thought through debate taking place in parliament and leading to a surprisingly large majority (politicians can change their minds shockah!!!). Then I was going to say how annoying it was that Patricia Hewitt is being villified in the papers this morning for making a U-turn and how the reluctance of politicians to change their minds because of this kind of barracking is a bad thing (why shouldn’t people change their minds in the face of mountains of evidence and rational arguments?). Then I was going to have a go at the Independent for being such a consumerist wolf in ethical sheeps clothing (over the last couple of weeks we’ve had the editorials “supermarkets are great lay off them you patronising fools” and ” what’s so wrong with a nice holliday in Burma?” to mention the two that have annoyed me most).
Anyway, through the gift of paraleipsis we’ve avoided that nastiness so I can get on with telling you how great The Eternals are. And how they seem to have been designed specifically to appeal to me and no one else, hence the difficulty experienced in obtaining their recordings. I got their most recent CD yesterday and it’s Grrrreat!
In an effort to delay the inevitable onset of carpal tunnel syndrome or some other thing that’s going to stop me from working and playing video games, I installed workrave. It tells you to take breaks with alarming frequency for anyone who’s spent the last 10 years of their life hunched over a computer keyboard for 8 hours a day (that’s me). In my breaks I’m trying to get good at running up and down stairs. My aim is to be able to do all 8 flights (basement to 7th) in our building without stopping by the local council elections in May.
