is that it will probably be deleted because I think it’s spam. The risk of deletion is greatly increased if I consider your name to have too few vowels in it.

Without wishing to turn this into a blog that’s all about Nintendo…

That’s right it’s Tetris “better than Tetris” Attack in (very limited) disguise. If you own a Nintendo DS then this is the game you need to buy.

Really, trust me.

The one player game is fine but it’s all about multi player and it sounds like they’ve done a really good job. Voice chat, finally I can throw out my mobile phone.

We used to play this every lunch times ’round at Scott’s house at university firing processor crippling combos back and forth on the emulated SNES version until our fingers cramped up. Ah happy days.

Puzzle League (bit of a dull name) is out on Friday.

Now all they need to do is release a DS version of Disgaea and I’ll be able to sell everything else I own.

PS. Eastenders is on in the background and they’ve mentioned having sex like 4 times in the last 10 mins. In spite of this it’s really, really dull.

Obviously they’re going for the streetwise demographic usually more attracted to the Xbox or Playstation.

You’d be surprised how often you spot this kind of thing, generally in The Sun (if you happen to be someone who’s slightly obsessive about graphs and charts and stuff and who flicks through all the papers each morning that is).

This is from the Times on the Saturday 23rd June:

At first glance a fairly innocuous piece of information graphics with quite a lot of distracting noise but you know not terrible. But on closer inspection…

Which is so far removed from an accurate pie chart of those figures …

… that it discredits all the other illustrations and, for me, seriously throws into question the rest of the article. I mean the most charitable explanation is that the people who produced the pie chart and the people who signed off the illustration are incompetent or lazy. But surely these are generated with some software, the designers don’t need to calculate and measure each angle so is it deliberate?

On a tangent, it’s interesting to note that the smoking figures for the UK adults population are (from memory) at something like 23%.

Pedals and rug?

check.

Angle grinder?

check.

Krautrock?

check.

Faust - Run

From Stewart Brand’s really rather good How Buildings Learn, What happens after they’re built. (if you’re interested you should try to get the US edition as the (well deserved) criticism of Richard Rogers was for some reason removed from the UK edition).

Pump Square of Siasconsett Nantucket, founded by whalers in the 1680s. The full taxonomy of add-ons is displayed. A former shanty in the foreground has become an ice cream saloon.

Henry Chandlee Forman’s chart of how whale houses grew (viewed as somewhat fanciful by other building historians). The original “great room” of these houses was only 11 by 13 feet.

There’s a wonderful summary of the whole book here.

I quite like it but it’s a bit New-Rave so i suspect it will look hideously dated by 2012 unless the designers are counting on the progress from scenester design to ultra-mainstream (traditional olympic logo territory) design takes about 5 years. I suspect in our fast moving times this might be a little long.

Reminds me a bit of Matisse’s Snail…

Maybe the Olympic mascot will be a snail.

Should I join facebook again? I used to just join everything but I’m making a concerted effort to keep my virtual life under some semblance of control at the moment and facebook seems like it might blow that out the water - what with its stalkertronic interface and its startling potential for allowing people I work with find me on the internet.

Over the last few years I’ve had accounts at friendster, bebo, tribe and myspace and to be honest they all amount to the same thing (a waste of time) , is this one going to be defunct in a few months too as people desert it for the next one?

But I know loads of people who use it and check it all the time and seem to be having fun. People who wouldn’t know their RSS from their elbow (I’m sure someone must have used that joke before), are using it and that hasn’t really happened with anything else.

But I’m just suspiscious of it in a more general way, like the way I suspiscious on peole with video cameras, there’s something I find slightly queezy about the whole thing.

anyway…

Show your reasoning in the comments if you want.

Holiday reading: Sandwiched between the ultra-lite new Paul Auster, Neil Gaiman’s re-imagining slightly flat reimagining of The Eternals and Francis Wheen’s entertaining, frustrating, infuriating and vague How Mumbo Jumbo Conquered The World, I read Oakley Hall’s Warlock.

I’d never heard about the book but found it because the idiot/ wonderful* independent book shop in West Hampstead had misfiled it under Fantasy/Sci-Fi. It turns out it’s absolutely brilliant. Set in a fictional wild west town near the Mexican border around 1880 the authour deconstructs the common western tales, Tombstone, Billy the Kid etc. and reassembles them into a multi threaded epic dealing with issues of social control, notions of justice and the nature of legends. Kind of like Alan Moore’s idea of “solve et coagula”…

…where “solve” is the act of dissolving something, where we take something apart and study how it works — what in our modern terms would be called analysis. In a scientific framework, it would be called reductionism. The other part of the formula is “coagula,” which is synthesis rather than analysis, holism rather than reductionism, the act of putting something back together in a hopefully improved form. Once you take the watch to pieces and see what was making it run slow, you put it back together and hopefully it works better.

I’d say that we’ve had an awful lot of “solve” in our culture, but far too little “coagula.” There are people who seem daunted by the complexity of our culture to the point that they’ll shy away from it rather than try to put those thousands of jigsaw pieces together into some sort of useful, coherent picture. Which is not to say that everybody is like that. You mentioned Thomas Pynchon earlier, and he would be one of my primary inspirations for that worldview. Reading “Gravity’s Rainbow” first alerted me to the fact that yes, you could work with this sort of complexity and richness.

In fact, Thomas Pynchon’s blurb on the back get to the heart of it better than I ever could…

Tombstone, Arizona, during the 1880’s is, in ways, our national Camelot: a never-never land where American virtues are embodied in the Earps, and the opposite evils in the Clanton gang; where the confrontation at the OK Corral takes on some of the dry purity of the Arthurian joust. Oakley Hall, in his very fine novel Warlock has restored to the myth of Tombstone its full, mortal, blooded humanity. Wyatt Earp is transmogrified into a gunfighter named Blaisdell who . . . is summoned to the embattled town of Warlock by a committee of nervous citizens expressly to be a hero, but finds that he cannot, at last, live up to his image; that there is a flaw not only in him, but also, we feel, in the entire set of assumptions that have allowed the image to exist. . . . Before the agonized epic of Warlock is over with—the rebellion of the proto-Wobblies working in the mines, the struggling for political control of the area, the gunfighting, mob violence, the personal crises of those in power—the collective awareness that is Warlock must face its own inescapable Horror: that what is called society, with its law and order, is as frail, as precarious, as flesh and can be snuffed out and assimilated back into the desert as easily as a corpse can. It is the deep sensitivity to abysses that makes Warlock one of our best American novels. For we are a nation that can, many of us, toss with all aplomb our candy wrapper into the Grand Canyon itself, snap a color shot and drive away; and we need voices like Oakley Hall’s to remind us how far that piece of paper, still fluttering brightly behind us, has to fall.

I really want to like Pynchon’s novels but never seem to get hooked. I guess I need to wait for another holiday and then put some effort in. I’m back into the idea that reading ‘dificult’ books is worth the effort at the moment.

Note about the cover: I normally don’t like Sigmar Polke much but the cover here fits perfectly; the atrophied photostats of the gun men exploring “Notions of perception and the authenticity of images” reflecting the ideas about how stories aquire cruft and are changed over time to suit the tellers ends. I love these NYRB editions.

*The staff have an excellent selection of unusual books but have problems organising them, particularly annoying is the section “Science/Religion” where The Selfish Gene sits next to The Celestine Prophecy. Also, they have an excellent comics section (maybe it lack personality a bit, strictly canonical stuff).

I was in a Waterstones in Wimbledon a few weeks back and the had Joe Sacco’s Palestine in the Sci-Fi/Fantasy section.

What infuriatingly bad bookshop organisation have you encountered recently?

Our flat is close to bursting at the seams so I’ve been ruthlessly chucking out defunct technology and nostalgic media (as regular readers may know I find things like old blank tapes and floppy disks intensely nostalgic)

I’ve had this since I was thirteen or fourteen, it’s what I discovered Sisters Of Mercy and John Peel and Sonic Youth on, it’s served as speakers for many many computers (3 different Amigas, 4 or 5 PCs) and not a few iPods, discmen (discmans?) and minidisc players. It’s been lugged around Europe and a variety of festival grounds campsites and barns in the Peak District to provide sound tracks to holidays and assorted teenage kicks.

The hole in the eject key is from where Baec (sp?) drove a screw into it when the tape mechanism stopped working for the 3rd trapping a Goats tape that Paul had made me in there the adaptation allowed us to get the tape out manually. Note: it was one of those one behind the other dual cassette things which seemed hopelessly futuristic when I first saw one at Mark Bigg’s house in about 1989, his brother had one one in a competition and we were all tremendously jealous.

The final straw came when the left speaker finally cut out about 4 or 5 months back (I was using it as an amp for my drum machine) and I couldn’t fix it (integrated circuit failure of some kind I think) It’s hard to justify keeping such a beast around when you can’t even use it as a tough amp/ speakers for taking camping.

Also, all my old Amiga disks. It probably seems a bit odd to get sentimental about old computer disks but I found myself scanning them all into my computer yesterday before they were pulled ot bits for recycling/ throwing away, even optical media is beginning to seem old these days, in 20 years it’s gogin to seem really odd that we carried around data in 720Kb chunks (Double Sided Double Density! Five Complete Games!).

Also for the bin are 100 odd issues of 2000AD and a nearly complete runs of Toxic!* and Tank Girl if anyone would like to claim them.

*reading that wikipedia page it’s amazing that Button Man and Al’s Baby were turned down for the comic as they were (IMO) among the best British strips of the early 90’s.