A Floating City
A simply beautiful design for a future Floating New Orleans as noted by Inhabitat:
It’s been almost three years since New Orleans weathered Katrina’s wrath, and debate still rages over plans to reconstruct the sunken city. Myriad options have surfaced ranging from rebuilding the levees to designing storm resistant structures to not rebuilding at all. Here’s an approach that endeavors to ride the river rather than stem it’s course. Harvard Graduate School of Design students Kiduck Kim and Christian Stayner have conceived of a Floating City that will “rise safely in an Archimedean liquid landscape.”
So elegant, so well designed and such a good way to work with the natural demands of a place rather than fortify against it. [More] [Via]
Links for June 2nd 2008
Interesting links for June 2nd 2008:
- It Really Looks Like Ice on Mars [Universe Today] – The Phoenix Lander on Mars may have uncovered ice. As anyone with a passing interesting in Mars science fiction will know, actually finding water/ice on Mars is the single either makes or breaks the possibility of terraforming Mars! 🙂
- ABC Earth [ABC Online] – “The ABC Earth content layer (to be viewed using the Google Earth 4.3 application) is a trial that consists of video, images and content developed by the ABC. The layer includes National News and video …” (Fun way of engaging with news!)
- Facebook ban for PM’s staff [Australian IT] – “Staffers working in Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s office and on his household staff have been asked to remove their Facebook profiles.” (A move sure to reinforce the image of Australia’s PM as something of a control junkie!)
- Town forces Google to scrap street images [The Age] – “The small, private community of North Oaks in Minnesota enforces its trespassing ordinance, and Google Maps is no exception. The mapping service’s Street View feature allows users to see what a certain address or intersection looks like …”
Videogames, Storytelling and Sex … all in 10 minute animated lectures!
Thanks to Boing Boing, I’ve just discovered two excellent animated mini-lectures from Daniel Floyd looking at story-telling and sex in videogames. The first one argues that videogames have an extremely exciting potential to be story-telling spaces, but that potential is rarely fulfilled and, at present, is largely discouraged by game distributors:
The second animated min-lecture is sure to prove a little controversial as it argues that in order to be taken seriously as an artistic medium, videogames need to have more sex in them. Floyd isn’t arguing for more sensationalised and sleazy games, but in contrast points out that every notable artistic medium is full of explorations of sexuality. If videogames normalised sex as part of character development and stopped using extremely large-breasted women killing things as a marketing tool, then sex would become part of the fabric of games, normalised not demonised (Floyd also reminds us that many gamers are adults; he’s not suggesting sex has to be part of all games):
I really like these videos: they’re an accessible and entertaining entry point for thinking about some big concepts in relation to videogames and they’re creative ways of engaging students on a topic beyond the traditional lecture style.
Links for May 27th 2008
Interesting links for May 25th 2008 through May 27th 2008:
- Death knell for television as we know it [The Age] – “Japanese television technology that will give viewers access to high-speed broadcasts over the internet could render conventional television obsolete and transform the media landscape within years, analysts have predicted.”
- Owning the Clouds [how now, brownpau?] – A worrying look at the way Google’s copyright takedown system favours big media over amateur production by letting derivative works (initially) send takedown notices to the original authors!
- HSC students to get Wikipedia course [The Age] – In an Australian first, NSW HSC students will from next year be able to take a course in studying Wikipedia, the online collaborative encyclopedia. Wikipedia,… has been listed by the NSW Board of Studies as prescribed text for an elective course…”
- Joss Whedon Fans Jump the Gun [NewTeeVee] – “Perhaps still smarting from their precious Firefly being killed off so soon, Joss Whedon fans are already mobilizing to save his next show, Dollhouse? before the first episode airs.”
Links for May 23rd 2008
Interesting links for May 23rd 2008:
- Lessons From the Class Blog [zigzigger] – Reflections on 4 semesters of teaching with a class blog in a media course. Some useful observations about how much students blog, ideas about assessing blogs and whether ‘forced’ comments are of any use.
- Star Wars Kid: The Data Dump [Waxy.org] – Andy Baio takes a very in depth look at the Star Wars Kid meme (that he named, hosted and shared) from 2003, complete with very, very detailed stats and a look at the media coverage SWK got.
- Cash will buy clone of man’s best friend [PerthNow] – “A US biotech company will clone dogs for the five highest bidders in a series of online auctions, in a move condemned by some ethicists who fear it could lead to human clones.” (Hello ‘RePet’ from The Sixth Day!)
That Hilter Meme
Memes are funny things (both funny as in odd and, if done well, often funny and in the laughing stuff) but I never really expected Hilter (or even an actor playing Hitler) to be become meme central. I guess that shows I really do underestimate those interweb folks! 😛 So, as you might have guessed, a new meme is rapidly spreading; it features new subtitles added to the 2004 German film Downfall (Der Untergang) by Oliver Hirschbiegel, which depicts Hitler’s last 10 days. This footage is now being remixed with new subtitles added to talk about new topics, many of which are really quite funny.
The standout version thus far, though, has to be this one in which Hitler realises that he’s the new Star Wars Kid:
I suspect the ridiculousness and almost sacrilegious idea of Hitler as a comic figure is one of the reasons it’s hard to look away from this clip! [Via Kevin Lim]
Update: Chuck Tryon has some interesting thoughts about a version of this meme which parodies Hillary Clinton’s campaign to become the democratic presidential nominee.
Tama Leaver dot Net by Tama Leaver is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.