Infocult: Uncanny Informatics

Mario Brothers Flash epic

Deviant Art is hosting Alex Leon's Flash epic story about the Mario Brothers computer game.  It uses the old game's visual imagery, but mixes in new music, adds dialogue, and creates a coherent revenge and war narrative.  It's divided into three parts of increasing length: 1, 2, and 3.  It's a good example of creativity by mixing someone else's intellectual property, as well - let's hope Nintendo agrees.

It's also part of two subgenres, net.art based on older computer games, and digital appropriations of the Lord of the Rings.

Paris: Invisible City

Bruno Latour's Paris: Invisible City is a nice example of using digital media for scholarly publication. The text addresses issues of space, from scale to proportion, distribution, and power.

(via Space and Culture)

Blood on Orkut: recommendations for reform

Rebecca Blood published a very sensible set of recommendations for improving Orkut. They range from navigation to architecture, IP policy to user options.

Add the idea of an Orkut game, and the Web response to this social software implementation grows.

Orkut gaming

Jill points out the prospective Orkut game:

It involves creativity, risk, stealth and an active orkut.com account. You will be playing in secret and, if you play it right, nobody else on orkut.com will detect that you're even playing.

They also call it the "orkut fight club game", which is a fascinating phrase for one's imagination.
(via Jill)

The world in There

There and the Pentagon are considering a virtual reality simulation of the world. The Semantic Earth meets Baudrillard's Borgesian dream of a 1:1 map -

the cartographers of an imaginary Empire "draw up a map so detailed that it ends up covering exactly covering the territory" so that the real territory underneath the map is obscured. The people of this Empire come to relate more closely to this map than they do to the original territory underneath (they live, work, and play on it, etc.) When, eventually, the map becomes tattered and frayed, and ultimately disintegrates, the people become nostalgic for it, feeling that they have lost something. The real territory which is now revealed to them seems alien, unfamiliar.

I anticipate an augmented reality iteration.

Mars dada

Mars dada passage for today: "MER-A ratted Adirondack yestersol while solar groovy, even though it was high tau in Gusev".

Translated from NASA's MARS lingo means, "Spirit Mars rover,
used its rock abrasion tool to grind into rock named Adirondack
one Mars day ago while receiving adequate power from its solar
panels, even though there was a large amount of dust suspended
in the martian atmosphere above its landing site in Gusev
crater.

(from KDNuggets, thanks to Jane Love)

321 Studios loses DVD fight

321 Studios makes DVD X Copy, which lets users copy DVDs for personal use. But they just lost the right to sell it. The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) argued, successfully, that the tool enabled rampant piracy. 321 claimed fair use.

An appeal is in the works.

Ohmynews! hits the anglophonsophere

OhMyNews!, Korea's excellent open source news project, has launched an English-language site.

"Every citizen's a reporter. Journalists aren't some exotic species, they're everyone who seeks to take new developments, put them into writing, and share them with others." ... (Oh Yeon Ho)

Another case of innovation through end-to-end openness. Have at it.

(via Smartmobs)

ETCon and m-learning

At the end of his lively account of ETCon, Justin Hall turns to give a snapshot of m-learning:

ETech must be what it feels like to be a citizen of the future - when you have expansive always-on network reach. If you integrate that kind of technology with a conference, or a school, you have an always-on university. Students have the choice to sit at the front of the class paying attention, or the back where it's easier to goof off. What if the notes passed between students in the back of the class could be part of the feedback loop for a presenter? Or even better, what if that conversations could be taking place in parallel - stenocapturing and comments online running parallel with real-time presentations. If we give the passionate smart restless kids a chance to hack and chat in conversation with the social scientists and wiser minds, we could see some deeply informed discussion with these new tools.

Add this to Vinge's "Fast Times at Fairmont High," and you begin to see what's emerging.

Recursive simulation: the Sims plays Sim City

Recursivity: SimSlice is a game your Sims characters can play, a program-within-a-program. Richard Powers once told me that he was hoping to see computer program characters coding; we're on the way. Put another way, we can subsume urban design under the family and interior decorating.

"Basically, I wanted to create a game within a game, where a Sim could remain unemployed and make a living 'farming' a mini city that is complete with buildings, houses, offices, parks and even little citizens scurrying around," says Simslice designer Steve Alvey. "There had to be consequences not only for a Sim's actions but also their inactions."

Shades of Greg Egan.