Infocult: Uncanny Informatics

Gothic flash game from Skeleton

The Skeleton Shop has at least one Gothic Flash game. It involves protecting semi-animated scarecrows from devouring, descending ravens:

Music by Johnny Hollow. Looks from My Pet Skeleton.

Deli.co.us hack

extispicious is a visualization tool for one's del.icio.us/ profile. It looks like the concept maps Visual Thesaurus provides, or some of the Flash map apps from the geniuses at Levitated:

That's my friend heresiarch, there. I'm DoctorNemo.

deli.co.us is a lot of fun, and I hope to post about it later.

Simulation game for US election: Kerry's Vietnam missions

Simulations meet the US election: Kuma Reality Games is releasing a Web-based game simulating several of John Kerry's swift boat missions in Vietnam.
The company site says the game should be out by the end of the month.

Iranian blog crackdown continues

Following our earlier posting about the Iranian blog crackdown, Dan Gillmor has a followup. Technicians were ordered to filter, and, failing that, arrested as well.

The name of Saeed Mortazavi has come up as a leader in the crackdown.

Hoder notes that the net is where Iranians prefer to get their news.

Electoral-vote visualization tool: votes make sizes

Revisiting our earlier posts about election visualization on the Web, Electoral-vote.com has another visualization tool, which displays states' sizes determined by their electoral numbers.

Game-playing to socialize kids

Glenn Reynolds has a useful column about games and society, arguing not that games don't have bad effects on players, but that users obtain socially good information from playing:

Thanks to The Sims, they know how to make a budget, and how to read an income statement -- and to be worried when cash flow goes negative. They understand comparison shopping. They're also picking up some pointers on human interaction, though The Sims characters seem a bit dense in that department at times. (Then again, so do real people, now and then).

This might be a nightmare for some, computer games emerging as tools to hone good behavior.  I'm reminded of Hakim Bey's insistence that art has effects:

The idea that art can be voided of political meaning appeals now only to those liberal cretins who wish to excuse "pornography" or other forbidden aesthetic games on the grounds that "it's only art" & hence can change nothing. (I hate these assholes worse than Jesse Helms; at least he still believes that art has power!)

[emphases in original]

Iranian bloggers arrested

Two Iranian bloggers, along with a journalist, were recently arrested. They are Babak Ghafoori Azar and Shahram Rafi Zadeh.

Several sources report that three young journalists have been arrested for assisting the reformist websites, Rouydad, and Emrooz. Apparently security officials stormed their homes and took their PCs etc.

(thanks to Masserat Amir-Ebrahimi)

Underground cinema steps to the surface for a glimpse

Following up on our earlier posting about the Paris catacomb cinema, the mysterious organizers have apparently come forward.

"They freaked out completely," Lazar, their spokesman, said happily. "They called in the bomb squad, the sniffer dogs, army security, the anti-terrorist squad, the serious crimes unit. They said it was skinheads or subversives. They got it on to national TV news. They hadn't a clue."

To be fair, until recently very few people did have a clue about La Mexicaine de la Perforation, a clandestine cell of "urban explorers" which claims its mission is to "reclaim and transform disused city spaces for the creation of zones of expression for free and independent art".

Huddled round a table in an anonymous Latin Quarter bar, the group's members - of whom only Lazar wanted to be named - relate past exploits: rock concerts for up to 4,000 people in old underground quarries; 2am projections in a locked film theatre; art and photo exhibitions in supposedly sealed-off subterranean galleries.

(via BoingBoing)
The subject line of this post feels like sp*m text surrealism.

Sampling story of the day: George W. does U2

In honor of this week's dubious ruling against, er, about sampling, here's a mashup: George W. Bush signing "Sunday, Bloody Sunday".

broken bottles under children's feet
bodies strewn across the dead end streets
but i won't heed the battle call
it puts my back up puts my back up against the wall

sunday bloody sunday
sunday bloody sunday
let's roll

(greetings to Reasonites)

Sampling only by pay for play, says US court

The US 6th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that rappers must license music they sample, and pay as required.

"If you cannot pirate the whole sound recording, can you 'lift' or 'sample' something less than the whole? Our answer to that question is in the negative."

(thanks to Jesse Walker)