Category: Random

You don’t get to see a lot of sky when you live in a city like London. For the vast proportion of the time the sky is an adjunct to your life. It’s outside your frame of reference. It’s barely relevant in fact. It’s the thing above the buildings, but only because there’s got to be something above the buildings. For the vast proportion of the time you’re surrounded by walls.

I feel different when I’m in the country now. There’s more sky there, and it tends to take centre-stage. I’ve come to love the sky since I’ve lived in London – because I miss it, I suppose. Sometimes you catch glimpses of it – the sun sets down Oxford Street when you’re standing near Holborn, and the walls become a frame for the sky for a moment. I feel like I’m straining my neck. In the country, the sky pushes down on the earth. It keeps everything in perspective. How can things seem important when there’s streams of colour in every direction as far as the eye can see? And the clouds hang in strips, or build like islands. And the sun ruptures through it all.

One of the most transformative experiences of my life was to do with skies. I was driving towards Bristol from London and it was raining everywhere. It was just before sunset, but it seemed like the night because the clouds were so thick. The air was more water than air and it was very difficult to see anything. And then for a few moments the sun came below the level of the cloud, and the sun was pink and red, and literally everything turned pink. The clouds lit up pink from below in all directions, the road was wet and reflected pink upwards. Every particle of water in the air caught the light and glinted and flashed. It was probably the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen in my life.

When I went to Los Angeles to see Kerry and Sean, we went to the pier. And we saw Tyne Daly from Cagney and Lacey. And there was a man on the pier with a bubble-blowing machine. And when the sun set over Malibu, I think I nearly cried because it was so beautiful. And I think Sean and Kerry thought I was a bit soft, or a bit insane.

There are times in the city when the buildings seem to high, they seem to block out the sun too much. They get in the way. Then the things that happen around us lose their perspective. They grow out of proportion. They’re huge. Their shadows are huge and cold. And then the relationships that have frayed and fallen apart seem spectre-like, inhuman. And the future seems formless yet empty – like it’s on a reel or tape loop, like it’s the skipping sound of a CD gone wrong. And then you take comfort in your friends, such as they are (or great as they are), and wait for something new to happen.

I saw Gideon and Nick today. We shopped for coats. I talked to Matt Webb over AIM, and met up with Kelly to celebrate her birthday. I met four new people today. Two were women, two were gay. I spoke to Danny on the phone, and tomorrow we’re going to see XXX. And I e-mailed my other Nick to see if he wanted to join us. And then there was the text message conversation with someone I’ve only recently been back in contact with. I’ve got a presentation to prepare and a sitting-room full of cold curry and empty drink cans. And a younger brother who means more to me than anything else in the world.

Yesterday I was talking about a Buffy-universe immersive online game – whether it could hope to make any money and whether or not it could hope to be successful or interesting. Since then, the debate’s really taken hold – particularly on the sites of Dan Hon and his brother Adrian – both of whom were involved to varying degrees with the cloudmakers that was responsible in large part for the community that grew up around the AI game. The sheer scale and intelligence of their responses is quite beyond my ability to summarise, so instead I thought I’d link through to the individual posts in as-close-to-chronological order as I could manage, which brief thoughts as and when they occurred to me:

• Dan Hon’s “I’ve Got A Theory”
  Probably the best thing published on the web in the last twenty-four hours, Dan Hon’s article (because it has to be seen as such) is probably the best online guide to some of the costs and techniques involved in a good immersive interactive game that there is.
• Adrian’s replies
  While Joss Whedon, creator of Buffy, is undoubtedly a nice guy who would give this sort of game a second thought, I assume that Fox holds all the rights to Buffy…”
• Bronwen joins in
  “Think of it this way: last week, ratings for BtVS were 3.8/6. To put that into perspective, JAG won the time slot with ratings of 11.0/16. Now, make any sort of guesstimate whatsoever about how many of those BtVS watchers would go online to read something about the show, and compare that to the JAG percentage. “
• Dan Hon’s “Once More With Feeling”
  A follow-up to Adrian’s post, attempting once more to explain why such a game might be a practical thing to attempt.

I can’t emphasize enough how interesting Dan’s first post above is, or how insightful it is. Read immediately. Useful stuff…

A couple of days ago I posted about Willow mentioning Google on Buffy, and how cool that was. Exact exchange was, I believe, “Have you tried googling her?”, followed by Xander’s shocked, “Willow, she’s only seventeen!”

Ahem. Maybe you had to be there… Anyway – in the course of the episode, when in fact they google the girl in question, they stumble upon her site, where they find what can only be described as some bloody awful poetry. The site was visible on screen for a few moments. And here’s the extraordinary bit – it actually exists and is online: Cassie Newton’s Poetry and Paintings. There’s a thread on Metafilter all about it as well…

I had a conversation with a friend a short while ago about how similar this was (in some ways) to the AI game concept that Spielberg and Dreamworks dreamt up. Dan (the friend) and I, discussed whether or not the Buffy universe would be a suitable place for a game of the same size and scale as the AI one. Was it rich enough? Was it varied enough? Does it have enough scale, shape or granularity? And the answers, as Dan says, are clearly yes.

The question then is where or when you could launch such a thing – what potential benefits it could accrue for Joss Whedon and/or 20th Century Fox. The most obvious use for such a game would be as a parallel story structure to any potential Buffy-related movie, or as a long-teaser campaign for a Buffy-universe TV series. But I wonder – would there by any way in which an online Buffy game could emerge that paid for itself? Or are these kinds of games destined to be classy, intelligent and engaging promotional materials alone?

PS. Should Mr Whedon and the Buffy creators be interested in such a venture, I know exactly which people should be developing it – and one of those people should be me. My e-mail address (on the off-chance), remains tom@plasticbag.org.

High court hang-ups:

Counsel: Now, Mr Chrysler – for let us assume that that is your name – you are accused of purloining in excess of 40,000 hotel coat hangers.
Chrysler: I am.
Counsel: Can you explain how this came about?
Chrysler: Yes. I had 40,000 coats which I needed to hang up.
Counsel: Is that true?
Chrysler: No.

One of my esteemed occasional-hosts in Los Angeles, Sean Nadeau, has finally assembled a site for all the astonishing flash animations he’s done for all kinds of weird people, including The Flaming Lips. Best thing he’s ever done? Tom does the Sound of Music.

So it’s official. In the episode of Buffy broadcast in the States this evening, Willow will mention the practice of “Googling” for a name. And it will be funny. And lo, Google will be iconic.

Today, under the direction of Phil Gyford, I stumbled upon a fascinating interview with the man behind the redesign of Wired.com – a design that I am gradually warming to. There are parts of the design that annoy me profoundly – particularly on the front page (the unnecessary width of the left-hand column and the eye-straining colour combinations are especially irksome), but one thing I can’t fault them on – they’ve used valid XHTML and CSS, pushing the standards for the web ever forward. I tend to forget how scary such a move is for companies, who suddenly may find their site looking ugly in Netscape 4.x. I suspect I forget this because many weblogs – myself included – have been designing without tables for over a year now (although I never can be bothered to finally drag myself that extra foot over the finish-line and properly validate). But then it’s easier for us. Fluffier. More trivial.

Anyway, before I get over-excited again, here’s the interview with Douglas Bowman of Wired news, and a little quote to whet your appetite: “I remember one project for Lycos where we had nested tables 10 levels deep. I counted them myself. It wasn’t that every level was absolutely necessary to reproduce the intended design effects. But each table ensured the flexibility we needed if certain modules and pieces of content appeared or disappeared. When you get to that point, the amount of markup you have to sift through to find anything becomes ridiculous. Until this redesign, Wired News wasn’t even using CSS to style the content inside tables. The sheer amount of redundant <font> tags inside every cell was probably enough to double file size. “

There’s an interesting weblogs-related article up at 24ore.com. Except it’s in Italian: È un contagio da Blogs. Oh and except I only think it’s interesting because when I ran it through babelfish it came up with loads of incomprehensible stuff and the line:

“We make the case simpler than a person who starts a Blog writing of its life or its interests”, explains Tom Coates, expert of Weblogs.

Which is, you know, nice. Still that doesn’t resolve my fundamental problem – my desperate need to know what the badly translated phrase, “In this way, via continuous superimpositions, detailed lists are formed interest community, than they become rich to vicissitude”, means. Amongst other things…

So what I’m thinking is how incredibly cool it would be if someone needed to practice their Italian to English translation abilities and was prepared to stick an English language version somewhere on the interhighweb…

So why the paucity of updates? Why the off-the-cuff, commentary-free nuggets that I’ve been feeding you lately? There’s a couple of reasons, none of them serious. Firstly, the community project I’ve been working on at work went into its first stage of testing at the end of last week, which meant everything got a bit hectic. Hopefully I’ll be able to show some of it to the outside world in the coming weeks, but in the meantime it’s nose/grindstone time.

I thought I’d be more creative on the weekend but it turned out that my thinking-coherently gland, having been radically over-stimulated last week, kind of went into shock. So I spent most of the weekend watching The West Wing, while sorting through papers and bills (total cheques written out – £2001.94). My beautiful computer stayed mostly quiet in the corner of the room.

There are other reasons. Other things to do. I’m supposed to be writing a piece on the ways in which mainstream media interacts with weblogs. I’m supposed to be talking to Cal and Denise about (at least) two different spare-time-projects. And I’m supposed to be thinking of what I can do to celebrate this weblog’s third birthday, which is in a little over two weeks. It’s all very exciting, but my tiny brain hurts…

Riding along with the Internet Bookmobile: Michael Hart is one of those people who straddle the line between visionary genius and obsessive nutcase. “You know that episode of “Star Trek,” when they look in the computer to find some 20th century book that tells them what to expect when they go back in time,” Hart says. “How do you think those books got in the computer? That’s me.”