Group items tagged

Interesting idea from Bogost. Although he labels it as game art, I might consider this a multimedia piece as the code itself, the process of "re-soldering" and essentially rebuilding the game cartridge, and then the finished project performed online with DIY functionality seems much more complex than the book describes. Personally I think it's a brilliant but I'm not sure I know what (if anything) it means...

Interesting process of Wikipedia's response to really poorly done political commentary on its site.

The author argues that Word has too many workarounds, and especially when it comes to publishing on the web. There's another nice example of the code Word throws in there, too.

Apparently people in China claim that their phones smell like fruit when charging. According to the article, the smell might come from the organic solvents used in the manufacturing process that heat up when charged. One Apple China rep advised iPhone owners not to inhale too hard.

Finally (and what will appear first), all this talk about digital technology and web design pulls up an equal impulse in me to talk about other skill sets that get undervalued in an information economy. I read this a bit ago and enjoyed it. There also seems to be a trend currently that is leading us toward a sort of steam punk utopia where we will have a mixture of high and low technology. For more on the philosophical argument being put forward in this article, I highly recommend Shop Class as Soulcraft and The Mind at Work. To see some indications of the trend I'm talking about watch How It's Made (which tends to skew toward human components of the production process and is based in a tactile fetish of understanding modes of production since you do not learn how to make things ... or really how things are made) and check out all the books on craft skills, cooking, and carpentry that are exploding all over Amazon with noticeably nostalgic titles. Speaking of which, did the knitting craze end or am I just not around 50 people that have recently taken up knitting anymore?

Oh! Also add to the "evidence" list farming/gardening and the back to earth books ... and psychologically the zombie and (to a lesser extent) virus craze in movies, books, games, etc.

This is a page off the official website of Tim Berners-Lee, and here he explains the Semantic Web, which involves "using the WWW infrastructure to create a global, decentralized, weblike mesh of machine-processable knowledge."