Reality Games

A few examples of smartphone based games, in which you play the game within the "real" enviroment.  The games are location aware: objects, tasks, or effects are stored at locations within a city: but you can only see these objects, tasks, or effects when you have you are looking at the enviroment through your smartphone screen. The thought of people running around the city, fighting off the attack of deamons and mages which only they can see, is terrifying. 




From the article: 

The idea of playing in an area that you are intimately familiar with or to explore your city more was intriguing. While other apps use geographical location purely for reference, Shadow Cities really emphasizes your particular neighborhood and surrounding ones. After all, there is an inherent desire to defend what’s ours, and neighborhoods are a good place to start. By using actual location, the iPhone becomes a window to a parallel world, hence the name of the game.

The iPhone is a magical device that allows you to become a mage and take part in battles against mages from the other faction, of which there are two, the Animators and Architects. You discover friends on your team near your location and working together through in-game chat, you conquer your city neighborhood-by-neighborhood. There are NPCs, which are roaming spirits, and real players around you that you can fight. You fight by learning spells, which you cast my using the iPhone’s touch surface to draw the rune shape. When you are on the move, you can patrol areas for enemies.

via: http://singularityhub.com/2011/07/08/players-rule-their-real-neighborhoods-with-shadow-cities-a-location-based-mmorpg-for-the-iphone-video/

And Google is getting involved (obv). 



AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!1111111

and: http://singularityhub.com/2012/11/17/a-google-surprise-worldwide-alternative-reality-game-ingress-revealed/

$308,000,000 to kill a convict

 Taxpayers have spent more than $4 billion on capital punishment in California since it was reinstated in 
1978, or about $308 million for each of the 13 executions carried out since then.


umm....??  


via http://j-walkblog.com/index.php?/weblog/posts/Execution_Costs/
via http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-adv-death-penalty-costs-20110620,0,3505671.story

It's on!

Obama threw down the gauntlet.

[Update: For context, while Obama gave this speech he was in the midst of the attempt to kill Osama.  The assasination was to occur 4 hours before the Correspondents' Dinner, but due to weather concerns in Pakistan, it was delayed by 24 hours, and  occurred the next evening.]

Anonymous - A Movement

We must resist, not as a last act of desperation, but as a first act of creation. We will raise public awareness with DDoS attacks like we have successfully done in the past. Comparable to a sit-in, DDoS protesters disrupt business or government actions by obstructing the flow of normal traffic, in order to make a political point. Anonymous will fight against censorship and oppression. The truth is too important.

-Member of Anonymous, from a irc chat transcript with HB Gary CEO.

And is it wrong to fight for the Truth, against censorship and oppresion? Are these not, the ambitions of History, and the Religions?

Communication

I probably convey less then 1% of the what I intend. But please consume it as 100% of what I mean.

Coherent Sensations

Art should make us feel more clearly and more intelligently.  It should give us coherent sensations that otherwise we would not have.  

-Robert Hughes Mona Lisa Curse





Thanks to Azzo for the link.

Super Bowl Sex Traffic

"We are expecting thousands of underage domestic minors to be trafficked to the Super Bowl"


""The Super Bowl is one of the biggest human trafficking events in the United States," Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott told a trafficking prevention meeting in January."


"That campaign has also attracted heavy hitters like Dallas Cowboy Jay Ratliff, a three-time Pro Bowler, who made a public service announcement entitled "Real men don't buy children. They don't buy sex.""


Via Reuters

Hellmann's Mayo

credits to Mark for showing me this a while ago.  Also congrats to Hellmann's for such a good film.

Janjaweed

"A blanket term used to describe mostly armed gunmen in Darfur, western Sudan, and now eastern Chad... Since 2003 they have been one of the main players in the Darfur conflict, which has pitted the largely nomadic tribes against the sedentary population of the region in a battle over resource and land allocation" via

Photo via Citizen X

Mad as Hell

Michelle Bachmann and Two Cupcakes

I like how the video ends as soon as her message begins.  Also the eye popping: it is good:


via J-Walk Blog

Sisyphus

And we think Sisyphus to have an inane hardship?  

This is his life:  to work honestly, with his body, for himself.  Would he not, in a painting, be depicted roiling with lean muscle? Sweating? Gainfully employed? 

“How much are you willing to sacrifice? How much are you willing to gain?” he says to us.

And where is the innanity in working hard?

Customs

"The court gave no reasons for its decision not to hear the case, which is its custom." via cbc


WTF?  "Custom"  like some "cute" little custom: "oh,  Mortals, citizens, you must be content to listen to our decrees, for they are Just.  We are diligent, and they are just.  They are true.  Question them not, for our decisions are true and just."


I think of Sparta, and the Ephors (etymology = "one who oversees")


I think of this:


Spartan boys who showed excellent promise and seemed to be future leaders participated in a tradition called Crypteia.  It was a way to prove their skills and prowess.   


The practice of  Crypteia, involved the following:  "Every autumn, according to Plutarch (Life of Lycurgus, 28, 3–7), the Spartan ephors (classical Greek Ἔφοροι) would pro forma declare war on the helot population so that any Spartan citizen could kill a helot without fear of blood guilt. The Cryptes were sent out into the countryside with only a knife to survive on their skills and cunning with the instructions to kill any helot they encountered at night and to take any food they needed."


"a helot" was a brutually suppressed "population group", in some form of serf-bondage to Sparta.  Apparently they had quite a miserable life: the Spartans "assign to the Helots every shameful task leading to disgrace. For they ordained that each one of them must wear a dogskin cap and wrap himself in skins and receive a stipulated number of beatings every year regardless of any wrongdoing, so that they would never forget they were slaves. Moreover, if any exceeded the vigour proper to a slave's condition, they made death the penalty; and they allotted a punishment to those controlling them if they failed."


 I imagine if the most promising graduates from Oxford or Cambridge, each year being given a shotgun, and a horse, and being told: you can kill as many Illegals as you can see.  The Prime Minister killed 23 when he was their age.


Apparently the Spartans might also have practised "population control on then", and there are records that 2,000 were killed in one ambush/event:


"The helots were invited by a proclamation to pick out those of their number who claimed to have most distinguished themselves against the enemy, in order that they might receive their freedom; the object being to test them, as it was thought that the first to claim their freedom would be the most high spirited and the most apt to rebel. As many as two thousand were selected accordingly, who crowned themselves and went round the temples, rejoicing in their new freedom. The Spartans, however, soon afterwards did away with them, and no one ever knew how each of them perished."


Why shouldn't we know the reason the Supreme Court didn't persecute Harper for breaking his own law?  


via Wikipedia Helots, Ephors, 
  

Temple of The Crab Nebula

"Up where?" We ask, and easily you point fingers upwards.  But your finger is really rather inaccurate.  I can't see what you are pointing at, your hand is shaking slightly, and my eyes are worse then yours, so I can't see as far.


You respond "there" to my renewed question, pointing more resolutely, yet still inaccurately.  Inexplicably wordless upon the co-ordinates.  Are you pointing at the clouds ? Or the Heliosheath?  Or the Stars? Is this what you are pointing at?

If you were pointing at this, I would be inclined to believe you.  But suspicion now falls upon your Pillars of Salt and Water to Wine. These are really (you must be honest) banal compared to The Crab Nebula.

The ability to turn Water into Wine is at hand: Go outside while it is raining. Falling upon the Vineyard.  Watering it. Let the grapes grow.  Harvest the grapes.  Processed by Vinters.  Voila. Is the Farmer, then also a Child of God? 

Your Sodium Pillars are rather brittle, when the Scientists in their Presses from human ashes create Diamond's. ("LifeGem Memorials of Chicago charges $4,000 to $22,000 for a synthetic diamond that a family member can wear when you are gone, made from the carbon you leave behind" via)

If you were pointing at The Crab Nebula (or some such mass of of energy) surely your Temples and Churches would look differently.  

This all compels me to assume you aren't really pointing at the Crab Nebula.  

Where are you pointing?

P.S.

What would a Temple to The Crab Nebula look like?  A good architectural competition. 

Vonnegut

From a letter he wrote: 


Guard yourself at all times. A lot of people believe that beauty is some kind of conspiracy -- along with friendly laughter and peace. 

Cheers.
Kurt Vonnegut


via Letters of Note

Glock Sales Surge

F'd up:

"...Instead of hurting sales, the [recent Arizona] massacre had the $499 semi-automatic pistols -- popular with police, sport shooters and gangsters -- flying out the doors of his Glockmeister stores in Mesa and Phoenix.

"We're at double our volume over what we usually do," Wolff said two days after the shooting spree that also left 14 wounded, including Democratic Representative Gabrielle Giffords, who remains in critical condition.

from The Washington Post

via J-Walk Blog

With us or Against Us

The ethos, in use for the last 1600 years has caused us to divide and abnegate.  Your with us, or against us.  Good or Bad. Happy or Sad. Rich or Poor.  It is an Ethos which polarizes: making our lives cheap, filling us with guilt, original-sin, hollow-happiness, obesity, chemicals. 

Promise is distant: blurry and unreachable as we navigate our day through the cracked, cloudy, dark and dusty abberation of this medieval lens.  Coping.  Sighing, grumbling, murmuring, discontented, stressed, tired, hostile, apathetic: born with this lens in front of us, we think of it as Reality.

The catclysms of History, which we call "revolutions", are deathly word-games that have resulted in the addition of new words and sentences: replacing one term for another; one division for another; one model for another.  

Through a dichotomatic lens, we will not, cannot, see unity.


*Culture is the lens through which we shape our reality. 

Too School for Cool

Thanks to Azzo for Video

I had always assumed that the Pope “knew better”, that Paris Hilton was “smarter then that”, but today while listening to Ryan Seacrest and P!nk on the radio, I realized that people truly believe what they say they believe.  It was a deeply affecting and emancipating understanding.

On the Jet Pack

Because I don’t want to be driving on the ground, I want to be flying like a fucking eagle above it.

Smurf's Village

Scary:
  

"It's quite likely that most of the money pulled in by these [smartphone] games comes from addicted adults who want to quickly build their Smurf villages, bakeries, zoos and zombie farms. But there's a loophole in the in-app purchase process that children stick their fingers through." via

"...addicted adults who want to quickly build their Smurf villages, bakeries, zoos and zombie farms.." 

WTF.  And we say our 'age' is the sum of passing years, and disparage as less those who have less years:

How would a government composed of only toddlers function?  Probably crappily. A government of kids?  "I have the conch, hear me, hear me -- crushed by the unconscionable boulder. And young adults?  Emphatically, so the street will quickly fill with Robespierres.

Adults? Filled with adults addicted to digital Smurf Viallge's, Digital bakeries, Zoos, and Zombies Farms.


We?  Are we not also caught within our own eddies?