NO MORE

This is now a closed blog and from now on I'll only update NEW LASER IDEA. There will be no more dual posting.
That is all.

Summer in the city

I'm currently on vacation in my apartment in Stockholm. Drop by if you want anything. I'll be back in the blogosphere by the end of the month.

Intellectual property and graffiti in video games

I've recently seen steal this film and the better sequel steal this film II, the first one manly discuss the raid against The Pirate Bay in 2006 while the later, better one concerns information and the spreading of information. Their idea is that new media and new distribution lines of information is above all an unstoppable force and that sharing is a basic human need; talking, physical touch and all kinds of human interaction are by the filmmakers considered as a form of sharing. For me this is a bit of a dual edged sword. I and all other people working with creativity sell our ideas for a living. Artists, AD's, writers and gardeners alike all make their bread money from the theory that an idea put into reality has worth, at least to someone else that holds money. If we someday make a technology that reads minds and share thoughts the way we share files today the creative industry will be the bad guys in the debate, taking the seat inherited form the church, the rules who were against free speech, the telegraph companies, the live musicians guild, and now record companies and MPAA.
We will of course lose the battle and have to go looking for new careers. I'll be a trucker, or if the future comes to fast a space-trucker.

Now on to my other subject for the day: I’ve been thinking a bit about the quite old and quite bad video game Getting Up lately. For those of you who don’t know the game is presented as Marc Ecco's Getting up: contents under pressure and feature loads of graffiti. The player act as Trane who starts out as a toy in the scene and struggles to get respect and reputation, eventually it all turns in to the regular power to the people-state bad, individual good story that we're all familiar with and at least I like. The game is both quite good and really crappy at the same time and that is what gets to me. While the camera sucks, the fighting is too hard and the sneaking is totally impossible there are a lot of things that make up for it.
Firstly a whole bunch of graffiti legends show up to teach Trane a trick or two, the only one I knew about beforehand (not being particularly in to graffiti) is Obey but I’m sure all who know the scene know Futura, Seen, T-Kid and the others.
What’s really, really good about the game is its way to show and tell about personal development. As Trane starts out he's tags and throw-ups look like the shaky 80-style graffiti with a clear look of someone wanting a lot but not really knowing how to accomplish it, as we move on trough the game Trane develops a more personal style while he travels in graffiti history being more and more modern for every new level. Eventually Trane learns that words influence others and that there is something worth telling, he gets political and into wheat-paste posters. The final is simply beautiful, when Trane grabs climbing gear, a big roller and writes "STILL FREE" at an entire bridge pillar, while the cops fire at him from a helicopter.
It's a nod to the end of the movie Bomb the System that all should watch at least once, since it deals with people trying to do what they feel is right in a controlled world.

My feedreader makes me think i live in the future

Ever since I saw Back to the Future part 2 as a kid I've wanted to live in the future.
And I think i speak for all of us when i say that a pink hover-board made by Mattel is a must buy on the release day in the not so distant future.
I'd say the society we live in are all struggling towards a future and a whole lot of futrure-thingies have come to exist in the public market during the last two decades.

The most important one of these are of course the feeds and the feed reader.
Ugly orange screens with white letters, slowly scrolling upwards in public spaces, displaying news and propaganda are an essential item of the technoir dystopian cyberpunk future.
The basic text feeds are the last secure mass communication lines in Transmetropolitan.
In the far future mental logs from exploring spaceships are displayed as feeds on the civilized planets, millions of light-years away.
Text is basic; text takes almost no storage space.

Yes, this is a bit more nerdy then my unusual entries.
And now what I wanted to say all along: my shared objects from google reader
This is what I like recently and might be fun for someone else to see. And the important thing to do is to share the one you think are interesting, on and on in an endless loop. Entries are now free from their websites and their creators.

Somehow it’s just like piracy, but legal.

Mimicking work

We are in the first week of The Industry Project, our weary last module before summer-holidays and internship. It’s quite good; we act as three separate agencies with real life clients and make believe budgets. I got appointed the CEO position of my agency and have spent the last days counting man-hours, costs and profit. Right now we’re getting into routines and have assigned smaller groups to each client. I’d like to say we are on top of it, but this being Hyper Island I’m sure we’ll get hit by the storm quite soon. Actually looking forward to it.

Back from the thing with the thing.

Amsterdam is over and I'm back in Duckburg once again. It took me about 20 minutes to get restless and wanting to head over to Häktet for some regular Hyper Islanding.
Anyway.
It was great to be away.
I remembered what life actually used to be like before... Before what? before 2006 I’d say... before I started my the worst few of my really worthless jobs. I'm never gonna have a worthless job again. That is probably the key thing for me going to Hyper at all.

Epitaph said that they want to do something with the strategy we gave them, and that feels so good. Firstly as a confirmation that we did do the right thing, put our focus the right way and actually pulled off all that work in a swedish-summer-weathery town full of bars, clubs, drugs and hookers. Secondly because I actually didn't think that they would dare to do anything with it.

So now all that’s left is to find an agency internship, in Stockholm or Amsterdam, and just keep the good spirit up for little more than a month and then I'm off for a real job in a real world (well, it'll start as a real internship but... you know..).

Honest Bob and the Factory-to-Dealer Incentives

In our task to shake the foundations of the music industry my research let me to illegally download a record by a band named as stated above. Honest Bob are somewhat famed by having songs son Guitar Hero I & II, but nothing gave away how they actually sound and behave in album form.
First of all, I have a hidden side that loves silly-but-witty lyrics from artist like Tom Lehrer, Doktor Kosmos and of course Bellman. Honest Bob delivers all this with lyrics about the time cube, Chomsky’s language theories and occasional references to aliens and Swedish artists.
The sound is a easy listen kind of lounge rock, speaking to my fascination of artist like Mike Flowers and Hugo Montenegro (not that I listen to them, but none the less they fascinate me).
But still they might be crap, it’s too early to say.
Did i mention they made a heal like a hole cover?

In other news Skynet is coming. Read all about it on Wierd.