The giant winged guy in the back

My younger and more informed cousin will occasionally indulge me in the gossip loop surronding those very interesting online communities built over cult favorite games like unreal tournament, halo, etc. Basically folks who don't give a second thought to understanding a group of capital letters like: 'MMORPG'. World of Warcraft being one of the closer ones to mainstream (i suspect Coke is commisioning a commercial as i type. (1, 2) I unfortunatley have no immediate friends who play- which is why i'm only hearing about this now.

Emergent gaming is an emerging concept discussed within the circles of these Internet communities- it's where the mass culture of the gamers begins to intereact within and with that world in an unexpected way- surprising even the designers. The classic example of this would be the above video showing the result of a few trickster players working for 45 minutes to lure a near invincible boss to the nearby town of Stormwind- hence inviting a sort of Godzilla scenario and a tremendous group response for all the townsfolk, all of whom died (in game) and ultimatley causing a real life server crash. If you don't kill Kazzak in under 3 minutes, he enters supreme mode and is of course, invincible. The event for sure headlined all the fan sites.


I was fascinated with the collective stir it caused among that community- how it forced many people to work unexpectedly work together during a serious chrisis- what that virtual behavior sets up for folk who will likely never unite with strangers against an obvious foe. They're town was under attack and being basically super heroes in training, they were going to damn well do something about it. If WoW was smart they'd have monsters attacking Stormwind as regulalry as they attack Agrabah.

Also the event occuring within the system itself- which invited a patch to solve the unforseen problem. Argueably by being updated or taught further, the game is learning.

I think the singularity involves animals

A Recent Boing Boing post led me to this article where MIT researches describe the possibility that Rats may dream in a similar manner to humans.

"Wilson showed that rats formed complex memories for sequences of events experienced while they were awake, and that these memories were replayed while they slept--perhaps reflecting the animal equivalent of dreaming...

...In the latest experiment, by recording brain activity simultaneously in the hippocampus and the visual cortex, Wilson and Ji demonstrated that replayed memories did, in fact, contain the visual images that were present during the running experience."

Another recent news item describing how Elephants can recognize themselves in mirrors is another step in understanding the connections between humans and other animals. If some great technological breakthrough is on our horizon, I feel the implications will weigh heavily upon our understanding and interactions with other animals. Up to this point technological progress has been a very human centric endeavor; perhaps a reorganization of our relationship to technology also means a reorganization of our relationships to other species of "animals"

New Action Sports

I heard Steve Wozniac (inventor of the Apple 1 & 2) played Segway Polo. Who thinks this is cool because I do.

Revolution 9?

I was looking at a page of bealtes midi songs, and there was a link for "Revolution 9". I was extremely curious as to how someone would translate the John Lennon sound collage into a midi programmable piece. This midi re-interpretation is an interesting artifact, due to the fact that midi here is completely incapable of creating anything resembling the original recording.

Also the midi artist is anonymous.

Scary Santas

Here is a link to a group of photos of children being scared of Santa in photos. The photos were submitted by viewers of the website. It is fabulous

Originally from Boing Boing