Gaming to Survive
This week, TED, offered up a fascinating lecture by game designer and futurist, Jane McGonigal. Particularly interesting is the bit starting around 12:30 where she relays Herodotus’s tales of gaming in the Lydian empire (circa the 12th century BC).
What’s the Frequency, Kenneth?
For those of you that don’t know, I spend the majority of my days VJ’ing for Frequency, an internet video show akin to radio’s Pandora.
While most of my work consists of combing the internet for various gems, I also occasionally get to create custom playlists to show off the site’s toolset for assembling video collections. Here are two recent ones I’ve compiled:
The Pale Blue Dot
Leave it to Carl Sagan to illuminate the optimistic side of the argument I made a couple posts ago, regarding our species. There is always hope — even if it lies beyond the horizons of our imagination.
Contemporary Slavery: The US Penal System
Fantastic round table lead by Stephen Fry on the out of control incarceration rate in this country. We imprison more people, per capita, than any nation in the history of the world. Fortunately for the Prison Industrial Complex, the coming double-dip recession will surely provide ample opportunity to sweep thousands more into our penal/human chattel holding cells, that we may create more wards of the state and more productive slave labor. Huzzah for free societies.
Space Chimp
I half expected this short film to turn into a bizarro version of Planet of the Apes. I wanted this aged space chimp to land on an irradiated Earth, thousands of years after his departure (due to the temporal demands of general relativity) and scream to the heavens in chimp language, “You blew it all up, you bastards!”
Louisville Slugger Fiddle
Glenn Donnellan, a fiddler for the National Symphony Orchestra, crafted an electric fiddle out of a Derek Jeter-model baseball bat.
His fiddling rendition of the national anthem on July 4, at a Washington Nationals game, gives me the chills. It sounds like something out of a Ken Burns’ Civil War documentary.
Meet Me in the Basement
Here’s some skillfully assembled montaging by Broken Social Scene. The video draws an important connection between the riot police defending consumerist society to the last and vapid pop icons distracting would-be supporters of future protest movements.
Koyaanisqatsi by King Crimson
This is one of those serendipitous finds that is a little bit too Meppy for coincidence’s sake. Here we have footage from Mep favorite Koyaanisqatsi set to music from progressive rock band, King Crimson, which just happens to be one of the major influences of The Road.