|
|
Here’s some juicy news concerning last year’s “pay what you want” experiment from Radiohead: according to Rolling Stone and musically.com, Radiohead’s publisher Warner Chappell confirmed yesterday that “Radiohead made more money before In Rainbows was physically released than they made in total on the previous album Hail To the Thief“.
If you had told me when I was sixteen that later in my life I would, in the course of approximately one year, spend some genuine facetime with Neil Gaiman, James Morrow, Mike Mignola, Kelly Link and Jonathan Carroll I would have said that you were nuts. (Well, I would have also said “Who’s Kelly Link?” back then, but that’s beside the point.)
If you’d told me that I would have gotten the chance to meet Rand Miller (the co-creator of Myst), Bill Willingham (who writes Fables), befriend Raph Koster and listen to a lecture by Guillermo del Toro in that same year, I’d’ve told you that you were also insane.
If you’d told me that if you extended that window out to eighteen months it would also include getting to meet Jeff Smith and graduating from MIT, I’d’ve told you were completely barking mad.
Yet, that’s the eighteen months it’s been for me. When I look back on 2007-2008 and think about all this economic disaster and political hoo-rah and all the rest of the bizarreness afoot in the world, that’s what I should remember – that this year-and-some-change has been amazing, wonderful and incredibly stimulating.
All of this is brought up by my attending back-to-back lectures by both Stephen Greenblatt (the noted New Historicist from Harvard) here at MIT and Jonathan Carroll (one of my favorite novelists) at the Harvard Bookstore last night. Consider my mind officially blown.
Over at the C3 blog, I’ve just posted a quick write-up (with photos!) of Bruce Sterling’s excellent keynote lecture at the 2008 Austin Game Developers Conference. You can find the entry under the title Metafun for Metaplayers.
A few weeks ago, I had the pleasure of attending Bruce Sterling‘s keynote lecture at the 2008 Austin Game Developers’ Conference. (I was there co-presenting a video game adaptation workshop with Matthew Weise, a comrade-in-arms of mine at the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab.) Sterling was, as ever, utterly brilliant; given my previous exposures to Sterling at SXSW conferences in the past, I was expecting to be entertained. What I hadn’t expected was for Sterling to give his entire lecture as a piece of performance art.
Thanks to the inestimable Raph Koster, we have a mostly complete transcript of Sterling’s presentation, which opened thus:
Hello, thanks for having me into your event today, and thanks for that intro. Though there is a problem with that: I am not Bruce Sterling. He couldn’t make it. He sent me instead.
The reason he couldn’t make it is that in 2043, Bruce is 89. Dr. Sterling is too frail to get into a time machine to talk to game devs, so he called on me to do it. I am one of his grad students. I volunteered, sort of, to journey back in time using some of our new technical methods. It wasn’t exactly easy, but I am here and fully briefed.
Priceless. You should definitely swing by Koster’s site and read the whole thing, even though it can’t compete with the sheer ludicrousness of Sterling Dr. Sterling’s unnamed grad student whipping a cheap kitchen towel out of a bag and introducing it as his computer.
 “So my PC is like a towel,” not-Sterling said. “Cheap and old and the dullest thing in the world, I have always had one. ‘2008, computer pioneers, they still think computers are exciting! They don’t get that computers in 2043 are like bricks, forks, toothbrushes, towels.’ I researched that subject, and yeah, for an old fashioned audience, a mid-21st century computer is cool. So here it is: General Electric personal mediators, very stable, five years old. No full functionality in 2008 because we don’t have the cloud here yet. It tapped into something called Windows Vista when it got here and gave up, gone all limp, nothing left on here but this frozen screensaver pattern.” Which, of course, was the pattern on the towel. Like I said, priceless.
What really left me howling, however, was when not-Sterling all but name-dropped C3.
I have just discovered that, in addition to Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book, Pratchett’s Nation, Link’s Pretty Little Monsters and Carroll’s The Ghost in Love, Louis De Bernieres’ new book A Partisan’s Daughter hit shelves today.
I yield! I yield! My poor wallet! What else could this fall possibly throw at me?
(Well, there’s this, this, this, and this, not to mention this, this, this and this. Arrrgh.)
Don’t mind me, just trying to get my drawing skills back – which have apparently atrophied worse than a fish’s feet.
September 30, 2008
3:00 pm
Consider this a public service announcement that Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book, Terry Pratchett’s Nation AND Jonathan Carroll’s The Ghost in Love are out today. TODAY. Go! Stop reading this and go, dammit! Hie thee to a bookstore! Or Amazon!
I could also note that the 2-disc Blu-Ray set of Iron Man is out today, but I suspect that will take care of its own sales figures, thankyouverymuch.
Two additional things I will note, however, is that Jonathan Carroll’s jonathancarroll.com has received an astonishingly beautiful makeover, using a palette similar to my own and a design that I wish I’d thought of (and may indeed lift bits of at some point in the future, especially the gorgeous blend of blacks and parchment and breathtakingly beautiful photography); and that Kelly Link’s Pretty Monsters is out next week, so you might as well pre-order that while you’re clicking away at Amazon. I mean, it’s just the efficient thing to do.
(I myself would be clicking away if I weren’t so damned impatient. Off to the mall I go ASAP after work, I suspect…)
September 30, 2008
1:44 pm
September 30, 2008
8:54 am
It saddens me to announce that this morning I was forced to part company with something dear to me, something that had been with me a long time. We had literally seen the world together, but in the end, it wasn’t enough.
When you come home from a trip and one of your cats pees on your black duffel bag, you can scrub it with the natural cleaning supplies and try your best to get the smell out. You can even largely succeed, but when you do you find yourself putting the bag in the basement and opting for a different bag the next time you go on a business trip, for fear that said bag will cause great hordes of drug-sniffing dogs to go crazy at the airport, or, worse, your good clothes will emerge from the bag smelling like cat pee, which is, of course, awesome when presenting at conferences or meeting Big Important Peopleâ„¢. So, into the basement it goes.
When a great whopping hurricane comes barreling its way into your town and brings water into your basement, and when it comes into only that part of the basement where the black duffel that may or may not smell like cat pee currently happens to be residing, well, that’s a goddamn sign.
Farewell, black duffel bag. We had some great times. You’re gonna be hard to replace. (But the next time I’m at the outlet mall, I’m sure gonna try. And then I’m keeping it away from the cats. And the basement. Yeah, that’s the plan.)
September 27, 2008
9:55 am
I’d like to announce the release of Eludamos, the Journal for Computer Game Culture, which is now available for reading online as HTML or downloading as a PDF at eludamos.org. The table of contents for this issue includes:
- An introduction by Gareth Schott
- “Using Literary Theory to Read Games: Power, Ideology, and Repression in Atlus’ Growlanser: Heritage of War” by Johansen Quijano-Cruz
- “Video Game Play Effects on Dreams: Self-Evaluation and Content Analysis” by Jayne Isabel Gackenbach and Beena Kuruvilla
- “”You Are Dead. Continue?”: Conflicts and Complements in Game Rules and Fiction” by Jason Tocci
- “A Review of Agent Emotion Architectures” by Stuart Ian Slater, Robert Moreton, Kevan Buckley and Andrew Bridges
- “Thinking out of the box (and back in the plane). Concepts of space and spatial representation in two classic adventure games.” by Connie Veugen and Felipe Quérette
- “”We don’t want it changed, do we?” – Gender and Sexuality in Role Playing Games” by Arne Schroeder
- “Play belongs to Everybody”: An interview with the Ludica Collective by Cindy Poremba
- “Mass(ively) Effect(ive): Emotional Connections, Choice, and Humanity” by Natalie M. Ward
- “Grand Theft Auto IV Considered as an Atrocity Exhibition” by Martin Pichlmair
- “The 3D Story” by Tamer Thabet
This is the first issue where I’m serving as a section editor and proofreader, and I’m honored to be included in the editorial staff of this up-and-coming journal of game studies. Check it out!
|
