• "My 12 year old daugh­ter uses a com­pletely unfil­tered Inter­net con­nec­tion. She also has root access to the net­work at home and to the com­puter she uses. Yet she’s never encoun­tered any of the prob­lems Sen­a­tor Con­roy and the likes of Sen­a­tor Field­ing seem to believe are ram­pant — no nas­ties, viruses, stalk­ers or any other unde­sir­able in sev­eral years of using the Inter­net unfil­tered and mostly unsu­per­vised. And you know why? _Good rules and decent par­ent­ing_ (well, cer­tainly the first and hope­fully the second)." Man, Australia's conservatism is getting rather scary.
    (tags: censorship internet filtering parenting australia )
  • "Landscaping overgrows, walls develop mildew, ceilings cave in—a building can be shut down, but that doesn’t make it go away. Brian Ulrich’s photographs of closed-down malls and big-box retail stores reveal the potential ghost towns lying inside successful shopping complexes all across America." Wonderful pictures; striking, strange, and sad all at once. And: all a little bit "Dead Center".
    (tags: photography malls america us architecture abandoned shopping )

Cowboys and Batman

13 December 2009

When I was reading Brandon‘s round up of the year’s games at Boing Boing, I stumbled upon this fantastic quotation about one player’s experience of Scribblenauts:

For example, a friend at work solves most problems with a jetpack and a lasso, instead of a grappling gun. In his heart he’s a cowboy, and in mine I’m Batman. That the game lets both of us express that is awesome.

– comment by ‘Periphera’

I’ve already linked to this in my delicious stream, but the more I think about this, the more I love it.

I loved that the way players approach problems in the game is tied to their own imaginations – I know that my solutions in that game are.

But as I thought on it, I loved the delineation of the world – into people who are Batman, and people who are cowboys.

Batman’s a toolsmith; not only does he rely on his tools (as will as prowess) to solve problems, but he manufactures new ones to fit the task. His toolkit becomes more diverse as the problems he solves do, and he’ll use any and all available technology to influence what he builds. So he’s one kind of hacker, if you like: he’ll glue anything and everything together, pick up tiny fragments of techniques, languages, platforms, patterns, and bodge them together. (Toolsmithery is a practice and metaphor I’m very fond of for hacking/coding – the first part of building anything is building the tools you need. My dad’s a model engineer, and has spent as much time building tools as building a steam engine, I reckon).

The cowboy is more pragmatic. He has one tool – a lasso, or a gun, or perhaps just a prairie stare – and he uses that to solve all problems. He’s still using wit and ingenuity, but channeled through the single tool that he’s master of. Again, another kind of hacker: one favoured tool that they’re master of, and can be applied to all problems; the best of the bash/Perl hackers I’ve met are much like this.

I talked to Webb in the pub on Friday about this. He instantly asserted that he’s a cowboy. That fits. I’m pretty sure I’m a Batman.

And now I have another lens to view the world through.

posts , , , , , ,
  • "A Bitter Aftertaste is a jeepform roleplaying game for four players that premiered at Ropecon, the Finnish national roleplaying games convention, in 2007. It is about two lovers who have just had the best sex of their lives, sitting on a balcony overlooking their city, and talking." Two players are the physical characters; the other two are their internal monologues and thoughts. Sounds wonderful – a combination of roleplaying and improv. An RPG designed for an audience.
    (tags: games jeepform rpg theatre improv )
  • "4chan is, I contend, the most interesting angle we have on the evolution of human consciousness. It is a shamanic experience, a bardo of becoming, where the soul is detached from the body, set free to wander in the wilderness of banality until it encounters the epic lulz of meeting itself… and finding that it, itself, is the most disturbing thing on 4chan." o_O. Just worth linking to for the eyeball-expanding prose; there may be something in there, but I'm not sure.
    (tags: 4chan internet culture society people )
  • "Passing the salt will never be the same. We all knew it was inevitable. Passing the salt by hand just isn’t efficient enough in a world of bullet trains and pizza delivery and broadband. Luckily the condiments have come to life! They will waddle wherever you tell them to, so the next time someone wants the pepper, wind up the key, and pepper they shall have! Mercilessly marching towards them like the terminator, more of a threat to dull tastes than the human race." Not sure they're £20-good, but I do like this condiment set made of small robots.
    (tags: salt pepper condiments robots smallrobots )
  • "Here’s a complication of some common and useful time & date calculations and equations. Some, though very simple, are often misunderstood, leading to inefficient or incorrect implementations. There are many ways to solve such problems. I’ll present my favorites." These are, indeed, useful, and I've been using a few of them recently.
    (tags: mysql tips programming databases sql )
  • "It's funny, but from the 1890s and until the First World War, photographers prized lenses for their unsharpness: when artists found the lenses that gave them just the right degree and quality of unsharpness, they treasured them like jewels. This attitude survived until the 1940s among portrait photographers. The unsharpness of their lenses of choice was considered by many portraitists an indivisible part of their aesthetic signature." Mike Johnston on the taste for sharpness of portrait lenses.
    (tags: mikejohston photography sharpness lenses perception )
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