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Aral's script converts any online statement into CSV for FreeAgent; I don't use FreeAgent, but I have a feeling I could modify this into something useful. (In other news: why is all UK online banking so bad?)
Play is a serious business
22 April 2012
I had the great pleasure to get to Galy Tots at Kemistry last week: a lovely, tiny retrospective of Ken Garland Associates’ work for Galt Toys. It was lovely: lots of nice examples of graphic design and photography, as well as lots of items on display, including a prototype of knock-down furniture for playgroups, that was just beautiful.
There were several particularly lovely touches: firstly, that all the toys and games on display were set up to be played with – indeed, that they were set up so that children as well as adults could play.
And secondly: all the exhibition copy was written by Garland himself, which gave it a tone that was both very honest but also charming and subtle.
There were two quotation I took down, because they made an impact, and I wanted to share them.
Garland wrote about Edward Newmark, who had been manager of Paul and Marjorie Abbatt’s toyshop before he went to Galt.
Edward brought with him the conviction that play is a serious business, and toys are the tools of the child.
Talking about their time working for Galt, Garland said:
Most especially, it is rare for designers to have the experience of their work being enjoyed before their very eyes. I have had the greatest delight in seeing children playing our most successful game, Connect, in many parts of the world.
Watching something being enjoyed before your eyes is one of the great pleasures of designing things to be played or interacted with.
(And, by corollary, nothing hurts more, or reminds you to up your game, than watching somebody not have fun with something assumed they would enjoy).
Spring Clean
20 April 2012
I’ve had a new version of my site template kicking around for years now; today, I finally bit the bullet and pushed it love. The main additions are a slightly different talks page, which tries to catalogue everything in some for or other. Some talks have the full text available; others are there as video or PDF. I’m going to keep working on this over time, and try and get some of the more recent ones up.
Similarly, the projects page collates things I’d call projects: stuff I’ve made, with links to code or relevant blogposts where appropriate.
I’ve also moved to a slightly more responsive layout, because I end up using this site for reference from my mobile phone. The whole thing is deployed – and has been for a while now – using my Capistrano for WordPress configuration. It’s 2012, and you shouldn’t be drag-and-dropping in an FTP client if you can help it.
And, finally, I’ve turned comments off. I’m really not convinced of the value of them any more; I enjoyed the days when everybody wrote responses on their own sites. I might re-enable them, but for now, there are no comments. I’m still displaying old comments, and trackbacks and pingbacks will still show up.
That’s it for now, but the whole thing is in a better shape for the future: there’s finer-grained modelling of top-level objects going on, which makes my domain-driven brain much happier. And it’s a bit wider, and the text can breathe some more.
Better write some things to go on here, then.
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"There’s still a smell of bullshit to almost every videogame story I read, even as it’s advanced to a very high level being in The New Yorker and The New York Times Magazine. To me it derives from this politeness about the thing that’s experienced. In literary criticism there are really cutting deconstructions of things that are inadequate—Nabokov talking about what a fraud and charlatan Faulkner was—but there’s this really intelligent, but painfully milquetoast, quality to the way we appreciate games. It’s a reflection of how partially engaged we are with each one. We consider games primarily as ideas, rather than actual evolving relationships that we’ve had over time." Yeah, that. I enjoyed this discussion: I'm pretty sure you don't have to finish games to review them. Then again: I also think writing about games six months after they came out is way more interesting than trying to hammer through something to fit into a review cycle.
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Oooh, the Shruthi got an upgrade: not just white PCBs, but an interesting new filter board. Seriously tempted by one of these.
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"If most of the value is now in the initial creative act, there’s little benefit to traditional hierarchical organization that’s designed to deliver the same thing over and over, making only incremental changes over time. What matters is being first and bootstrapping your product into a positive feedback spiral with a constant stream of creative innovation." (Michael Abrash is scary smart, at Valve, investigating wearable computing, but this line – about the value of being first and being innovative – was the most important here for me.)
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"PhantomJS is a headless WebKit with JavaScript API. It has fast and native support for various web standards: DOM handling, CSS selector, JSON, Canvas, and SVG."
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"It’s the symptom of the algorithm. It’s what comes out of the digital-political-economy of cultures that live by networks and the machinary (soft/hard/hashtag-y) that underpin it all. All this #newaesthtic #ooo #futureofproduction stuff is the excess. The unexpected, unplanned for result. It’s the things that happen without one self-consciously *going after* #newaesthetic / object-oriented ontological / future of network connected things sensibilities." A calm, rational, open-ended commentary from Julian. I liked this point.
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"We'll only really understand what we're doing when it stops feeling new, when we have a sense of history about what we're making." Better keep on making, then. (This is good. Also: well done Phil. It's important to say well done, and this is a lot of effort, and it's been brilliant. Finishing in May! Gosh).
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Gorgeous work from Ken Garland, and an exhibition of the Galt Toys work in Shoreditch. And, best of all, the exhibition lets you play with the toys. Will be going to this.
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"In making this list, Sterling privileges the visible objects of New Aesthetics over the invisible and algorithmic ones. New Aesthetics is not simply an aesthetic fetish of the texture of these images, but an inquiry into the objects that make them. It’s an attempt to imagine the inner lives of the native objects of the 21st century and to visualize how they imagine us." I'm never quite convinced by the Creators Project, and their introduction to this feels a bit woolly, but the interviews are all very good. This quotation, from Greg Borenstein, is excellent.
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"That’s why I like having these little printed books, or these little files of my notes, because I can literally pull up anything I want to remember from Moby Dick, and in repeating it, remember it. Annotating becomes a way to re-encounter things I’ve read for pleasure." Which is why I have a stack of eight books on my dining table, and more to come over the years – to be read, not just hoarded.