the new Xbox 360 article on BBC

The BBC has released an article on the lates gaming console, XBOX 360.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4482200.stm

At the link you can also find a video link that goes through the history of gaming from the PONG games in the 70s, the Mario years of the 80s, through the playstation years of the 90s

Graphic Novel Generator pt. 2...specificities

Here's a mock set up:

You have a graphic novel. About 120 pages.
Each page consists on average 6 panels to tell the story.
That gives an average of 720 images.

Put those 720 images into a random generator. Most likely for the story to make any sense at all, images will probably be collected into groupings. A specific scene for example that would have a total of 10 panels would be one grouping. So the generator could randomize the order of the scenes - 72 scenes for example.

These 72 scenes could be placed with an individual number and then put into the generator (similar to how a wu-name generator would work with text), where it would pair the number with a placement in the layout of the story.

The Online Society of Gamers!!!

It's this generation. It's the millions of nerds all around the world that grew up on computers, the nintendos, the super nintendos, the first 3D graphic games for PCs... It seems to all fit so nicely for this generation.
It was my generation that had the nintendo at a young age, then the super nintendo, then the playstation, playstation 2, and somehow making it to the right age range to play the 'new' thing - the Mature games, such as GTA. And now we're the age of kids that are the mass population occupying the virtual world of online games.

It leads to a few big questions such as where will our world be in 20 years? We've already embraced something as complex and intertwining as the Internet. We're now selling virtual spaces to each other for REAL money. We're buying and selling products that only exist in data.

We're meeting friends online - people we'll probably never meet in the flesh. We're building relationships. We're already living in our own virtual fantasies.
Most of young adults living in developed countries are consuming these laptops and pcs consistently, constantly upgrading these devices of storage, communication, and creation.

Generator Idea....

I wonder how complicated a generator can be. We've seen name generators, Haiku generators, sonnet generators.... codes and random selection that deconstructs original formats and formulates new ones.

What if you were to have a comic book, say like Sin City, which is composed of several stories in one graphic novel. If you were to create a generator that would somehow compose a new graphic novel. The frames are cut up, muddled around and a generator would randomly select images to create a NEW story. What if the hero is killed halfway through the storyline, but pops back up again with his origins at the end of the story, and the opening of the book explodes with a scene supposedly set 30 pages later. It sounds far fetched, but with a computer, cutting picture frames can be rather simple, as does labelling each frame, coding it and mixing it into a generator.

Book Report

When matt was describing Oulipo to the class a couple weeks ago, I found myself asking questions regarding the relevance of the topic. Finding odd and new ways to present text seemed a little arbitrary. I didn't see the point of creating new sonnets out of old ones, especially when the grammar was all over the place.

However, after recieving answers to those questions, more than anything, these different ways of portraying poetry, literature, etc, seems to me a jumping point for something more in context. If poetry is manipulated, switched around, jumbled about, and the outcome seems just as mixed, the new mixture provides for the artist/writer a new branch of understandings for the text. With that, the writer can compose his own piece in the formula of common literature, with the enhancements he has discovered in those experiments.

The idea of creating a Dadaist poem, transforming order into chaos, sensibility to vulgarity seems to me as well a great experiment of formulating my own text in a concept where there are no boundaries. And if i wanted to, i'd reestablish the text to fit the boundaries of literature and compose something original and 'poetic' at the same time.

When first coming to calArts, I was a huge fan of realistic/naturalistic acting. Creating a sense of the real world onstage. This was opposed by the manifesto of the school of theatre. The shows in CalArts, for a long time have been a pest of text. Words were abstract, heightened by avant garde performances.
It was difficult going away from a CalArts performance thinking "yeah I totally got it!" Most of the time after the show was spent trying to figure out what was meant when a character said this or that. As I got more accustomed to the way these shows were done (and participating in a number of them myself), I learned to appreciate the impressionistic representation of text. Real life sets the soil, a playwright plants the seed, and the productions take on the shape of a Jurassic periodic plant existing in 21st century Central Park.

Forwhat is textbuta tool createdbyman which canbemanipulatedbentcontrolledbroken down down down down
whatif wewereall to TALKLIKEBABIESfortherrrrrrrrestofourrrlives

text allows us to leave the norm and to escape to a world where we might enjoy ourselves or end up scratching our heads because some dude came up with something cool, and the other dude just doesn't get it. all in the eye of the beholder.

homework is late!

Jason,

if you get this on Monday night, this means that I was not able to conduct my book report. Migranes have been inflicting my ability to do productive things apart from reading comic books...

the book report will be posted on the blog before Wednesday's class.

matthew

Virtual Property Market Booming - BBC Article

Property is hot in virtual worldA gamer who spent £13,700 on an island that only exists in a computer game has recouped his investment, according to the game developers.
The 23-year-old gamer known as Deathifier made the money back in under a year.
The virtual Treasure Island he bought existed within the online role-playing game Project Entropia.
He made money by selling land to build virtual homes as well as taxing other gamers to hunt or mine on the island.
Project Entropia offers gamers the chance to buy and sell virtual items using real cash, a trend which is gaining popularity as the boundaries between the virtual and real worlds continue to blur.

Property boom
There are fortunes to be made in the burgeoning world of MMORPGs (massive multiplayer online role playing gaming).

The views in the virtual world are pretty good"The money made to date is only a taste of what can be achieved with my virtual island purchase," said Deathifier.
"We've really only just begun with the estate sales and land management, there is still more room for growth and revenue with the untapped resources surrounding the land."
Last month, another of Entropia's virtual properties - a virtual space station - sold at auction for £57,000.


While the real housing market may be somewhat static, the one in the virtual world is booming, said the space station action winner, gamer Jon Jacobs, AKA Neverdie.
He said the virtual real estate market was "on fire" as gamers increasingly realised that virtual worlds could start to compete with real worlds at an economic level.
Neverdie plans to use his space station to establish an in-game "night club" through which the entertainment industry can sell music and videos to gamers.
The Entropia economy works by allowing gamers to exchange real currency for PED (Project Entropia Dollars) and back again into real money.
Ten PEDs are the equivalent to one US dollar and gamers can earn cash by accumulating PEDs via the acquisition of goods, buildings and land.
Project Entropia was launched in 2003 and now has 300,000 registered accounts.

Haiku Generator

Nouns:

"penis", "2", "orange", "2", "mask", "1", "chow mein", "2", "poster", "2", "lotion", "2", "light bulb", "2", "car pool", "2", "pillow", "2", "ceiling", "2", "comic", "2", "sunflower", "3", "soul", "1", "font", "1", "bungalow", "3", "canopy", "3", "crib", "1", "potato", "3", "cloud", "1"

Verbs:

"jump", "1", "cum", "1", "slip", "1", "pop", "1", "rush", "1", "light", "1'", "tap", "1", "severe". "2", "stew", "1", "heal", "1", "slice", "1", "crack", "1", "scratch", "1", "dancing", "2", "swatting", "2",
"blister", "2", "fuck", "1", "fly", "1", "flutter", "1", "conserve", "2"

Adverbs:

"quickly", "2", "silently", "3", "harshly", "2", "sparsely", "2", "hurriedly", "3", "badly", "2", "effectively", "4", "cautiously", "3", "recently", "3", "ecstaticly", "4", "little", "2", "verbosely", "3", "much", "1", "frequently", "3", "purposefully", "4", "ostintatiously", "5", "erratically", "4", "morosely", "3", "deviantly", "4", "early", "2"

Adjectives:

"synchronized", "3", "ambiguous", "4", "vaccant", "2", "glum", "1", "gorgeous", "2", "kleidoscopic", "5", "wanton", "2", "horny", "2", "archaic", "3", "non-chalant", "3", "conformed", "2", "devious", "3", "malnutritioned", "4", "dead", "1", "gargantuan", "4", "succulent", "3", "elusive", "3", "prickly", "2", "flatulant", "3", "indecisive", "4"