25 February 2003

Various mobile and games links B'ngo to compete Nokia N-Gage Orange and O2 cautious over 3G - Orange: 'It is not about the technology, more what the technology can do for people' iMode to integrate Flash - too late for Europe? Is there really a market for a $20,000 mobile phone? - see also Jim Griffin's discussion with Frank Nuovo, Vertu's designer about the 'digital pocket'. Online gaming growing rapidly - broadband is driving adoption Docs-to-be study art to hone medical skills - 'By gazing at an artwork for 10 minutes, students and doctors can become better diagnosticians' [via various places] 6:21:19 PM     comments

MMOG game A Tale in the Desert reviewed by Greg Costikyan: flawed, but 'if you're interested in MMGs at all, you have to check this out' by Massive Multiplayer.org: 'exactly the kind of game that the MMOG market needs' The game. [via costik, metafilter] 5:53:34 PM     comments

William Gibson in Observer, 2001: Otaku - Modern boys and mobile girls WG asks himself Why Japan? (it's the global imagination's default setting for the future), tells us that Japanese culture is as fractally codified as English culture is, and then gets on to explaining the otaku: The otaku, the passionate obsessive, the information age's embodiment of the connoisseur, more concerned with the accumulation of data than of objects, seems a natural crossover figure in today's interface of British and Japanese cultures. I see it in the eyes of the Portobello dealers, and in the eyes of the Japanese collectors: a perfectly calm train-spotter frenzy, murderous and sublime. Understanding otaku -hood, I think, is one of the keys to understanding the culture of the web. There is something profoundly post-national about it, extra-geographic. We are all curators, in the post-modern world, whether we want to be or not. The Japanese are great appreciators of what they call 'secret brands', and in this too they share something with the British. There is a similar fascination with detail, with cataloguing, with distinguishing one thing from another. Both cultures are singularly adroit at re-conceptualising foreign product, at absorbing it and making it their own. See also: Doctorow's passionately/obsessively linky review of Pattern Recognition, WG's latest Lawrence Eng's The politics of otaku, which glosses the word's etymology (my house / thou / Ma'am / sir), which makes us recall the social/ritual formalities of Stephenson's Diamond Age and WG's own (with Bruce Sterling) Difference Engine. [via boingboing, google] 5:44:50 PM     comments

Bobby Robson on football managers and artists If you’re a painter, you don’t get rich until you’re dead. The same happens with managers. You’re never appreciated until you’re gone, and then people say: 'Oh, he was OK'. Just like Picasso [via football365] 3:31:04 PM     comments