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Sunday, 16 October 2005
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Cory Doctorow:
The Guardian has an amazing interview with my hero, Brazilian culture minister and jazz legend Gilberto GIl:
And in one small development that none the less sums up the mood, the
left-wing administration of President Luiz Inacio da Silva, or "Lula",
has announced that all ministries will stop using Microsoft Windows on
their office computers. Instead of paying through the nose for
Microsoft operating licences, while millions of Brazilians live in
poverty, the government will use open-source software, collaboratively
designed by programmers worldwide and owned by no one.
"This isn't just my idea, or Brazil's idea," Gil says. "It's the
idea of our time. The complexity of our times demands it." He is
politician enough to hold back from endorsing the breaking of laws, for
example on music downloading, but only just. "The Brazilian government
is definitely pro-law," he grins. "But if law doesn't fit reality
anymore, law has to be changed. That's not a new thing. That's
civilisation as usual." (He is not a hi-tech person himself, he says,
but readily concedes that his children have "probably" done a fair bit
of illegal downloading.)
Gil is a great composer in
his own right; he knows the value of letting go, the greedy insistence
on rights sometimes being counterproductive.
Link
(Thanks, Robert!) [Boing Boing]
11:40:30 PM 
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Canadian researchers have discovered that smoking marijuana could improve a person's memory and mood.
There isn't a musician I know who
wouldn't welcome positive news about dope, but somehow I'm pretty sure
their experience would lead them to doubt this. The memory part, not
the mood bit, obviously.
[ABC News: Health]
10:42:00 PM
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Cory Doctorow:
Master
game designer Greg Costikyan has posted the PowerPoint deck from his
Future Play conference presentation, titled, "Imagining New Game
Styles." The presentation introduces the concepts of game styles, which are related to the fundamentals of play and not to be confused with game genres.
Examples of game styles include "The Chess Family," characterized by
"capture by replacement; bilateral symmetry and equality of material;
functionally differentiated pieces; play by movement & capture, not
placement and victory through capture of a single piece."
The most fascinating part of this is the catalog of game styles that
have seen little development to date -- if you want to think about the
future of video-games (and games in general), start to imagine how
these fallow styles could be made to bear fruit.
636K PowerPoint Link
(via Games * Design * Art * Culture)
[Boing Boing]
9:38:53 PM
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Over the last few days I have had
lunch with two people (one at a time) whom I hadn't seen for over
thirty years. These were experiences about which I have very mixed
feelings. Mostly, it was pleasant.
I've tried, unsuccessfully, to order my thoughts about these meetings.
I've ended up with a collection of nonsequiturs, and logical dead ends,
that even I don't follow very well now.
One person I met was a woman I don't want to describe too closely, but
the bare facts are [I wrote some stuff here originally, about who she
is and what she is to me, but thought it better not to publish; I'll
leave it at this]. This complicates things somewhat for me, but of course means nothing to her. Obviously, even I went on to have a life.
One thing that surprised me was that she has gone on to be exactly the
person I imagined she would be. Bully for me and my judgement. She was,
of course, utterly lovely.
When I saw Felicity the next day, she too was predictable in her insecure possessiveness.
"Do you still find her attractive?"
I couldn't lie. I said,
"Oooo, yeah."
In every possible way.
The other was a man I knew as a class member in high school. We were
never best friends, but were, at various times, as close as teenage
boys allow themselves to get. He was always a straightforward lovely
bloke I always felt I could trust. We certainly shared musical
interests. Even in his case, there was a really trivial incident that I
regret, that put a cloud over the prospect of meeting him. The matter
was so trivial that he had no recollection of any such thing, so it
wasn't a problem for anyone but me, as is so often the case.
I really enjoyed meeting both of them, in spite of some reservations,
most of which were just the residue of an ongoing shyness I've had all
my life.
But, due to my social ineptness, I think I was hard work for my more confident and gregarious companions.
I'm never sure of what is appropriate to ask, or to say, so I end up
silent. I think this makes me come across as:
(choose one or any
combination)
- aloof and uninterested
- dumb and boring,
- melancholy and morose
- self-centred and self-important
- mad and delusional
- suspicious and paranoid.
I'm really quite a nice, normal person. Just a bit slow sometimes, and overwhelmed by the chaos of human interaction.
I can't help thinking that I have missed some kind of important
opportunity. I'm pretty sure I blew any chance at an ongoing friendship
with at least one of them. Guess which?
In the words of Peter Green -
Oh well.
9:33:39 PM
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Cory Doctorow:
Wal-Mart called the police on a high-school student who brought in a
pic of a homemade anti-George Bush poster for photo-finishing. The
Secret Service went to the kid's high-school and confiscated the
poster.
Jarvis had assigned her senior civics and economics class "to take
photographs to illustrate their rights in the Bill of Rights," she
says. One student "had taken a photo of George Bush out of a magazine
and tacked the picture to a wall with a red thumb tack through his
head. Then he made a thumb's-down sign with his own hand next to the
President's picture, and he had a photo taken of that, and he pasted it
on a poster..."
An employee in that Wal-Mart photo department called the Kitty Hawk
police on the student. And the Kitty Hawk police turned the matter over
to the Secret Service. On Tuesday, September 20, the Secret Service
came to Currituck High.
"At 1:35, the student came to me and told me that the Secret
Service had taken his poster," Jarvis says. "I didn't believe him at
first. But they had come into my room when I wasn't there and had taken
his poster, which was in a stack with all the others."
I'm speechless.
Americans, of course, are now free-speechless.
Link [Boing Boing]
9:27:27 AM
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© Copyright 2005 Peter Nixon.
Last update: 1/11/05; 10:06:45 PM.
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