Writing - Page 105 of 130

Political Computer Games

Geek temperatures be rising, if the steady stream of provocatively coded games be any indication. Portal yourself into political games thru www.selectparks.net & http://radioqualia.va.com.au/replay, or wear out your arrow keys on some of these:

War Games
Aside from the name of an excellent educational movie about the dangers of nuclear war, there’s a long list of war-related releases vying for attention. Once you’ve gagged at the Official US Army game homepage, try September 12. Over 100,000 players have now wandered here, and got the clever and simple messages embedded which you can only learn by playing. An effective use of gameplay to demonstrate some ideas. “This is not a game – you can’t win and you can’t lose. This is a simulation. It has no ending. it has already begun. The rules are deadly simple. You can shoot. Or not. This is a simple model you can use to explore some aspects of the war on terror.” And file under ‘Rumoured Political Games’? Sez Google: ‘Capcom is in talks with Michael Moore and his production company for a Fahrenheit 9/11 game based on the movie. It is expected it will be released for PC, Playstation 2, and XBox’.

www.donkeyjohn.com
Klever + kute recreation of the donkey kong console in flash, drawing attention to the quite horrible way the Australian Government is negotiating the oil between East Timor & Australia. Kodework by Kaho from Elefant-Traks ( geek-girls – apparently he’s a splendid breakdancer too ). “The evil Donkey John is laying claim to East Timor’s oil resources. Guide brave Xanana Gusmario up the oil rig using the arrow keys and jumping the barrels of stolen oil. Flick the switch to start the International Crane of Justice and use it to bring Donkey John down.”

Pixel Farmers
Graphic designer Josh On from Future Farmers has brought the world a few nifty flash games: www.theyrule.net – which maps out the incredibly interlocking directories of the top companies in the US ( recently updated to 2004), and now www.antiwargame.org – where the aim is strategise as the US President, secure offshore oil-wells and maintain popularity. Sez decoder, Josh On:
“The war in Afghanistan and the war to effect regime change in Iraq, have little to do with battling terror and everything to do with securing the interests of the US ruling class in the world. This includes controlling the world’s oil resources (the planned pipeline across Afghanistan, the abundant high quality oil in Iraq)”.

He also pointed to this great site ( http://homokaasu.org/rasterbator ) which is a game involving computers if you consider the way it might be able to help you create large scale posters on a computer for interesting public placement?
“You can upload an image using this flash app, which then allows you to decide how many pices of paper you want it printed on. It turns your images into the black and white dotted images that you see in newspapers so that it scales well. You recieve the resulting image in a pdf file. Brilliant.”

Pixelated Farmers
boldgames.com/johndeere.html
In the light of a recent BBC article pointing out that the world does not have enough water to maintain a BEEF based diet ( Animals need much more water than grain to produce the same amount of food, and ending malnutrition and feeding even more mouths will take still more water.), the fresh new ‘John Deere American Farmer’ simulation can be seen in a kinda politically motivated light. But perhaps creating and managing your own successful farm with ‘John Deere American Farmer’ could be played creatively. At any rate there’s no doubt a lot of fun to be had “Purchasing and controlling authentic John Deere branded equipment — tractors, combines, planters, cultivators” amongst other exciting farm activities.

Invader Games
Have seen plenty of variations of this classic arcade game – with George Bush, flashing 8-bit nuns, and assorted symbols / animals / fetishes, but this one is kinda cool – Space Invaders Act 1732 which lets you shoot at American corporate logos with words from a legislation Act.

Who’d have thought it’d be gamers that’d be blunting the war on terrorism? More next week..

by Sean Healy, August 20, 2004 0 comments

Addictive TV Interview for Ministry Mag

Aside from running the wildly popular Mixmaster TV ( & now DVD ) series, regular AV nights in Paris & London, and setting up one of the world’s first VJ labels, Addictive TV have also been building Japanese bridges, getting new av artist releases ready and testing the yet to be released DVD turntables. Founder Graham Daniels explains:

How’d the classic films remix project @ Paris go?
Fantastically. We had Bruce Li the Invincible remixed by Eclectic Method; Nosferatu remixed by Kane & Fodel (Brian Kane founded the AV pioneering Emergency Broadcast Network); Vengeance Valley by The Light Surgeons; Seven Samurai by German AV act Bauhouse, and Cary Grant’s Charade remix by The Noodles Foundation was a real crowd pleaser.

What sort of work have Si Begg’s Noodle Foundation planned for their DVD?
True to their media- mangling roots, they’ll be messing with your mind. They’re shooting a lot of material, we’re clearing some old late night cult TV for them to plunder. The Noodles guys have worked together for many years, playing live, running nights in London, and share an absurd sense of humour. Robin Mahoney, who heads the visuals side of The Noodles Foundation, produced and directed Glastonbury The Movie.

What excites about the prospect of solo DVD’s by The Mellowtrons & Exceeda?
Giles Thacker was Orbital’s VJ who pioneered their whole visuals look and toured the world with them, and his Mellowtrons animation style is a little like Terry Gilliam on acid! Exceeda are heavily into AV Cutup and make original and humourous work using a hell of a lot of originally shot footage.

What’ve been interesting developments in the VJ world?
That there’s now dozens of VJ software packages all fighting for users. Visuals and VJing have become more widely accepted by a lot of digital arts festivals and electronic music events. The DVJ-X1 DVD turntables from Pioneer; they’ll radically affect the scene in time. You can pitch adjust the speed or scratch the video in time with music when VJing, but its their AV potential where they really amaze.

What’s unique/attractive about the Japanese visual scene?
People actually go along to see the VJ play. Glamoove, probably Japan’s most famous VJs, have toured across Japan with different DJs in tow. We played in Tokyo at Club Yellow and Womb, and the visuals were absolutely central to both nights, and this year at Ageha – Tokyo’s newest ‘superclub’ – we played alongside 808 State using a pair of Pioneer loaned DVJ DVD decks, plus my laptop and a small DVD player.

( for ministry magazine, 2004 )
See also : another Addictive TV piece.

by Sean Healy, August 6, 2004 1 Comment

Destroying Evil

Head to head this week in the war on terror, EVIL vs clip-art heroine, animated gif surrealist & all-round San Franciscan adventuress, 1 x Katie Bush. Print media cannot do justice to the twin blows she strikes for freedom at the stroboscopic browser batterers: destroyevil.com & lovekatie.com.

What’s evil about Katie?
There is nothing evil about katie! Evil creatures (such as evil women) act out of an insidious lack of compassion (especially with their vagina or their genitals). They do this for fun and for evil sport, or out of a vaginal duty to some evil deity or heinous master. It is sick and it is terrifying and it must be destroyed! Katie doesn’t participate in this type of naughty! Katie is the way, the truth and the life. On top of that… To be evil, you must be headquartered in the torrid caverns of red hell. My anonymous hotmail email address PROVES that I am not headquartered in that area. If you had done a little research before contacting me, you would know that geographical experts have produced a textbook that indicates that the earth’s INTERIOR consists of evil, non-righteous hell-fire … I live on the EXTERIOR of the earth and therefore have nothing to do with this!

What’s evil about webpages?
A website is a collection of information-like documents or ‘pages’ that can be viewed by handsome men and/or pretty ladies using calculation boxes known as ‘computers’. These calculation boxes are able to perform tasks (such as ‘sorting’ or ‘correlating’) typically associated with female office secretaries, but at FRIGHTENINGLY INHUMAN SPEEDS. Many researchers have proven that where there is frighteningly inhuman speed: there is evil! to prove this terrifying point, I took the liberty of lowering a penis-like device, known as a ‘microphone’ into the grotesque internals of my calculation box. Needless to say, Ii was shocked! Nothing I can do, nothing I can say, will ever erase the horror of audio-evil-hell I heard. it sent chills screaming through my soul. If evil is not real, then i am the most deceived lady in all the land.

Evil in Australia?
From what I can ascertain, the only thing evil about Australia is the Crocodile Hunter Steve Irwin, his wife Terri Rains and their crocodile baby Bindi Sue.

Can you make an Australian reader piss their pants?
There is a bridge here in San Francisco. It is funny.

What per centage of Californians have RSI?
I don’t think I know what that is. But I am frightened. And I am pretty sure I have it. It itches all the time and when/IF I look at my vagina… I only see the RSI and I know that something is horribly, horribly wrong. (So I don’t look at it and I do not tell ANY of my sexual partners).

How’s California become a better place since Arnie got elected?
In every way a bronzed lady (such as myself) can imagine. Thank god Arnold Schwarzenegger was ‘elected’ to one of the most powerful positions in the world and innocent multi-national corporations like Enron can now go about their business in peace! Plus, it’z neat that he was in the movies! What would this patriarchal world have come to, if George Bush’s baseball buddies hadn’t been allowed to pillage.. I mean .. conduct unregulated laundering.. I mean business in the sunny state. As a consumer of things (go malls!), I was delighted that that silly-willy $9 BILLION lawsuit (brought on by the former/ousted Governor of California) against Enron and other oil-lovin’ businessmen was dropped the second Arnold was elected! On top of that.. it’z neat, ’cause he’s in movies! Hopefully those incriminating Enron memos between Kenneth Lay and the Terminator (awesome movie!) will stay in the dark where they belong! (www.ConsumerWatchdog.org) If a little Austrian boy can eventually make his way across an ocean to star in ‘Twins’ (Danny DeVito was initially reluctant to talk that role! what was he thinking!)…. he is surely qualified to run the world’s fifth largest economy.

If Animated Gifs were a super-hero, what’d their secret weapon be?
Animated Gifs ARE super-heros. I am not supposed to talk about it, but the only way you can tell if an animated Gif is a boy super-hero or a girl super-hero is by suddenly turning it upside down and looking at its 2-dimensional genitalia(s). (**WARNING***! They are normally reluctuant to SHOW YOU.. so you have to take them to a disgusting bar and use small doses of computerized horse tranquilizer). If the .gif file contains an animated penis: its secret weapon is quite often a frighteningly large ejaculatory pixel wand. If the .gif file contains a tube-like opening that extends from the labia minora to the uterus and is elastic enough to allow passage of an animated fetus: it is a girl super-hero and her secret weapon is that she can receive a penis during coitus.

Your 5 year GOAL for Destroying Evil?
To consume All/consumers.

>When websites have epitaphs, what’ll yours be?
destroyevil.com

Evil Quizzer Of The Week:
Q. What’s the difference between liberating the people of Iraq, and say Sudan or Rwanda?
A. Neither Sudan where thousands are currently being killed every week and up to 1 million people have been drive from their homes, or Rwanda where 800,000 people were killed in 1994 – have enough oilpipes feeding Uncle Sam’s engine.

Jurassic 5, Tortoise, Thievery Corporation, X-ecutioners, Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry or Danger Mouse aren’t down with that, and if you buy the “Genocide in Sudan” charity CD they feature on, you’ll be helping Sudanese people : http://waxploitation.com/html/sudan_news.html

by Sean Healy, July 20, 2004 0 comments

Making Web Moofies

Prioritise. Anybody successful will admit it’s the only way to get anywhere. Bumping to the top of this week’s list then – finally making a music video and publishing it online. After all, doesn’t the world deserve to see as well as hear the BlackSmiths – a reggae band who drown Morrisey songs in too much reverb?

Prepare Your Movie
Before the shrinking process even begins to get your movie online, it’s worth considering what sort of movies work best in an online environment. Googling will reveal a range of pages, most of whom agree on a number of things which will help your clip be web-friendly, before you even begin compressing the little bugger to a fraction of it’s size. Of course, these are just general priniciples to keep a video looking as good as possible on say a 56k modem – which is always going to be a stretch, and tis sometimes handy to know some of the rules before breaking them.

*Generally webclips are 320×240 or smaller – so the first thing to remember with web audiences is that your clip can’t rely on subtleties, nuances and details. Remember this as you storyboard your clip ( www.storyboardschool.com ).

*Given your small viewing area, close ups and mid shots can deliver more detail than wide and long shots.

*Keeping camera and subject movement to a minimum will help compression work better ( ie zooms, pans, tilts and on-screen action etc – providing smaller file size and better image quality. (Less ‘different’ image frames to ‘compare’.) For this reason tripods and steady images are preferred to shaky handicam footage.

*Fine backgrounds as they can cause file sizes to bloom. Medium-fast pans typically become blocky blurs.

More Rasta Cut Fasta
Choppin & splicin, choppin & splicin. Fun to be sure, but even after such rigorous planning and meticulous shooting, the beast still has to be captured onto a hard drive. Firewire is generally the best option here, although given it’ll be on the web – plenty of USB devices are suitable too. Tis best to capture at full resolution if have the space, and shrink the resolution at the last step – maximising the amount of image data the compression program has to play with for optimising your clip. Full size captured video is generally around 100mb a minute, so a 3minute wailing morrisey reggae clip can take up to 2 gigs of space when you consider edits and rendering space needed. Mixed & chopped? Time to kompress.

Killa Kompression
Aight. Most video editing software can output your clip in a variety of ways. The key things for optimal online file size and quality are image size ( 320×240 or 240 x180 ), frame rate ( instead of 25, reduce to 15 frames per second, and where given an option for keyframes – one keyframe every 80 is seen as sufficient for webmovies ) and the choice of codec. Common (kompression) codecs are Cinepak, Indeo, photojpeg and Sorenson and they each have their merits for encoding clips. Many prefer the tiny filesizes that Sorenson produces, but they also take a long time to encode and are processor intensive. Mp4 video files are becoming popular for online delivery, and a relative newcomer to the codec ballpark is DivX, which is doing for video what mp3 has done for audio – make large files much smaller with as little quality reduction as possible. To encode as a divx you will need to download and install their codec first ( see www.divx.com ) and this should then hopefully appear as an encoding option within your editing software.

Dedicated Kompressors
Aside from editing software, apps such as Media Cleaner (www.discreet.com/products/cleaner), Sorenson Squeeze (www.sorenson.com), Wildform Flix, Real Player ( www.real.com ) and ffmpeg (ffmpeg.sourceforge.net) all provide dedicated kompression tools which give more export adjusting detail and provide many batch processing options ( for those with many rasta clips to make ). Flix & Squeeze are notable here for their use of Flash software to shrink filesizes.

Udder Options
*Embedded movies on webpages? You’ll need to use a quicktime codec to embed within a webpage. Most web authoring apps make this process kinda easy, or you can always ‘view the source’ of a webpage with an interestingly embedded movie and adapt to suit your own needs.

*Streaming? This basically means that the viewer can start watching your clip as it is downloading, rather than having to wait until the entire thing has downloaded. Quicktime has options for this, that you will have to tweak – as does the Real Producer companion app to the real player.

*Dump your clip onto www.archive.org or the P2P networks instead of the web? ( http://bitconjurer.org/BitTorrent is your friend here ).

by Sean Healy, July 20, 2004 0 comments

Weather Splicing Chimps

If in the mood for a campy Thai drag queen spy movie with heavy buddhist morals – it’d be hard to go past ‘The Adventures of Iron Pussy’ which just screened at the Melb_Inter_Film Fest. Nevertheless, we have other important things to deal with this week.

Movies to Change Climate To
Under the influence of sites like say – www.lifeaftertheoilcrash.net, www.energybulletin.net, www.endofsuburbia.com & say www.peakoilaction.org.. and say given the war in Iraq and with the TV flickering on about the current record high and rising price of oil – I was kinda curious about how the makers of the profoundly moving ‘Independence Day’ tackled Global Warming and other matters of Climate Change. Rest assured ‘The Day After Tomorrow’ is a gripping, stunt-packed romance thriller!

Not to take anything away from the money shots – New York hit by tidal waves and later freezing over, Los Angeles wiped by tornadoes, including a nice Hollywood sign rip-up – this is an emotional rollercoaster, it’ll sweep you off your feet, it’ll keep you on the edge of your seat, and yet somehow, miraculously against all odds, and despite the deaths of millions of people because of irreversible climate change, two teenagers will manage to find true love, and a scientist dad will fight off evil nature to rescue his son. Five teary stars.

Edit Your Mpegs
www.alfanet.it/squared5
Many online movies are encoded as mpegs – heavy compression that greatly reduces the file size of a movie. It is also uses for videos put on VCDs. This makes them great for sending around the internet, but unfortunately the way the audio and video are compressed together as one file ( called muxing ), means that it is difficult to edit these files with the audio and video in synch. There are quite a few small home-made applications available to extract the audio and video in various ways and then re-stitch them together, but the recent publishing of ‘Mpeg Streamclip’ is a very welcome and free! addition to the tool-kits of would-be collage-ists.

MPEG Streamclip converts MPEG files into muxed, demuxed, QuickTime or DV files with more than professional quality, so you can easily import them into your video editing app of choice. A cool function of this software is that you can select a portion of the file you want to export as an editable movie – not just the entire file – which is handy if you want to sample a small section of a feature length film for example. Just set your in and out points and bingo. Works like a treat – though is for mac OS X only. On the PC – I’d be reckoning the much recommended www.virtualdub.org might solve mpeg editind issues for you.

Lancelot Link, Secret Chimp
Aye Carumba~! If anybody has ever spent any time collecting footage of monkeys performing human tasks – the odd beer commercial here, the rollerskating chimp on a kids show there – they can appreciate the rare glimpse lancelink.jpgthese animals give us of ourselves, a reminder of our own animal clumsiness – and they can also appreciate how hard these clips are to find. If you have a friend like that, have the smelling salts ready when you introduce them to the wonderful world of Lancelot Link, Secret Chimp – an entire goddamn sitcom series made by the creators of ‘Get Smart’ where each of the 24 episodes is peppered with all the shots and cheesy sets you’d expect in a spy sitcom – except that every character is a chimp dressed up and moving it’s mouth in a talking like manner. Google this hilarity, and when you’re done – try the ace documentary interview with the directors by Jeff Krulik, I Created Lancelot Link, available free to watch here: www.planetkrulik.com/link.htm

by Sean Healy, July 20, 2004 0 comments