War Games

Sheeeeeeyat, how much fun was Gulf War news footage? Delivered to be sure, from one of the sides at war, but at least the US made it entertaining. Apparently seeing human casualties of war in Vietnam footage changed too many opinions about that war, and so Gulf-viewers got missile-cam. And thanks to www.americasarmy.com, today we’ve got a computer game to play.

www.americasarmy.com
Why bother with one of the huge range of Osama Bin Laden game-clones available at google, when you could be shooting terrorists in a computer game made by the US army themselves??!! Players can undergo basic training and fight in 10 multiplayer missions, including one to defend an Alaskan pipeline. Now available for download, and soon to be packaged with popular game magazines and in Army recruitment centres, ‘America’s Army’ not only let’s you hunt terrorists but also doubles as a recruitment tool.

“With this game we hope to educate young Americans and present them with a realistic, engaging view of today’s modern Army and its opportunities,” said Lt. Col. Casey Wardynski. Stay tuned – On 25 July, they’ll release the first of many updates, U.S. Army Sniper School.

Rambo Vs Osama
Post S11, the Pentagon tracked down several Hollywood screenwriters including Steve de Souza ( Die Hard ), to discuss ‘left-field, off-the-wall ideas’ about America’s war. The man they should’ve been speaking to, Sylvester Stallone, is reportedly working on a script for Rambo IV which sees him kicking some Taliban Butt (TB).

Arnie For President
While Ronald Reagan may have seen merit in the Rambo movies, like Sylvester, he was an actor. Politics these days needs more muscle, such as beefy ex-wrestler Jesse Ventura, a currently elected US Governor. Ain’t no finer branded beef than Mr. Schwarzenegger though, and rumours persist that he is preppin his way to the White House. Watch this space.

The War On Terrorism
” If they do it it’s terrorism, if we do it, it’s fighting for freedom,” said a U.S. Ambassador in Central America in the 1980s, when asked to explain how U.S. actions such as the mining of Nicaragua’s harbors and bombing of airports, differed from the acts of terrorism that the U.S. condemned around the world.

Since World War II, the United States has dropped bombs on 23 countries. These include: Korea 1950-53, China 1950-53, Indonesia 1958, Cuba 1959- 60, Congo 1964, Laos 1964-73, Vietnam 1961-73, Cambodia 1969-70, Guatemala 1967-69, Grenada 1983, Lebanon 1984, Libya 1986, El Salvador 1980s, Nicaragua 1980s, Panama 1989, Iraq 1991-1999, Sudan 1998, Afghanistan 1998, and Yugoslavia 1999, including Civilian targets during the Gulf war, Vietnam, Panama, Philippines, Korea, Hiroshima and Nagasaki. 100,000 Iraqis died in the Gulf War and the suffering continues. 6,000 Iraqi children die every month from hunger and disease – the same number as died in the attacks on the WTC and Pentagon.

by Sean Healy, July 19, 2002 0 comments

Nomadic Research Labs

Beyond ants born on a merry-go-round, beyond yourself being born on the back of a galloping horse, lies the question of whether you choose to be born – or if it just happens to you. Not sure which side of that fence long-time pedaller and tech-nomad Steven Roberts sits. As you can see at www.microship.com, he’s certainly mobile though.

How hard was your transition to becoming nomadic?
Pretty easy; Central Ohio inspires long-distance travel. As this coincided with my somewhat antisocial desire to combine all my passions into a lifestyle (which can be a bit rough on relationships), the pre-launch phase was 6 months of exuberant stress. Departure was something of a relief, and since I actually *moved* to the bicycle, there was no easy way to quit when my knees hurt. After a while, the road became home… or, more accurately, the Network did, and I spent my time wandering around my huge neighborhood, dropping in on friends.

Why did u choose a recumbent bicycle, instead of say a skateboard?
I don’t like pain.

What are some of the benefits / pitfalls of being a tech-nomad?
Well, when you’re a technomad, your physical location is irrelevant. These days, that’s a pretty easy concept to grasp, since a growing percentage of the population more or less “lives” online anyway, but back then it was a bit of a shock to people. A technomadic lifestyle is immensely liberating, of course, though it’s hard to accumulate vast quantities of stuff.

Presume u must meet many online friends while travelling. Do many of them join you for a while on the road?
In the bike era, it seemed to be a sort of all-or-none situation: I did the first 10,000 miles solo (with occasional friends joining me for a day or two). The next 6,000 was with a girlfriend, then the last little
trip with BEHEMOTH was more or less solo but for an unforgettable on-the-road 3-week romance.

I am approaching the Microship project quite differently. Two boats (canoe-based amphibian pedal/solar/sail micro-trimarans) are under development here in the lab, but the plan is to travel as a technomadic flotilla of 4-8 travelers, with other nomads joining the group for varying periods over the 2+ year expedition. We are building the wireless network and other toolsets to accommodate a
variable number of participants in the community.

Strangest encounter u’v had on the road / waters?
The band of convicts in the woods who plied me with pastries from a truck wreck is right up there…

Why a solar powered linux server on a boat?
Well, how else would I manage pier-to-pier networking? Solar because I don’t have a big diesel engine to crank up whenever I need power, and Linux because it’s wonderful what you can do with commodity
hardware when you install a decent operating system. Besides, the open source community is a rich resource of clever people who like to build interesting tools. (My personal productivity machine is a Macintosh 14″ iBook running OS X.)

What sort of environmental data-collection are you doing in your expedition around North American waterways?
I’m collecting dozens of time- and location-stamped telemetry channels, streaming them to a publicly accessible server, and publishing all the tools and protocols with the hope of inducing other travellers to do likewise. Some of this is purely pragmatic (system diagnostics and the like), but the real goal is creating a huge amorphous archive of environmental data. Think of it as corporate urinalysis. In the
current political climate, it’s more important than ever for us to use our technology to expose environmental abuses and keep people suspicious. That’s not the central theme of the expedition, though: I’m actually doing this for fun.

How nomadic was your partner b4 u coaxed her to join u travelling?
Well, the partner you are probably referring to split in December… a 10-year development project is rough on relationships. There is a position vacant…

What would bring u back to the city?
Hmmmm. Free symmetrical broadband? A geek commune? Actually, it would be very hard to get me back to the city… my development lab is on a forested island in Puget Sound, and I only make it to Seattle about twice a year. I like calm places, one of the reasons I’ve migrated from road to water.

The best 3 pieces of hard earned advice you�d give someone wanting to become a pedalling nomad?
1. If you think too much about where you’re going, you’ll lose respect for where you are.
2. The greatest risk of all is taking no risk.
3. Don’t underestimate the importance of your hospitality database.

Future plans?
I’m currently working on a book about the Microship project for O’Reilly & Associates, and expect to launch the expedition in the Spring of 2003. I welcome flotilla participants, project volunteers, and other input… see http://www.microship.com/latestnews/live.html for a new photo and short text update almost every day.

by Sean Healy, July 11, 2002 0 comments

Blogs, Blogs, Blogs

Blogging. It started as web-logging – a convenient way of recording your daily trawl through web esoterica and current affairs for others to see. Now all manner of news sites, embarrassing online diaries and gossip sites are using blogs of sorts to keep their site freshly updated.

Just Another Buzzword
Well yeah, of course it is. Web-critters do love to add new bookmarks in their vocab. But give blogs a chance? For starters, ‘Blog’ sticks a little better than ‘frequently updated personal commentary’. The word has also become the glue of sorts for a whole treasure of sharply written, informative, often hilarious and mostly daily updating website authors. Exploring only a few of the following blogs will quickly show you just how interwoven their links can be, and the extent to which people are banding together around the concept of the ‘blog’.

Do It Yourself
Probably the best thing about a ‘blog’ is that it facilitates very easy online publishing and continual updating. A thriving collection of online software allows you to create and maintain your own website merely by visiting a particular webpage and typing in your new entry and sending it off. Voila. Your website now has a new commentary pushed to the top of your page for all to read. www.blogger.com is one of the more prominent offerings, although for a thorough listing of blogging tools, u needs to be chekkin:
www.lights.com/weblogs/tools.html & for blognews – http://blogdex.media.mit.edu

Cream of Da Blogs?
Like beer, taste in a blog is a personal thing. Some though have floated to wider recognition within the blogger community, even flirted with earning an income for their authors. Cult bloggers include Metafilter, milkandcookies, Memepool, fuckedcompany.com and Boingboing.net, but while their relentless delivery of weird to profound bounty impresses the socks off me, my barefeet do prefer to be tickled by some of the more offbeat blogs you can find in the side caverns linked by these or other blogs.

Guess What The Date Project is?
http://thedateproject.blogspot.com/
One computer types online diary of his attempts to get a girlfriend. On Saturday, June 29, 2002 he writes – ‘K’ and I have gone out a few times more, things are getting serious and continue to look promising. Of course, the journey is often more important than the destination, and this romantically entrepreneurial coder wants to keep going. “The introverted side of myself enjoyed the challenge of having to start three new conversations a day and go out to meet people”. See? Rivetting, isn’t it? Tha boy wants to keep these social experiments up though, so maybe keep your blog dial tuned for how this will affect him and ‘k’.

A Popular Blog
www.metafilter.com deals tha juice nicely, with a wide assortment of unusual stories and links. Catching my eye halfway down the page was their link to another blog ‘Supermodels Are Lonelier Than You Think!’, which combines ‘two of the best things in the world, blogs and beautiful women’, giving all manner of weird model related stories and updates. Clicking through to this blog, www.saltyt.com, showed them proudly noting their link from metafilter and commenting on an extra 16,000 visitors in the day since it was added.

NonBloggers
Ok, just gotta add – to anyone with a sampler, do chek www.CelebrityPrankCalls.com and please – run riot.

by Sean Healy, July 5, 2002 0 comments

Velvet Strike

Network gamers are breeding. Slowly, tense laughter and twitchy nervous systems are spreading throughout our inner-cities. Perhaps you have already been claimed. How long since your last game of “Counter-Strike”? Did you notice ‘Velvet-Strike’ on the walls, ceiling or floor? Anne Marie from opensorcery.net is responsible for this joystick war on the war on terrorism. You are welcome to join her.

Why spray paint grafitti inside a computer game?
Using the built-in graffiti function that comes with all half-life mods was a good way to propogate our messages.

What sort of responses have u had from Counter-Strike gamers?
Some long involved responses from people who really thought about what we were doing. A number of creepy and sometimes hilarious hate mail: woman-haters, gay haters, military pro-american patriots, a couple right wing pro israeli american jews, and gamers angry we intruded on their normal game play environment. We seem to have pissed off the 14 year old CS game playing boys, judging by their spelling. Spammers keep bogging down our discussion forum and calling us gay faggots.

Have many people submitted their own “spray-paints” relating to this theme?
Presently there’s about 24 sprays by 9 different authors including some by Chris Burke, who made textures for the retail version of Counter-Strike. And at least one from Australia – by Rebecca Cannon from selectparks.net.

What other game modifications have inspired you?
Joan Leandre’s flight sim mod that he’d put aside due to sep-11 shock. That piece was recently finished and shown at the Moscow art software show “read-me” (He has a beautiful approach to modifying games while reusing original movement algorithms.) http://www.retroyou.org/retroyou_g_nosltalg/g-nostalg.htm Brody Condon was the major inspiration for the “intervention recipes”. He had done interventions inside Tribes2 and recorded them on video.

And disturbing game-mods?
Brody’s work also disturbs me in a nice way. Pretty virtual blood and gore. It can make you nauseous. Adam Killer is classic. http://www.tmpspace.com/

Why do you think military network games are so popular?
1) The gameplay in Counter-Strike is engaging and complex and exciting, regardless of whether the theme is militaristic or not.
2) Military fetishism is on the rise. The culture of gamers who play counter-strike is increasingly misogynist, homophobic and intolerant. A boys training ground. The intense reaction to our project seems to confirm this ( I thought most people would take Velvet-Strike as a little joke).

What sort of games do you think might succeed them?
I’m not against in-game violence (i often enjoy it). I’m concerned with what game violence is coupled with: militaristic, heterosexist boys clubs in the real life, outside the game, war time environment of the “war on terrorism.” We are also opposed to military fantasy masquerading as “realism”.

Anime Noir in a nutshell?
A_N is an erotic role playing game I co-designed with Melinda Klayman, inspired by Japanese Anime. A_N emphasises social interaction and flirtation with other players. Advancement occurs through seduction. Players navigate the city through a 3-D map and use an action palette of erotic actions on each others’ little naked bodies. At some point we hope to add further levels of increasing complexity. http://www.playskins.com

What attracts you to surreal Japanese erotica and computer generated characters?
The mutability of the characters, the transgression of boundaries. What’s disturbing and tragic in RL is delicious in fantasy life. Bodies morphing into sea creatures, animals genetically mutating into sentient sexy creatures, chemical spills that cause a whole city to mutate. We love our female scientist and cat girl characters. Computer generated and even non-realistic digital 3-D bodies, have a kind of doll-like fetish appeal. There’s also a fetish appeal to flat anime style drawn graphics, which appear in the intro story of Anime Noir.

Had any dreams influenced by the way you use software?
When I’m scripting or debugging code sometimes I have dreams where I spend all night debugging strange dream logic word problems. The words just float in space in front of the world. It’s a little boring and not as satisfying as actually writing script. Sometimes though I have a new solution to try in the morning.

by Sean Healy, June 20, 2002 0 comments

Tales from Tha DNA Trenches

This week I thought I’d delve into the genetic engineered stew we seem to have cookin’ round the globe. And you can fess up if you don’t quite understand what all the fuss is about. Starts with a brief explanatory blurby just for you.

Genetic Engineering: Wassup????
Individual living cells make up all living things from single celled bacteria to complex organisms with billions of cells, like ourselves. Genes control the chemical messages within cells that determine the form and functioning of the cell, the organism’s various organs, and the whole organism.These codes of life consist of four chemical building blocks, arranged in pairs, like the treads of a spiral staircase. Millions of different combinations of the basic chemicals determine the different genetic make up of each kind of organism.

Genetic engineering is a set of techniques and processes for altering these genetic codes. Plants, animals, micro-organisms or even humans, that are different in some way from their natural counterparts, can be engineered. Some examples include: blue roses; research mice containing a human cancer gene; pigs and fish with added genes to grow faster and bigger; and herbicide tolerant crop plants.Changes may be passed on to the off-spring of the engineered organism if its germ (reproductive) cells are altered.
(Adapted from an Australian Conservation Foundation pamphlet )

Alba the Flouro Green Glow in the Dark Rabbit
http://www.ekac.org/gfpbunny.html
‘Designed’ by Eduardo Kac who has a lot of trangenic experiments under his belt, Alba sure is pretty. So she should be. She’s an artwork. Born in February 2000 and brighter green than dishwashing liquid, Alba is actually an albino rabbit with pink eyes. Alba only glows when illuminated with the correct light. When (and only when) illuminated with blue light, she glows with a bright green light. She was created with a synthetic mutation of the original wild-type green fluorescent gene found in the jellyfish Aequorea Victoria.

The Pink Castle Mutants
http://www.sayhi.to/thecastle
Obviously if you want to protest about the growing of some genetically modified crops, you go and maybe do a crop pull and get some media attention. Must be a lot of crop pulls happening in the UK, because these kids seemed to think they’d need to build a flouro pink castle at a farm on top of the genetically modified crops to get media attention. Surprisingly their tactic worked for them and the crops were never properly maintained. The pics alone are worth checking out.

CopyRight Your DNA
http://www.creativetime.org/dnaid/copyright.html
At this point, it seems YOU DO NOT OWN YOUR GENES. That is to say you have no personal authority to prevent your genome (your unique DNA sequence spelled out in genetic code) from being replicated by others for a variety of potential uses. What to do? Download the Genetic Code Copyright certificate. This simple fill-in form offers you a means to proclaim ownership of your individual genetic identity. It is a symbolic gesture of your claim to rights that is not a legally recognized act at this time.

Grow Your Own Opinions
http://www.geneethics.org
Explore the ethics behing genetic engineering in plants and humans.

http://www.geneart.org : ‘See Paradise now on this genetics art stie & Picture the Genetic Revolution with a range of art projects.’

http://www.monsanto.com/
One of the most victimised biotech companies in the world, poor things.

by Sean Healy, June 17, 2002 0 comments