Our grand-daughter, aged six and a half, has decided that museums are A Good Thing, and so we took her to the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge over the Easter holiday. She had a great time (we could hardly drag her out of the Armoury), but what really struck me was that whatever took her fancy she photographed on her cameraphone.
At first I was alarmed at the rapid and apparently indiscriminate way she took her pictures: "oh, that's nice,`' click; "that's nice," click; click. And then I realised that for the cameraphone generation this is one of the ways in which you experience and process the world, marking those things of interest by taking a photo of them.
It wasn't the only way she experienced the museum objects; we talked about the ones on which she seemed to focus ("which parts of the horse is its armour protecting?), and having obtained some paper and crayons from the Visitors desk she drew about a dozen of her favourite exhibits as we went around. We also hunted for all the cool objects illustrated on the kid's map of the museum: the box of gold coins, the slightly scary painting of a winged skeleton, the giant ceramic owl, the Egyptian sarcophagus, and the figurine of an angry Harlequin (which she spotted before we did). But at the end of a long day she was still snapping with almost as much intensity as when she started.
I'm not worried about whether her pictures are any good, or even whether she keeps a single one of them. I'm happy to accept the cameraphone as one of the tools with which a child these days encounters and tries to make sense of the world. I'm also deeply grateful to the Fitzwilliam for having lifted their ban on photography; clearly our grand-daughter was not their first visitor to experience the Museum through a cameraphone!
Thursday, 8 May 2014
Monday, 5 May 2014
Seen and heard: April 2014
Bach's The Well-Tempered Clavier, played by Angela Hewitt - on four CDs. I'd been meaning to get a recording of this, and I'm so glad that I chose this one, because it's tremendous and great for driving to (much better than rock anthems). More seriously, Hewitt is looking like becoming this generation's definitive interpreter of Bach on the piano; I'm sorry I missed her recent talks and performances at Cambridge, which from John Naughton's blog were something pretty special.
Rev - new season of the TV comedy, though the term "comedy" seems hardly appropriate when the storylines are so sad and heart-rending, as Tom Hollander's basically decent urban vicar struggles to do the right thing in a crazy and broken world.
John Craxton exhibition at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge - basically Picasso's cubism, but in mediterranean colours and with mediterranean subject: goats, mountains, seafood, beautiful worn faces.
Detective Grimoire (a review is here) - lovely cartoon-style game with great voice acting, in which you play a detective investigating a murder at a bizarre tourist attraction (Boggy's Bog). The investigation is beautifully implemented: each suspect can be questioned on a small number of standard topics, or you can present them with a clue or ask them about another person. When you find something suspicious, you have to drag-and-drop words to form a sentence identifying precisely what is suspicious and why - a neat way of incorporating the intellectual element of the detection.
The Library of Birmingham - see separate post.
The Love Punch - light comedy caper with Emma Thompson (who carries the show) and Piers Brosnan (who makes a very acceptable foil), with admirable assistance from Timothy Spall and Ceilia Imre; phrases like "guilty pleasure" and "great holiday entertainment" spring to mind. But good also to be reminded of Thompson's versatility; she doesn't just do nannies these days.
Ghost Hawk - by Susan Cooper, best know for The Dark is Rising sequence. This novel follows the inter-twined stories of a Native American boy from the Pokanoket tribes and an English boy during the mid-seventeenth century, when the conflict between the peoples did not yet seem inevitable. I put the book on my wish list, on the strength of a strong review in The Guardian, and wasn't disappointed: superb writing, clear and economical yet powerful, reminding me very much of Ursula Le Guin.
Monument Valley (a review is here) - fabulous new puzzle game on the iPad / iPhone, in which you guide a little princess around a series of buildings which incorporate M.C. Escher type tricks. The graphic and auditory aesthetic is Zen-like; this is simply a beautiful place to be. My only complaint: that there are just 10 levels.
Black Coffee - the Agatha Christie Theatre Company performing an Hercule Poirot play at Milton Keynes Theatre, with Robert Powell successfully wresting the Poirot role from the legacy of David Suchet. Proper theatre, properly done.
Choral training with Stephen Cleobury, Director of Music at King's College Cambridge - a valuable day for Polymnia, the choir in which I sing, in preparation for our trip to Granada. It never occurred to me before how much singing is like writing, especially in its presentation to an audience. Two of his tips: if your part if interesting, tell them about it; and if your part is ordinary, find a way to make it interesting.
Leap - a screening of my sister's short film (this is the trailer). A great little story, economically and engagingly told, with some neat visual themes and a powerful build-up to the slam-bang ending in which the significant of the title is revealed. Go Ros!
Rev - new season of the TV comedy, though the term "comedy" seems hardly appropriate when the storylines are so sad and heart-rending, as Tom Hollander's basically decent urban vicar struggles to do the right thing in a crazy and broken world.
John Craxton exhibition at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge - basically Picasso's cubism, but in mediterranean colours and with mediterranean subject: goats, mountains, seafood, beautiful worn faces.
Detective Grimoire (a review is here) - lovely cartoon-style game with great voice acting, in which you play a detective investigating a murder at a bizarre tourist attraction (Boggy's Bog). The investigation is beautifully implemented: each suspect can be questioned on a small number of standard topics, or you can present them with a clue or ask them about another person. When you find something suspicious, you have to drag-and-drop words to form a sentence identifying precisely what is suspicious and why - a neat way of incorporating the intellectual element of the detection.
The Library of Birmingham - see separate post.
The Love Punch - light comedy caper with Emma Thompson (who carries the show) and Piers Brosnan (who makes a very acceptable foil), with admirable assistance from Timothy Spall and Ceilia Imre; phrases like "guilty pleasure" and "great holiday entertainment" spring to mind. But good also to be reminded of Thompson's versatility; she doesn't just do nannies these days.
Ghost Hawk - by Susan Cooper, best know for The Dark is Rising sequence. This novel follows the inter-twined stories of a Native American boy from the Pokanoket tribes and an English boy during the mid-seventeenth century, when the conflict between the peoples did not yet seem inevitable. I put the book on my wish list, on the strength of a strong review in The Guardian, and wasn't disappointed: superb writing, clear and economical yet powerful, reminding me very much of Ursula Le Guin.
Monument Valley (a review is here) - fabulous new puzzle game on the iPad / iPhone, in which you guide a little princess around a series of buildings which incorporate M.C. Escher type tricks. The graphic and auditory aesthetic is Zen-like; this is simply a beautiful place to be. My only complaint: that there are just 10 levels.
Black Coffee - the Agatha Christie Theatre Company performing an Hercule Poirot play at Milton Keynes Theatre, with Robert Powell successfully wresting the Poirot role from the legacy of David Suchet. Proper theatre, properly done.
Choral training with Stephen Cleobury, Director of Music at King's College Cambridge - a valuable day for Polymnia, the choir in which I sing, in preparation for our trip to Granada. It never occurred to me before how much singing is like writing, especially in its presentation to an audience. Two of his tips: if your part if interesting, tell them about it; and if your part is ordinary, find a way to make it interesting.
Leap - a screening of my sister's short film (this is the trailer). A great little story, economically and engagingly told, with some neat visual themes and a powerful build-up to the slam-bang ending in which the significant of the title is revealed. Go Ros!
Sunday, 4 May 2014
Cuttings: April 2014
Why Snapchat is valuable: it's all about attention – blog post by Danah Boyd, quoted in John Naughton’s Memex 1.1 blog. “When someone sends you an image/video via Snapchat, they choose how long you get to view the image/video. The underlying message is simple: You’ve got 7 seconds. PAY ATTENTION. And when people do choose to open a Snap, they actually stop what they’re doing and look. In a digital world where everyone’s flicking through headshots, images, and text without processing any of it, Snapchat asks you to stand still and pay attention to the gift that someone in your network just gave you.... Snapchat is a reminder that constraints have a social purpose, that there is beauty in simplicity, and that the ephemeral is valuable. There aren’t many services out there that fundamentally question the default logic of social media and, for that, I think that we all need to pay attention to and acknowledge Snapchat’s moves in this ecosystem.”
Tumblr's Hilarious New Legal Terms Of Service Include A Ban On Pretending To Be Benedict Cumberbatch - Business Insider article, referenced in the Simplification Centre blog, where Rob Waller comments: “This is innocent-smoothie copywriting applied to the small print. I found it good fun, but could this technique be repeatable by others? Only if it suits their users and brand. Like those smoothies, too much can make you queasy after a while.” Some extracts from the Terms of Service:
Why all babies love peekaboo - from Mindhacks blog. "An early theory of why babies enjoy peekaboo is that they are surprised when things come back after being out of sight. This may not sound like a good basis for laughs to you or I, with our adult brains, but to appreciate the joke you have to realise that for a baby, nothing is given. They are born into a buzzing confusion, and gradually have to learn to make sense of what is happening around them. You know that when you hear my voice, I’m usually not far behind, or that when a ball rolls behind a sofa it still exists, but think for a moment how you came by this certainty.... As the baby gets older their carer lets the game adapt to the babies’ new abilities, allowing both adult and infant to enjoy a similar game but done in different ways. The earliest version of peekaboo is simple looming, where the carer announces they are coming with their voice before bringing their face into close focus for the baby. As the baby gets older they can enjoy the adult hiding and reappearing, but after a year or so they can graduate to take control by hiding and reappearing themselves. In this way peekaboo can keep giving, allowing a perfect balance of what a developing baby knows about the world, what they are able to control and what they are still surprised by. Thankfully we adults enjoy their laughter so much that the repetition does nothing to stop us enjoying endless rounds of the game ourselves."
Tumblr's Hilarious New Legal Terms Of Service Include A Ban On Pretending To Be Benedict Cumberbatch - Business Insider article, referenced in the Simplification Centre blog, where Rob Waller comments: “This is innocent-smoothie copywriting applied to the small print. I found it good fun, but could this technique be repeatable by others? Only if it suits their users and brand. Like those smoothies, too much can make you queasy after a while.” Some extracts from the Terms of Service:
- "Confusion or impersonation. Don't do things that would cause confusion between you or your blog and a person or company, like registering a deliberately confusing URL. Don't impersonate anyone. While you're free to ridicule, parody, or marvel at the alien beauty of Benedict Cumberbatch, you can't pretend to actually be Benedict Cumberbatch."
- "Gore, Mutilation, Bestiality, or Necrophilia. Don't post gore just to be shocking. Don't showcase the mutilation of torture of human beings, animals, or their remains. Dick."
- "Misattribution or Non-Attribution. Make sure you always give proper attribution and include full links back to original sources. When you find something awesome on Tumblr, reblog it instead of reposting it. It's less work and more fun, anyway. When reblogging something, DO NOT inject a link back to your blog just to steal attention from the original post."
- "[Hilda Matheson, first director of talks], like her colleagues, was making up broadcasting as she went along. What was a “programme”? The models for BBC broadcasts were the public lecture, the political speech, the theatre and the variety hall. One of Matheson’s many achievements was to realise that the microphone demanded an entirely different manner from the podium. “It was useless to address the microphone as if it were a public meeting, or even to read it essays or leading articles,” she wrote. “The person sitting at the other end expected the speaker to address him personally, simply, almost familiarly.” She rehearsed, coaxed and harried speakers until they found a mode of speech that worked."
- Vita Sackville-West, whom Matheson invited to give talks, gave the following account: “You are taken into a studio, which is a large and luxuriously appointed room, and there is a desk, heavily padded, and over it hangs a little white box, suspended from two wires from the ceiling. There are lots of menacing notices about ‘DON’T COUGH – you will deafen millions of people’, ‘DON’T RUSTLE YOUR PAPERS’, and ‘Don’t turn to the announcer and say was that all right? when you have finished’ … one has never talked to so few people, or so many; it’s very queer. And then you cease, and there is an awful grim silence as though you had been a complete failure … and then you hear the announcer saying ‘London calling. Weather and News bulletin’, and you creep away.”
Why all babies love peekaboo - from Mindhacks blog. "An early theory of why babies enjoy peekaboo is that they are surprised when things come back after being out of sight. This may not sound like a good basis for laughs to you or I, with our adult brains, but to appreciate the joke you have to realise that for a baby, nothing is given. They are born into a buzzing confusion, and gradually have to learn to make sense of what is happening around them. You know that when you hear my voice, I’m usually not far behind, or that when a ball rolls behind a sofa it still exists, but think for a moment how you came by this certainty.... As the baby gets older their carer lets the game adapt to the babies’ new abilities, allowing both adult and infant to enjoy a similar game but done in different ways. The earliest version of peekaboo is simple looming, where the carer announces they are coming with their voice before bringing their face into close focus for the baby. As the baby gets older they can enjoy the adult hiding and reappearing, but after a year or so they can graduate to take control by hiding and reappearing themselves. In this way peekaboo can keep giving, allowing a perfect balance of what a developing baby knows about the world, what they are able to control and what they are still surprised by. Thankfully we adults enjoy their laughter so much that the repetition does nothing to stop us enjoying endless rounds of the game ourselves."
What are libraries for?
At some time or another over the last decade or so, probably every librarian in the world has asked themselves what the purpose of libraries is, in an internet-equipped world where all the information and literature of the world is available (at least in our imagination) with speed, ease and convenience at our own desk or in our own palm.
A photograph of a medieval library, in a recent article in the Cambridge Alumnus Magazine (Issue 71, pp 28-33), reminded me of how much things have changed. When that library was built, books were so scarce that there was no need for bookshelves: each book had its own reading desk, to which it was chained. There was no question of borrowing books; to read a particular book, you had to travel to a particular library and sit down at a particular desk. There was no presumption that a library's purpose was to make books available; in fact, Umberto Eco in The Name of the Rose only required a slight imaginative twist to conceive of a monastic library actually designed to prevent would-be readers from accessing the books therein.
The huge libraries of the nineteenth and twentieth century were designed in a period in which it seemed an achievable ambition to gather all human knowledge, or a pretty good approximation to it, within the compass of four walls and a very large number of bookshelves. My old university's library was one of the handful in the country designated as "copyright libraries" (the British Library, formerly the British Museum, being the most famous) legally entitled to claim a free copy of every book and periodical published in the UK - a right that even before the advent of the internet was becoming increasingly difficult to exercise.
Now public libraries are re-branding themselves as information resource centres, and librarians spend as much or more time with digital materials as with printed books. At the Open University, where I currently work, and where only a tiny fraction of its students are able to visit the Library in person, the shift to online resources is a natural complement to our distance learning - though it does make the Library building a curiously empty space, with the librarians hidden behind Staff Only doors and the reading desks inhabited by a handful of African research students in need of somewhere to work.
So it was a joy to visit the new Library of Birmingham: a building conceived and designed not just to replace the old Birmingham City Library but to create a new role for itself. No public library is going to compete with the digital resources of the internet, but it can do something which the online environment can't: it can provide a physical space which is a nice place to be. And that the Library of Birmingham has done beautifully. Visiting it on a Sunday afternoon, with my wife and an old friend now a Librarian at the Barber Institute of Fine Arts, we were struck by the number of families enjoying the building: browsing, exploring, having a good time.
From the outside, the building looks like a gold and silver jewellery box, but inside nothing is box-like: the internal walls all seem to be curved, running around like a snail's shell. The only obvious straight lines are the escalators, slicing across the central atrium at jaunty angles. Riding them up to the top of the building is like going on a non-scary theme park ride: vaut le voyage just for the pan-optical views alone. The books are arranged so as to be meaningful and convenient to users, rather than librarians and catalogues: there are books for browsing, the one (mainly fiction) most likely to be borrowed; there are books for finding things out (mainly non-fiction), arranged in radial shelves; and there are books purely for reference (such as the Statutes of England), which most users will never consult but look great on the shelves in their identical bindings and are located where they can best be decorative, as a sort of literary wallpaper.
At the top of the building is an observation deck, with large red sofas in which to relax and look out across the cityscape. There's also the Shakespeare memorial room: an elegant Elizabethan-style wood-panelled room, transported from the original library where it was built in 1882. A stone panel from 1887 cryptically connects the Library to its nineteenth century past and remoter medieval history. There's even a (well-signposted) secret garden. On the ground floor is a cafe, where we rounded out our happy afternoon with tea and cakes.
One of the tests of a library is what unexpected discoveries you make there. My unexpected and unlooked-for discovery, from a facing-out display in the non-fiction section, was a book called Writing for New Media - modern in this context meaning 1998,but still deeply relevant and inspirational in several intriguing chapters on the grammar of interactivity. (I've since ordered the book and will no doubt be posting about it soon.) May all the users of this great new library enjoy, as we did, happy afternoons and serendipitous discoveries.
A photograph of a medieval library, in a recent article in the Cambridge Alumnus Magazine (Issue 71, pp 28-33), reminded me of how much things have changed. When that library was built, books were so scarce that there was no need for bookshelves: each book had its own reading desk, to which it was chained. There was no question of borrowing books; to read a particular book, you had to travel to a particular library and sit down at a particular desk. There was no presumption that a library's purpose was to make books available; in fact, Umberto Eco in The Name of the Rose only required a slight imaginative twist to conceive of a monastic library actually designed to prevent would-be readers from accessing the books therein.
The huge libraries of the nineteenth and twentieth century were designed in a period in which it seemed an achievable ambition to gather all human knowledge, or a pretty good approximation to it, within the compass of four walls and a very large number of bookshelves. My old university's library was one of the handful in the country designated as "copyright libraries" (the British Library, formerly the British Museum, being the most famous) legally entitled to claim a free copy of every book and periodical published in the UK - a right that even before the advent of the internet was becoming increasingly difficult to exercise.
Now public libraries are re-branding themselves as information resource centres, and librarians spend as much or more time with digital materials as with printed books. At the Open University, where I currently work, and where only a tiny fraction of its students are able to visit the Library in person, the shift to online resources is a natural complement to our distance learning - though it does make the Library building a curiously empty space, with the librarians hidden behind Staff Only doors and the reading desks inhabited by a handful of African research students in need of somewhere to work.
So it was a joy to visit the new Library of Birmingham: a building conceived and designed not just to replace the old Birmingham City Library but to create a new role for itself. No public library is going to compete with the digital resources of the internet, but it can do something which the online environment can't: it can provide a physical space which is a nice place to be. And that the Library of Birmingham has done beautifully. Visiting it on a Sunday afternoon, with my wife and an old friend now a Librarian at the Barber Institute of Fine Arts, we were struck by the number of families enjoying the building: browsing, exploring, having a good time.
From the outside, the building looks like a gold and silver jewellery box, but inside nothing is box-like: the internal walls all seem to be curved, running around like a snail's shell. The only obvious straight lines are the escalators, slicing across the central atrium at jaunty angles. Riding them up to the top of the building is like going on a non-scary theme park ride: vaut le voyage just for the pan-optical views alone. The books are arranged so as to be meaningful and convenient to users, rather than librarians and catalogues: there are books for browsing, the one (mainly fiction) most likely to be borrowed; there are books for finding things out (mainly non-fiction), arranged in radial shelves; and there are books purely for reference (such as the Statutes of England), which most users will never consult but look great on the shelves in their identical bindings and are located where they can best be decorative, as a sort of literary wallpaper. At the top of the building is an observation deck, with large red sofas in which to relax and look out across the cityscape. There's also the Shakespeare memorial room: an elegant Elizabethan-style wood-panelled room, transported from the original library where it was built in 1882. A stone panel from 1887 cryptically connects the Library to its nineteenth century past and remoter medieval history. There's even a (well-signposted) secret garden. On the ground floor is a cafe, where we rounded out our happy afternoon with tea and cakes.
One of the tests of a library is what unexpected discoveries you make there. My unexpected and unlooked-for discovery, from a facing-out display in the non-fiction section, was a book called Writing for New Media - modern in this context meaning 1998,but still deeply relevant and inspirational in several intriguing chapters on the grammar of interactivity. (I've since ordered the book and will no doubt be posting about it soon.) May all the users of this great new library enjoy, as we did, happy afternoons and serendipitous discoveries.
Tuesday, 15 April 2014
Why kids learn to use technology quickly
Here's an interesting take on the well-known phenomenon of small children using complex pieces of technology with ease. And it's so obvious that I'm surprised it never occurred to me before, nor have I seen it in any other writing about young people and technology.
I saw it in a passing comment by technology journalist Alex Wiltshire. He was talking about Minecraft, which in case you don't know is a hugely popular game, played either solo or co-operatively online by children as well as adults, though the game was not specifically designed for them. As he observes: "When it first came out everyone was confused as the developer gave little or no guidance. It didn't specifically say you had to cut down a tree to get some wood, whereas games that are produced by big companies give instructions – the last thing they want is for people not to understand how to play. With Minecraft, which had an indie developer, the player had to work things out for themselves."
And here's the key bit. "Because you learn so much when you're young, kids are used to the idea of a world they don't fully understand, so they're comfortable with having to find things out for themselves."
Now this is quite an unexpected way of looking at the phenomenon. We tend to think of kids as having some sort of special technical ability, ascribing it an essentialist explanation such as them being "digital natives" or their brains being wired differently. But of course, as he says, for children >everything< is strange and unknown, and given that kids are able to figure out adults and the rules by which they operate - far more complex than any technology, and far more critical to a child's survival - it should not be surprising that they can cope with a multi-channel television service or an iPad.
This perspective also reminds us that, though we adults may envy kids' facility with technology, it comes at a price: that of living in a world which they don't fully understand and which many things are strange and potentially threatening.
References
Marc Prensky, (2001) "Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants Part 1", On the Horizon, 9 (5), pp 1-6.
Diana G. Oblinger and James L. Oblinger (eds), Educating the Net Generation (Educause, 2005)
David White (2009), "Not ‘Natives’ & ‘Immigrants’ but ‘Visitors’ & ‘Residents’", TALL blog
David S. White and Alison Le Cornu (2011), "Visitors and Residents: A New Typology for Online Engagement" First Monday, 16 (9).
I saw it in a passing comment by technology journalist Alex Wiltshire. He was talking about Minecraft, which in case you don't know is a hugely popular game, played either solo or co-operatively online by children as well as adults, though the game was not specifically designed for them. As he observes: "When it first came out everyone was confused as the developer gave little or no guidance. It didn't specifically say you had to cut down a tree to get some wood, whereas games that are produced by big companies give instructions – the last thing they want is for people not to understand how to play. With Minecraft, which had an indie developer, the player had to work things out for themselves."
And here's the key bit. "Because you learn so much when you're young, kids are used to the idea of a world they don't fully understand, so they're comfortable with having to find things out for themselves."
Now this is quite an unexpected way of looking at the phenomenon. We tend to think of kids as having some sort of special technical ability, ascribing it an essentialist explanation such as them being "digital natives" or their brains being wired differently. But of course, as he says, for children >everything< is strange and unknown, and given that kids are able to figure out adults and the rules by which they operate - far more complex than any technology, and far more critical to a child's survival - it should not be surprising that they can cope with a multi-channel television service or an iPad.
This perspective also reminds us that, though we adults may envy kids' facility with technology, it comes at a price: that of living in a world which they don't fully understand and which many things are strange and potentially threatening.
References
Marc Prensky, (2001) "Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants Part 1", On the Horizon, 9 (5), pp 1-6.
Diana G. Oblinger and James L. Oblinger (eds), Educating the Net Generation (Educause, 2005)
David White (2009), "Not ‘Natives’ & ‘Immigrants’ but ‘Visitors’ & ‘Residents’", TALL blog
David S. White and Alison Le Cornu (2011), "Visitors and Residents: A New Typology for Online Engagement" First Monday, 16 (9).
Wednesday, 2 April 2014
Seen and heard: March 2014
A Bestiary of Jewels - a remarkable artwork created by the jeweller Kevin Coates, consisting of a series of broaches and necklaces mounted in imitation book pages, each one of which is themed around a person and an animal (for example, Flaubert and a parrot, Montaigne and a cat, Charles Ludwig Dodgson and a dodo). Unfortunately the film of the opening of its exhibition at the Ashmolean is not very good, but it does at least show some of the objects, which are actually quite wise as well as witty…
Syberia – iPad version. (See review of original, and "making of" video.) My initial excitement an iPad version of one of my favourite games was tempered by the discovery that (1) the iPad interface doesn't work as well with the gameplay (instead of hotspots becoming visible on mouse rollover, you're only able to have their either On or Off - On and all the surprises and hidden objects aren't surprising or hidden, but Off and you can't see where you're able to move and explore); (2) some of the animation sequences have been shortened (why? how much money can it really have saved?); and (3) it's only the first chapter of the game, the first of four locations. I won't be recommending it to all my friends.
The Last Express - by contrast, this is a really super conversion of a 1997 game, set on the Orient Express in the months before the Great War. There's a tremendous feeling of being in an early Hitchcock movie (The 39 Steps or The Lady Vanishes), as you discover the friend who'd summoned you to join him murdered in his compartment (your first task is to avoid getting arrested for his murder), and you slowly investigate the other travellers on the train (a German "businessman", an Austrian celebrity violinist, a French engineer and his family on their way to an oilfield in the Middle East, a bohemian Frenchwoman and the Englishwoman she''s persuaded to come on a romantic getaway, an elderly Russian count and his daughter, and a posse of Sebian nationalists). Fantastic rotoscoped animation conveys character and response, with very smooth transitions from first-person to third-person view as they character you play enters a cut-scene. A time-based adventure too; characters move between the cars (for example, to have dinner) and you need to be in the right place to overhear the right conversations. Definitely a classic. (See the iOS version trailer, the original trailer, and the Adventure Gamers review.)
Oh Do Shut Up Dear! The Public Voice of Women - London Review of Books lecture by Mary Beard. A proper, old-fashioned lecture; why don't we have more of them on telly? Especially when they're as good as this. Beard, as is well-known, has direct experience of the disturbing and disturbed ways in which men try to get women not to speak in the public sphere, and the classical knowledge to trace it back to the Odyssey where it's presented as part of the adolescent Telemachus' coming of age. But her argument goes beyond her own, or other women's, experience. "We should ... try to bring to the surface the kinds of question we tend to shelve about how we speak in public, why and whose voice fits. What we need is some old fashioned consciousness-raising about what we mean by the voice of authority and how we’ve come to construct it."
Serenade to Music, by Ralph Vaughan Williams – performed by Milton Keynes Sinfonia and Polymnia (in which I sing). Stunning RVW harmonic textures, with words from Shakeapeare’s Merchant of Venice, including this passage expressing his mistrust of anyone who did’nt “get” music: “The man that hath no music in himself, nor is not mov’d with concord of sweet sounds, is fit for treasons, stratagems and spoils;… let no such man be trusted.” Which when you think about it is pretty much the same as Trevor Chaplin’s verdict on the people who can and can't hear the music in Alan Plater’s Beiderbecke Connection (about which I've blogged previously).
The Americans, series 2 - the return of our favourite KGB agents. Now that Philip and Elizabeth’s marriage has stabilized, after he saved her from death at the hands of the FBI in the last season’s final episode, the domestic drama for this season is proving to be the effect of their espionage on the children – especially their far-too-savvy teenage daughter, who is understandably curious about what Mom and Dad get up to at night.
Turks and Caicos - very watchable political thriller by David Hare, with Bill Nighey rivetingly compelling and full of presence as the honest and decent ex-MI5 man seeking obscurity in the titular islands.
W1A - does one laugh or does one cry? For anyone who works in a large organisation, the idiocies of the fictional BBC's PR and senior management are all too familiar, and to see the absurdities blown up on screen is at least a reassurance to us that we're not crazy.
Sacred Body - experiential workshop at Turvey Monastery. A very good day with pschyotherapists Katarina Gadjanski and Hannah Russill, moving back and forth between the triple foci of mind, body and emotion. Leaving behind the dualism of Western philosophy and Pauline theoogy, as Thich Nhat Hanh says: "Only by cultivating a mindful body and an embodied mind can we be fully alive" (Peace of Mind: Becoming Fully Present).
Syberia – iPad version. (See review of original, and "making of" video.) My initial excitement an iPad version of one of my favourite games was tempered by the discovery that (1) the iPad interface doesn't work as well with the gameplay (instead of hotspots becoming visible on mouse rollover, you're only able to have their either On or Off - On and all the surprises and hidden objects aren't surprising or hidden, but Off and you can't see where you're able to move and explore); (2) some of the animation sequences have been shortened (why? how much money can it really have saved?); and (3) it's only the first chapter of the game, the first of four locations. I won't be recommending it to all my friends.
The Last Express - by contrast, this is a really super conversion of a 1997 game, set on the Orient Express in the months before the Great War. There's a tremendous feeling of being in an early Hitchcock movie (The 39 Steps or The Lady Vanishes), as you discover the friend who'd summoned you to join him murdered in his compartment (your first task is to avoid getting arrested for his murder), and you slowly investigate the other travellers on the train (a German "businessman", an Austrian celebrity violinist, a French engineer and his family on their way to an oilfield in the Middle East, a bohemian Frenchwoman and the Englishwoman she''s persuaded to come on a romantic getaway, an elderly Russian count and his daughter, and a posse of Sebian nationalists). Fantastic rotoscoped animation conveys character and response, with very smooth transitions from first-person to third-person view as they character you play enters a cut-scene. A time-based adventure too; characters move between the cars (for example, to have dinner) and you need to be in the right place to overhear the right conversations. Definitely a classic. (See the iOS version trailer, the original trailer, and the Adventure Gamers review.)
Oh Do Shut Up Dear! The Public Voice of Women - London Review of Books lecture by Mary Beard. A proper, old-fashioned lecture; why don't we have more of them on telly? Especially when they're as good as this. Beard, as is well-known, has direct experience of the disturbing and disturbed ways in which men try to get women not to speak in the public sphere, and the classical knowledge to trace it back to the Odyssey where it's presented as part of the adolescent Telemachus' coming of age. But her argument goes beyond her own, or other women's, experience. "We should ... try to bring to the surface the kinds of question we tend to shelve about how we speak in public, why and whose voice fits. What we need is some old fashioned consciousness-raising about what we mean by the voice of authority and how we’ve come to construct it."
Serenade to Music, by Ralph Vaughan Williams – performed by Milton Keynes Sinfonia and Polymnia (in which I sing). Stunning RVW harmonic textures, with words from Shakeapeare’s Merchant of Venice, including this passage expressing his mistrust of anyone who did’nt “get” music: “The man that hath no music in himself, nor is not mov’d with concord of sweet sounds, is fit for treasons, stratagems and spoils;… let no such man be trusted.” Which when you think about it is pretty much the same as Trevor Chaplin’s verdict on the people who can and can't hear the music in Alan Plater’s Beiderbecke Connection (about which I've blogged previously).
The Americans, series 2 - the return of our favourite KGB agents. Now that Philip and Elizabeth’s marriage has stabilized, after he saved her from death at the hands of the FBI in the last season’s final episode, the domestic drama for this season is proving to be the effect of their espionage on the children – especially their far-too-savvy teenage daughter, who is understandably curious about what Mom and Dad get up to at night.
Turks and Caicos - very watchable political thriller by David Hare, with Bill Nighey rivetingly compelling and full of presence as the honest and decent ex-MI5 man seeking obscurity in the titular islands.
W1A - does one laugh or does one cry? For anyone who works in a large organisation, the idiocies of the fictional BBC's PR and senior management are all too familiar, and to see the absurdities blown up on screen is at least a reassurance to us that we're not crazy.
Sacred Body - experiential workshop at Turvey Monastery. A very good day with pschyotherapists Katarina Gadjanski and Hannah Russill, moving back and forth between the triple foci of mind, body and emotion. Leaving behind the dualism of Western philosophy and Pauline theoogy, as Thich Nhat Hanh says: "Only by cultivating a mindful body and an embodied mind can we be fully alive" (Peace of Mind: Becoming Fully Present).
Cuttings: March 2014
If religion exists to make raids into what is unsayable, musicians penetrate further than most - Giles Fraser's "Loose Cannon" column. “The best theologians are musicians. And Christianity is always better sung than said. To the extent that all religion exists to make raids into what is unsayable, the musicians penetrate further than most…. All of which is why it is such a mistake that the church is selling off its best family silver by increasingly cutting its cathedral choirs….This isn't something that ought to be a concern simply for the religious. When the National Gallery seeks to save a painting for the nation, Richard Dawkins doesn't protest that it's a painting of St John or a depiction of the crucifixion – or, at least, I don't think he does. Even those who don't do God generally get the value of cathedral choirs. Let's protect them.”
Hidden hatred: What makes people assassinate their own character online, sometimes driving themselves to suicide? - article in The Independent, referenced in Mind Hacks blog. “Why would anyone post dozens of fake messages of abuse about themselves on a social media website?... In the pantheon of attention-seeking disorders, self-trolling has much in common with self-harming and self-starving….As a therapist, I think we're confronted by people in severe distress feeling insecurely attached to parents, guardians and peers. As a result, mental processing remains juvenile whatever their biological stage. Their sense of personal identity seems fluid, fragile or miscalculated (one reason to denounce yourself in public is to conduct a rather risky opinion poll). Fantasy becomes reality – it's notable that some of the American students in the study came to believe that they'd been trolled for real just because their own words in print said that they had.”
Writing Hyperlinks: Salient, Descriptive, Start with Keyword - article from the Nielsen / Norman Group. “Improve page scannability by using links that are easily noticeable and understandable. First, don’t make users hunt around the page in search for clickable elements. Second, don’t force users to read the text surrounding a link to determine where it leads. This is both time consuming and frustrating. Helpful links are visually distinct from the body text and specific to the page or document that they refer to.”
The perils of feedback - Oliver Burkeman's "This column will change your life" column. “Too many managers muddle three types of feedback, write Stone and Heen: appreciation (praise for accomplishments), coaching (tips for improvement) and evaluation (rating someone's performance, especially relative to others). At the least, they argue, companies using formal reviews should separate those three into different sessions. “
The truth about lobbying: 10 ways big business controls government - article in The Guardian by Tamasin Cave and Andy Rowell. 1. Control the ground. 2. Spin the media. 3. Engineer a following. 4. Buy in credibility. 5. Sponsor a thinktank. 6. Consult your critics. 7. Neutralise the opposition. 8. Control the web. 9. Open the door. 10. And finally…
There and Back Again: A Packet’s Tale. How Does the Internet Work? - video referenced in John Naughten’s Memex 1.1 blog. “The video lets you ride shotgun with a packet of data—one of trillions involved in the trillions of Internet interactions that happen every second. Look deep beneath the surface of the most basic Internet transaction, and follow the packet as it flows from your fingertips, through circuits, wires, and cables, to a host server, and then back again, all in less than a second. “
What's so funny about peace, love and Starship? - Dave Eggers article in The Guardian. “I tried to think of a time when I'd seen so many people so happy all at once.... Most of what we do is wrong, we have to admit this – most of what we do is utterly wrong. We make colossal blunders, then small corrections, then more mistakes, more small corrections. Sometimes we learn, usually we don't. But then every so often we create a little joy. Every so often someone creates a perfect pop song, and then people can come and hear it being played, even in an Native American casino built on land stolen and restolen over and over again, by a band far past its creative prime, simply because if they do, before we are too old to do so, before we all die, before the United States crumbles in on itself, people will forget all our mistakes, national and personal, for a second or two, and will dance our ugly selves stupid."
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