imagine Sisyphus happy

In the immortal words of Helium... For you! The first 10 words. And the new home of the cookie rolling project.

Speaking of which: this week, I'll be rolling cookies in Albuquerque, New Mexico; Philadelphia, PA; and Moorestown, New Jersey.

Mo'town, as we called it in high school, is my childhood hometown, and much to my twin sister's horror ("GAG ME!!!" was how she put it in her email, I believe), it was recently named The Best Place to Live in America. Well, some people might like the, um, "tree-lined oasis, dotted with gingerbread homes and million-dollar mansions," but urban it ain't. No regrets about the first 17 years, but these days... I'll take Manhattan. Or Berkeley.

My cellphone trebuchet

My cellphone trebuchet
Originally uploaded by Avant Game.

Today I experienced the experience of catapulting my cell phone down the historic mint alley in SOMA. It was part of a pervasive play experience designed by the prankish Austrian art collective monochrom. I was thrilled to hear they were going to be conducting local mischief here in San Francisco. I have loved monochrom ever since they invented massively multiplayer thumb wrestling. I am probably the most hard-core MMTW gamer in the world, since I frequently require students and audiences to play it. Yes, no doubt soon my Node Runner world championship status will be superceded by my MMTW global domination.

Alas, my phone did not survive the trip, which consisted of a rather dramatic arc 30 feet in the air and a fatal crash landing 60 feet down the pavement. The damage inflicted: a smashed LCD screen with leaking crystal, a detached battery, a broken hinge, and exposed innards.

If I don't return your calls for a few days, you know why.

I am wearing a secret message.

I am wearing a secret message.
Originally uploaded by Avant Game.

You are reading the secret message.

Is it for you?

Speculate now.

ice cold playtest

Met at Cesar's for ice tea and playtesting today. The waitress seemed annoyed that we were too busy playing our first flash mockup to order food. Just couldn't take our attention away from Greg's laptop long enough to explain what we were up to. We probably seemed like a bunch of Cal techies not suitably socialized for midday bar outings. Maybe Cesar needs a tool to wake up Wi-Fi zombies like us. (Sean, you reading this?)

What I couldn't tell the waitress at Cesar's, I can tell you. We're bringing together four members from the design teams for Organum and Demonstrate to collaborate on a new Alpha Lab project... a kind of social software gaming system for, shall we say, an unexpected population. (No, it's nothing like Dogster.) We're calling the system Generation.

No more public statements for now, but feel free to ping me if you'd like to help playtest. Long distance playtesting is a-ok. All you need is access to a phone of any kind.

Today's playtest generated the following poem as one of its outcomes:

Woman, skipped, skipped, rip things up!
Guinea pig, I repeat myself. Tomatoes.
Pinatas, make oatmeal, to do list.

Your interpretation invited.

salty burning numb (yum!)

I went hiking in Claremont Canyon yesterday to clear my head. Three hours, six miles, and 1000 ft elevation change later, I was sweaty, sunburnt and still fixated on the bug and its countdown. While up there, didn't pay enough attention to the trail... scratched my palms slipping on loose gravel, more than once. Now it hurts to type. (July 20 2004)

I went hiking in Claremont Canyon yesterday. It was just me and Kiyash. He was on the Claremont hike last year, too, but I didn't mention him back then because damsels in distress need to be single. I didn't scratch up my palms this time, because we did the loop backwards. We've done that trail maybe a dozen times since we moved to Berkeley in Summer 2001, and every time we've gone up one way and down the other. This time, we reversed it. Amazing what a difference that made. Both the ascent and descent were markedly more difficult, but felt exactly right. The ascent should be up the narrow, scrambly hillside path, the path I scratched my hands up on last year. And the descent should be down the shaded woodsy widecut swath. Sort of like we were hiking in reverse all these years, but of course those hikes were good, too, and memorable--two New Year's Day hikes, for instance.

Today we went to stomp around the salt ponds by the Dumbarton Bridge. That bridge is a lovely firmament which until today I had experienced only peripherally, furiously powerpointing across it in the passenger seat on my way to the PARC forum last spring. Getting to know the Dumbarton Bridge a little better, we did a mash-up of the Tidelands Trail and the Newark Slough Loop Trail. Salt flies everywhere. Chaotic flocking behavior of bird overhead. Funny... last night we watched the Rolling Stones documentary Gimme Shelter. Mick Jagger kept imploring the violent Altamont crowd to "get it together, can't we all just get it together?" The birds overhead for awhile really seemed like they were just not going to get it together. Not going to do that emergent self-organizing bottom-up woo-ha everybody writes about these days. Watching Gimme Shelter was research, although I didn't know it when we started the DVD. (At first, it was just an attempt to clear out a Netflix that has been lingering around the apartment while we plowed our way through all five discs of Season 3 of Six Feet Under.) But those of us who ask people to assemble in large groups in public for festive and playful occasions have a responsibility to understand why it occasionally goes wrong. Also, I'm interested these days in how non-festive crowds might get it together. Spontaneous community in public spaces. Working on it. More. Soon.

We also experienced the salty burning numbness of a barely sweet Cucumber Chile popsicle today.