*Beasts of the Southern Wild* is a Sundance-winning magic realist film about a little girl in a bayou community struggling to save her father and her home, and it has one of the most powerful and beautiful trailers I’ve ever seen.
View Link [trailers.apple.com]
US Special Forces are helping African troops capture warlord Joseph Kony, a mission that a US official directly credits to the controversial Kony 2012 viral social media campaign. Snip:
Gen. Carter F. Ham, the overall commander of American forces in Africa, has a “Kony 2012” poster tacked to his office door. As one American official put it: “Let’s be honest, there was some constituent pressure here. Did ‘Kony 2012’ have something to do with this? Absolutely.”
View Link [nytimes.com]
I for one welcome our mocap suit-powered robot overlords. VR researchers in Australia just developed a mocap suit capable of controlling a physical robot in real time, a la Real Steel. More info:
View Link [nwn.blogs.com]
I for one welcome our mocap suit-powered overlords. VR researchers in Australia just developed a mocap suit capable of controlling a physical robot in real time, a la Real Steel. More info: http://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2012/02/mocap-driven-robot-control-created-by-vr-researcher.html
View Link [youtube.com]
In this essay, I argue that the Lincoln of *Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter* is the Lincoln we need today. Thanks to the continued virtualization of culture, especially through videogames and mash-up, user-generated content, movies like this help make historical figures like Lincoln *more* real to us. A straight biopic of Lincoln’s life (which Steven Spielbeg is making) will probably be shrouded and aged by its attention to historical details that are hard for us to relate to. But a Lincoln who fights vampires? He seems more contemporary to a culture of videogames and historical plasticity, in which vampires always loom. In this context, the virtual, vampire-slaying Lincoln will likely seem more real and tangible to most of us than the sepia-toned Lincoln can ever be.
View Link [nwn.blogs.com]
Mathematician Henry Segerman creates copies of a 3D printed Hilbert curve he originally made in Second Life which, thanks to its twisty material, can also be worn as a geekily fashionable hair accessory!
View Link [nwn.blogs.com]
A lot of anti-war activists think Ron Paul is an ally they should support, but according to a former campaign staffer, he’s anti-war in a way that very very few would agree or be comfortable with:
“For example, he strenuously does not believe the United States had any business getting involved in fighting Hitler in WWII. He expressed to me countless times, that ‘saving the Jews,’ was absolutely none of our business. When pressed, he often times brings up conspiracy theories like FDR knew about the attacks of Pearl Harbor weeks before hand, or that WWII was just ‘blowback,’ for Woodrow Wilson’s foreign policy errors, and such”
View Link [jezebel.com]
To satirize digital age capitalism, a couple of artists created a virtual sweatshop in Second Life, and unveiled their project at Sundance. But what began as an ironic, somewhat condescending performance art quickly changed due to some fascinating and hilarious emergent behavior, heightened by the sudden appearance of a totally confounded Robert Redford.
View Link [nwn.blogs.com]
In Journey, a PS3 game coming out this year, players need to climb a mountain with a random online stranger. It seems eerily similar to Mercerism, the religion in Philip Dick’s *Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep*, in which Empathy Boxes link simultaneous users into a collective consciousness based on the suffering of Wilbur Mercer, a man who takes an endless walk up a mountain while stones are thrown at him, the pain of which the users share.
View Link [nwn.blogs.com]
Innovative Ideas: An Online Forum For Lobbying
The Brooking Institute just proposed a great alternative to Congressional lobbying: “An online clearinghouse where any group or individual… can comment on proposed legislation and view the positions of others.” That’s right: A Submitterator for US Congress! Good summary and feasibility analysis from The Policy Brief blog.
View Link [thepolicybrief.wordpress.com]
Did Bradley Manning Almost Blow The Operation To Capture/Kill Osama Bin Laden?
According to this blogger’s close analysis, Manning’s Wikileaks dump revealed how close US intelligence were to finding OBL, and that the Obama administration probably moved up the raid because that knowledge was published by Wikileaks. As the UK Guardian reports: “WikiLeaks released the report last week, prompting speculation that the US, afraid that its planned raid might be preempted, brought forward its attack.”
View Link [extremeliberal.wordpress.com]
This beautiful short movie combines steampunk-esque Second Life machinima and real world documentary footage shot in India by the filmmaker to tell the story of a virtual world avatar who revolts against his owner.
View Link [ http]
In a huge milestone for mainstream recognition of games as an art form (suck it, Ebert), the taxpayer-funded organization will now award cash grants to submissions that are games, machinima, augmented reality, and other interactive media.
View Link [nwn.blogs.com]
A very interesting Quora thread (with NYT staffers participating) explains the logic of its paywall, which many have noted is easily game-able and porous. But as the publisher himself says, that’s exactly the point. The strategy is to capture a small slice of NYT’s regular users who, for example, can’t figure out how to get around the paywall via Twitter etc. and/or the rich who don’t care about paying premium prices for premium content.) Now it suddenly seems like a good idea.
View Link [b.qr.ae]
Amazing factoids about Japan’s largest crime families helping in the relief effort:
All three major crime groups–the Yamaguchi-gumi, the Sumiyoshi-kai, and the Inagawa-kai–have “compiled squads to patrol the streets of their turf and keep an eye out to make sure looting and robbery doesn’t occur,” writes Jake Adelstein, author of Tokyo Vice… “The Sumiyoshi-kai claims to have shipped over 40 tons of [humanitarian aid] supplies nationwide and I believe that’s a conservative estimate.”
View Link [slate.com]
“If it bleeds, we can kill it!” From the wacky geniuses who brought us “Silence of the Lambs” the musical and “Total Recall” the musical, a brilliant rendition of everyone’s favorite 80′s sci-fi classic starring two US governors and a gentleman with a shaving fetish. Spoiler alert: “Ugly motherfucker” did not make it to the final lyric sheet, but it still rocks.
View Link [youtube.com]
An engineer at USC’s Insititute for Creative Technologies developed software that connects a Kinect to Second Life, so you can command your avatar to fly by pantomiming Superman, and translate a hug gesture into the metaverse. Anyone can download his software to try it out for themselves, and developers can use OpenNI to create their own gesture recognition algorithms.
View Link [nwn.blogs.com]
Egyptian Second Life users around the world are gathering on an SL island to anonymously share resources and info. With the 3D graphics, the Arab pop music, and Arabic voices in VOIP, you can feel their mounting jubilation through the pixels themselves.
View Link [nwn.blogs.com]
This is a gorgeous music video combining Second Life machinima, the triphop music by an SL-only combo called Soleil, and the steampunk-flavored metaverse installations of an anonymous Toronto artist known only by her avatar name, Bryn Oh.
View Link [nwn.blogs.com]
Alexis Madrigal of Atlantic Monthly has the thrilling inside story of how Facebook helped bring the Tunisian autocrat down — first by becoming a channel for dissidents and their supporters. And then by preventing Tunisian authorities from hacking into their citizens’ Facebook accounts. No wonder Tunisian protesters put Zuckerberg’s kissed face on their banners (http://www.boingboing.net/2011/01/18/tunisia-protest-bann.html).
View Link [theatlantic.com]
Running on WebGL (a standard graphics format for upcoming versions of Chrome, Firefox, and Safari), OurBricks allows 3D content creators to import files made in Maya and other standard graphics programs into a shareable, embeddable web viewer. You can CC-license your content and eventually sell it with other licensing, like an Etsy for 3D graphics creators.
View Link [nwn.blogs.com]
Developed by USC’s Institute for Creative Technologies, the WoW Kinect hack runs on FAAST (for Flexible Action and Articulated Skeleton Toolkit), free software that’ll soon be open sourced too. So we’re probably going to see many more MMO/metaverse-to-Kinect hacks like this. As Mitch Kapor told me last year, it’ll probably take a motion control system like this to make 3D worlds become mass market phenomenon.
View Link [nwn.blogs.com]
“Zimbabwe’s Mugabe-appointed attorney general announced he was investigating the Prime Minister [Morgan Tsvangirai] on treason charges based exclusively on the contents of the leaked cable… Tsvangirai and his political party… are considered Zimbabwe’s greatest hopes for unseating the country’s long-time de facto dictator Robert Mugabe…”
Or rather, because of Wikileaks, WAS.
View Link [theatlantic.com]
It’s Ethics 101: Is it right to tell a lie or keep a secret if bad people will do bad things if they knew the truth? Almost everyone would say Yes. Assange thinks otherwise. Or he hasn’t thought through what he’s doing on the most fundamental level. While undermining the democratic deliberative process that makes it possible for US to decide that question.
In yet another classy move, Assange told the UK press that his legal problems stem from feminism. Specifically: “Sweden is the Saudi Arabia of feminism… I fell into a hornets’ nest of revolutionary feminism.” A more interesting allegation than CIA dirty tricks, I suppose, but then again, the way he’s ruining Wikileaks’ credibility, I’m beginning to think Assange himself is a CIA mole.
View Link [littlegreenfootballs.com]
In an act of incandescent irony, Julian Assange’s lawyer has protested the leaking of his client’s police records, stating, “I do not know who has given these documents to the media, but the purpose can only be one thing – trying to make Julian look bad.” Which is, if you switched his name for “the US”, pretty much what Hillary Clinton just said about Wikileaks.
View Link [theatlanticwire.com]
This is especially rich, given their arch response earlier this year when Wikileaks was criticized for releasing a 1000-page police file in Belgium, which included names, unsubstantiated allegations, and detailed descriptions of alleged sexual molestation.
Jewels Vern, and 
Antinous / Moderator are discussing. 
W. James Au is discussing. 
Fiat Lux is discussing.
Jewels Vern 9:10 am on 06/09/2011 Permalink | Log in to Reply
Excuse me, that is what the congressmen are supposed to be for.
Antinous / Moderator 2:38 am on 06/09/2011 Permalink | Log in to Reply
Good luck to them. I hope their version gets less spam than ours.