Month: October 2007

Rodrigo y Gabriela

Finally, at 22:00, they gave it up to us: A full, euphoric Diablo Rojo. The relief was evident – everyone jumped out of their seats, clapping and dancing. It was a perfectly calibrated use of the delayed-resolution device. I associate the concept with Wagner, since a professor pointed it out to me in Tristan und Isolde – the music never resolves until the opera’s end, maintaining a feeling of unsettlement throughout.

Heh. My best clubbing experience ever also had this sloooow crescendo, where they would build things up for about 2 hours before they reached 11. It makes you angry and hopeful as you suffer towards resolution 🙂

Google Transit Implications

This isn’t about Google at all. The issues Google Transit raises merely go to the core of what we do with local public transport data. This is all part of a much wider data liberalisation/control agenda. In the case of public transport information, there are real benefits to data liberalisation, even if that means there is no way to recover the costs of gathering the data

hopefully this will force the agencies to make their transit data freely available, as some enlightened ones like BART already do

The joys of ‘porting

For example, 1 stunt I used frequently involved setting up a portal somewhere high above me on a wall. Then I’d jump off a cliff, start falling — and then open a portal precisely at the spot where I was due to hit the ground. My momentum would blast me out the portal high above the ground, shooting me like a bullet through the air to a far-off ledge I couldn’t otherwise reach. The game constantly challenges you to invent ever more paradoxical feats of self-propulsion. I used the same momentum-gathering technique to bounce myself vertically upward out of a hole in the ground, and then, while flying through the air, shoot another portal in a nearby piece of ground.

about time that games seriously explore alternate realities with alternate physics