My attitudes toward music have changed drastically in the past few years, in several ways. It’s become so easy to obtain digital music, and squeezing it onto mobile devices so convenient over physical media, that I’ve bought more music, been exposed to more music, and seen more live shows in the past few years than [...]

As well as working for Pixel-Lab, I occasionally do bits for Mudlark, who held a launch event in Birmingham last Friday.
It sparked off a lot of thoughts about communications, which I’ve written up for them here.
There were a few definitions given of the term post-digital, including Matt defining it as “a state in which we [...]

(This is written for Russell Davies’ Lyddle End 2050 project. The photos are all of models I made for it, and you can also see them as a set on Flickr).

We’ve lived through a lot of futures and most of them, we didn’t see coming. We’ve imagined many more, and I have a lot of [...]

It’s an odd climate in which to coin such a post title, but a few things I’ve observed have been rattling around recently.
The ongoing economic crisis seems to drive people to more conservative tactics, which aren’t necessarily safe (i.e. retreating to currency in the name of liquidity doesn’t seem like a very sure bet…). The [...]

(In which the author/typist apologises in a roundabout way for posting less nowadays)
I need more time to sit and think about this, but Jane Pinckard has posted something very good, though preliminary, about emergent trends in entertainment.
There’s definitely something to this:
Facebook status updates are absolutely brilliant ways for expressing an immediate state, and allowing someone [...]

Amazing glitch music visual tracker:

Open source, runs on Linux with PS2 pads. More details over at Planet Damage, he doesn’t seem to link the project website, but it’s fijuu.com.
(via The Day They Tried To Kill Me)

I’ve been sceptical of CDs and optical media since I last moved house and had to carry them. I’m purging my possessions of extraneous stuff at the moment, and last night ripped and tagged all of my remaining CDs. The pile came out to about 4 gigabytes of MP3s, which is the size of the [...]

After the jump there’s a written version of the keynote talk I gave at Under The Mask, Perspectives on the Gamer on Saturday the 7th of June. You can find slides to go with it here, an embedded version with image credits here, links to most of the things I’m talking about here, the conference [...]

Here are the slides for the Game Culture Talk I did last Saturday at Under The Mask:

| View | Upload your own

These are also mirrored with transcript on the Pixel-Lab site.
If the embed doesn’t work for you, here’s a link to the slide page.
Photo credits after the jump. Most images were used under creative [...]

I’ve been asked to deliver a keynote at Under the Mask: Perspectives on the Gamer. Provided everything goes to plan, this post will be automatically published while I’m giving the talk.
Slides and a written version of the talk can be found at the Pixel-Lab site or a few entires on in this blog. For now, [...]

(CC licensed image by Roadsidepictures)
I ran an event for work a few nights ago, and one of the things that came up in discussion was this blog entry by Ste Pickford. He raises an interesting question:
I’m playing GTA4 right now but I’m not very good and shooting / aiming games, so I’m struggling with some [...]

This time at Cebit 08. Details are scant on who’s behind this one and what tech it uses (FTIR would be possible I guess but easily confused if it’s as transparent as it appears to be. Maybe a capacitance sensing mesh sandwiched with the glass?), but it’s nice to see something this big looking so [...]

For years, I’ve had a love/hate relationship with any kind of aspiration and status. That kind of internal conflict always signifies something interesting, unsettled and insufficiently explored. I can’t resist tugging away at the loose ends, which in this case has driven me to some extremes in the past, and only now is it really [...]

Currently, I’m writing a response to the Byron Review for my employer, and a part of that involves looking at the risks of virtual worlds.
One which very few people seem to be thinking about is that many of them conflate self worth with shopping:
If you’re a parent, I would be much less concerned about things [...]

One of the things I work on nowadays is an event called Never Mind The Polygons, a games industry discussion/booze up.
Andrew Armstrong, who curates a videogames section of the Internet Archive, kindy filmed the last one and produced a video of it. This one has a panel made up of Andrew Oliver from Blitz, Louise [...]