Brian Kerr

It’s winter, worst season for fishing in Animal Crossing. If it’s after 4PM and snowing, you may be able to catch a coelecanth in the ocean; it has a huge fish shadow, looks pretty sweet, and nets a cool 15,000 bells at sale. If your huge fish shadow is not a coelacanth, it’s going to be a tuna, which is not a bad deal either.

This may be a placebo effect, but Nathan and I had decided that there seems to be better fish when you’re visiting over wifi.

Update 2007 1 30: one Flickr’d coelecanth for your pleasure (via acww Flickr tag).

(tags: animalcrossing feedback-loop)

The Dumpster is a “breakup browser” — a net art presentation of weblog breakup posts. Lev Manovich calls it

a group portrait appropriate for the age of data mining, large databases, and global surveillance programs such as Echelon. The group ‘painted’ by The Dumpster … was created by the artist by searching though the digital traces that people leave online … each individual breakup experience becomes a point in a multi-dimensional space that we are invited to explore.

The Dumpster provides a very smooth continuum between [1] randomly clicking around to building cut-up style breakup stories and [2] (after you’ve figured out the spatial and color cues) deliberately structuring the narrative you create. It’s a serial kind of thing, where you have to develop a small amount of skill with the system in order to appreciate it.

Micro-crisis of representation

So many of these things and/or their critics lapse into the weirdly spatial language of ‘exploration’ or ‘browsing’ when talking about what you are supposed to actually do with somebody else’s net art.

Fine, go explore the work, but how does the creator describe + measure conversions? This may seem like a non sequitur, but even if the creator/artist/whatever doesn’t care how many conversions/appreciators/whatevers there are, there’s still ultra value in quantifying what has to happen, so you can set up your page/work/whatever to prod folks in the right direction.

(tags: analytics design media web)

Graduate student Brian

Working on a4a, which is a bunch of things all at once. It’s an art gizmo, a rehabilitation tool, and an inviting space. Conceptually we’re still in the tag cloud stage, but will serialize that down to an elevator pitch soon enough.

Reading old science fiction, it’s good fodder for wordie.

Other stuff too boring to write about.

Human being Brian

Ostensibly heading out to RecentChangesCamp 2007 next week for a few quality days of sitting in a big empty room with a bunch of people talking about open culture + open technology, for some values of “open,” “culture,” and “technology.”

Winter in Animal Crossing, snow on the ground every day, and falling sometimes. There are snowballs; you can roll a couple snowballs up and make a snowman. (Once in a while you can see a tiny dung beetle (!) industriously pushing around a snowball.) If you do a good job and roll a correctly-proportioned snowman, it’ll say thanks, and then mail you a gift. If you roll a grossly disproportionate snowman — whose head is too big for its body — it’ll tell you that it’s happy to be alive, or that it’s enjoying its birthday, and that it’s glad you made it, even if it wishes you had paid more attention. Regardless, your snowman will melt over the next few days, and disappear. There’s a melancholy here, but that’s how Animal Crossing works. It’s kind of how life works too.

Working on a project which I need to figure out how to decloak. It’s something kind of embarrassing, but also the kind of thing that everybody should try at least once.

Enjoying Slicehost: slowly consolidating web sites, defunct project repositories, etc. into the same place. LightTPD with mod_evhost is pretty cool. Maybe the closest we’ll get to Xanadude Ted Nelson’s infotopia is, I dunno, running a jabber server and asking it how early we are for the bus. The nice thing about riding the bus is that you’re always early for the next bus.

Getting ready for a sea change, not sure what I’m looking for but I’ll know it when I see it.

(tags: animalcrossing public-transportation self slicehost umsi)

A WalkerTracker wager with acts of poetry on the line: Sue’s and Liana’s combined step count versus mine, from a few days ago through the end of January.

Update 2007 01 13: I should have done this in the first place —

<>

+

(tags: urbanranger walkertracker)

Things: AboutUs, Alice in Ultraland, Animal Crossing, Assistive Media, Community Grants, Dhalgren, Hiveminder, Local Names, NEW Service Network, Portland, Python, School of Information, Shadow of the Colossus, Trellis, Walker Tracker.

Abstractions: Analytics. Collective action. Guerrilla education. Limited peripheral participation. Slow-burn melancholy. Two more semesters at the School of Information; the error was/is my own. What you can measure, you can change. Wrapped up nonprofit sector tour; unsurprising results.

(tags: self walkertracker)