Category Archives: reTransmit

cool things I’ve learned from others directly or found online which hopefully relate to the core topics of the blog

Future Blog

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I’ve been asked to give some indication of what’s in store for this blog and whether it will be continued. The short answer is “Yes”. However, the next incarnation will be at a different URL… though still within the rebang.com domain.

Further, because blogspam is such a bandwidth ripper and because I’d rather leave this ad-free, comments and trackbacks will likely not be permitted. I’m instead looking at other options for discussion and hope to have some way to facilitate it. Trackbacks will likely not be opened as it’s simply too ripe for abuse. Perhaps if I wanted to dedicate more time to deleting the spam and/or keeping up with extensions to control it, but I don’t; it might be of interest to those of you who visit this site that after all this time I still have zombie PC’s pinging to try to post their worthless messages on outdated entries. That’s the net.

Also, while I’d like to have my new website up and running by 1 Oct, the truth is that what I’m doing goes well beyond just a blog. This incarnation of the weblog was really an overly-successful test… never intended to be permanent. If you recall my focus, then you might get some hint of where I’ll be taking this website. Unfortunately that means stretching out into a lot of seemingly unrelated areas. I hope that when I’m done you’ll appreciate what can only be a modest effort.

Brown on Design

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Just read the Fast Company article “Strategy by Design” penned by Tim Brown, IDEO‘s vocal and oft-quoted CEO. While informative, it probably succeeds best imo as an example of how words alone (for some people) can sometimes fail. A shame. The Industrial Design profession could use someone today able to communicate as effectively in word as with imagery. So far I’ve not found a design writer that rises to the task. Then again, I should probably read more.

Entertaining Shifts

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BusinessWeek online has an informative article on the entertainment industry’s current DVD-sales woes. The reasons for the sales slump are obviously speculative, but some of the guesses are interesting to consider. At the core of this problem is: What are people doing with their leisure time (assuming they aren’t so tired from the long work weeks that they have the energy to do anything more than sit in front of the tube)?

One interesting bit from the article:

During its first quarter, ending May 28, Best Buy said it saw revenue declines for DVD sales that were “comparable” to the double-digit sales hikes it reported for video-game sales.

With the continued press about the growth in casual gaming, I’m wondering if the “fragmenting market” comment isn’t the most accurate. And perhaps some of those casual gamers who might be part of a new fragment are moving onto the harder stuff. I’m curious to know how many are female. And how many make their way to There or The Sims Online.

Sony Exchange Live

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Here we go. The floodgates to the virtual market have just opened as Terra Nova informs readers that Sony’s virtual goods exchange service has commenced operations. Read the news, view some screenshots, and keep track of the comments here.

Additionally, I have to admit that after having spent the better part of a year recently on an indy game project which fell apart primarily due to lack of a worthwhile marketing plan, I realized that content was increasingly becoming the real prize. Consequently I’m glad I went back to content creation (I do still enjoy coding, but would like to make time for porting and building upon my old aerospace analysis work… someday). I think the recent turn of events bodes well for those of us making real-world quality models.

Over the past three of four years of hanging out on indy game forums and seeing so many projects wither on the vine due to lack of compelling content (and the free stuff online just doesn’t cut it), it’s hard to not reach the conclusion that a virtual market has some potentially nice ripple effects. I’m looking for one ripple in particular. If it makes waves, I think alot of people will be pretty happy.

Hive-Minded Swarm On Exhibit

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Via Bruce Sterling’s Wired blog comes this interesting bit on a collaborative art effort called “The Minded Swarm“. From the press release:

The artists have met for some years in a science fiction reading group, absorbing SF’s mode of fantastic speculation into their own practice. Assuming the model of a Gestalt Organism (Theodore Sturgeon, More than Human, Vintage, 1998.) where individual capacities merge to create a single distributed intelligence, the artists have enacted a state-change, adopting a communal consciousness (Olaf Stapledon, Starmaker, Wesleyan University Press, 2004 (1937), p. 271.) as a means of artistic production.

If you’re in the LA area, the exhibition runs through Sunday, 4 September 2005.

This reminds me a little of the early efforts of a European collective called Workspace-Unlimited. A few years back when they popped up on the radar they were attempting to use the Quake 3 game engine to create a virtual artistic community (it appears they’ve morphed into something else now perhaps). They got off to a really nice start with the game engine, and the possibilities to do something like a virtual “hive mind” project seemed within reach. But as some of us pointed out, they probably ran into licensing issues and the like. It does look like they have something else “virtual” going on though. Something to check out when I have a minute…