Banksy - the gallery show

This looks great - a few pieces remind me other other work (Tweety looks like something by Patricia Piccinini and the Ice Cream van echoes a piece from a Sydney sculpture comp a few years back) but hey, that's art for you.

The Paradise Motel - Back in town.

The Paradise Motel are one of my all time favourite bands - lush (some may say sumptuous) swirling guitar rock with a melancholy pop twinge, fronted by one of the most haunting female vocalists I've ever heard in Merida Sussex.

I saw these guys supporting the Dirty 3 at the Plaza Ballroom, a magical space beneath the Regent Theatre all done up like some kind of fairytale. (Also the first smoke-free gig I'd been to - the restoration of the space had just been finished and they didn't want it getting all dirtied up). I still rank this as one of my best gigs ever.

Very happy to read this morning while idly wondering whatever happened to Merida that they have reformed and recorded a new album, release date as yet unknown.

This clip for one of the songs though suggests that they are back in form - and I was particularly happy to note that it is set in Burnley St, Richmond (95% sure), not far from my old house.

Welcome back guys.



There's also some Paradise Motel spin-off news - a new Melbourne "supergroup" - Lee Memorial

The new band from Karl Smith of Sodastream. Off the album The Lives Of Lee Memorial released on Dot Dash and featuring Laura MacFarlane from Ninety Nine, Tom Lyngcoln the guitarist from Nation Blue and Matt Bailey former bass player with The Paradise Motel.

I'm sure it's stupid but I still want to see it - Mega shark vs Giant octopus

Mega Shark Vs Giant Octopus is a real film starring Lorenzo (Renegade) Lamas and Debbie (sorry Deborah) Gibson.

I'm hoping they play it perfectly straight down the line serious and don't try to be funny. Either way, I'm sure that it can't be half as good as the trailer but I'd still watch it.

Farewell Frankenstein

Frankenstein! Frankenstein the legend, Frankenstein the indestructible! Sole survivor of the titanic pile-up of '95, only two-time winner of the Transcontinental Road Race... Frankenstein! Ripped up, wiped out, battered, shattered, creamed, and reamed... a dancer on the brink of death... Frankenstein, who lost a leg in '98, an arm in '99! With half a face and half a chest, and all the guts in the world.

Other people might laud the recently departed David Carradine for his name-making role as Caine in the tv series Kung Fu or for his recent come-back as Bill (in Kill Bill Vol 1 & 2) but it was his work in Death Race 2000 that I like him most for.

According to the internets, it seems as though it could well have been auto-erotic asphyxiation that killed Carradine (a much cooler term than "tragic wanking accident"), in a weird way I kind of hope it was. The alternative, suicide, is just a bit too much of a bummer.

Anyways, thanks David, you were tops

LOLchoms

Not the best photoshop job I've seen but you've got to love a LOLcat starring Noam Chomsky
Thanks Internetz

The Chaser or The Chafer?

The Chaser boys have set up the jump ramp over the shark tank and are revving the motorcycle while Pinky Truscadero looks on in horror.

Maybe I'm wrong but it seems to me that they are desperately trying to land some lucrative overseas sales (or move altogether), which is why they have prepackaged so much content from their individual world tours last year. They hold onto these clips for dear life in the hope that something vaguely relevant pops up that justifies playing them. (This also means that they don't have to do as much work week to week preparing content that is actually topical)



I thought the sick kids sketch was the highlight last night of a pretty thin show. I've definitely seen that Oscar movie sketch done (better) elsewhere and I thought that the bored expression on the cops face at Buckingham Palace said it all. His comments about them going away if he gives them the punchline they so clearly wanted so they could get some laughs for their show were pure pwnage. (Points to the team for including them).

The Fritzl sketch was outrage for outrage's sake - way to stick it to a girl who was imprisoned in a basement for decades, raped repeatedly and made to bear children to her demented father. That'll show her. Seriously guys, satire is really meant to stick it to the powerful. Inbreeding and incest is funny (wrong but funny) when it's consensual but this just wasn't cool and seemed a lot more like callous attention seeking.

Generally speaking, the skits where you pick on poor schmucks working in shops or dumb vox popees on the street are similarly weak and paint you as self important tossers. I'll admit that I laughed when you did the whole bandit/stocking mask thing last season but when I think about it, those poor shopkeepers didn't deserve that kind of fright just for turning up to work.

How about trying a little harder to be funny (like the original newspaper) and a little less hard to be the naughty attention seeking boys sticking it to soft (and dated) targets.

Interestingly, it seems like the sick kids sketch - The make a realistic wish foundation - is the one that has got the Limited News media all upset.

Viewers swamped the ABC's switchboard with complaints after The Chaser's War On Everything skit called "Make a Realistic Wish Foundation", the Daily Telegraph reports.

Chaser members Andrew Hansen and Chris Taylor asked actors playing terminally ill children what they wished for.

One girl's wish was to meet Hollywood teen heartthrob Zac Efron, but instead she was handed a stick by Taylor who tells the camera, "why go to any trouble when they're going to die anyway".

Taylor went on to say the foundation's aim was to help "thousands of kids to lower their extravagance and selfishness in the face of death".

Update: Evidently my keen eye for outrage has failed me again and it is indeed the "Make a realistic wish foundation" sketch that has stirred everyone up, to the point that they have issued an apology and are cutting the sketch from a repeat of the show this even.

Sure, sick kiddies are poor taste but I still can't help feeling that the Fritzl sketch was worse.

I thought I'd coined a new word but Google told me I was wrong

The new word?

Mehtitude - feeling meh about things

At present there are 414 other instances of this word listed in Google. Oh well, meh.

Gillette: Because every man should look like a 10 year old boy

The most disturbing part of this video is that the guy appears to have accidently cut his penis off and hasn't yet noticed.

Total Eclipse of the...WTF - Arthur Fonzarelli has an army of clones

I have blogged about the literal music videos created by Dust films previously, but I have to mention this particular effort from dascottjr, it's his take on Bonnie Tyler's Total Eclipse of the Heart.

I still have tears at the corners of my eyes from one viewing of this clip - they have done some incredibly beautiful work here. Kudos.




Ok, here's another - the literal version of The Beatle's Penny Lane.

ZOMG!!1! - Two movies I want to see in one day

This is a very nice job from secretsaucetv

New from the writer/director of Brick - The Brothers Bloom

Brick was easily one of the coolest films that I saw in 2005 - a clever suburban film noir set in an American high school. It gets extra cool points because most people have never heard of it and my knowledge of it therefore makes me superior :)

Seeing the "from the writer/director of Brick" at the head of the ad for The Brothers Bloom was all I needed to mentally add it to my mental must see list. All I know is what I have seen in the trailer - and that's pretty well all I want to know.

It's a con-artist movie with some amusing slap-stick moments and what appears to be a big bucket of style.

Playing Plants Vs Zombies - from an educational perspective.

Casual gaming wunderkinds Popcap have just released their latest game, Plants Vs Zombies.

It takes the classic Tower Defense game mechanism of placing a variety of offensive and defensive objects in a space to prevent enemies from making it all the way through your space to your house. In this instance, it pits cutesy (but not sickeningly so) plants - including energy generating sunflowers, potato landmines, pea-shooting vines and obstacle providing walnuts against a horde of increasingly difficult (yet lovable) zombies. This video gives a sense of the aesthetics of the game.

Popcap are also the producers of smash-hit casual games including Bejeweled and Peggle, so they know a thing or two about casual games.

The success of casual games, particularly among non-gamers, is something that educators interested in using games in learning should give close attention. From my experiences - including a moment of "where did the last two hours go?" last night playing Plants vs Zombies - the core elements of good casual gaming are a simple interface, comfortable learning curve, regular rewards and pleasant aesthetics.

All of the Popcap games that I have played involve the player using one button - left mouse click. When you look at "hardcore" cames - particularly in the Real Time Strategy (RTS) and Role Playing Game (RPG) genres, it is possible to have different actions mapped to the majority of keys on the keyboard. Clearly a fairly daunting entry point to someone not familiar with gaming controls and conventions. Even the consoles (Xbox 360 and Playstation 3) have around 12 -15 usable buttons on their controllers. (The Wii on the other hand has 2 or 3 in most games - and leads the console market on sales by a wide margin).

In Plants Vs Zombies, you have a front yard which is 9x5 squares. You click one of a range of plants in a top menu and click again to place it on the lawn. From here, it's largely a matter of managing resources and adapting your plant placement to the oncoming zombie hordes.

The learning curve is gentle - each level introduces another fundamental element of the game and gives you an opportunity to succeed with it before adding another element - be that a new type of plant weapon or a new, tougher zombie. This reinforces prior learning experiences and adds a need to continually learn new skills. The increasing challenge keeps you engaged and motivated and new weapons/obstacles provide new forms of entertaining feedback. These are the first two levels and a later one, which show you how the gameplay evolves.

Regular rewards are another key element of casual games - these don't have to be big things, just pleasing aesthetic elements such as score boosts, cute noises and perhaps most satisfying so far in this particular game is the whump of an exploding potato landmine and the mound of mashed potatoes (and zombie) it leaves behind. (In a cute way, of course). Games such as Peggle are much more demonstrative in this regard, flashing and dinging almost like a pinball machine with virtually any successful action and offering praise and reinforcement for positive player actions. (Perhaps a little behaviourist but it's hard to argue with the success of the game). An interesting story that came out of the initial playtesting of Peggle is that players who were initially "meh" about the game found it much more engaging when the points values of their rewards had a few zeros added to the end, making them seem more valuable.

The aesthetics of the PopCap games are generally pleasing to the eye, bright (but not to bright) colours and cheery (but not annoying) music and sound effects. These clearly mark the experience as one of play rather than work and I feel that they tap directly into the need for escapism that brings people to these games.

Not all of these thing will work in educationally oriented games but in terms of creating a space that is welcoming to new gamers and which provides motivation, it is hard to see a better approach.

Have I mentioned recently that Skynet is here?

Yes, my mildly disconcerting obsession with our future robot overlords continues.

This time it is a UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle) that can be picked up for between $900 and $5000 (U.S) which can carry a number of different types of video cameras and which is flown remotely by someone wearing video glasses that see exactly what the Draganfly sees.

(I am thinking how awesome it could be to have one of these for shooting movies)

Yet another reason why Firefox is best - Hyperwords

The astonishingly awesome Stephen Fry mentioned his love of Firefox add-on Hyperwords in a tweet this morning and I have to say that it's easily the coolest add-on I've seen since Ubiquity.



Nifty, no?

The coloured waterfall of the office

I could be the killjoy lefty who bemoans the pointless waste of natural resources that this represents but it's also very pretty, so I'll let it pass. It's also conceivable that they are still usable.


EepyBird's Sticky Note experiment from Eepybird on Vimeo.

Dashing* towards the Script Frenzy deadline

*By dashing I am referring to my hopes and dreams.

Ok, so unless I start typing in my sleep, it's fairly unlikely that I'm going to knock out the 80+ pages remaining to be scripted in my magnum opus for Script Frenzy by the end of the month.

Script Frenzy is a month long screenplay writing exercise intended to get dusty screenplays out of drawers (real or mental) and onto paper.

In spite of my failure to get the writing done, I'm actually feeling pretty good about the work that I have managed to get done over the last 28 days.

I have completely reshaped the story behind the first draft of the script that I put together, incorporating virtually all of the good ideas I've had in the last #cough11yearscough#.

I've learnt how to use a very nifty piece of screenwriting shareware called Celtx that has freed me from the onerous script formatting conventions and I've also (eventually) got a sense of the best way for me to work on my writing. (Funnily enough, it's not a million miles away from the process that I developed to write uni essays over the last two years. I just need to develop a process for actually staying put in my seat during writing time now.)

All in all, it's coming together. I have a nagging suspicion that this draft will come in at somewhere around 3 hours long and with a $100 million budget, but that's for the producer to worry about, right?

Taking the spycam pen for the bikeride

A few lessons learnt from this - the pannier clips on the front of the bike are at more of an angle than I thought and the noise of the rubber hitting the road is surprisingly loud. The camera also appears to quit after 30 mins filming, which is good to know.

Anyway, this is the first 30 mins of the ride (which is approx 45 mins), compressed to a bit over 3 mins. (Which by rudimentary mathematics suggests that this is what it might look like if/when I ride my bike at 200km/h.

(Oh and the music in the clip is just some generic production music from the Ulead video editing software package)

Nice and elevating - Lost Generation

I'm not normally one to post motivational/inspirational stuff - indeed I'm far more comfortable cynically decrying it - but I was quite taken with this short video. It's a remake of an Argentinian political advertisement called "The Truth" by RECREAR and was placed second in the AARP U@50 video contest.

It's only about 2 minutes but has to be watched right to the end. 



(Thanks to Sue at work for sending this around)

Whatchootalkinbout? Mr Drummond gets creepy

Fantastic example of how much different music can make to setting the mood. I know find the opening credits of Diff'rent Strokes entirely unsettling - thanks Internetz

The most awesome fun ever - indoor skydiving

No doubt this guy is a seriously practiced professional indoor skydiving and a schmuck like you or I would spend the majority of our time slamming into the glass walls at the side, but how much would you like to find out?

It truly is a golden age that we live in.