Time is short this week, so just a few links I found interesting…
- Make Me Watch TV: Collaborative torture. This guy lets people choose what he watches on TV. Naturally, voters tend to make him watch the worst of the worst (though it seems that sometimes people are nice and let him watch an episode of Lost or Doctor Who). After each viewing, he blogs about what he’s seen. One interesting thing here is that, if you want, you can “sponsor” a time slot: If you pay him $5 (per half hour), he’ll let you override the popular vote and force him to watch the program of your choice. Democracy in action.
- Life After the Video Game Crash: In light of recent bloggery, this article in which David Wong recaps the history of video games (including the beloved Atari 2600) also predicts the coming of another Video Game Crash. Basically, it argues that the next generation gaming consoles offer very little in the way of true innovation and Wong is betting that people will stay away in droves. Regardless of what you may think, it’s worth reading because Wong is funny:
And yet, even with the enormous number of games (Metroid delayed my discovering girls for a for a good 18 months), the gaming experience itself still couldn’t keep our interest for more than a few years. Attention waned again, but this time new, fancier systems arrived just in time, offering a new and novel experience thanks to prettier graphics and character animation. And yet those systems (the Sega Genesis and later the SNES), as great as they were, eventually were retired to closets and attics and the sandy carpets of the Pakistani black market. It was a bitter, dark cloud of Japanese expletives that wafted from the meeting rooms at Nintendo and Sega when they realized their industry effectively lived under a curse.
- The World’s Most Important 6 Second Drum Beat: Nate Harrison’s fascinating 2004 video explores the history of the “Amen Break,” a six second drum beat from a b-side of a 1969 single that’s been used extensively in early hiphop and sample-based music. From there, it spawned subcultures like drum-and-bass and jungle music. Aside from the strange fact that this is a video (there doesn’t appear to actually be a reason for this – most of the video is simply a video of a record playing or a guy sitting in a room, for instance), this is compelling stuff. It covers the history of the break, but also some issues about ownership, copyright, and what constitutes art and creativity…
Apologies for the lameness of this entry. I’ve been travelling this weekend, and I’m exhausted. I’ve got several of these weekends coming up, so I’m going to try and set up some guest bloggers to post in my stead. I think the next one will be in two weeks or so. Anyway, I’ll try to post again later this week…