ma says:

Is there a medieval battle at Machine this Saturday night? Yes. Do you have to bring your own beer? Yes. Will there be men and women dressed in full plate armour hitting each other with pieces of metal? Yes. Can you safely watch the action projected next door at the film center? Yes. Is this the best idea ever? Yes. Will there also be monguls, vikings, and centurians? Maybe. Will I wear my chain mail suit? Unclear.

Looks frickin’ cool.

Machine Project announces
“Untitled War”, a medieval battle staged inside the gallery space. On July 17
from 6 to 8pm, armored warriors will engage in gut wrenching, full-contact
combat with assorted melee weapons.

“Untitled War” is the latest project by artist and uber-gamer Brody Condon. Working in the mystical
confluence of contemporary art practice, 3D games, and historical combat
reenactment, Mr. Condon’s work is engaged in locating and fabricating
situations and visual works where computer games and game culture leak outside
of the gaming box and into lived experience. In “Untitled War”. Condon’s
ongoing work on SCA (Society for Creative
Anachronism, www.sca.org) culminates in a full-contact battle royale staged
inside of Machine Project, located in Echo Park Los Angeles.

“Untitled War” is a performative event combining fantasy role-playing,
fabricated history, extreme sports, and computer games. Warriors from various
historical periods from the SCA will endure an ongoing First Person Shooter
Game style Deathmatch battle. Live camera views (similar to the spectator
camera views found in online FPS games) will be streamed online and projected
next door at the Echo Park Film
Center, creating a game-like viewing experience for those outside the
space.

“Untitled War” is the first one man staging of a Medieval battle in Los
Angeles by Mr. Condon, a former member of the SCA. Mr. Condon’s personal and
collaborative work has recently been exhibited at the 2004 Whitney Biennial,
the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and the New Museum of Contemporary
Art.

Thanks to SCA and the Echo Park Film Center for their generous
support.

More information about Brody Condon’s art work can be found at his website,
www.tmpspace.com

Brody Condon also recently created a 650 Polygon John Carmack sculpture piece.

• LINUX:
  Rute User’s Tutorial and Exposition – a very comprehensive tutorial to LINUX (compare to other guides, see also my tip sheet)

Probably not a lot on the blog while I try to wrap up/do some coding before going to HOPE 5.

If you have a chance, check out In My Place (via), a journal of a person who discovers he’s HIV positive.

• A Living Document – NPR’s Annual Reading of the Declaration of Independence. Worth hearing out loud.
• vvvv is a toolkit for real-time video synthesis and controlling physical devices. It’s a novel approach to creating media applications.

  vvvv was designed to facilitate large media environments with multiple computers, physical interfaces, audio, and real-time graphics that can simultaneously interact with many users. But that does not mean that you can’t develop more modest applications with it.

Meghan Newell’s Flash Portfolio – a couple notes on Flash design/usability:

• Because of resizing, navigation (tiny numbers) moves by itself making linear nav, which should be incredibly simple, very difficult
• Fitt’s Law
• Launch area on all the rest of the area including right above the numbers
• Confusion of status, navigation, text

Most of this can happen in HTML… Flash just makes it easier/more egrarious. Also the general Flash problems (no bookmarking/URIs, visited link history, status bar, browser navigation).

• Rhizome – new k nowledge management experiment exploring interesting issues

Justice rejects data request – now this is reaching new levels of ridiculousness:

WASHINGTON (AP) – The Bush administration is offering a novel reason for denying a request seeking the Department of Justice’s database on foreign lobbyists: Copying the information would bring down the computer system.

“Implementing such a request risks a crash that cannot be fixed and could result in a major loss of data, which would be devastating,” wrote Thomas McIntyre, chief in the justice department.s office for information requests.

Advocates for open government said the government’s assertion that it could not copy data was unprecedented but representative of generally negative responses to Freedom of Information Act requests.

“This was a new one on us. We weren’t aware there were databases that could be destroyed just by copying them,” Bob Williams of the Center for Public Integrity, or CPI, said yesterday. The watchdog group in Washington made the request in January. He said the group expects to appeal the justice department.s decision.

So, if this data can’t be copied out without risking destruction, how do they access their own information? And shouldn’t these people (Ashcroft down) in the Justice Department be dismissed or arrested already? I don’t get how we can claim to be a nation of law when it seems like those in power are able to repeatedly break them with impunity.

(Well, this accurately reflects what our country is, I suppose.)

• PHP Scalability and Performance – Jeff Moore summarizes some of the recent links re: PHP scalability
• todo: memcached vs msession
• Lots of good stuff recently on Aaron Swartz’s Weblog
• Bruce Bartlett Calls Clinton a Successful Eisenhower Republican – also, some interesting commentary:
  

  First, can we please please please please please please PLEASE!! stop talking about Bush’s “tax cuts.” There are no tax cuts. There’s a tax shift–current taxpayers pay less, and future taxpayers pay more. Only by pretending that nobody has to service and amortize the growing federal debt can you talk about Bush’s “tax cuts.” They aren’t there, any more than a $5,000 increase in your VISA limit is an increase in your income.

• Tiger Gadgets/Widgets – see the gadgets now.
• Hyatt writes about Dashboard Gadgets – Dave describes Dashboard as sidebars outside of the browser. Active Desktop but windowable is how I’m looking at it. Now if WebCore could build in the rest of the DOM2 functionality it’s missing… In either case, Dashboard is nothing like Konfabulator. It’s WAAAY better from a web geek’s perspective.
• How many hours? – Photomatt asks how many productive hours you average per day. I have most of my days blocked out in iCal these days. That and maybe a focus tracking applicaiton and some rulesets could probably make some interesting charts