Roo Reynolds - What’s Next?

Guild Dinner Party

Posted by Roo - 22/07/08 at 09:07:52 am

A couple of weeks ago, just as I was finally getting sucked into World of Warcraft, I received this mysterious invitation.

Now, this guild is actually a bunch of real-life friends who use Warcraft to hang out together. Members who have outed themselves include Alice Taylor (who recently blogged about receiving some guild postcards) Kim Plowright (who made some awesome cross-stitch patterns) James Wallis (who presented a geophysical study of the World of Warcraft during Interesting 2008 and then wrote up his findings in an essay). I was excited to catch up with these people, and also to get to know the members I have not met yet.

Being a humble level 18 hunter, I didn’t have any suitable clothing for a formal dinner (my skinning and leather-working abilities extend to the embossed leather boots I was wearing and not much further) but Alice Taylor lived up to her name and kindly tailored many beautiful tuxedos and dresses for the guests.

The Wayfarer’s Rest Inn, like the rest of Silvermoon City, is beautiful. A great setting for a formal dinner. James dished out lashings of beer and wine and scrumptious food which included soup, rat kebabs and strawberry ice-cream. We danced and joked and generally, you know, had a party.

Eventually the party spilled out into the street, forming a conga line through Silvermoon City. We then moved on to Thunder Bluff and skinny-dipped in the pool there, before James revealed his final surprise of the evening: a fish course called ‘Savory Deviate Delight‘ which magically transformed us into ninjas and pirates. Yay.

More:

• Alice’s blog post
• Margaret’s blog post
• Mike’s pictures
• My pictures

Jesse Thorn interviews Ze Frank

Posted by Roo - 16/07/08 at 10:07:34 am

Perhaps the two most awesome people on the internet, making each other laugh and talking about the web for half an hour.

Ze Frank on The Sound of Young America from Jesse Thorn on Vimeo.

Ze talks about ‘internet icebreakers’ and the web as a participatory platform

“…around 2003 it became very obvious that the web wasn’t just a publishing platform, it was a participatory platform as well. You could provide little areas where people do the work for you and you take the credit for it. It’s called Web 2.0″

They talked (of course) about Ze’s daily video blog, The Show (which you may remember I mentioned last year, as it was coming to a close). More things: “The great thing about a conversation is that the other side fills in the gaps for you”, If The Earth Were a Sandwich. Did you know that Ze is co-writing a movie? Color Wars, “Place can’t be the dominant metaphor”, games which cross boundaries, and more.

* is what a(n) * calls a(n) *

Posted by Roo - 15/07/08 at 10:07:43 pm

A cynic is what an idealist calls a realist.

- Sir Humphrey Appleby, ‘Yes, Minister’

Searching the web for variations on the “* is what a * calls a *” snowclone turns up things like

• A cynic is what a romantic calls a realist
• A pessimist is what an optimist calls a realist
• a cult is what a big religion calls a small religion
• A stable is what a pimp calls a group of women that prostitute for him
• a Squid is what a dumb Jarhead calls a sailor
• A Hottie is what a racing drivers calls a fast lap
• a hypothesis is what a scientist calls a theory
• a “deli water bottle” is what a New Yorker calls a bottle of water purchased in a deli
• a player is what a woman calls a guy who doesn’t want to go out with her
• a “flea” is what a surgeon calls a pediatrician-in-training
• a calorie is what a physicist calls a kilocalorie
• a pressure ulcer is what a doctor calls a pressure sore
• A bulkhead is what a sailor calls a wall on a ship
• a jarpie is what an Aussie calls a saffie

I love the way these open up more questions. A Jarhead is a marine, but what’s a saffie?

Of course the web also turns up some staggeringly stupid examples, including A pessimist is what a realist calls an optimist, if I recall the quote correctly. Wuh?

Given my investigation into * is the new * last year, I naturally wondered how I’d go about graphing these. A quick experiment with Graphviz gives me a couple of alternative approaches.

Even just wondering how to map these three-way relationships (in which all three parts might be re-used) gives some interesting choices. So far, I think B works better than A. You learn more from it. To tell me which two people call the realist a cynic using A, you’d have to read all the labeled edges. B is much easier. I’m sure I’m missing some obvious alternative approaches here though.

Interesting 2008 - thirty more interesting things

Posted by Roo - 23/06/08 at 09:06:30 am

This time last year I made a list of thirty interesting things at Interesting 2007. Let’s try that again.

1. After an amazing welcome (including a singalong) from Russell I kicked things off by claiming that LEGO is full of WIN. [slides] [video]
   
2. Gemma Teed told us about horses’ blind spots. [video]
3. Collyn Ahart Chipperfield talked about nostalgia and fantasy (nostalgia is dead, let’s not limit ourselves to reality).
4. Steve Hardy shared his thoughts on the importance of creative generalists (curious about everything, experts at nothing. They balance and feed the specialists). [slides]
5. Daniel Raven-Ellison talked about guerilla geography.
6. Michael Johnson gave a history of guitar music and graphic design.
7. Phil Gyford talked about acting and masks. [clips]
8. James Wallis presented a geographical survey of the World of Warcraft. [video] [video] [theory]
   
9. Matt Dent talked about how he designed the backs of the new UK coins (which are stunningly cool, and fit together to form one large image).
10. Matt Webb shared an alternative history of Patagonian telecoms networks and the Conquistadors. [slides]
11. Andrew Webb gave a heartwarming account of the making of channel4.com/foodmap.
12. Andrew Walkingshaw talked about informatics and the naming of things (a computer, like a cat, has three names).
13. Andrew Dick shared his tales of insomnia, and how bad story tapes help him overcome it.
14. Jenny Owen told us her favourite things about Churchill.
15. Matthew Irvine Brown conducted a 30-strong impromptu Guardian-sponsored orchestra of recorders (Russell: “You wouldn’t get that at TED”) [video]
16. Lloyd Davis played two songs on the ukulele and led us in mountain medidation
17. Beeker directed a mexican wave.
18. Simon and Curtis James accompanied Ken Hollings reading an extract from Welcome To Mars. [audio]
19. Anna Pickard shared her favourite words (including biscuit, duck and flange. Plosives are funny)
20. Younghee Jung talked about her ambient interest in the toilets of the world
21. James Bridle instructed us on the relationship between booze and civilization [essay]
22. Kim Plowright presented a cultural history of the vacuum cleaner
23. James Houston showed his ‘Big Ideas (don’t get any)’ video which has been Big On The Internet in recent weeks, and was his final year Graphic Design project. He graduated yesterday with a first. Congratulations James.
24. Jim Le Fevre got lots of wows with his Technics Zoetrope. [video]
25. Gavin Starks talked about acoustic cosmology and the application of music to the cosmological theories of n-dimensional space. Oh yes.
26. Joel Gethin Lewis taught us about the meaning of the word ‘Hiraeth’, which might be a cross between a longing for home and knowing that you belong there.
27. George Oates talked about ‘the raw material of social engineering’, especially crappy Flickr groups.
28. Lea Becker talked about scribbles.
29. Leisa Riechelt presented some thoughts on the brain, including synaptic pruning.
30. Max Gadney told us about his interest in World War 2.

(Each photo is a link. Thanks to Ged Carroll, Steve Bowbrick, Meg Pickard, Jenni Lloyd and Nick O’Leary,)

More stuff:

• Flickr group
• Russell made a timelapse video
• SlideShare event (add more!)
• More discussion here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here here and yet more.
• Roundup from Russell.
• Guardian video series.

LEGO is full of WIN - my Interesting 2008 talk

Posted by Roo - 22/06/08 at 05:06:33 pm

Here are the slides and audio for the talk I gave at Interesting 2008 yesterday. 30 slides in 3 minutes.

I’ll post my notes on the day later when my brain recovers a bit more. Rest assured it every bit as interesting as last year. Update: my notes are here.

For now, see my Flickr set, interesting2008 on Flickr and
interesting2008 on Technorati.

Update: the Guardian are hosting a series of videos of the Interesting 2008 talks. Here’s my talk.

Aww. That’s sweet.

Posted by Roo - 15/06/08 at 12:06:41 am

One of the best bits about visiting different countries is picking up the local delicacies. I rediscovered my stash of American chocolate earlier. Here’s what I’ve been nibbling on today…

Don’t bother with the Skittles or the ‘Goobers’ (stupid name for chocolate covered peanuts). The Dark Chocolate M&Ms are definitely the highlight.

Welcome to the New Sincerity

Posted by Roo - 28/05/08 at 08:05:49 am

For the past few decades, western culture has been marked by a postmodern ironic appreciation of the kitsch and the corny. I’m beginning to wondering what comes next. Bear with me.

In this essay from 2006 the British philosopher Alan Kirby identifies the successor to postmodernism as being pseudo-modernism, which includes “all television or radio programmes or parts of programmes, all ‘texts’, whose content and dynamics are invented or directed by the participating viewer or listener”. Kirby certainly makes some great points in this piece, and it’s well worth a read. He’s noticed that in becoming more digital, the world is increasingly participatory (and he does all of this without saying 2.0 anywhere).

In postmodernism, one read, watched, listened, as before. In pseudo-modernism one phones, clicks, presses, surfs, chooses, moves, downloads.

Despite being a decent summary of a possible view of the world today, the conclusion is hard for me to swallow.

Here, the typical emotional state, radically superseding the hyper-consciousness of irony, is the trance – the state of being swallowed up by your activity. In place of the neurosis of modernism and the narcissism of postmodernism, pseudo-modernism takes the world away, by creating a new weightless nowhere of silent autism. You click, you punch the keys, you are ‘involved’, engulfed, deciding. You are the text, there is no-one else, no ‘author’; there is nowhere else, no other time or place. You are free: you are the text: the text is superseded

While he makes some great points (particularly about an increasingly participatory culture which makes the world which came before it feel, to its members, drab and oppressive) I can’t help think that whatever comes - and has been coming - after postmodernism is going to have to be not just participatory but also a lot more positive than what Kirby is describing. It’s not going to be single-user either; the idea that “there is no-one else” makes a mockery of the social implications which underpin his vision. That there may be not always be a (discernible) author doesn’t mean there won’t also be other people in the experience.

I mentioned last week that I’ve been listening to a lot of Jesse Thorn this year. It turns out that Jesse Thorn is the founding father of a movement called the New Sincerity, which might just hold the answer to my current “what’s next?” question regarding post-postmodernism.

A great starting point for understanding the New Sincerity is this episode of ‘The Sound of Young America’ from 2007, particularly the first 10 minutes or so. The New Sincerity movement was not born with this broadcast (there are references going back a long way earlier) but it’s a rallying cry to live a New Sincerity summer and enjoy life unironically. The New Sincerity is something we already understand, if only we can strip away some negativity and appreciate something for its merits rather than for some sort of ironic kitsch value.

A perfect example of the New Sincerity is Evel Knievel. There’s no way to take Evel Knievel literally. It’s impossible. The man has a leather jumpsuit and he drives a rocket car. The leather jumpsuit has red, white, and blue stars and stripes on it. It’s absolutely preposterous. On the other hand, there’s no way to appreciate Evel Knievel ironically. He’s too awesome, right?. He has - I don’t know if we’ve mentioned this - a leather jumpsuit with the Stars and Stripes on it and a rocket-powered car. That’s why we appreciate Evel Knievel with the New Sincerity

The New Sincerity replaces postmodern irony not with Kirby’s trance but with an almost childlike exuberant appreciation of everything that is awesome. In the earlier Manifesto for The New Sincerity, Jesse concludes with these words:

Our greeting: a double thumbs-up. Our credo: “Be More Awesome.” Our lifestyle: “Maximum Fun.” Throw caution to the wind, friend, and live The New Sincerity.

In absorbing the tenets of the New Sincerity, I naturally think about Ze Frank, a man who exhibits awesomeness in his own right but also has a clear desire for other people to be awesome. Obsessively watching his popular (and highly interactive) video podcast ‘the show’ last year, I was repeatedly stuck by his genuine joy in the strangeness and creativity of the world. If you’ve never watched any and want to get started, these are some of my favourite episodes.

Ze’s term for his own viewers is Sports Racers (and he usually singing a little song when he uses the word: “sports racers, racing sports. What’s your power move?”.) If Ze Frank has been full of old school irony, he might have referred to his viewers using the tired sports cliche of ’sports fans’ (”Hey, sports fans!”) but he isn’t, and he doesn’t. In the (current) words of the ‘Sports Racer’ Ze Frank wiki entry:

Ze is switching it up, with a nod to the theoretical ‘interactivity’ of our new medium of internet, and so, instead of sports fans, we are sports racers. Participators in the dialogue

Ze Frank may never even have heard the term, but he exudes the New Sincerity like flying a kite with Bruce Lee on a sunny day.

Back to Jesse. In an interview with the Gothamist in November 2006 he shared more insights about the New Sincerity:

At its core, it’s a rejection of what we called The Old Irony, which ruled the cultural roost, or at least the hipster part of the cultural roost, for the past fifteen years or so.

Part of what the New Sincerity is is being larger than life and the acknowledgment that the coolest stuff comes from being completely unafraid of being seen as uncool. It encompasses everything from small things like high-fiving and flying a kite to bigger things like being Evil Knievel.

it’s a willingness to earnestly appreciate something even if it’s bigger than something someone would earnestly feel comfortable earnestly appreciating. Even if it means taking the risk of someone thinking it’s ridiculous because, ultimately, it’s more important to be awesome than to be cool.

Personally, I think I’ve had enough of irony and I don’t think I’m alone. I’m sick of feeling that I have to be sarcastic in order to be funny, or admire things because they are so-bad-they’re-good. My wife and I already hi-five each other unironically, so although it’s going to be hard to break my long-ingrained habits of ironic appreciation, it shouldn’t be a massive lifestyle change to earnestly embrace everything that’s genuinely good. New Sincerity? Count me in.

Speaking at Open Tech 2008

Posted by Roo - 26/05/08 at 09:05:57 am

Open Tech 2008 is

an informal, low cost one-day conference on technology, society and low-carbon living, featuring Open Source ways of working and technologies that anyone can have a go at.

The Schedule includes the very lovely Kim Plowright talking about art history with Matt Webb, which will be worth the price of admission on its own. Other things not to miss include Gavin Starks talking about AMEE, Suw Charman doing ORG things, Simon Willison on OpenID, Gavin Bell on that and other distributed federated stuff, Tom Loosemore on ‘The Bastard Child of Biard and Berners Lee’, Adrian Hon on ‘We Tell Stories‘ and many many more.

I’ve offered a short slot on Current Cost meters which has been accepted and is scheduled to happen during the 4-5pm session in the Upper Hall. Nick O’Leary has agreed to help me out too. It will mainly involve us talking about how (and why) you’d want to track your house’s electricity consumption. (In case you’ve missed it, the interwebs have recently been filling up with interesting hackers’ discoveries about the Current Cost recently. In addition to Nick’s Google Chart API tricks and my radial Google Charts charting stuff there are details of the XML format from Rich Cumbers, tips on how the serial connection works from Chris Hand and previously unknown details about buying official cables from Current Cost via James Wallis. There are tips, tricks and ideas galore to share). By the time the events comes round, there will be even more to talk about too I’m sure, and in a way that feels more like an informal but useful talk rather than a blog post full of links.

Open Tech 2008 will take place on Saturday 5th July 2008, 11am-6pm, at ULU, Malet street. Tickets cost a mere £5, paid on the door.

(I’m also doing 3 minutes at Interesting 2008 on Saturday the 21st of June. Something about LEGO).

Jordan, Jesse, GO!

Posted by Roo - 23/05/08 at 10:05:08 pm

Jordan, Jesse, GO! is probably the best entertainment podcast going. I’m a few weeks behind (I’ve clearly neither been flying recently nor mowing my lawn enough) but here’s the episode I’m listening to tonight. Join me.

Any show which has a forum and a voicemail account hotline (+1 206-984-4FUN) has to be good.

I’m not sure everyone will fall in love with it as instantly as I did but the theme music alone was enough for me to know that this was something deeply adorable. I’ve listened to so many episodes this year (usually while flying somewhere or mowing something) that I now have some sort of semi-pavlovian reaction to it. Putting it on makes me feel comfortable and happy and strangely like I’m at home regardless of where I actually am.

Jesse Thorn has a public radio show (also podcast), The Sound of Young America. You may have heard of him. He interviewed Stephen Colbert and not only some of the stars of ‘The Wire’ (the best TV show ever by the way) but also geek hero Merlin Mann. That’s as mainstream as anyone needs. It’s co-presented by Jordan Morris (correspondent for Fuel TV’s Daily Habit). Both of them are younger than me. Dammit.

“Where do you find the time?” Clay Shirky and the Cognitive Surplus

Posted by Roo - 16/05/08 at 11:05:56 am

Clay Shirky and the Cognitive Surplus might be a good name for a band.

I found this video of Clay Shirky at the recent Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco via Warren Ellis. It is 15 minutes long, and the territory covered includes…

• The critical technology for the early phase of the industrial revolution was gin.
• The TV sitcom is the today’s gin. The new social lubricant. The heatsink for the cognitive surplus.
• “Where do people find the time?”
• Wikipedia has taken roughly 100 millions hours of culumative effort so far.
• Americans watch 200 billion hours of TV between them per year.
• “It’s better to do something than to do nothing”
• Even lolcats are an invitation to participation “if you have some sans serif fonts … you can play this game too”
• Media is becoming less about just consumption and more about consumption + production + sharing.
• “This isn’t the sort of thing that society grows out of, it’s the sort of thing that society grows in to.”
• Anecdote: a four year old searching behind a TV, looking for the mouse
• “A screen that ships without a mouse ships broken”
• “Media that’s targeted at you but doesn’t include you may not be worth sitting still for“

There’s a transcript of the speech on Clay’s blog. If you’re not into video, go and read that instead.

Mark Morford discusses Clay’s speech on SF Gate. He’s critical about the potential of participatory media for art, creativity and independent thought, saying

if social networking is the future of creativity, the future is bland indeed.

I think he’s missing the point. Yes for sanity’s sake, let’s do more than networking with our surplus. Of course. Let’s make amazing things. Even (gasp) more amazing than Wikipedia. I’m increasingly seeing social networking tools as a radar which helps me (to reiterate those three key points from Shirky’s speech) consume, produce and share. In themselves, those tools are indeed faddish (Twitter is still hot. The love affair with Facebook has come and gone for many people) but the underlying reasons for networking (whether physical or online) remain. Someone’s social network shouldn’t be confused with a tool which helps them maintain and extend that network online. These tools are often (if they want to be successful) a means to an end.

Mark Morford is also concerned about the danger of ‘groupthink’ in collaborative projects:

Wikipedia’s unusual success aside, few things are worse in this human world than creation by committee, by crowd and consumer and the masses. Few things destroy true vision and the integrity of a unique idea more than bowing to the forces of groupthink.

At first glance, that does seem to be a valid challenge. How often do digital-era collaborative social surplus energy projects ever actually feel like committees though? Aren’t they more like communities? Flexible to the point of being fickle perhaps, but not bowing to any (traditional) pecking order other than a very fluid meritocracy which respects contribution over seniority. There’s a creative advantage to projects which use the cognitive surplus of people outside their salaried day-jobs which may make them immune to the influence of the sort of groupthink which Morford has no doubt endured in the real world. Since the participants’ investment in spare time projects is very portable, there’s little danger of them remaining involved in a bland, tired dead-horse project when they can hang out with creative, passionate people doing something authentic in the virtual team next-door.

And let’s not confuse the size of the potential pool of participants with some sort of “how on earth can we scale a team to that many people?” problem. If he wants virtual teams working online with creative integrity, we don’t have to wait; there’s no shortage of them today. The creative energy of the world doesn’t have to be scaled horizontally to include the masses. It might stack. The next Wikipedia is no doubt already already happening, and it might be quite a lot smaller. The good thing is that it won’t be alone.