live brief evaluation (or i'll be glad when this is over)

The main thing that I think of when I think of this brief is having far too many ideas and things to learn and nowhere near enough time to carry it all out. I really wanted to try to stretch the brief as far as I could, to really take my web skills further and see what else I could do instead of just a nice layout and working links.

My first ideas were very much wanting to show the mix of the real and virtual in my life, and not really concentrating on the everyday boring routines but looking at the traces left by my scurrying around the place and the weird things in my head, which naturally affect my perception of the outside world. I was also interested in the idea of leaving traces on web pages, which found it's way out in my new addiction to twitter, which I started using as a tool to track my thoughts about just about anything and also my ideas and research for the project.

I also started using myspace and facebook more as it was suddenly classifiable as work since it was an example of “web 2.0”, although I didn’t end up using them in my project at all.

The final product is something like my original idea but not. It’s a lot simpler than I had originally planned, my original idea was to have lots of random pages and having them all interlinked, almost a representation of my mind or memory. The final product is still pretty random, I tried to keep the text to a minimum apart from the pop ups, I wasn’t about to explain myself or anything on there, I wanted it to be confusing.
Some of my ideas such as the singing kokeshi and myspace feeds had to be abandoned as I was running out of time and it was making everything far too complex. I had to simplify my ideas into something I could actually make instead of something that I couldn’t get to work.


I think in the second year of this course I will definitely be doing interactive design, as much as I like motion graphics and am starting to like video I’m starting to become obsessed with the possibilities of interactive design. After looking into the twitter API and getting an idea of how web 2.0 works and how different sites can be mashed up together and used as well as looking into the work of Brendan Dawes and John Maeda which focuses on the more experimental uses of digital media. At the start of the year I was still interested in web design but wanting to see if I would be good at anything else, and after messing around in other areas for a bit I’ve found that I’m more obsessed with web design than ever, as everything else I’ve enjoyed this year can easily be brought into web design, which is something I tried to do by using video and second life in my website as well.

typical...

i find a website of amazing twitter and flickr mashup amazingness, view the source and all the comments explaining everything is in french...

i don't speak french...
it's amusing though...

// Si elle est appelée sans paramètres,
// cette fonction renvoie une valeur en virgule flottante indiquant la version Flash Player ou 0.0
// ex : Flash Player 7r14 renvoie 7.14
// Si appelé avec reqMajorVer, reqMinorVer, reqRevision renvoie true si cette version ou une version ultérieure est disponible
function DetectFlashVer(reqMajorVer, reqMinorVer, reqRevision

dammit... Michio Kaku told me that english was going to be the language of the global community, and of the "elites".

but it reminded me of the AIDO page by brendan dawes, which is probably more do-able.
(woo! 100th post!)

i think we hit a psychic wall

researching twitter api and mash ups and making my head explode.

so much code that i don't understand makes my head hurt.
and i'm having to use safari to blog and check email which is just plain WEIRD.

anyway...
i first tried looking at the badges on the twitter site, which i thought i would be able to customise relatively easily. i stared at the code until my head felt a bit numb, and then found the twitter fan wiki which contains loads of cool mashups, i especially like twitter in 3d (oooh it's swooshy) and celly which is very cute.

there's also handy descriptions of the twitter api which i'm hoping i might be able to make sense out of. but to be honest i'm not sure. it makes my brain numb.

i've also been looking at stuff by john maeda which i'll blog about later... mwaaah...

i can't go off critical studies cold turkey.

"...The mirror is, after all, a utopia, since it is a placeless place. In the mirror, i see myself there where i am not, in an unreal, virtual space that opens up behind the surface; i am over there where i am not, a sort of shadow that gives my own visibility to myself, that enables me to see myself there where i am absent: such is the utopia of the mirror. But it is also a heterotopia in so far as the mirror does not exist in reality, where it exerts a sort of counteraction on the position that i occupy. From the standpoint of the mirror, i discover my absence from the place where i am, since i see myself over there. Starting from this gaze that is, as it were, directed towards me, from the ground of this virtual space that is on the other side of the glass, i come back towards myself; i begin again to direct my eyes toward myself and to reconstitute myself there where i am. The mirror functions as a heterotopia in this respect: it makes this place that i occupy at the moment when i look at myself in the glass at once absolutely real, connected with the space that is around it, and absolutely unreal, since in order to be percieved it has to pass through this virtual point which is over there."

- Michel Foucault, "of other spaces"

walking home..

tra la laa laaa laaaa.

using my crappy 4 mega pixel camera. i figure the crapper it looks the more realistic it is.

meet fio kohime

she scares me a little. maybe because she's almost like my digital self but not.
maybe it's the eyes, i've made them red so people can be lazy and tell me apart from her without having to look at the name. cos people are lazy.
and she's probably evil.
so far i've had a few problems transferring my inventory, not everything is copyable or wants to behave.
it's also a bit tricky to make sure that she doesn't start creating her own traces just yet... i want to have an exact as possible copy of fio kaminski, and then people can mess with her and she can have her own life and seperate existence.


i think this idea was mostly inspired by the life_sharing project by 0100101110101101.org. although i'm nowhere near as hardcore as them, i'm not making all my data available, just a copy of my avatar.
at the moment she can edit my objects but i think that right will be revoked before i give the password out, and she can't build on the island.

catch up...

plans many plans...

ideas:

- my second life clone, called fio kohime is already in existence. since so much of my time is spent on second life, i've decided to create an identical avatar so that people can see what it's actually like to be me in second life. at the moment she's pretty much identical to fio kaminski in appearance, i just have to make her inventory identical too (easier said than done, damn permissions). i was planning to make her password openly available to anyone really, but too many people have said the word "machinima", which makes me a little worried my little clone would be abused, although it would be interesting to see what people did with her and what she would end up looking like. It could be an interesting little existence.

- a website mashed up from several different things, but mainly including abuse of java script. or flash. i dunno.

inputs:
- twitter
- myspace
- facebook
- digital photos from a crappy 4 mega pixel camera for the authentic crappy photo web look
- daft punk's "technologic" lyrics seem to describe my day. maybe include mp3 somewhere. or just use lyrics in ANNOYING POP UPS FROM HELL. i used to be able to make pop ups but then pop up blockers kept blocking them :(

so i need to:
- finish making clone
- plan website (layouts going to be pretty random, but i need to plan which page follows which etc.)
- take shitloads of photos
- continue twitter ramblings, and using myspace and facebook
- relearn java!

meet yoshimi

she now exists in two realities.

lovebytes!!!!

they've finally got this years website up and running with lots of nice information which makes me squeal.

squeal.

there's going to be a two day workshop by david muth about processing, a really cool java based program which you should download and play with. i want to go the the talk, does anyone want to come with?

twittering

blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah

meet the fuccons

they're an american family that's just moved to japan.
and they're manniquiens.

i have fallen in love

and discovered that my little geisha key ring which inspired the little geisha things i made in SL is actually a kokeshi doll.

THEY'RE SO FRIGGIN CUTE.

learn more about the pretty doll

oooooooompfff...
this is why i should stay off ebay. i keep using it to substitue the fact that i can't travel to japan.

i also bought some pretty origami papers ^_^
for inpsiration / artistic purposes.
it's perfectly legitamate spending of my student loan.

i want an aibo :(

i miss my fish

traces left by yesterday.

for the personal development brief, the website creativley showing a day in my life blah blah blah.

warning: contains abuse of scrolling text.

my humble abode

it's pretty.

i'm in second life again...

Object-Name: Fio's blogging laptop
Region: The Collective (283648, 294912)
Local-Position: (154, 140, 51)

blogging from my little house in SL, i've just put up pretty lighting and i'm showing my laptop off to steve blogstop

Video editing is hard :(

I entered this project with some enthusiasm as video is something I’ve been interested in quite some time but never really experimented with. But was a little worried about the group work side of things, wondering if there would be conflicting ideas or if I would be left whimpering in the corner as my work got trashed and twisted into something else. I worry too much.

Another concern was my insomnia, which insisted on me sleeping at stupid times instead of following a normal sleeping pattern, resulting in me being unconscious in bed while some of the lessons were taking place, and just generally making myself a bit stressed worrying if I was causing the group to fall behind. Once again I was worrying too much! Steve was very understanding of my little problem and never seemed too annoyed when I would show up at three in the afternoon.

But the group work itself didn’t really pose any problems, me and Steve worked well together and genuinely liked each others ideas, and listened to each others feedback. It was interesting to see his take on our idea, which was “anger at technology”.

While we were developing our ideas and getting used to using final cut, me and Steve worked on two separate films, which we were then going to edit into one film. Unfortunately we were supposed to be working in a group of three, but our third group member never made an appearance. But we still had a bit of a democracy functioning, the parts we both really wanted to be included (me – synthy sounds, scary growling man, “techno”, Steve – penguins, fade outs, explosions), were included in the final edit. And we both got a say on the final edit, we’re good friends so weren’t afraid to say what we really thought about the film.

I think our idea development could have been a bit more structured, it was more a process of each other exploring what the theme meant to us and then bringing our ideas together. I’m still having some difficulty with the idea of storyboarding everything first, to me it seems much more effective to try the idea out and see if it works then planning everything before hand, especially since we were using stock film and not shooting anything of our own. I think for the second part of this module where we actually shoot everything ourselves will have to planned a lot more, and not just knocked together on a whim. But for this section at least I think my approach worked well.

The programs we used for this project (Final Cut, DVD studio Pro) seemed a bit overwhelming at first, lots of confusing looking buttons and two preview windows and for quite some time not knowing how to get rid of the “un rendered” screen of agony and woe and the annoying bleeping sound. I found final cut very frustrating to use as a new user, although the basic functions were easy enough to figure out, wanting to make something specific happen or just preview the film without exporting it all was confusing. Hopefully all this frustration will pay off in the second part of the module.

If I was to do this project again I would like to have been able to attend all the lessons I missed from being unconscious, I do have a sense of not really being there for this project which annoys me as I’ve still worked hard. I would have also liked to had a little more time if possible, and seen if I could get myself to storyboard my ideas and maybe even do it in a group.

was anyone else...

actively brainwashed by McDonalds during their childhood by this game?

i've been playing it on my sega emulator today and admist all the gleeful memories of spending days of childhood illness shooting slimey monsters and evil squeaky beavers, it all seems a bit sinister.

look! when he stands still he blows bubbles and chews his gum. he even looks pissed of at you sometimes.

the game has an environmental theme (McDonalds trying to be ethical about brainwashing young innocent minds maybe?) in which the two characters you can choose from, Mic and Mac (thoughtful, must of spent hours brain-storming) run around the place shooting a squirty gun at things and yelling "AWESOME!!!"

The first three levels are set in a toxic world, in the second set of levels hard helmeted beavers throw logs at you, which seems a bit silly because surely beavers would want to protect their habitat from the nasty malevolent living axes which try to chop your skull open. there's also nasty plants that spit at you and wont die. I'm sure there's other levels but i often get bored at this point or die, i think it's an ice based world, i got there once when i was a kiddie, i was very bored with tonsilitis.

but now i'm all grown up, my tonsils were removed when i was nine and feel a bit used. i loved this game, and it was just a nasty marketing ploy attempting to make me eat crap food. although i still feel a sense of joy and self worth when i complete the levels and Ronald McDonald is there with a flag waving me in, my childhood innocence is gone and i see him for what he really is. A weird creepy clown who hangs around with young kiddies promising them a good time whilst making them obese. i've always thought he's a bit creepy to be honest.

but atleast ecco the dolphin isn't trying to sell me anything. even though the bad thing that happens at the start used to give me nightmares.

i still hate talking to the other dolphins though, they say stupid things, so i just ignore them and eat fishies. i've never completed this game, it was far too hard for me as a child an although it experienced a short come back when i was a young teen and finally had my own telly in my room i still find it much more fun to just swim around eating fishies, seeing how fast i can go before headbutting the coral reefs and doing flips in the air. the furthest i ever got were the ice levels, and i'm pretty sure i just used google to get the cheat codes. still this game is really pretty, and the sounds are creepy but great, but i hate the noise he makes when he's hurt, i genuinely feel bad.
it's a pity i have such a short attention span.

i'm gonna go play sonic 2! YEAH.

why i shouldn't edit

whilst eating starburst.

everything ends up speedy.


why do i get more done when i spend a whole 3 hours working on stuff as opposed to a whole day?

what i did yesterday

me and steve are working on two seperate videos, which we are then going to combine into one, and then move bits around and edit them some more.
still at the stage of working seperately-ish, so this is what i've done so far.

personal development brief thing

i've decided to do the "design a website which creatively demonstates a typical day in your life" brief as i'm really itching to do lots of web design type stuff again. i've been trying to get my fix in my spare time with my personal site when i can be bothered to sit infront of my screen and not log onto second life, but i'm really wanting to experiment a bit more, and need a bit of incentive.

i want to take this oppurtunity to make myself learn more code, probably something along the lines of XML or a java based script like processing (program used by brendan dawes, from magnetic north and that bloke that did that book "analog in, digital out" which you should go and buy.) i also find his abuse of FTP and PHP (which is in the book but i can't find in on the site) and amazing interactive snow globes interesting. and since it's supposed to be about a day in my life i want to experiment with what kinds of information i can put in to my site through different inputs.

i also want to see how i can possibly combine / make something nice to look at and maybe click from all my different sites / presences. try to possibly make something as ugly as a myspace page into something nice. maybe make records of what i'm doing when on different sites to make pretty things.