MachineMachine /stream - search for castle https://machinemachine.net/stream/feed en-us http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss LifePress therourke@gmail.com <![CDATA[MiSTer FPGA in 2022: A Primer Guide to Retro Gaming's Hardware Emulator / MY LIFE IN GAMING]]> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rhT6YYRH1EI

Coury and Try go over what it's like to get started with the MiSTer FPGA project in 2022 - the parts you need, the processes required to set it up, what you need to do to get great audio and video, and what kinds of fun things you can do with the many console, computer, handheld, and arcade cores! You might just see that it isn't nearly as hard as you thought it was!

► Resources

► MiSTer Development & Documentation :: https://github.com/MiSTer-devel :: https://mister-devel.github.io/MkDocs_MiSTer/

► MiSTer Social Resources :: https://misterfpga.org/ :: https://discord.gg/misterfpga

► MiSTer YouTube Resources :: https://www.youtube.com/MiSTerFPGA :: https://www.youtube.com/MiSTerWalrusFPGA :: https://www.youtube.com/VideoGameEsoterica

:: https://www.youtube.com/LusRetroSource

► Chapters 00:00 - Opening 1:55 - Part 1: MiSTer Overview 6:45 - Part 2: Core Focus: Atari Consoles, ColecoVision and other Pre-NES Consoles 12:06 - Part 3: Building your MiSTer 19:26 - Part 4: Core Focus: NES and Super NES 27:38 - Part 5: Setting up the SD Card 33:34 - Part 6: Core Focus: PC-Engine/Turbografx-16 & Neo Geo 44:18 - Part 7: MiSTer OS, Input Options and other Odds 'n Ends 53:51 - Part 8: Universal MiSTer Settings, Editing the .ini File 01:05:16 - Part 9: Core Focus: Sega Master System, Game Gear, Genesis/Mega Drive and Sega CD 01:20:16 - Part 10: MiSTer Audio and Video Settings 01:37:07 - Part 11: Core Preview: MiSTer PlayStation 1 01:43:32 - Part 12: Core Focus: 486 PC, Commodore 64, Amiga, ZX Spectrum, MSX, Sharp X68000 02:10:07 - Part 13: Core Focus: Game Boy / Color, Game Boy Advance, WonderSwan, Atari Lynx 02:25:25 - Part 14: Core Focus: Capcom CPS-1 & CPS-2, Sega System-16 and more Classic Arcade Games 02:37:02 - Ending


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My Life in Gaming makes documentaries, deep dives into retro console hardware, and more.

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Thu, 31 Mar 2022 08:00:35 -0700 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rhT6YYRH1EI
<![CDATA[Reflections on Philip K. Dick | Open Geography]]> https://opengeography.wordpress.com/2015/11/21/reflections-on-philip-k-dick/

Amazon have just released their adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s Man in the High Castle. David Gill, at San Francisco State University, was recently interviewed by Salon about the show. He makes some interesting observations that I think bear examination:

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Thu, 03 Dec 2015 14:39:20 -0800 https://opengeography.wordpress.com/2015/11/21/reflections-on-philip-k-dick/
<![CDATA[Terry Gilliam's deleted animations from Monty Python & The Holy Grail]]> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1oGpR_TP7ME

To celebrate the 40th anniversary theatrical re-release of ‘Monty Python and the Holy Grail’ and the release of the 40th anniversary Blu-Ray, DVD & limited edition castle gift set we've put together this video of Terry Gilliam's lost animations from the film.

The video includes an introduction from Terry G to his lost animation reel where he talks about where the artwork came from and the inspiration behind some of the animation, music by Neil Innes that didn't make it into the final cut, new animations and deleted animations of 'The Tale of Sir Robin', 'Elephant & Castle', 'Meanwhile, King Arthur & Sir Bedevere...', 'Run Away!' and 'The Tale of Sir Lancelot'.

Don't forget, the 40th anniversary limited edition Blu-ray box set and DVD are out in October.

Subscribe to the Official Monty Python Channel here - http://smarturl.it/SubscribeToPython

You can pre-order the new 40th anniversary Blu-Ray release here: US -http://www.amazon.com/dp/B013P0WZVS UK - http://www.amazon.co.uk/Monty-Python-...

Visit the official Monty Python store - http://smarturl.it/MontyPythonStores

Visit the NEW Monty Python iTunes store - http://smarturl.it/MontyPython1D5TGitun

Welcome to the official Monty Python YouTube channel. This is the place to find top quality classic Python videos, as well as some special stuff that you'll only find here such as interviews and behind-the-scenes footage from our live shows. All the Pythons including John Cleese, Michael Palin, Eric Idle, Terry Gilliam, Terry Jones & Graham Chapman can be found here being incredibly silly.

New videos will be uploaded every Monday!

http://www.montypython.com/ https://www.facebook.com/MontyPython https://twitter.com/montypython

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Mon, 12 Oct 2015 07:42:39 -0700 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1oGpR_TP7ME
<![CDATA[‘ashamed of her monstrous form, the beast concealed...]]> http://gifbites.com/post/87032953325

‘ashamed of her monstrous form, the beast concealed herself inside the castle with a magical mirror as her only window to the outside world’ by Shawné Michaelain Holloway / @cleogirl2525 Part of the #GIFbites Project for Bitrates Exhibition L↺↻p it!

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Tue, 27 May 2014 14:01:27 -0700 http://gifbites.com/post/87032953325
<![CDATA[Noise; Mutation; Autonomy: A Mark on Crusoe’s Island]]> http://machinemachine.net/text/research/a-mark-on-crusoes-island

This mini-paper was given at the Escapologies symposium, at Goldsmiths University, on the 5th of December Daniel Defoe’s 1719 novel Robinson Crusoe centres on the shipwreck and isolation of its protagonist. The life Crusoe knew beyond this shore was fashioned by Ships sent to conquer New Worlds and political wills built on slavery and imperial demands. In writing about his experiences, Crusoe orders his journal, not by the passing of time, but by the objects produced in his labour. A microcosm of the market hierarchies his seclusion removes him from: a tame herd of goats, a musket and gunpowder, sheafs of wheat he fashions into bread, and a shelter carved from rock with all the trappings of a King’s castle. Crusoe structures the tedium of the island by gathering and designing these items that exist solely for their use-value: “In a Word, The Nature and Experience of Things dictated to me upon just Reflection, That all the good Things of this World, are no farther good to us, than they are for our Use…” [1] Although Crusoe’s Kingdom mirrors the imperial British order, its mirroring is more structural than anything else. The objects and social contrivances Crusoe creates have no outside with which to be exchanged. Without an ‘other’ to share your labour there can be no mutual assurance, no exchanges leading to financial agreements, no business partners, no friendships. But most importantly to the mirroring of any Kingdom, without an ‘other’ there can be no disagreements, no coveting of a neighbours ox, no domination, no war: in short, an Empire without an outside might be complete, total, final, but an Empire without an outside has also reached a state of complete inertia. Crusoe’s Empire of one subject, is what I understand as “a closed system”… The 2nd law of thermo dynamics maintains that without an external source of energy, all closed systems will tend towards a condition of inactivity. Eventually, the bacteria in the petri dish will multiply, eating up all the nutrients until a final state of equilibrium is reached, at which point the system will collapse in on itself: entropy cannot be avoided indefinitely. The term ‘negative entropy’ is often applied to living organisms because they seem to be able to ‘beat’ the process of entropy, but this is as much an illusion as the illusion of Crusoe’s Kingdom: negative entropy occurs at small scales, over small periods of time. Entropy is highly probable: the order of living beings is not. Umberto Eco: “Consider, for example, the chaotic effect… of a strong wind on the innumerable grains of sand that compose a beach: amid this confusion, the action of a human foot on the surface of the beach constitutes a complex interaction of events that leads to the statistically very improbable configuration of a footprint.” [2] The footprint in Eco’s example is a negative entropy event: the system of shifting sands is lent a temporary order by the cohesive action of the human foot. In physical terms, the footprint stands as a memory of the foot’s impression. The 2nd law of thermodynamics establishes a relationship between entropy and information: memory remains as long as its mark. Given time, the noisy wind and chaotic waves will cause even the strongest footprint to fade. A footprint is a highly improbable event. Before you read on, watch this scene from Luis Buñuel’s Robinson Crusoe (1954):

The footprint, when it first appears on the island, terrifies Crusoe as a mark of the outsider, but soon, realising what this outsider might mean for the totality of his Kingdom, Robinson begins the process of pulling the mark inside his conceptions: “Sometimes I fancied it must be the Devil; and reason joined in with me upon this supposition. For how should any other thing in human shape come into the place? Where was the vessel that brought them? What marks were there of any other footsteps? And how was it possible a man should come there?” [3] In the novel, it is only on the third day that Crusoe re-visits the site to compare his own foot with the print. The footprint is still there on the beach after all this time, a footprint Crusoe now admits is definitely not his own. This chain of events affords us several allegorical tools: firstly, that of the Devil, Crusoe believes to be the only rational explanation for the print. This land, which has been Crusoe’s own for almost 2 decades, is solid, unchanging and eternal. Nothing comes in nor goes beyond its shores, yet its abundance of riches have served Crusoe perfectly well: seemingly infinite riches for a Kingdom’s only inhabitant. Even the footprint, left for several days, remains upon Crusoe’s return. Like the novel of which it is a part, the reader of the mark may revisit the site of this unlikely incident again and again, each time drawing more meanings from its appearance. Before Crusoe entertains that the footprint might be that of “savages of the mainland” he eagerly believes it to be Satan’s, placed there deliberately to fool him. Crusoe revisits the footprint, in person and then, as it fades, in his own memory. He ‘reads’ the island, attributing meanings to marks he discovers that go far beyond what is apparent. As Susan Stewart has noted: “In allegory the vision of the reader is larger than the vision of the text; the reader dreams to an excess, to an overabundance.” [4] Simon O’Sullivan, following from Deleuze, takes this further, arguing that in his isolation, a world free from ‘others’, Crusoe has merged with, become the island. The footprint is a mark that must be recuperated if Crusoe’s identity, his “power of will”, is to be maintained. An outsider must have caused the footprint, but Crusoe is only capable of reading in the mark something about himself. The evocation of a Demon, then, is Crusoe’s way of re-totalising his Empire, of removing the ‘other’ from his self-subjective identification with the island. So, how does this relate to thermodynamics? To answer that I will need to tell the tale of a second Demon, more playful even than Crusoe’s. In his 1871 essay, Theory of Heat, James Clerk Maxwell designed a thought experiment to test the 2nd law of Thermodynamics. Maxwell imagines a microscopic being able to sort atoms bouncing around a closed system into two categories: fast and slow. If such a creature did exist, it was argued, no work would be required to decrease the entropy of a closed system. By sorting unlikely footprints from the chaotic arrangement of sand particles Maxwell’s Demon, as it would later become known, appeared to contradict the law Maxwell himself had helped to develop. One method of solving the apparent paradox was devised by Charles H. Bennet, who recognised that the Demon would have to remember where he placed the fast and slow particles. Here, once again, the balance between the order and disorder of a system comes down to the balance between memory and information. As the demon decreases the entropy of its environment, so it must increase the entropy of its memory. The information required by the Demon acts like a noise in the system. The laws of physics had stood up under scrutiny, resulting in a new branch of science we now know as ‘Information Theory’. Maxwell’s Demon comes from an old view of the universe, “fashioned by divine intervention, created for man and responsive to his will” [5]. Information Theory represents a threshold, a revelation that the “inhuman force of increasing entropy, [is] indifferent to man and uncontrollable by human will.” [6] Maxwell’s Demon shows that the law of entropy has only a statistical certainty, that nature orders only on small scales and, that despite any will to control, inertia will eventually be reached. Developed at the peak of the British Empire, thermodynamics was sometimes called “the science of imperialism”, as Katherine Hayles has noted: “…to thermodynamicists, entropy represented the tendency of the universe to run down, despite the best efforts of British rectitude to prevent it from doing so… The rhetoric of imperialism confronts the inevitability of failure. In this context, entropy represents an apparently inescapable limit on the human will to control.” [7] Like Maxwell, Crusoe posits a Demon, with faculties similar in kind to his own, to help him quash his “terror of mind”. Crusoe’s fear is not really about outsiders coming in, the terror he feels comes from the realisation that the outsiders may have been here all along, that in all the 20 years of his isolation those “savages of the mainland” may have visited his island time and again. It is not an outside ‘other’ that disturbs and reorganises Crusoe’s Kingdom. A more perverse logic is at work here, and once again Crusoe will have to restructure his imperial order from the inside out. Before you read on, watch another scene from Luis Buñuel’s Robinson Crusoe (1954):

Jacques Rancière prepares for us a parable. A student who is illiterate, after living a fulfilled life without text, one day decides to teach herself to read. Luckily she knows a single poem by heart and procures a copy of that poem, presumably from a trusted source, by which to work. By comparing her memory of the poem, sign by sign, word by word, with the text of the poem she can, Rancière believes, finally piece together a foundational understanding of her written language: “From this ignoramus, spelling out signs, to the scientist who constructs hypotheses, the same intelligence is always at work – an intelligence that translates signs into other signs and proceeds by comparisons and illustrations in order to communicate its intellectual adventures and understand what another intelligence is endeavouring to communicate to it… This poetic labour of translation is at the heart of all learning.” [8] What interests me in Rancière’s example is not so much the act of translation as the possibility of mis-translation. Taken in light of The Ignorant Schoolmaster we can assume that Rancière is aware of the wide gap that exists between knowing something and knowing enough about something for it to be valuable. How does one calculate the value of what is a mistake? The ignoramus has an autonomy, but it is effectively blind to the quality and make-up of the information she parses. If she makes a mistake in her translation of the poem, this mistake can be one of two things: it can be a blind error, or, it can be a mutation. In information theory, the two ways to understand change within a closed system are understood to be the product of ‘noise’. The amount of change contributed by noise is called ‘equivocation’. If noise contributes to the reorganisation of a system in a beneficial way, for instance if a genetic mutation in an organism results in the emergence of an adaptive trait, then the equivocation is said to be ‘autonomy-producing’. Too much noise is equivalent to too much information, a ‘destructive’ equivocation, leading to chaos. This balance is how evolution functions. An ‘autonomy-producing’ mutation will be blindly passed on to an organism’s offspring, catalysing the self-organisation of the larger system (in this case, the species). All complex, what are called ‘autopoietic’ systems, inhabit this fine divide between noise and inertia.  Given just the right balance of noise recuperated by the system, and noise filtered out by the system, a state of productive change can be maintained, and a state of inertia can be avoided, at least, for a limited time. According to Umberto Eco, in ‘The Open Work’: “To be sure, this word information in communication theory relates not so much to what you do say, as to what you could say… In the end… there is no real difference between noise and signal, except in intent.” [9] This rigid delineator of intent is the driving force of our contemporary, communication paradigm. Information networks underpin our economic, political and social interactions: the failure to communicate is to be avoided at all costs. All noise is therefore seen as a problem. These processes, according to W. Daniel Hillis, define, “the essence of digital technology, which restores signal to near perfection at every stage.” [10] To go back to Umberto Eco then, we appear to be living in a world of “do say” rather than “could say”. Maintenance of the network and the routines of error management are our primary economic and political concern: control the networks and the immaterial products will manage themselves. The modern network paradigm acts like a Maxwell Demon, categorising information as either pure signal or pure noise. As Mark Nunes has noted, following the work of Deleuze and Guattari: “This forced binary imposes a kind of violence, one that demands a rationalisation of all singularities of expressions within a totalising system… The violence of information is, then, the violence of silencing or making to speak that which cannot communicate.” [11] To understand the violence of this binary logic, we need go no further than Robinson Crusoe. Friday’s questions are plain spoken, but do not adhere to the “do say” logic of Crusoe’s conception. In the novel, Crusoe’s approach to Friday becomes increasingly one sided, until Friday utters little more than ‘yes’ and ‘no’ answers, “reducing his language to a pure function of immediate context and perpetuating a much larger imperialist tradition of levelling the vox populi.”[12] Any chance in what Friday “could say” has been violently obliterated. The logic of Ranciere’s Ignoramous, and of Crusoe’s levelling of Friday’s speech, are logics of imperialism: reducing the possibility of noise and information to an either/or, inside/outside, relationship. Mark Nunes again: “This balance between total flow and total control parallels Deleuze and Guattari’s discussion of a regime of signs in which anything that resists systematic incorporation is cast out as an asignifying scapegoat “condemned as that which exceeds the signifying regime’s power of deterritorialisation.” [13] In the system of communication these “asignifying” events are not errors, in the common sense of the word. Mutation names a randomness that redraws the territory of complex systems. The footprint is the mark that reorganised the Empire. In Ranciere’s parable, rather than note her intent to decode the poem, we should hail the moment when the Ignoramus fails, as her autonomous moment. In a world where actants “translate signs into other signs and proceed by comparison and illustration” [14] the figures of information and communication are made distinct not by the caprice of those who control the networks, nor the desires of those who send and receive the messages, but by mutation itself. Michel Foucault, remarking on the work of Georges Canguilhem, drew the conclusion that the very possibility of mutation, rather than existing in opposition to our will, was what human autonomy was predicated upon: “In this sense, life – and this is its radical feature – is that which is capable of error… Further, it must be questioned in regard to that singular but hereditary error which explains the fact that, with man, life has led to a living being that is never completely in the right place, that is destined to ‘err’ and to be ‘wrong’.” [15] In his writings on the history of Heredity, The Logic of Life, Francois Jacob lingers on another Demon in the details, fashioned by Rene Descartes in his infamous meditation on human knowledge. François Jacob positions Descartes’ meditation in a period of explosive critical thought focussed on the very ontology of ‘nature’: “For with the arrival of the 17th Century, the very nature of knowledge was transformed. Until then, knowledge had been grafted on God, the soul and the cosmos… What counted [now] was not so much the code used by God for creating nature as that sought by man for understanding it.” [16] The infinite power of God’s will was no longer able to bend nature to any whim. If man were to decipher nature, to reveal its order, Descartes surmised, it was with the assurance that “the grid will not change in the course of the operation”[17]. For Descartes, the evil Demon, is a metaphor for deception espoused on the understanding that underlying that deception, nature had a certainty. God may well have given the world its original impetus, have designed its original make-up, but that make-up could not be changed. The network economy has today become the grid of operations onto which we map the world. Its binary restrictions predicate a logic of minimal error and maximum performance: a regime of control that drives our economic, political and social interdependencies. Trapped within his imperial logic, Robinson Crusoe’s levelling of inside and outside, his ruthless tidying of Friday’s noisy speech into a binary dialectic, disguises a higher order of reorganisation. As readers navigating the narrative we are keen to recognise the social changes Defoe’s novel embodies in its short-sighted central character. Perhaps, though, the most productive way to read this fiction, is to allegorise it as an outside perspective on our own time? Gathering together the fruits of research, I am often struck by the serendipitous quality of so many discoveries. In writing this mini-paper I have found it useful to engage with these marks, that become like demonic footprints, mutations in my thinking. Comparing each side by side, I hope to find, in the words of Michel Foucault: “…a way from the visible mark to that which is being said by it and which, without that mark, would lie like unspoken speech, dormant within things.” [18]    

References & Bibliography [1] Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, Penguin classics (London: Penguin Books, 2001).

[2] Umberto Eco, The open work (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, n.d.).

[3] Defoe, Robinson Crusoe.

[4] Susan Stewart, On longing: narratives of the miniature, the gigantic, the souvenir, the collection (Duke University Press, 1993).

[5] N. Katherine Hayles, “Maxwell’s Demon and Shannon’s Choice,” in Chaos bound: orderly disorder in contemporary literature and science (Cornell University Press, 1990).

[6] Ibid.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Jacques Rancière, The emancipated spectator (London: Verso, 2009).

[9] Umberto Eco, The open work (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, n.d.). (My emphasis)

[10] W Hillis, The pattern on the stone?: the simple ideas that make computers work, 1st ed. (New York: Basic Books, 1999).

[11] Mark Nunes, Error: glitch, noise, and jam in new media cultures (Continuum International Publishing Group, 2010).

[12] Susan Stewart, On longing: narratives of the miniature, the gigantic, the souvenir, the collection (Duke University Press, 1993).

[13] Nunes, Error.

[14] Rancière, The emancipated spectator.

[15] Michel Foucault, “Life: Experience and Science,” in Aesthetics, method, and epistemology (The New Press, 1999).

[16] François Jacob, The logic of life: a history of heredity?; the possible and the actual (Penguin, 1989).

[17] Ibid.

[18] Michel Foucault, The order of things?: an archaeology of the human sciences., 2003.

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Wed, 07 Dec 2011 08:50:14 -0800 http://machinemachine.net/text/research/a-mark-on-crusoes-island
<![CDATA[VideoGames can't tell stories]]> http://www.next-gen.biz/opinion/opinion-games-cant-tell-stories

Games don’t do storytelling well because they can’t deliver the four key components of story. There is no hero. Time is in the control of the player, not the creator. There is no inevitability or sense of being powerless. And the story cannot have the player’s full attention. So a videogame Hamlet is just a guy running around a castle flipping switches and collecting items to kill his uncle, the big boss at the end. All those speeches just get in the way.

The player is not treading the boards at the Old Vic. He’s solving problems, taking action, creating and winning. Sometimes designers think this is just a matter of technique or technology. But it’s not, it’s a fundamental constraint borne of the psychology of play. It will always be so, and is why in 40 years there have never been any good game stories.

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Thu, 24 Nov 2011 02:53:57 -0800 http://www.next-gen.biz/opinion/opinion-games-cant-tell-stories
<![CDATA[How the Illusion of Being Observed Can Make You a Better Person]]> http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=how-the-illusion-of-being-observed-can-make-you-better-person

A group of scientists at Newcastle University, headed by Melissa Bateson and Daniel Nettle of the Center for Behavior and Evolution, conducted a field experiment demonstrating that merely hanging up posters of staring human eyes is enough to significantly change people’s behavior. Over the course of 32 days, the scientists spent many hours recording customer’s “littering behavior” in their university’s main cafeteria, counting the number of people that cleaned up after themselves after they had finished their meals. In their study, the researchers determined the effect of the eyes on individual behavior by controlling for several conditions (e.g. posters with a corresponding verbal text, without any text, male versus female faces, posters of something unrelated like flowers, etc). The posters were hung at eye-level and every day the location of each poster was randomly determined.

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Wed, 11 May 2011 03:14:15 -0700 http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=how-the-illusion-of-being-observed-can-make-you-better-person
<![CDATA[Ridley Scott goes back to Philip K. Dick for The Man In The High Castle]]> http://io9.com/5658586/ridley-scott-goes-back-to-philip-k-dick-for-the-man-in-the-high-castle

According to the Guardian Ridley Scott is producing a four-part BBC miniseries based on Philip K Dick's novel The Man in the High Castle. Howard Brenton, the playwright and Spooks writer, is presently adapting the book. Its a pretty complicated story with handful of story lines that follow a variety of characters, so it's perfect miniseries fodder. It should be interesting to see if Scott keeps his miniseries set in the same time period as the book, the 1960s — we feel like he may be tempted to update it to the here and now. But either way, we're really excited to watch the world-building begin on this feature.

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Fri, 08 Oct 2010 03:45:00 -0700 http://io9.com/5658586/ridley-scott-goes-back-to-philip-k-dick-for-the-man-in-the-high-castle
<![CDATA[Philip K Dick journals to be published next year]]> http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/arts_and_culture/8653261.stm

The Exegesis, much anticipated by fans of the writer, will come out in autumn 2011, publisher Houghton Mifflin Harcourt revealed.

Dick, who died in 1982 at the age of 53, had 44 novels published. His first was Solar Lottery in 1955.

He is best known for works including The Man in the High Castle and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? - the basis of 1982 film Blade Runner.

Other films based on Dick's books include Total Recall and Minority Report.

Dick's journals include descriptions of a series of "visions and auditions" he says he experienced.

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Tue, 04 May 2010 02:28:00 -0700 http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/arts_and_culture/8653261.stm
<![CDATA[The moment he pulled it out the castle exploded.]]> http://hellograndad.tumblr.com/post/456754870

The moment he pulled it out the castle exploded.

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Thu, 18 Mar 2010 08:07:00 -0700 http://hellograndad.tumblr.com/post/456754870
<![CDATA[DOKAKA Super Mario Castle theme]]> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eb4D-TeREBs&feature=youtube_gdata ]]> Fri, 18 Sep 2009 08:22:00 -0700 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eb4D-TeREBs&feature=youtube_gdata <![CDATA[Galactic Center of Milky Way Rises over Texas Star Party]]> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Z3cVQcfb-w

All night time-lapse video of sky over Texas Star Party in Fort Davis, Texas taken with 15mm fisheye lens. Stars, constellations, meteors and satellites can be seen passing overhead for most of the evening. The video ends with the bright galactic core of the Milky Way rising above the horizon and overhead. Higher resolution videos and astrophotographs at: http://www.wlcastleman.com/astro/tsp09/index.htm

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Wed, 20 May 2009 09:20:00 -0700 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Z3cVQcfb-w
<![CDATA[Evil Lair: On the Architecture of the Enemy in Videogame Worlds]]> http://bldgblog.blogspot.com/2009/05/evil-lair-on-architecture-of-enemy-in.html

Game developers are unconstrained in their designs for the enemy. Such designers will be punished with poor sales, not death in the gulag, if their designs for the overlord are unpopular. They could go anywhere with the homes of evildoers: halls of electric fluorescence, palaces carved from corduroy, suburban back yards.

And yet, in spite of this freedom, most videogame designers choose to make a definite connection to familiar – or real-world – architecture. Perhaps they think that the evil lair must emanate evil. There's surely no room for ambiguity with videogame evildoers: the gamer needs to know that it's okay to aim for hi-score vengeance.

Conveniently, evil already has a visual language. Put another way: I have seen the face of evil, and it is a caricature of gothic construction. There's barely a necromancer in existence whose dark citadel doesn't in some way reflect real-world Romanian landmarks, such as Hunyad or Bran Castle. The visual theme of these games is so heavily dep

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Sun, 17 May 2009 03:23:00 -0700 http://bldgblog.blogspot.com/2009/05/evil-lair-on-architecture-of-enemy-in.html