Hello Monster!

Flapping around in Iowa at the moment – don’t ask me why. Have tried to plot out a few malls, get my bearings on tech availability, and tried (unsuccessfully at first) to find a Wii – see what all the fuss is about. There is a pronounced Wii shortage nationwide at the moment, and periodic shipments trickle into the Midwest only to be snapped up by hordes of juniors who have cajoled and entreated their elders out into the desolate cold wastes to ambush the store staff at various outlets.

Missed the delivery at Target and Walmart by scant minutes – this, on my second day of hunting for one of Nintendo’s new systems. End up at Best Buy, and miss the tickets they were handing out by an hour. My brain is beginning to hurt – started to ask around inside the store – see where the stock was – what exactly was the deal with the tickets?

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An interesting teaser trailer from the developers of Dark Messiah of Might and Magic and the art Director from Half Life, comes The Crossing, a singleplayer/multiplayer fusion of FPS gameplay. From its patently cracked opening premise : ‘What if the Knights Templar had survived past 1307 AD?’ [answer : they would be pretty fucking old and probably pissweak at fighting], the trailer then hints at gameplay of a mixed nature – the fodder NPCs you gun down in this game are supplied by real players. Trailer here.

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Not exactly news, and more on the inferred gossip side of things, but whilst walking outside for a smoke at Minneapolis airport last Thursday night during a layover, I spotted a driver sporting a sign - ‘N. Gaiman – courtesy car from Empire Interactive’ (Empire is a games publisher). I asked the driver if it was the Neil Gaiman he was waiting for, and he answered yes, but was pretty non-committal after he ascertained that I wasn’t Him. Documented a blurry snap of the guy as flimsy evidence and walked out into the snow for a digestive. Would it be an American Gods beat-em up? A spin off from one of the new films, perhaps a children’s horror game? Some new property? Completely innocent visit or similarly thin association, say a book reading?

You can watch Neil Gaiman’s blog, but remember, you saw it here first (apologies to Mr Gaiman if the cat is out of the bag – consider traveling under a nom de plume perhaps – Mr Sandman?).

A dazzling and psychedelic tour de force, this multi-platform brilliant gem is everything a real-time collaborative artspace should be as a screensaver. Less morally satisfying than folding proteins, less ego incentivating than SETI at Home, yet more pleasingly hypnotic than both combined. Download and vote to further mutate their genetic algorithms (you have to be online to vote).

“Electric Sheep is a free, open source screen saver run by thousands of people all over the world. It can be installed on any ordinary PC or Mac. When these computers “sleep”, the screen saver comes on and the computers communicate with each other by the internet to share the work of creating morphing abstract animations known as “sheep”. The result is a collective “android dream”, an homage to Philip K. Dick’s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep.”