meish dot org: life, unfolding

Are you going to be watching the Eurovision Song Contest (final) tonight? Are you going to be watching it in the company of family or friends? Improve the experience by playing Eurobong-a-bingo!

This Eurobingo PDF file contains ten player sheets filled with random Eurovision cliches and phenomena which may be observed during the show broadcast. Simply check off each as they appear - award spot prizes for completing a line, and the first person to complete a whole sheet wins the kitty (or another prize of your choice).

There are also three additional ways to win: before the show begins, add your best guess for each of the quant questions at the bottom of the sheet. Closest wins!

This game has been published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Sharealike license. Feel free to adapt, remix and share it, but please leave attribution intact.

Thanks and happy bing-a-bang-a-bingo!

Part of the brilliance of a photographic observation game like noticin.gs (which I wrote about the other day in the context of synchronicity and gaming) is that - as the name implies - it encourages you to be observant and notice things when you’re out and about in the context of your everyday life.

Paul Mison wrote about noticin.gs recently saying that it’s “helping [him] to look around” and that’s absolutely the same feeling I have.

I’ve got a long history of capturing random spotted/found/noticed things and moments from my commute and daily wanderings, stretching back many years - and not just photographically, either. Sometimes with the camera, sometimes with words, sometimes just by making a mental note - it’s the habit of receptiveness to the world around that’s interesting.

This relates to something else I wrote a while back about super-noticing:

Super-noticing is something which happens a lot if you’re trained to be receptive and observant, but also if you’re thinking about a particular thing.

This in turn relates to another earlier post about the ethnographic discipline of pattern recognition:

Part of the toolkit of ethnography and anthropology in general is observing patterns. This could be patterns in behaviour, appearance, ritual, language or otherwise. The anthropologist’s job is to spot the patterns and try to understand what (if any) significance they have, especially in relation to social or cultural environment, or other prevailing conditions.

The discipline of noticing stuff is part of what makes receptiveness and observation useful in life, as well as in anthrolopology and social gaming. But it’s good to have a particular outlet (or should that be inlet?) for the activity. As I wrote in the super-noticing post,

“Flickr is great for developing a discipline around noticing, too, and Flickr groups in particular - if your eye is receptive, then every journey out into the world can be filled with potential squared circles and little fellas and malapostrophication and more.”

Well, noticin.gs turns that hyper-receptiveness up to 11, but inverts it - it’s not about seeing the patterns so much as the anomalies - the things you spot which shouldn’t be there, or stand out, or catch the attention because they don’t belong, or are otherwise notable. Noticeable. Noted.

Once you start playing noticin.gs, it’s very difficult to stop noticing things. Above and below are just a few of the things I’ve noticed while out and about, captured with my phonecam, and filed to noticin.gs.

Read the rest of this entry »

I was interested to learn (via Mashable) that Hipster social location game Foursquare is launching in London at the end of the week. For those unfamiliar with it, it’s not in fact the primary school playground game we used to call “Champ”, but a location based social networking game played mainly via mobile apps, which involves players “checking in” whenever they visit a bar, restaurant, event or hangout to receive points based on frequency, pattern of activity, who else checks in at the same time as them and so on (there’s a full breakdown of points awarded in their Wikipedia entry). With enough points, a player becomes the “Mayor” of a particular venue, until someone else overtakes them.

Friends (and family) in the US tell me that it is hopelessly addictive and that it’s increasingly the first thing people do when arriving at an event these days.

I’m not sure that London has enough social butterflies and hipsters to make this take off in much the same way (who am I trying to kid? Of course it does!) but it reminded me a bit of two other things I’ve been engaged with in recent time.

The first is recently-acquired by Nokia social travel tracker Dopplr, which contains strong elements of synchronicity and coincidence built in to the user experience - while no points are awarded, the service tells you when your friends will be visiting your city, or when your scheduled trip will coincide with that of another traveller you’re linked to. In theory, that could mean that you’d be able to drop people a line saying “Hey, Dopplr tells me you’re going to be in Madrid at the same time I’m going to be there - let’s do lunch!” though in practice my experience has been that I tend to know when friends are going to be in the same place as me because we’re going there for the same conference or wedding or whatever.

But another game I’ve been playing recently (and really getting into) is the rather marvellous noticin.gs which is wonderfully simple yet very addictive. The game involves taking photos of things you’ve spotted and then geotagging them on Flickr.

You get points for noticing things
and points for being geographically near someone else’s noticing
and points for being the first noticing in a new area
and points for being noticed within a few minutes of another player’s noticings
and so on.

All you need to do to play is take a photo and upload it to Flickr, tag it “noticings” and make sure it has location data - some mobile phone apps include this on upload, but if not, you can always do it manually later, bearing in mind that points are only calculated on the previous 24 hours of noticings.

It appeals to me partly because it’s a habit I have anyway (spotting interesting things on my daily routine or extraordinary explorations and migrations across town) combined with a delicious frisson of pointy reward but for things which are not to do with effort but to do with coincidence and synchronicity and chance.

In other words, playing the game is rewarding in itself because it encourages you to open your eyes and capture interesting stuff in the everyday; getting points for doing so in a time/place which coincides (or not) with another player’s actions which you couldn’t know about is a delightful, random cherry on top.

Challenged by m’colleague Neil to reveal what I’ve been consuming, media-wise this week, I am delighted to flash my digital hem, as it were, particularly because it affords me the parallel opportunity to apologise for being AWOL since before Christmas. I’ve been away, you see, and as a result, my media consumption for the past week has been a bit different in many ways to what I might otherwise have consumed.

What I read
Despite not being in the office (or perhaps because of it), I’ve enjoyed reading the paper: The Guardian, of course and particularly enjoyed the NYE quiz special edition of G2 - I got further with King Williams College Quiz than in previous years (i.e. managed to answer a whole 23 questions), and the general quiz of the year kept me guessing for at least a few pots of tea. But since I’ve been up in Scotland for a few days, I’ve also been reading The Oban Times (which is handy for broader local news as well as the cult-reading that is D Morisson’s weekly roundup of Scalpay news) as well as Round And About Mull, the monthly island paper, for local perspective (i.e. in order to understand the contexts of what many local conversations are about).

In addition, I flicked through the Birmingham Airport free magazine (called Destinations, I think) and had a saunter through both The Herald and The Daily Record in the BA lounge this afternoon, though I don’t think we can really count that as reading. Oh, and I read an article about the Isle of Mull Weavers at Ardalanish, which featured in Country Life of all things, which my mum had borrowed from a friend. I swear I didn’t read anything else in there, though.

I also dipped into Utopian Dreams by Tobias Jones, which I’d heard snatches of when serialised on Radio 4, but found a copy of at my mum’s house. But managed not to touch the book I took up with me for holiday reading (A Spot of Bother by Mark Haddon) until the train/plane today, because I was so busy. Busy relaxing, of course…

What I watched
Not a right lot. This is basically because my mum doesn’t have a television. However, in the few days I was in Shropshire at the end of last week, I saw The History Boys on the BBC, and the news. On DVD, I watched a couple of episodes of Coast 2 with my mum (showing her how to watch DVDs on new laptop) and after dinner with some friends on the Ross of Mull, An Inconvenient Truth, which I’d somehow managed to miss. And on New Year’s Day, when particularly hungover, I took the laptop back to bed and watched Dara O’Briain’s live solo standup gig via the streaming version of iPlayer. And let me tell you, for that alone, I *heart* the BBC.

I singularly failed to watch either of the DVDs I carried around with me because they’d just arrived from Lovefilm before I set off on my travels - The Magicians and The Lives of Others. Maybe this weekend - could make for a slightly random double bill…

What I listened to
Being in a rather (how can I put this politely?) radio-wave-light area, radio didn’t feature too hugely in my daily audio diet, but I did manage to receive Radio 4 (sort of) when driving across the island yesterday, and used the BBC’s Listen Again to catch up on news from R4.

Musically-speaking, I listened (with my dad) to some Peter Skellern, a lot of Bach, some Ella Fitzgerald and a bunch of 1950s Trinidadian London Calypso and (with my mum) to Julie Fowlis’ excellent Cuilidh album, plus Kate Rusby’s Awkward Annie, among others. On my ipod, I continued to plough my way through the This American Life archives (from about 1999), mainly. I didn’t listen to much music via ipod, really, which is odd for me.

What I surfed
Given that I’ve been away, a lot of my normal surfing patterns were disrupted, and so any surfing fell into two distinct classes: Maintenance (which included Gmail, Twitter, Netvibes and Flickr) and Random Weird Shit (which included ebay searching for sonic mouse deterrents for a friend of mum’s, Nestoria property porn and the official rules of shinty). When I could (and it wasn’t often) I used my phone to keep up with twitter and gmail. I used the web to create, though - both within flickr and for the local community on Mull following the annual Hogmanay Shinty on the beach shenanigans.

….and finally, though this wasn’t in the original meme: What I played
I can’t let an opportunity go by without mentioning Peggle (and specifically, Peggle for iPod) which kept my thumbs occupied for much of the journeying. I also played a lot of cards: Shithead, mostly.

I know I’m supposed to tag someone with this meme, though I don’t want anyone to feel under pressure, especially this early in the year. So, um, feel free to share what you’ve been consuming (if you want), Caroline, Tom, Gordon, Cliff and Wendy. Or don’t. It’s all gravy.

One of the main problems with having a dreary, damp summer (apart from flooding, mosquitos and real issues, obviously) is that I have become acutely aware that I tend to go to come home at night and think about, build and tinker with social/web things, despite the fact that I have usually spent the working day doing precisely that on the other side of London, for my employers.

So, some web tinkering and thinkering is for work, and some is for pleasure. In fact, the trouble with doing what I love for a living is that it’s increasingly difficult to tell where one starts and the other stops. As a result, it feels like my brain is very rarely in “off” mode.

I am determined, therefore, to find some way of switching off of an evening that doesn’t involve sitting in front of a computer monitor with a web connection. It would probably be better for my general wellbeing if it didn’t involve narcotics, larceny or extreme sports. I also find it quite difficult to do absolutely nothing - need to be busy, in some form, or I tend to drop off stupidly early - unless I’m on a plane or train or something, in which case I like nothing better than to get lost in the pages of a book, or listen to music and stare out of the window.

With all that in mind, I’ve been thinking about getting a games console.

Yes, I know - substituting staring at one screen for staring at another is hardly a revolution - but it strikes me that a bit of mindless gaming action might be just the thing to help switch brain off while keeping hands occupied. Incidentally, I’ve already tried knitting - I’m rubbish at it, but that didn’t stop me from making a blanket.

I’m not much of a gamer, to be honest. I have a Nintendo DS, and I’ve previously had (and in fact, still have, in a box on top of the wardrobe) a SNES, and a gameboy about a million years ago. I love the DS for its portability, but I want something I can play at full screen size.

With all that in mind, I’m thinking about getting a console. Any suggestions? I know everyone says “get a Wii!” but I just don’t think I’d play it so much once the novelty has worn off - and besides, I’m going to be playing mostly on my own, and I really get the impression that Wiis are more social tools.

My current leaning is towards picking up an old PS2. Any reason why not?

And then there’s the games, of course. I realise that the console choice can be largely influenced by the availability of decent games. On my DS I’ve enjoyed playing Super Mario Kart, Super Mario World, MiniMario vs Donkey Kong and 42 Classic Games (though I only like a handful of those - I think they’ve made up at least a dozen of them, anyway) and on the SNES I played the hell out of Super Mario Land, Prince of Persia, Super Mario Kart and so on.

Can you see a theme, here? No, it’s not just the fat plumber in the red hat.

See, I’m not ashamed to divulge that I’m not particularly into complicated games. My tastes are pretty simple.

I like running around, jumping over and onto things, occasionally picking things up, or solving things, or obliterating things through some innocuous means. I like pointless quests and platforms and things with lots of levels and worlds to conquer. I don’t care about being a footballer, a spy or a hired killer. I’m not interested in hunting down and/or slaughtering mobsters or monsters. I’m not a big fan of violence or screams or the realistic soound of shells detonating in the trench a few feet away. Dammit, I want to play games to relax, and that means rather childish, puzzling, low-skill games which I can get good at and do on autopilot.

I’m also looking for recommendations for some games which fit the criteria above. If it’s called MoronDeathBlast 9: Los Angeles, I’m probably not interested. If it involves faffing about a bit with a controller in a half-awake state, then bring it on.

How good are your ball control skills? I got to level 19 of this dastardly tricky game and then gave up.

You can, I’m sure, do better.

If you enjoyed point-and-click games like Samarost and the Quest for the Rest, you might also enjoy Indiana Jones and the Sacred Fortune.

Point and clickety click all the way, baby.

As with the best games, infuriatingly addictive: Hishi.

Another tetris clone. Only this one is different: it’s fucking tetris.

Funny how a word looks like a completely meaningless jumble of letters after a while.

This simple (yet infuriating) game really reminds me of one which came with Mac OS8. Same sort of mechanic - swinging a bar around coloured nodes, avoiding hazards.

If anyone can remember what it was called, I’ll be really grateful…

Update: There’s a sequel, too.