hobby 10,000

2008 is the Year of the Rat.  Which animal year were you born in?

I should really have answered this yesterday. Year of the Dog, dudes! And I do love dogs. Here's a picture of mine. She's dead now:

Gwen #1

She was a good dog. One day I'll get another.

1977

Whoops! It seems I haven't posted on Vox since, well, almost exactly this time last year. Will this be the only thing I add in 2008? We shall see.

What did you do for Chinese New Year? I was looking forward to joining the crowds enjoying the glorious spring weather while attempting not to get pickpocketed in London's Chinatown. Instead what I did was to finally succumb to another cold that's been doing the rounds and spend most of the weekend in solitary, fidgety contemplation. This inevitably leads to feelings of despondency. Thus I have self-prescribed a cure: Supersystem (clicky to the righty).

HT&U's debut

Yes - if nothing else, 2007 was a great year for music. I joined eMusic on a particularly good deal (here are some of the best things I've picked up on there). I had a huge amount of fun playing in a great band that nearly went somewhere (mind you, don't they all).

And Last.fm, one of my favouritest ever websites, has gone from strength to strength. I even set up an artist account for my rubbishly-monikered Nanoloop music - which is good because MySpace still refuses to play anything I upload to my account on there.

Sit Down and Shut Up

Sit Down and Shut Up: Punk Rock Commentaries on Zen and Dogen's Treasury of the Right Dharma Eye

Brad Warner

Hmm, I didn't intend this to be a 2007-recap post, but then as I didn't really have a specific topic in mind, I may as well continue by saying that it was also the year I 'discovered' Zen Buddhism. This no doubt raises a few eyebrows when I mention it in conversation. I'm not sure yet what my stance is on Zen - but I do know that I find it very interesting. Compelling, even.

As an ex-Christian I'm fascinated by religion in general - specifically the religious mindset - but, it turns out, most of what I'd assumed I knew about Buddhism (which wasn't much to begin with) was wrong, and the meaning of Zen was a complete mystery beyond pop culture references. Then on a long train journey my friend put straight some of my preconceptions and I've become enthralled in a whole new culture and philosophy. I highly recommend Brad Warner's Sit Down and Shut Up to anyone with even a passing interest in the essential yet mind-blowing teachings of Zen.

It's not religion as I knew it. A lot of it is completely alien. And it's probably 'just a phase'. But I've been thinking of writing about my experiences as I learn about it here on Vox, so if you hear from my again - whoever you are - any time soon, that's probably what I'll be talking about.

Show us something faded.

Frodus T-shirt

I was listening to the BBC World Service last night in an attempt to get to sleep when one of their business programmes ran a feature on artifical intelligence - what stage it's at, what previous predictions said it'd be like, and what could happen in the future.

It started out by suggesting that what people used to think of as "AI" is in fact all around us, integrated into products. Of course, most thinkers and futurists fifty years ago didn't predict the internet and our current communication culture - but we are surrounded by machines that help us and even make logical decisions in our daily lives. We just think of them as products and not 'robots'.

So that's all nice and safe. I can cope with that. The business angle of the programme was that artificial intelligence is likely to make bigger and bigger decisions on our behalf. Already it's being used on the stockmarket and the abilitly to identify and predict much more complicated, comprehensive trends is expected soon.

But those are just glorified versions of applications that have been around for ages, right? One of the people interviewed (I wish I'd been awake enough to pay attention to who they were now) said that like the 'intelligent' stock market software and future AI would be integrated into products, like I mentioned above.

However, another commentator said that he predicted that a human brain could be replicated in digital form by 2029.

That blew my puny man-mind a bit. If that's accurate (and hell, it probably isn't), that could well be within my lifetime. AI, I'm comfortable with, but self-aware AI? And then this same guy said that following the usual rate of technological progress, the capabilities of electronic intelligence would quickly become far superior to our own.

I had real difficulty getting to sleep after that. The implications are obviously massive and I know a great many people have already thought about them in great depth. But it's only now that it could happen in my lifetime that I've really thought about its impact. Suddenly Ghost in the Shell's cyberbrains, or even the more political man-and-machine ideas in the Matrix or Battlestar Galactica etc. seem surprisingly viable.

Keeping me awake:

• Humanity changing forever
• Being conscious beyond the means of our flesh bodies (e.g. extended 'life'): could we handle it psychologically?
• Would a digital replica of a human brain think, feel and behave exactly like a human?
• The horrific threat of crime: would you like to have your entire consciousness stored on a digital medium? 'Ghost-hacking' could be a real possiblity. And think of the spam!
• Two tiers of intelligent life: the technologically 'enlightened', cyborg, digitally-eternal beings of the 'first world' compared to the mortal, hungry, vulnerable humans of the 'third world'.
• And so on.

Yeah. Maybe I'll leave the radio off tonight.

Best of 2006

Well, here I am at my parent's house in Basingstoke for Christmas. With not much else to distract me I thought I'd take this opportunity to have a proper play with Vox, and catch up on some of the stuff I'd have like to have documented better before I forget it all completely.

2006 has been full of surprises, not all of them nice - but there's no doubt it's been fantastic in terms of travel. So I'm going to write a bit about that, starting with the definite highlight of the year: visiting my friend Gareth in New York.

New York City - Welcome to Mirrorworld

Well I say 'New York' - he actually lives in New Jersey, but right on the edge, overlooking Manhattan. That was one of the first things to strike me - looking out of his window when I arrived and seeing that skyline.

Pattern Recognition

Restroom Kiosk on the Subway

Gareth had only been in America for a couple of months so a lot of it was still new to him too. I now know why William Gibson's American traveller dubbed London 'mirrorworld' in Pattern Recognition: strange as it may sound, I loved taking the subway. It was an instantly familiar experience, yet the trains seemed fresher and the stations less labyrinthine than the tube.

I remember laughing out loud the first time I heard the driver make an announcement. Why? Because the gruff Brooklyn accent sounded exactly like a stereotype from a film. That happened to me a couple of times, again when I walked past some hobos who were speaking in the hoarse yell I know from so many movies.

And I was obsessed with pavements and street furniture. The uniform nature of the surfaces - always these untarmacked slabs of concrete - came as a surprise to someone used to such varied textures underfoot. As for the street signs, well, there was plenty to entertain me there. Especially when I happened to pass what appeared to be the sign for Murray Street, as featured on the back of the Sonic Youth album of the same name.

Visiting Brooklyn, I could see why it's an increasingly appealing place to live. Not having much of a frame of reference, I likened it to the trendy parts of East London - both are formerly industrial and working class areas that have been occupied by 'creative' types with a love of street art.

It was in Brooklyn that I had the pleasure of attending a free open-air Les Savy Fav show in a huge disused swimming pool.

We'll Make A Lover Of You

Les Savy Fav are almost guaranteed to put on a good performance, and this time was no exception. Frontman Tim was covered in red paint. But it was a very hot day in July, and he's an energetic guy and so quickly began to sweat it all off. There was also a noisy game of dodgeball in the pool that had been going for the duration of the event - including during Les Savy Fav's set. So Tim ran off the stage, still singing using his radio mic, and crashed into the court, grabbing the ball and temporarily disrupting the game.

Gareth and I attended quite a few other gigs on a semi-random basis, only with occasional success. I knew Lightning Bolt at Webster Hall would be great, but we tried going to not one but two 'world music' peformances in a tiny, unairconditioned box of a venue, both of which sounded a laugh in the Time Out writeups, but were mostly excruciatingly terrible.

Oh! And how can I not mention popping up the Empire State Building? I'm very lucky toknow someone who works almost at the top - just above the row of lights which change colour on special occasions (I was there around the time of Independence Day). I still can't fathom what it must be like to actually work up there on a daily basis. The view is quite incredible, especially around sunset. And you really get an idea of the scale of the city (approximate size: large).

Back down on street level, I took plenty of time to just wander around and try to get an idea of what it must be like to live in the city. I know I barely scraped the surface. It was hot - very hot - when I visited, and I know it got hotter the next month. So now when I think of New York I imagine it being baking hot, humid and thundery.

Graffiti Research Lab

It was hot on 4th July, when we watched the fireworks from an independant film screening. It was hot when we explored the warehouses in Brooklyn, and when we failed to get into Eyebeam, home of the incredible Graffiti Research Lab (I succeeded on a later date).

Central Park was also hot, but there was shade in the mysterious woods in the middle. And it was hot in Greenwich Village, which I thought was beautiful. If you happen to know of a cheap apartment going in the area, do let me know...

In fact I wouldn't rule out living in New York for a bit. Though probably not in the Village (unless I become incredibly affluent, which I suppose is always an option). It's definitely got under my skin, and I can't wait to go back to visit at least. So watch out, NYC: you haven't seen the last of me.

My New York set on Flickr

I've been using my time off to attend London Games Fringe events. The London Games Fringe is a great idea: it complements the po-faced and gratingly commercial industry and consumer offerings with an opportunity for us to enjoy a more theoretical - and playful - approach to gaming. I probably shouldn't have said "theoretical" there as that doesn't make it sound any less dull.

It really isn't dull though. On Monday night NTK's Dave Green hosted the Games You Should Have Played event, the idea being that he and the other panelists explain... oh, you already guessed it. It was great to see the maraca-based rhythm-action game Samba De Amigo being demonstrated, even if a few of my favourite games were omitted from the list completely. Though it would have been a difficult task to please everyone like me, I got the feeling the event was particularly geared to non-gamers, who would definitely have benefited from the range of stuff that was covered, and been a lot less sniffy. But glancing around, I seriously doubt that there were any non-gamers in the audience - with the possible exception of a girl who turned up late and then spent most of the time outside, doing what appeared to be some form of vigorous yoga whilst wearing a very short skirt.

But moving on...

Tim Wright

Today's day-long event was called Play Time, and was all about play. Considering it was free (with lunch included) it was very good value. It was hosted by Tim Wright (above) who I think is some sort of academic. Either that or an eloquent loon who wandered in off the Soho street - he's developing a 30-year plan to play golf on the moon, you see. With David Bowie.

I learnt a lot of interesting stuff about play - and much of it from people who aren't directly involved with videogames. The speakers included a poet, a blogger, a magician and a er... man from a theator, who pretended to rush off to the toilet and then rang his own mobile phone to see what we'd do. It was that kind of day.

It was also the kind of day in which we got to play with Lego - which is of course the best kind of day there is. I haven't played properly with Lego for years, but as an only child, it's one of the toys that was guaranteed to keep me completely engrossed by my solitary self when I was a youngun. Here's the model I built when we were prompted to make a "four-legged thing with a face":

My four-legged creation

The head spins round and everything. There was a serious point to the second part of the 'serious play' session, in which we were supposed to build a metaphorical journey from our life out of the model we'd started with. But as I had made some kind of semi-terrifying arachnid, I wasn't sure where to go with it and ended up on a tangent, pointlessly adding wheels. It's got four legs! It didn't need any wheels.

The magician (who also ran the Lego session) said that when most creative folk are brainstorming and they come up with an idea that's impossible to implement, they dismiss it. But for magicians and illusionists, the difficulty is actually coming up with new impossibilities that they haven't already mastered. Isn't that Interesting? It's all done with mirrors, of course.

Taking time off work is great. Today not only did I watch Neighbours - which was just as preposterous and infuriating as ever - but when wandering around Warren St and Tottenham Court Road I visited an occult bookshop and passed two independent boardgame emporiums. Truly the possibilities are endless.

Then on the way home during rush hour a youngish businessman in suit and tie sat down beside me on the tube and whipped out a red Game Boy Advance SP. "Aha, he's probably using it to watch a badly compressed South Park video" I thought, and peered into his lap to see what he was up to. No - he was playing the original Game Boy edition of Pokemon.

A business man. In a suit-and-tie. Playing first edition Pokemon. On the tube. Brilliant.

Show us some great sunglasses.