No, listen, what happened was this: they lied to you, sold you ideas of good & evil, gave you distrust of your body & shame for your prophethood of chaos, invented words of disgust for your molecular love, mesmerized you with inattention, bored you with civilization & all its usurious emotions.
Hakim Bey, Temporary Autonomous Zone
Author: cbcrenshaw
C.B. Crenshaw is a musician, artist, writer, coder, gardener, and maker in Alabama.
The Daisy
I have a little yellow Daisy on my front porch that I’ve been trying to keep alive for a few weeks. I’m not doing a very good job of it. The flower lives life on a strange carnival ride of forgetfulness, swinging wildly from healthy, golden vitality to a state of near-death droopiness over the course of each week, and I feel bad for it. I feel guilty just long enough to give it another starvation ration of water from a measuring cup out of the kitchen, that is, and then forget about it for another few days. I really have no idea what I’m doing.
I feel the same way about Twitter. Like the flower on my porch, I abandon it to time and entropy six days out of the week and overwater it on the seventh. It also gives me anxiety. I think, “I need to be better at Twitter.” I wonder, like most everyone with a high opinion of their own voice, “how can I get more engagement?” Just last night, I fell asleep thinking about how social media is a tool that I haven’t learned to properly use. Like an awl, maybe, which I also don’t know how to use.
Unlike the flower, which needs me to live, there’s no reason for me to feel that way about Twitter. Twitter is probably demonstrably better without me on it. But I can’t help it. I fret over it, like the Tamagotchi I got in a kid’s meal from KFC in 1996 that quietly beeped its way into my psyche until I pulled the battery with a pang of guilt and a whoosh of relief two weeks later. It’s the same mechanic: press one button to clear a need, another to build a relationship.
I need to figure out why the internet makes me feel this way.
Camera Roll: Saturday in Tampa
Finally getting these uploaded after traveling and working all day Sunday and today. We had an awesome time this weekend doing tourist-y stuff at the Florida Aquarium, Ybor City, and Busch Gardens. I’m only really happy with the photos of the saxophone-playing man, but it was a great trip anyway.
Minute Wild: Olustee Battlefield
I’ve been putting these on Vimeo, but I decided to take the plunge tonight and create a whole branded YouTube thing. So, if you have approximately four minutes, check out my channel, Minute Wild. Thank you so much!
Camera Roll: TLH and Last Podcast on the Left in Tampa
Road trip time. Day and Night 1.
Elegance
Just came across this quote in C.J. Date’s Database Design & Relational Theory, which is a more interesting book than the title might suggest.
“In computing, elegance is not a dispensable luxury but a quality that decides between success and failure.
Edsger W. Dijkstra
Watching problems that could have been solved years ago by thoughtful design cascade now one upon the other in the systems at work drives this point home. Spend more time thinking than doing.
Camera Roll: Mothership and Grime
Art: Watercolor Flamingo
I messed around and painted/drew this after all of my work was done tonight.
Minute Wild: Crowder Landing at Lake Jackson
Video Game Spaces: Halo
“When we gazed upon all this splendour at once, we scarcely knew what to think, and we doubted whether all that we beheld was real.”
Bernal Diaz del Castillo, The Conquest of Mexico and New Spain
You land on a strange “installation” and there are a few moments of silence for you to take in this unique world. After a quick look around at the clearing where your shuttle crash-landed, you make your way across a narrow bridge high above a bubbling stream. To the right, the stream cascades down a well-beaten course cut through a precipitous rocky valley. To the left, this. This expanse of land, water and sky slicing the inky vastness of space. There is a dialectic of sublime beauty and precarious terror in this space. You feel as though you could peer into the cumulus distance for hours, exclaiming at the wonder of it all like Bernal Diaz del Castillo and his murderous crew of invaders. They felt as alien in Tenochtitlan as you feel in this place. The only choice, though, is to pass through an evergreen grove up the rough path leading toward the source of the stream. There is gunwork ahead, unfortunately.
What I want to suggest, in this and future posts about video game spaces, is that games are a new design commons — a new public architecture that we should take just as seriously as we do “real” spaces. We inhabit games for longer periods of time than we inhabit most public spaces. I’ve spent more time running around the archives level on GoldenEye than I have spent in church; far more time driving around the virtual streets of San Andreas than riding the subway in New York City. All of these spaces were shaped by human hands and minds for humans to inhabit.
I also hope to think through some of the design problems inherent in games. These are not democratic spaces, for example, and they are not free in any sense of the word. Burning electricity instead of calories, too, may not be sustainable for our bodies or the planet. As in Halo, violence is the dark centerpiece of most video game spaces, as well. What cultural work are these costly, undemocratic, and violent realms performing? Are we designing and inhabiting beautiful hellscapes?
I’ll share spaces in games here when the inspiration strikes. I hope you can use them to question your assumptions about architecture, landscape, and industrial design, as I am. At the very least, I hope that you can appreciate their beauty and the skill that goes into designing and building them.
C.B. Crenshaw 