Graham Sergeant

Bret Terrill, CEO of Tenuki, identified 4 reasons in a recent blog post: 1.You’re really you on Facebook. In most situations where avatars are successful, users are masking their identities… 2.Avatar applications don’t encourage repeat usage. I customize my avatar once and I’m done… 3.It’s all lead-gen. The goal of most of the well-done avatar apps is to drive you from Facebook to another property. That’s not the way to grow a Facebook app. 4.No virality. None of the existing avatar applications have any viral hooks build into them, except the common “Here’s 50 coins if you add a friend” invite page… - Graham Sergeant

"A giant waterworld that is wet to its core has been spotted in orbit around a dim but not too distant star, improving the odds that habitable planets may exist in our cosmic neighbourhood. The planet is nearly three times as large as Earth and made almost entirely of water, forming a global ocean more than 15,000km deep. Astronomers detected the alien world as it passed in front of its sun, a red dwarf star 40 light years away in a constellation called Ophiuchus, after the Greek for "snake holder"." - Graham Sergeant

"On top of ole smokey." - zeroinfluencer

"A collaboration between Free Scott (Ridley and Tony Scott’s newly launched entertainment division) and Ag8 (an independent studio based in the United Kingdom), Purefold is an upcoming transmedia narrative extension of the Ridley Scott classic Blade Runner. Set in the near future, the project explores what it means to be human. This case study discussion will examine how Purefold’s creators have guided the project through its early concept and design phase. Drawing together members of Ag8, creative collaborators, and representatives from a major brand sponsor, this panel will examine the project from a variety of perspectives. Exploring the motivations for building a transmedia project around Blade Runner, the panel looks at the potential transmedia might offer for revitalizing older properties. It explores the roles different stakeholders play in the conception and design of a project, as well as the challenges of meeting varying desires and ambitions. The panel considers whether some genres are better suited for transmedia properties than others, and looks at how to extend existing properties with substantial fan bases, considering questions of co-creation and fan/audience production." - Graham Sergeant

"I love Lego's Frank Lloyd Wright Collection has a mini model of the Guggenheim Museum in NYC, but I'm more in love with the model of the Fallingwater house built over a waterfall. The real house sits 50 miles from Pittsburgh, and although it looks as if it belongs in the future, it was constructed around 1935. The house has always been one of those fantasy homes of mine, I suppose because it is in the woods, but also close to water. (Two of my favorite things, in theory.) A shame we can't all live somewhere so interesting." - Graham Sergeant

what a soundtrack for a game. lovely. - zeroinfluencer

"The Black Iron Prison is a concept of an all-pervasive system of social control postulated in the Tractates Cryptica Scriptura, a summary of an unpublished Gnostic exegesis included in VALIS. “ Once, in a cheap science fiction novel, Fat had come across a perfect description of the Black Iron Prison, but set in the far future. So if you superimposed the past (ancient Rome) over the present (California in the twentieth century) and superimposed the far future world of The Android Cried Me a River over that, you got the Empire, as the supra- or trans-temporal constant. Everyone who had ever lived was literally surrounded by the iron walls of the prison; they were all inside it and none of them knew it. ”" - Graham Sergeant

"In the TV series Lost, the beginning scene in the season 4 episode entitled "Eggtown" depicts John Locke delivering this book to Benjamin Linus while he is being held prisoner by the survivors in the barracks. Benjamin tells Locke that he has already read the book, to which Locke replies, "... read it again, you might catch something you missed the first time around." Two episodes later the prisoner is seen reading the book and there is a brief close-up where the cover of the book fills the screen." - Graham Sergeant

hard to choose but I think ubik might be my favourite: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki... - James Tindall

I consider myself a fan but tbh I find him hard going and problematic... his ideas trouble me for a long time afterwards. The slow entropy as the world falls apart at the end of Ubik was horrible like one of those dreams where you're walking through treacle, but the imagery will stay with me forever. - Graham Sergeant

"Yesterday, Mobile Orchard’s own Dan Grigsby posted about how he performed Apple-approved iPhone interprocess communication using URL handlers in his Alocola iPhone app. Shortly thereafter, Ryan Johnson of InnerFence commented that they’ve been doing the same for a while with their own apps. InnerFence are perhaps best known for their powerful Credit Card Terminal app that enables you to turn your iPhone into a credit card terminal for taking payments on the fly. They’ve used two way app communication (via URL handlers) to allow other apps to use the Credit Card Terminal app for processing payments (jn particular, Ring It Up)." - Graham Sergeant

"Apple is famously restrictive about confining third party apps to their sandboxes. That Apple doesn’t allow background processes is well-known, and Apple rejects apps that attempt to read the various databases and media folders directly. So it’s a bit surprising that Apple supports a form of inter-process communication (IPC) using URL protocol handlers. In this post, I’ll show how Alocola — our open source, Apple approved, in the App Store, Safari location helper — uses URL protocol handlers for IPC to work alongside Safari." - Graham Sergeant

"In that speech I did on world generation, one of the slogans I had on there was, "Establish the familiar so people can appreciate the exotic." And if you don't do that, if you try to do something that's too exotic, it doesn't give them anything to hold onto. They don't have a handle. They don't know what they're supposed to pay attention to. So in many cases, the part that's familiar is the plot line. If I can grab onto that plot line, then I can appreciate the exotic of the fact that this plotline is happening in outer space or underwater -- as opposed to, if I have a totally exotic environment and a totally exotic plotline and totally exotic characters, I get lost. Other times, you give them a very familiar setting, so the setting is something they're very comfortable in and they can immediately absorb, and then you can throw them a plotline which is totally whacko. They're able to appreciate the fact that the part that's exotic is the plot. " - Graham Sergeant

"In any kind of free-to-play ramp, you've got a certain amount of assets that you're going to be able to get just by playing, right? So you're going to be able to get a relatively nice small collection just by playing with no money," says Weisman, in reference to the game's free-to-play, microstransaction-supported revenue model. "Earning your way through collections of seven to 10 guys. If you get mom to throw in a 10-dollar gift card... that's going to get you another 10 guys. And, you know, that will be pretty fun. You'll be able to stay and be competitive." - Graham Sergeant

"Swarms of giant jellyfish are threatening Japan's fishing industry as the huge seaborne creatures are ruining fishermen's nets and catches" - Graham Sergeant

"Valve's Jason Holtman has said that fears the Steam platform could become a monopoly in the digital market are unfounded, and that the company's own game releases help the platform to grow for the benefit of all." - Graham Sergeant

Boom - very good article - those guys understand this area perfectly. - zeroinfluencer

"In 2000 an American internet startup called HavenCo set up a much more provocative data haven, in a former second world war sea fort just outside British territorial waters off the Suffolk coast, which since the 60s had housed an eccentric independent "principality" called Sealand. HavenCo announced that it would store any data unless it concerned terrorism or child pornography, on servers built into the hollow legs of Sealand as they extended beneath the waves. A better metaphor for the hidden depths of the internet was hard to imagine." - Graham Sergeant

Really really good read that article and "the hollow legs of sealand" just has to make an appearance in the cotidal universe doesn't it??? - James Tindall

"The history of the town itself is of a failed Californian utopia—in fact, incredibly, if completed, it was intended to rival Los Angeles. From the city's Wikipedia entry: California City had its origins in 1958 when real estate developer and sociology professor Nat Mendelsohn purchased 80,000 acres (320 km2) of Mojave Desert land with the aim of master-planning California's next great city. He designed his model city, which he hoped would one day rival Los Angeles in size, around a Central Park with a 26-acre (11 ha) artificial lake. Growth did not happen anywhere close to what he expected. To this day a vast grid of crumbling paved roads, scarring vast stretches of the Mojave desert, intended to lay out residential blocks, extends well beyond the developed area of the city. A single look at satellite photos shows the extent of the scarred desert and how it stakes its claim to being California's 3rd largest geographic city, 34th largest in the US. California City was incorporated in 1965." - Graham Sergeant

Whilst we're on the subject of "unintentional land art visible from airplanes": http://www.boston.com/bigpict..., especially http://www.boston.com/bigpict... - Henry Cooke

"Seen enough to eye you But I've seen to much to try you It's always weirdness while you Dig it much too much to fry you The weirdness flows between us Anyone can tell to see us Freak scene just can't believe us Why can't it just be cool and leave us? It's so fucked I can't believe it If there's a way I wish we'd see it How could it work just can't conceive it Oh what a mess it's just to leave it Sometimes I don't thrill you Sometimes I think I'll kill you Just don't let me fuck up will you 'cause when I need a friend it's still you " - Graham Sergeant

"When I work on stories, I try to just get down to the absolute, the most bare bones concept you're trying to get across. That is what has to get protected. The story has some meaning; everything else is up for grabs. That one core bit has to stay in place, otherwise you have a meaningless story. That happens in games. You're like, "I care, why?" [laughs] when you are playing the game. " - Graham Sergeant

"The film-maker David Lynch, a great admirer of Ruscha, who also adopted LA as his home and has offered his own interpretations of it in films such as Mulholland Drive and Inland Empire, admits he is a bit perplexed by Ruscha’s assertion. “Ed has said California hasn’t influenced him one little bit, but I disagree. I like to think the California sun has burnt out all unnecessary elements in his work.” The bigger truth is that you can’t look at a lot of Ruscha’s paintings without thinking of LA, “with its sign-filled streets sprawling like dispersed and diffused flows of random information”" - Graham Sergeant

"Zynga reportedly makes around one third of its revenues from cost-per-action advertising, which is estimated to amount to between USD 33-84 million per year for the company, and the lawsuit claims that Facebook shares "a substantial portion" of this revenue. FishVille, Zynga's most recent Facebook title, was recently briefly removed from the site for featuring cost-per-action advertising. The ads allegedly trick users into signing up for unauthorised phone charges or expensive mail order products. They are called 'free trials' but one plaintiff claims she faced a USD 165 charge on her phone bill for 'free' items delivered to her that she is unable to return or obtain a refund for. " - Graham Sergeant

"In journalism, no matter how, to what degree or level a technique is done, one is moving horizontally. One never moves vertically. You almost never go down inside, you are moving horizontally on a narrative thing of personal comment one way or another and a superficial surface, horizontal narrative. The whole point about fiction is that you start out horizontally and at the first opportunity you go vertical, you're inside of the characters, deep inside the situation where you're god, moving vertically but your narrative is horizontal, you're moving vertically and horizontally at the same time, simultaneously. In reportage, most reportage, all reportage I can think of moves horizontally. One is always on the surface. Now, my point was that if someone could truly master a subject journalistically to the degree that you knew so much about it that you could with all honesty move in and out of the characters exactly as you would in a novel, that you knew so much about it, had so much command over it that in a work of journalism you could move horizontally and vertically at the same time. That was the whole point of In Cold Blood and the other thing is there's a technical innovation in that book which is that I the reporter never appear. They don't seem to realise this is the single most difficult thing in the whole thing and the reason I did it... it was almost a technical impossibility. The reason I did it was for the reason I call it a non-fiction novel, I wanted to prove that the reporter could be completely absented from the thing." - Graham Sergeant

"Unfortunately, these apps are hobbled for one big reason: none of them, on either console, can be used while you’re playing a game or watching a movie. You have to quit your game and start up a separate program to update your status or see what your friends are up to. In other words, Sony and Microsoft are totally missing the point. Twitter and Facebook are valuable organization tools for making play dates, rallying troops for clan practice or recruiting friends for co-op. And without the ability to use these services while a game is in progress, you still have to keep your iPhone or netbook open on the coffee table if you want to ping your friends during gameplay. That’s not convergence. It’s clutter." - Graham Sergeant

"On his own blog, he set up a "Googlewhack" of Belle de Jour and Brooke Magnanti, creating the only page on the internet where the two terms appeared together in an unrelated context. Because his software alerted him to the IP address of those accessing his site, he was able to monitor anyone Googling the two terms... ...However, several weeks ago he spotted searches originating from an IP address at Associated Newspapers, publishers of the Daily Mail, and contacted Magnanti to warn her the paper was on her tail." - Graham Sergeant

"Has nothing to do with threatening to rip your opponent's arms off if they beat you at chess or its equivalents, though it operates on similar principle. In war, if the opposing side pulls back and raises the white flag, you've won. Some people like to think that this strategy also works in the art of debate - that if you can get the opposing side to shut up, you're right by default. The sad part? It works. Not just in media, but in real life, too. In fact, most political systems are based on doing this. No, seriously. A Chewbacca Defense is part of an argument that intentionally or unintentionally has the effect of confusing the opponent so that they will stop arguing with you. If they are too chicken to continue the argument, the point they are trying to argue must be equally as flimsy, right? Right? " - Graham Sergeant