(Untitled)- May 30, 2008 Rage Against the Machines, a thoughtful piece on the ongoing problems we seem to have with categorising video games, deducing exactly what it is they do us when we play them, and working out what this means for society. The statistics are certainly arresting: "The video games industry, meanwhile, continues to grow at a dizzying pace. Print has been around for a good 500 years; cinema and recorded music for around 100; radio broadcasts for 75; television for 50. Video games have barely three...http://www.thingsmagazine.net/2008/05/rage-against-machines-thoughtful-piece.htm (Untitled)- May 28, 2008 London and its airports, an ongoing struggle. Ted Heath planned for a new 3rd airport at Foulness Island back in the 1970s - it was dubbed Heathograd by a cynical press. Permission was sought and granted, and at first it seemed like the airport would be up and running by 1980. The M12 motorway was planned, ploughing through Essex on its way to the sea and the 25,000 acres of alluvial marshland. One of the other sites considered alongside Foulness was Cublington in Buckinghamshire, which...http://www.thingsmagazine.net/2008/05/london-and-its-airports-ongoing.htm (Untitled)- May 27, 2008 We've missed the anniversary slightly: Mideast Oil Discovered - There Will Be Blood, a brief note of a momentous day. In Adventure in Oil: The Story of British Petroleum (1959), Henry Longhurst writes 'The day was the 26th of May, 1908, and, though we may be sure that not a single schoolboy will find it in his history books, it was in fact one of the most significant dates in world history. George Reynolds, the explorer who struck the first well at Masjid-i-Suleiman, was accompanied by one...http://www.thingsmagazine.net/2008/05/weve-missed-anniversary-slightly.htm (Untitled)- May 23, 2008 Two economic indicators. Do 1.3 million people really earn their living from eBay Probably not, but we can certainly expect the number of people trying to rise in the next few years. We don't imagine that eBay has much of a presence in Monaco. Perched on the hotter edge of Europe, it seems the Principality now represents the start of Dubaisisation's creeping spread. The news that Cramped Monaco is planning a new district represents the first evidence of a pure architecture of economics in...http://www.thingsmagazine.net/2008/05/two-economic-indicators.htm (Untitled)- May 23, 2008 The Encyclopedia of Business Cliches bad tempered and simplistic piece in The Providence Journal on mayoral opposition to modernism around the world Dawdlr, RD is on a mission to engage the analogue side of our increasingly digital brains, hopped up on 1s and 0s and near incapable of having any original thought ultra-quick T-shirt folding explained Inside the Scandal That Rocked the Formula One Racing World ('...in sleepy Surrey County') more to follow.http://www.thingsmagazine.net/2008/05/two-economical-indicators.htm (Untitled)- May 21, 2008 'Astonishingly, Britain used to lead the world in the production of mechanical elephants.' Eastcliffe Richard on the self-propelled pachyderms of old English coastal resorts (which are now spawning endlessly fascinating waves of weblogs, railing against corrupt councils, half-baked plans, and crumbling infrastructure, all from a position of, what one must assume, is deep love for their immediate environment). One leg leads to another, a classic visual cliche revisited and collated. At Print...http://www.thingsmagazine.net/2008/05/astonishingly-britain-used-to-lead.htm (Untitled)- May 19, 2008 Can a Dead Brand Live Again New Consumer Archaeology (via tmn). See also Brand Tags, a project designed to eke out the 'meaning' in brands by asking visitors to speak their brains (via autoblog) 'Disney Launching "Interactive" Environment in Google Earth One Day Before Closing VMK'. The Virtual Magic Kingdom is curious internet dinosaur, a gated, highly branded online world that has somehow been buried beneath the hype surrounding the _other_ major online world. Does this mean that such...http://www.thingsmagazine.net/2008/05/can-dead-brand-live-again-new-consumer.htm (Untitled)- May 15, 2008 In the Realm of Jet Lag, a Pico Iyer piece from 2004 that includes the story of Sarah Krasnoff, a woman who abducted her grandson in a custody dispute, then fled to the only place she thought would be free from the law, the international flight: 'They took about 160 flights in all, one after the other, according to the stage piece ''Jet Lag.'' They saw 22 movies an average of seven times each. They ate lunch again and again and turned their watches six hours forward, then six hours back. The..http://www.thingsmagazine.net/2008/05/in-realm-of-jet-lag-pico-iyer-piece.htm (Untitled)- May 12, 2008 My Kingdom for a horse, in which Jonathan Jones lauds Mark Wallinger's overgrown equine submission to the Ebbsfleet Landmark invited competition (BBC story, plus a gallery of all entries at wallpaper). Is this a return to a new era of literalism, or simply a gleeful satire of our era's addiction to straightforward, uncomplex gestures. Probably a mix of both, a way of giving the 'masses' (notoriously forthright about sculpture, perhaps more so than any other art form) exactly what they want by..http://www.thingsmagazine.net/2008/05/my-kingdom-for-horse-in-which-jonathan.htm (Untitled)- May 7, 2008 Fantasy and reality. Architectural detective work. Does the Kingsford Venue look familiar This 'uniquely designed' concert hall in the Cornish theme park Flambards is actually the 'radical reinvention the accepted idea of a tent or a marquee', courtesy of one Zaha Hadid. ZH's structure (one, two) was the first of the gallery's series of 'mini-icon' commissions, and perhaps the most pavilion-like. The series has become steadily more diaphanous and permeable, culminating in Frank Gehry's...http://www.thingsmagazine.net/2008/05/fantasy-and-reality.htm |