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Three

7 posts under this tag.

3 ARG samples 2
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8
 May
31

Grouped under the ARG, Alternate Reality Gaming, label for lack of a better term. I think all 3 exemplify something new, unsettling, and fascinating that I don’t yet have a word for.

  1. Little BrotherELZR, now available as atoms and bits, has a glorious climax of hundreds of vampires invading San Francisco’s civic center, messing with general paranoia.

    > RULES FOR VAMPMOB

    > You are part of a clan of daylight vampires. You’ve discovered the secret of surviving the terrible light of the sun. The secret was cannibalism: the blood of another vampire can give you the strength to walk among the living.

    > You need to bite as many other vampires as you can in order to stay in the game. If one minute goes by without a bite, you’re out. Once you’re out, turn your shirt around backwards and go referee—watch two or three vamps to see if they’re getting their bites in.

    > To bite another vamp, you have to say “Bite!” five times before they do. So you run up to a vamp, make eye-contact, and shout “bite bite bite bite bite!” and if you get it out before she does, you live and she crumbles to dust.

    > You and the other vamps you meet at your rendezvous are a team. They are your clan. You derive no nourishment from their blood.

    > You can “go invisible” by standing still and folding your arms over your chest. You can’t bite invisible vamps, and they can’t bite you.

    > This game is played on the honor system. The point is to have fun and get your vamp on, not to win.

    > There is an end-game that will be passed by word of mouth as winners begin to emerge. The game-masters will start a whisper campaign among the players when the time comes. Spread the whisper as quickly as you can and watch for the sign.

    > M1k3y

    > bite bite bite bite bite!

  2. Freezing Grand Central, a most elegant improv piece (via Alan).


  3. That great Free Hugs campaign a while ago:


  4. Got more samples along these lines? I wanted to quote something from SFZero but I’m still too new to it…
tagged books, fun, future, games, memes, questions, san francisco, surprises, three, videos, web, youtube | 2 Comments

3 current infatuations 2
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7
 Apr
22

I’m most definitely an idiot in at least Cortazar’s sense—always able to enthuse about anything and everything. Sometimes the excitement loop becomes critical and, a happygasm reached, I need simply contemplate the object of my devotions to reach instantaneous paroxysmal contentment. There are many examples of such cases in this blog (at its best moments it is merely a compilation of them) and here are the 3 most recent:

1. This glass. Seriously. It’s thick and stocky, heavy and curvy, velvety (in that strange way good glass can be) and transparent. Plus, it has an extremely low center of gravity (thanks to its glassy booty) that gives ponderous gravitas to the gassiest soda. I won’t drink in anything else. That all this heavenly goodness was less than a buck a piece (we’ve eight of’em) only adds to my marvel—a fragile monument to capitalism and division of labor. The photo makes absolutely no justice to its glistening beauty.
Glass
2. Mac OSX Tiger’s Wallpaper. The asymmetry, the restraint in means, the abstract yet natural forms—sometimes petals sometimes hyperbolas; sometimes tears in the canvas, sometimes valleys, sometimes hills—with their rolling, blue gradients, their digital, velvety textures; the tridimensional light play of twodimensional curves—a perfect background, ideally fitted to highlight whatever is atop it, to be discrete, serene and becoming, never flashy, never tiring. Because make no mistake, this is a designELZR, it has a purpose: to be a desktop wallpaper. And it easily trumps the cloy BlissWP, the over-eager photos, the dull colors, the duller patterns (ugh). As far am I concerned it is the best graphic design of the late twentieth century.
3. This quote. Such words. Some four centuries old and still as haunting.
No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend’s or of thine own were. Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.
John DonneWP, “Meditation XVII” of Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions
tagged art, beauty, criticism, death, design, elzr.com, formist, fun, happiness, images, industrial design, lists, little things, love, lyricism, macs, photos, quotes, three, touching, wealth, whimsicist, wisdom, writing | 2 Comments

3 Sightings 2
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7
 Mar
11

A ”Jew” car plate (they’re assigned sequentially here in Guadalajara so there’ve been a lot of Jews lately):

Jew Plates

A rather machista ad for pickups:

Mejor Dime Camioneto

And, well, the bizarre machitoWP:

Machito
tagged albums, food, formist, gender, guadalajara, jews, lists, local, marketing, original content, photos, three | 1 Comment

3 NYT Essays 2
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7
 Mar
09

All three of them long (9,000 words average), all three of them remarkable. Favorite to least-favorite-but-still-remarkable,

Unhappy Meals By Michael Pollan January 28, 2007

What should we eat?

Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

..A little meat won’t kill you, though it’s better approached as a side dish than as a main. And you’re much better off eating whole fresh foods than processed food products. That’s what I mean by the recommendation to eat “food.� Once, food was all you could eat, but today there are lots of other edible foodlike substances in the supermarket. These novel products of food science often come in packages festooned with health claims, which brings me to a related rule of thumb: if you’re concerned about your health, you should probably avoid food products that make health claims. Why? Because a health claim on a food product is a good indication that it’s not really food, and food is what you want to eat.

Darwin’s God By Robin Marantz Henig March 4, 2007

How can we explain belief in God?

Stephen Jay Gould, the famed evolutionary biologist at Harvard who died in 2002, and his colleague Richard Lewontin proposed “spandrel� to describe a trait that has no adaptive value of its own. They borrowed the term from architecture, where it originally referred to the V-shaped structure formed between two rounded arches. The structure is not there for any purpose; it is there because that is what happens when arches align.

In architecture, a spandrel can be neutral or it can be made functional. Building a staircase, for instance, creates a space underneath that is innocuous, just a blank sort of triangle. But if you put a closet there, the under-stairs space takes on a function, unrelated to the staircase’s but useful nonetheless. Either way, functional or nonfunctional, the space under the stairs is a spandrel, an unintended byproduct.

“Natural selection made the human brain big,â€? Gould wrote, “but most of our mental properties and potentials may be spandrels—that is, nonadaptive side consequences of building a device with such structural complexity.â€?

The possibility that God could be a spandrel offered Atran a new way of understanding the evolution of religion. But a spandrel of what, exactly?

Hardships of early human life favored the evolution of certain cognitive tools, among them the ability to infer the presence of organisms that might do harm, to come up with causal narratives for natural events and to recognize that other people have minds of their own with their own beliefs, desires and intentions. Psychologists call these tools, respectively, agent detection, causal reasoning and theory of mind.

From 0 to 60 to World Domination By Jon Gertner February 18, 2007

A look at Toyota.
By any measure, Toyota’s performance last year, in a tepid market for car sales, was so striking, so outsize, that there seem to be few analogs, at least in the manufacturing world. A baseball team that wins 150 out of 162 games? Maybe. By late December, Toyota’s global projections for 2007 — the production of 9.34 million cars and trucks — indicated that it would soon pass G.M. as the world’s largest car company. For auto analysts, one of the more useful measures of consumer appeal is the “retail turn rate� — that is, the number of days a car sits on a dealer’s lot before it is turned over to a customer. As of November 2006, according to the Power Information Network, a division of J.D. Power & Associates that tracks such sales data, Toyota’s cars in the U.S. (including its Lexus and Scion brands) had an average turn rate of 27 days. BMW was second at 31; Honda was third at 32. Ford was at 82 and G.M. at 83. And Daimler-Chrysler was at 107. The financial markets reflected these contrasts. By year’s end, Toyota would record an annual net profit of $11.6 billion, and its market capitalization (the value of all its shares) would reach nearly $240 billion — greater than that of G.M., Ford, Daimler-Chrysler, Honda and Nissan combined.
tagged cognition, essays, food, japan, magazines, marketing, process, quote collages, readings, religion, remixes, science, technology, three, writing

3 design curiosities 2
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7
 Feb
13

Boldness As Space
Minimalist Tabs
Color Bookcases
tagged albums, design, droll, ideas, lists, little things, macs, photos, three, web design

3 new eemadges 2
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6
 Sep
10

One on the design process, another on prejudices, and another on Ted NelsonWP, ELZR .

tagged design, eemadges, inspiration, links, lists, mindfulness, readings, three

Star
3-question test 2
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6
 Jul
04

Idling at the pool with my sister Chepe I came up with a 3-question test I specially liked. I have no psychological training whatsoever (nor do I believe in much of it) so I don’t have any ready-made answers at the ready if you do decide to answer it. But I promise it will be interesting and make you think (and that’s as good a yardstick for doing something as any).

Pay special attention to the wording and the intended meaning. It is not whether you would rather be intelligent or empathic, is whether you would prefer to have some more intelligence or some more empathy than what you already have.

3-question test

(1) Would you rather have more intelligence or more empathy?

(2) Would you rather have more 1) or more self-confidence?

(3) Would you rather have more 2) or more self-control?

My answers btw, are empathy, empathy, and self-control.
tagged epiphanies, favorites, ideas, memes, psychology, schemes for selfcontrol, selves, tests, three | 2 Comments