Well, life has been full and interesting these past few months. Plenty of things happening at work, but today I’m posting about my own new personal writing project which got underway last week. It’s called A Month In Music. I have all my MP3s in iTunes, and at first it tells you how many hours worth of music you have, and then how many days. I recently realised I had 30.3 days of music in my collection – a whole month. I was fascinated with the idea that I had, over 15 years, accumulated so much music that I could listen to it non stop for a whole month and never hear the same track repeated.

So that’s what I decided to do, writing about it as I went.The were rules of course: I was allowed to pick only the first song, and that after that, iTunes played randomly through the collection, and there would no skipping or pausing. Not at night, not during the day. Not at all. It was a really fascinating project, and I think it comes at an interesting time, as, thanks to Spotify and Youtube, the idea of a music collection with a definite border, an in/out, us/them split, becomes increasingly antiquated, despite music being such a key part of identity and pop culture. It was also a really good opportunity for me to revisit songs that once meant a lot to me, and go through some memories, because really, your music collection is a self-portrait in audio.

In addition to all the original writing, there’s a series of photos too. It’s going live once a day as a blog on monthinmusic.tumblr.com. I would, of course, be very happy if you checked it out.

For Custom PC and bit-tech

* Killing is fun. This was a blog post for bit-tech, and looked at the problem with FPS games set in a war-time environment: namely that the mechanics of the game are in opposition to the morality of the situation: to make the game fun, the killing has to be fun also:

“In every FPS you need to kill hundreds, if not thousands of people as you progress through the game. In fact, you’re not killing people: you’re removing obstacles, because single player games that aren’t primarily puzzle games or simulators are always about progress through the level. To impede progress and to make it challenging for the player, you need obstacles. These can be puzzles, but since you’re not making a puzzle game, it’s better if these are enemies, and it’s better if these enemies can tax the player by fighting back. When you, as the player, eliminate the enemies, you’re granted power-ups, new weapons and keys to enable you to access more of the game (and in turn cope with more powerful enemies). It’s such a simple and recursive formula that it needs to be jazzed up – it needs to be made fun, because you need to do it over and over and over again. It’s work.”

* My Best Gaming Moment of 2009. My contribution to a feature written for that flat period at the end of the year when there’s not much new happening but the site still needs updating. I picked playing Rock Band as my ‘moment’:

“The things I write and pictures I take are somehow less personal, less meaningful than things I read and the movies I see. This is especially the case with the songs I hear. If I’m taking notes for a piece of writing, I’ll often end up scrawling favourite song lyrics in the margins, signposts to where I want to get to. It often feels as if my meaning is inside the song, and I need to hear it to get to what I want. Fragments of melody lodge themselves in my head, and I’ll end up needing exactly the right song to write certain paragraphs. So it was obvious I was going to love Guitar Hero.”

* Noby Noby Boy review. A look at the newest game from the Lead Designer of Katamari Damacy:

“Despite Noby Noby Boy’s cute, naïve looks and non-lethal gameplay it will probably be one of the more divisive games of the year. Some will look at it as a beautiful piece of art that expands the notion that videogames are a more complex and involving form of art than anything else we currently have. Others will take one look at the flat shading, coy terminology and recoil in disgust. Several members of the bit-tech team certainly did when we had Noby Noby Boy running in the labs.”

For The Wired Jester

* Already mentioned a lot, but it was from 2009 so deserves a place in this round up post: write up of my visit to Peleliu, in the South Pacific, and its haunting WW2 relics.

* Virtual Reality, Then and Now. A short post on the fact VR is about computers bleeding into real life, not the other way around:

“In the 1980s and 1990s, the term ‘virtual reality’ was understood to mean the creation of reality inside the computer – and thus we would need to experience it using complex imaging and interaction systems (3D googles, cursors mapped to the movement of a glove etc.) The implication behind this was the reality itself would be untouched… Few people imaginged that when VR came to pass, it would actually involve computers altering the way we acted in reality.”

* On the importance of The Beatles releasing their music digitally:

“And so now they’re missing. Everyone learns the truth that the Beatles are Important with a capital I. The Best. The Greatest. Whatever is left that the other Apple has done well to build up. But the music just isn’t there. It’s absent from the places where the kids – the people who live and breathe music – are, and where everyone is increasingly going to be. iTunes is the biggest music retailer now, Guitar Hero is mainstream entertainment. The Beatles are abstract, venerated, protected. Their name is known, but I suspect knowledge – and love – of their songs is dipping lower and lower.”

(Somewhat dated now, with the release of Rock Band, but the points about their absence from TV/Film/iTunes stands.)

Fiction

The book is currently called The Fine Sort. Seven or eight chapters done, about 30,000 words or so. Nothing to post here just yet, but I did put together a collection of short stories and print them via Lulu. The result was excellent – great quality printing, lovely cover, nice stock. Some samples to follow on here.

(1) Pun not intended, and only applicable to those who remember film cameras.