Month: December 2002

The year without a winter

Phil Ackley lives in Anchorage, Alaska…

“Its December 2nd, and its raining. The grass is green. This is just sick and wrong…

Well, after the shortest winter in Anchorage’s history, a winter with an astounding 4.57 minutes of total snowfall, it’s breakup again in Anchorage. The higest temperture I saw today? 56 degrees. Summer (in December) here we come!”

The Go Game: San Francisco Urban Wireless Adventure

What happens when the Cacophony Society goes ultra high-tech…

The Go Game is an all-out urban adventure game, a technology-fueled, reality-based experience that encourages hard play and a keen eye for the weird, the beautiful, or the faintly out-of-the-ordinary. The “rule book” is reality, the “board” is your city, and the “pieces” are the players — you and your team.

Through clues downloaded to a wireless device and hints planted in unlikely places, you’ll be guided through a city you only think you’re familiar with. Clues can appear at any time, anywhere. Perhaps you didn’t notice the woman on the bus reading a magazine upside-down. Or the note stuck to the side of the bathroom mirror of your favorite bar, or the electric scooter parked outside with your name on it. After a day of Go, you will.

The SF Weekly has a more descriptive article

Frontline: The Merchants Of Cool

The TiVo sucked down Frontline’s The Merchants Of Cool a couple of days ago and only just now had a chance to watch it. The show surveys the current state of teen culture marketing and co-optation using the current suspects/demons of the moment (MTV, Britney, Fred Durst, etc.) with appropriate scenes of disapproval from culture critics.

Of course this is all nothing new, as folks who’ve read The Conquest Of Cool already know. The only thing that’s changed in the past forty years since is the number of zeros in the dollar amounts and the marketer’s desperation in keeping the modern hyper-conglomerate corporate beast fed.

Host Douglas Rushkoff‘s Utne Reader-level sanctimoniousness wears thin though. The show doesn’t address any race or class issues or consequences (the image/brand archetypes are all affluent and white) and doesn’t once consider that a teen culture could exist outside of corporate media. If I was a teenager, I guess I’d be pretty offended by the whole show, but then again I wasn’t cool (though I suppose anti-cool is now cool these days)

Anyway, the most interesting commentary can be found in the Frontline message boards for the show, and in case you missed it, you can watch the whole show online.