Crooked Still

 Posted by (Visited 5169 times)  Music  Tagged with: ,
Jun 102008
 

Shaken by a Low SoundHop HighIt’s been a while since I called out any music that has caught my attention — so I wanted to mention Crooked Still.

The press is labelling them as bluegrass. I suppose — though to me they sound like Alison Krauss’ voice melded with some of the classical/newgrass crossover of Appalachian Journey, though less angular. And in many ways more in the folk tradition than “normal” bluegrass (if such a thing exists anymore). The songs are arranged for double bass, cello, banjo, fiddle, and voice — and they’re all traditional songs taken to the point of unrecognizability at times. Really dark deep tones and really hypnotic.

The first two albums are Shaken by a Low Sound and Hop High. You can hear what they sound like on their MySpace page.

Auto-puppeteering avatars patent

 Posted by (Visited 6497 times)  Game talk  Tagged with: ,
Jun 092008
 

Massively has an article about a university in Australia patenting a way to extract emotional info from player actions and automatically puppeteer the avatar.

There’s a long history of this sort of thing out there, of course. This particular patent, for example, references pulling out emoticons from chat, as many worlds have done, but also pairing them up with voice analysis in order to better match up emotional markers provided by voice and the tone intended by a given emoticon.

The Sunday Poem: If Trees Did Not Stop Growing

 Posted by (Visited 6170 times)  The Sunday Poem  Tagged with:
Jun 082008
 

We spent some time today at the park at a Cub Scout event, and I fell asleep on our blanket on the grass, staring up at the maze of intersecting branches, and at the smooth-trunked trees that vaulted to the blue. I was struck by how alike the grasses were, the same shapes and forks and blind reaching for the sun, the way that the water grasses arching over the little stream were hiding tadpoles from my glance, and the way the bigger boughs made the sun dart in and out like flashing flickers on a fish – was something watching us?

It made me think, if trees are just huge grass, then what grows huger still?

If Trees Did Not Stop Growing

The trees are dense with cellulose,
are grasses overgrown. They fork
the sky, they prize the stratosphere

And if they got there, what?
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Areae makes the 2008 OnHollywood 100

 Posted by (Visited 5334 times)  Game talk  Tagged with: ,
Jun 062008
 

The 2008 OnHollywood 100 | AlwaysOn

We proudly present this year’s OnHollywood 100. With this list of top private companies, AlwaysOn’s editors and our panel of industry experts introduce a new generation of game-changing players in the digital entertainment industries.

These 100 companies have emerged in an exciting year in the world of entertainment–a year in which the old business models came crumbling down as writers took to the picket lines, musicians ditched their record labels, and breakout creative artists turned to venture capital for funding.

The OnHollywood 100 companies are fueling this disruption and creating new business models to fit evolving trends in consumer habits and content creation.

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