The demolition of Long Mill Dye House in Roanoke, Virginia brought down two smokestacks but one didn't fall as planned.

photo from WSLS.com

Watch this AP video and listen for one of the operators warn: "Be advised: one stack apparently did not fall in the right direction." There were no reports of injury to persons or property.

Long Mill demolition video

A local TV station WSLS reporter wrote:

Many of the people who came out to watch the building crumble worked in the mill for years, but for some it wasn’t such a sad sight to see their former employer come crashing down.

“I hate to see them kill all the big rats, they had rats over there about 2 foot long,” said Jim Chattin, who used to work at Long Mill.

Today Offworld got an exclusive sneak peek at the awesomely retro-futurist super HYPERCUBE, a game by Montreal art collective Kokoromi and developer Polytron that uses both red/blue anaglyph glasses and Johnny Lee-style Wii-mote head-tracking to play a stylishly minimalist block game inspired by the infamous "human Tetris" Japanese gameshow video. The game makes its debut tonight at Montreal's Society for Arts and Technology (the SAT), so head down if you're in the area.

We also mapped the evolution of the rhythm game from Parappa to Rock Band via a new interactive timeline, snickered behind the back of Kids In The Hall's Scott Thompson utterly failing at Portal, worried about UK indie dev Introversion trying to build an AI that cannot be stopped from blowing up the entire world, and finally, celebrated the tenth anniversary of Valve's original Half-Life, with new footage from a team of modders attempting to bring the game into the 21st century.

The single most comprehensive online public resource for original source material related to Jonestown is Alternative Considerations of Jonestown and Peoples Temple, a website sponsored by San Diego State University's Department of Religious Studies. The site includes scanned documents, photographs, first-person testimonies and reflections, and a periodic email newsletter with updates on research, and the whereabouts of those who survived.

The section I've spent the most time in is the Audiotape Project Index, which includes copies of original recordings made by People's Temple members in California and Guyana.

Some of the cassette recordings at the SDSU website were retrieved from Jonestown by the FBI; others are in the possession of the FCC, which monitored radio transmissions from the compound. I'm not clear on the specifics, but it seems many of the original recordings in government possession are lost, missing, or still classified and unavailable to the public. Some ham radio operators once maintained a website documenting their battle to get the FCC to release more shortwave radio recordings from Jonestown, but the website is now offline.

Here is a list of recording transcripts and summaries at the SDSU Jonestown Project website. They include:

* Peoples Temple audiotapes collected by FBI
* Tapes of Peoples Temple radio conversations collected by FCC
* The Miscellaneous Audiotapes link includes tapes donated from private individuals and collections.

Three examples of the recordings in this collection:

* FBI #Q 042, "The Death Tape", made in Jonestown on 18 November 1978, during the mass deaths. Warning: the audio is very disturbing. You can hear children dying. Here is the audio at archive.org.
* FBI #Q594: In this tape recorded 5 days before the mass deaths, Jones and followers fantasize how they will torture and kill People's Temple defectors.
* FBI #Q174: music and entertainment performed by Peoples Temple members in October, 1978. An announcer speaks: "And now, ladies and gentlemen. We’re glad to have you here in Jonestown, Guyana. Sit back and enjoy yourself. We have a brief program. Presenting to you, the Jonestown Express."

The Jonestown Institute website is maintained by Rebecca Moore and Elizabeth Parker, who say in the site introduction they hope visitors "will come away with an understanding that the story of Jonestown did not start or end on 18 November 1978.

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RELATED:

* The fact that so many Jonestown-related source materials are missing or classified has fed much speculation, and many conspiracy theories. This Feral House book includes an interesting essay by Jim Hougan which explores some of the wackier theories, and some of the possible links between Jonestown and various military/government activities involving the US or Guyana.

* Snip from a 1998 CNN item about how the lack of access to documents and audio recordings has fueld rumors of CIA involvement:

Some people believe CIA agents were posing as members of the Peoples Temple cult to gather information; others suggest the agency was conducting a mind-control experiment. In 1980, the House Select Committee on Intelligence determined that the CIA had no advance knowledge of the mass murder-suicide. The year before, the House Foreign Affairs Committee had concluded that cult leader Jim Jones "suffered extreme paranoia."

The committee -- now known as international relations -- released a 782-page report, but kept more than 5,000 other pages secret. Without those documents, it's hard to confirm or refute the speculations that have sprung up around Jonestown, said Melton, who planned to be in Washington Wednesday to ask for the documents' release.

George Berdes, chief consultant to the committee at the time of the investigation, told the San Francisco Chronicle the papers were classified to assure sources' confidentiality, but he thinks it is time to declassify them.

* Loren Coleman has a post up on his Copycat Effect blog about connections between the Jonestown deaths and the murders of then San Francisco political figures Harvey Milk and George Moscone. For some time before the extent of his insanity and destructive activity were known, Jones and his church -- in which most members were black, while most leaders were white -- received expressions of support from left/liberal politicians including Milk and Moscone, and black power activists like Angela Davis and Huey Newton.

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Boing Boing posts on Jim Jones, Jonestown and People's Temple:

- Jonestown, 30 years later: original audio recordings from People's Temple and Guyana.
- Jonestown, 30 years later: Life and Death of People's Temple (PBS video).
- Jonestown, 30 years later: interview with a survivor (video)
- Jonestown, 30 years later: From Silver Lake To Suicide
- Jonestown, 30 years later: "Father Cares," NPR documentary from 1981
- Raven: The Untold Story of The Reverend Jim Jones and His People
- Andrew Brandou on his Jonestown paintings

Blip Festival 2008, a celebration of low-res visuals and chipmusic, hits New York City on December 4. Brandon Boyer has the details and a promo video over at Boing Boing Offworld! Blip Festival 2008: The Promo

Ala Ebtekar is a Berkeley-based artist whose fantastic work juxtaposes "street" art and traditional Iranian culture. (Above, detail of this piece.) "In my own work, I'm trying to find a visual glimpse of a crossroad where present day events meet history and mythology," Ebtekar says. Ala Ebtekar site, Video profile on public television's Spark (KQED.org) (Thanks, Heather Sparks!)

Boing Boing Gadgets reader Tucker Cummings bought the Bandai Gun O'Clock and reviewed it for us! He loves it as a novelty, but apparently as an alarm clock it, er, misses the mark. From Boing Boing Gadgets:

The Gun O'clock has all the fun of Duck Hunt on the NES. Which is to say, it's fun, but I wish there was more to do. Both game modes are designed for very short rounds of play, which I found tremendously disappointing.

The clock's display goes to sleep after a few minutes. The backlight turns off, and the numbers turn from red to black, rendering the clock pretty much useless. Clearly, this is not the clock you should buy if you are looking for a useful time piece. But chances are, if you bought this clock, it was for the coolness factor.

And there is plenty of cool to be found.

Bandai Gun O'Clock alarm clock review

A 91-year-old Jersey City woman was conned by a burglar pretending to be a utility company employee. He told her that there was a water emergency and that if she didn't hold down the flusher on her toilet, the house would explode. Meanwhile, he stole almost $4000 in cash from her apartment. From The Jersey Journal:

The man first opened and shut a faucet in the kitchen and then went into the victim's bathroom where he flushed the toilet, reports said.

The man then instructed the victim to "hold down the flush handle or else the house will explode," reports said...

But after about two minutes, the victim told police "I didn't care if the house exploded" and walked into her living-room, at which time she discovered her house had been ransacked, reports said.

"Jersey City senior holds toilet handle while water company impostor ransacks house" (via Fortean Times)

Of the many television and film documentaries produced on Jonestown, the 2006 PBS American Experience feature Jonestown: Life and Death of People's Temple, directed by Stanley Nelson, seems to me the most sensitive and comprehensive. I read somewhere that Jim Jones' adopted son -- who appears in this film -- also feels that way. Google Video embed above, and here's the link. Amazon Link to purchase DVD, and here is the PBS website, with additional background.

Boing Boing posts on Jim Jones, Jonestown and People's Temple:

- Jonestown, 30 years later: original audio recordings from People's Temple and Guyana.
- Jonestown, 30 years later: Life and Death of People's Temple (PBS video).
- Jonestown, 30 years later: interview with a survivor (video)
- Jonestown, 30 years later: From Silver Lake To Suicide
- Jonestown, 30 years later: "Father Cares," NPR documentary from 1981
- Raven: The Untold Story of The Reverend Jim Jones and His People
- Andrew Brandou on his Jonestown paintings

Current TV contributor Charmosh produced this interview with Jordan Vilchez, a Jonestown survivor who lives in the Bay Area. In 1971, cult leader Jim Jones established the headquarters of the Peoples Temple on Geary Boulevard in San Francisco, CA. The building is now a US Post Office. Vilchez, a survivor of mass deaths in Jonestown, Guyana in 1978, remembers what it was like in the early days of the Peoples Temple. (thanks, Gabriel del Rio)

Boing Boing posts on Jim Jones, Jonestown and People's Temple:

- Jonestown, 30 years later: original audio recordings from People's Temple and Guyana.
- Jonestown, 30 years later: Life and Death of People's Temple (PBS video).
- Jonestown, 30 years later: interview with a survivor (video)
- Jonestown, 30 years later: From Silver Lake To Suicide
- Jonestown, 30 years later: "Father Cares," NPR documentary from 1981
- Raven: The Untold Story of The Reverend Jim Jones and His People
- Andrew Brandou on his Jonestown paintings

The LA Weekly published an article by Barry Isaacson about the discovery earlier this year of a number of letters sent by a Jonestown resident to her parents, who lived in LA's Silver Lake neighborhood.

Phyllis and her family were dead for more than a decade by the time her elderly parents moved out of their house in Silver Lake in 1992. Architectural real estate agents had to bring the exquisite midcentury modern on Micheltorena Street back from the brink of decrepitude before selling it to my wife, Jenny, and me. Handing over the keys, they told us that, according to neighborhood folklore, the Alexanders might have left behind a concealed suitcase containing correspondence from their long-dead daughter and grandchildren. We looked but found nothing, and having been made aware of the circumstances of this family’s demise, we felt reluctant to intrude on an almost unimaginable grief.

But this past February, 10 years after we started to raise a family of our own where the Alexanders had raised theirs, a handyman working on our house emerged from the basement carrying a dusty vinyl briefcase. Inside was an extensive collection of press clippings, evidence of an almost obsessive attempt by the Alexanders to make sense of their daughter’s fatal acts of bad judgment.

In a separate envelope were letters written by Phyllis from San Francisco and later from Jonestown, Guyana, where she and her husband had moved with their children in 1975. There were fond letters to their grandparents from Gail and David. The most moving document in the cache was a carbon copy of a painful valediction from Dr. Alexander to Phyllis, written on an old manual typewriter on September 21, 1977. Tenderly, but with eloquent firmness, he reprimands her, perplexed and offended by her embrace of Jim Jones, the deviant cuckoo who had flown into the Alexanders’ nest and whom Phyllis and her fellow Peoples Temple members called “Dad.”

From Silver Lake to Suicide (LA Weekly). Here's a related slideshow in the LA Weekly.

See also this related section of the SDSU Jonestown document archives, "The Chaikin/Alexander Letters," with PDFs of the original documents.

Boing Boing posts on Jim Jones, Jonestown and People's Temple:

- Jonestown, 30 years later: original audio recordings from People's Temple and Guyana.
- Jonestown, 30 years later: Life and Death of People's Temple (PBS video).
- Jonestown, 30 years later: interview with a survivor (video)
- Jonestown, 30 years later: From Silver Lake To Suicide
- Jonestown, 30 years later: "Father Cares," NPR documentary from 1981
- Raven: The Untold Story of The Reverend Jim Jones and His People
- Andrew Brandou on his Jonestown paintings

Shmuck Alert is a blog that reports on accounts of people hassling reporters.

Above: Officer Friendly from the Oakland School District Police threatens to "stuff" Oakland Tribune photojournalist Jane Tyska into his cruiser and jail her. If you don't like profanity, cover your ears.

Remind us to watch our elbows next time we're in Oakland! That seems to be all it takes to make the local School District Police Chief go postal! The cop in question is seen hurling invectives and otherwise being a total ass to Oakland Tribune photojournalist Jane Tyska. According to him, the female photog struck his patrol car with her elbow, setting off an on-camera tirade in which he curses her up (and down!), threatens to 'stuff her' in the back of his (fatally-crippled) cruiser and accuses her of trying to incite a riot. Hey occifer, how about a steaming hot cup of 'CHILL THE #&$@% OUT!'? I've seen calmer reactions at school bus collisions...

Schmuck Alert - Potty Mouth Cop (Thanks, Michael!)

Thirty years ago this week, nearly a thousand adults and children lost their lives in Jonestown, Guyana. The settlement was also known as "Peoples Temple Agricultural Project", and was formed by followers of the Reverend Jim Jones and Peoples Temple.

Today, some refer to the mass deaths as suicide, others murder. We still don't really know all the facts of what happened, or how, or exactly why. Autopsies were botched, records and forensic evidence were mis-handled, and many of the US government's documents remain classified, out of reach of FOIA requests.

But we do understand that most of the people who died on November 18, 1978 drank fruit-flavored Flavor-Aid laced with a variety of intoxicants and poisons: Valium, chloral hydrate, and cyanide. The victims included hundreds of children. Many of the corpses bore puncture wounds indicating they received cyanide injections.

Jones' followers had moved from their Northern California base to the South American jungle the year before. The promise: they'd build a utopian, agrarian, interracial community in Guyana, which had a Socialist goverment at the time. Jonestown was to be free from racism, sexism, and ageism, and founded on communist principles. Jones told his followers to think of him as a living incarnation of Jesus Christ, and God.

Over the past 30 years, many documentaries, books, and articles have been produced about Jones, Peoples Temple, and Jonestown. I'll be blogging pointers to some of them today.

I want to start with the one I've returned to again and again -- a radio documentary from 1981 that for me, also defines what radio journalism can achieve. "Father Cares: The Last of Jonestown," was co-written by my NPR colleague Noah Adams. Here's a snip from the original introduction on npr.org:

In the months preceding the tragedy, Jim Jones and his People’s Temple followers recorded their tho ughts, their problems and their aspirations. The hundreds of hours of audio tape form the basis of [this] NPR documentary (...) written by James Reston, Jr and Noah Adams, and produced by Deborah Amos. It was based on the tapes Reston acquired under the Freedom of Information Act, and won most major broadcast awards including the Dupont Col umbia Award, the National Headliner Award and the Prix Italia.

Father Cares: The Last of Jonestown recaptures the final months for the People’s Temple cult. After problems arose for the group in San Francisco, they moved to the South American jungle during the 1970's. In 1978, reports of an increasingly hostile and controlling atmosphere by Jones led to a Congressional fact-finding mission into the cult. As the group, led by Rep. Leo J. Ryan (D-Calif.), was preparing to leave they were ambushed. Ryan, three American journalists and a Peoples Temple defector were killed. A dozen other people were injured. The incident was just hours prior to the deaths of the cult members.

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Here's the web page for Father Cares: The Last of Jonestown, with audio links. Here is the direct *.ram link for the complete 90 minute program (requires Real Audio). The website for this related NPR feature, produced in 2003, also includes 3 direct audio urls for "Father Cares," broken into 45 minute chunks (requires Real Audio or Windows Media Player). Another powerful, related NPR piece: Noah Adams talks with Deborah Layton, author of Seductive Poison: A Jonestown Survivor's Story of Life and Death in the People's Temple.

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Here is more on producer Deborah Amos. Here is James Reston's website.

You may also want to obtain a copy of Reston's book, for which this radio work was, in part, preparatory research: Our Father, Who Art In Hell.

I stayed up all night last Saturday listening to Father Cares in entirety. I really hope you listen to it. It is a profound example of the power of radio as a storytelling medium. It captures the souls of those who died, and those who survived, with a sense of lasting respect and sorrow.

Boing Boing posts on Jim Jones, Jonestown and People's Temple:

- Jonestown, 30 years later: original audio recordings from People's Temple and Guyana.
- Jonestown, 30 years later: Life and Death of People's Temple (PBS video).
- Jonestown, 30 years later: interview with a survivor (video)
- Jonestown, 30 years later: From Silver Lake To Suicide
- Jonestown, 30 years later: "Father Cares," NPR documentary from 1981
- Raven: The Untold Story of The Reverend Jim Jones and His People
- Andrew Brandou on his Jonestown paintings

Thirty years ago yesterday, 900 people living on a commune in Guyana under the religious guidance of Jim Jones killed themselves, or were murdered. The story of Jonestown is an amazingly twisted tale involving faith, trust, charisma, control, and politics. In my opinion, that story has never been synthesized better than in Raven: The Untold Story of The Reverend Jim Jones and His People, just republished this week. Tim Reiterman, the main author of the 1982 book and former San Francisco Chronicle reporter, was investigating the cult for more than a year before the suicides. During a fact-finding mission to Guyana with Congressman leo Ryan, Reiterman was shot by Peoples Temple gunmen. He was injured, but Ryan and several others were killed. That's when all hell broke loose.

As Reiterman points out in his preface to the book, Jones had a sign hanging above his throne with this phrase painted on it: "Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it." Indeed. There are still stories from Jonestown waiting to be remembered, and lessons to learn from those stories. Raven: The Untold Story of The Reverend Jim Jones and His People is a good place to start. Also, Xeni will be posting a number of Jonestown related items today so please stay tuned.
Buy Raven: The Untold Story of The Reverend Jim Jones and His People (Amazon), Interview with Reiterman (TIME)

Watch carefully -- this information in this infomercial will "magically" pull us out of the Great Depression II.

Last week, we announced an Obfuscated code contest with a geektastic prize provided by our sponsor, Safari Books Online, who also offered BB readers one month free online access to any of the following books: JavaScript: The Definitive Guide, Learning Perl, and Head First HTML with CSS & XHTML. The goal was to write a wonderfully obfuscated code snippet that prints out the phrase "Boing Boing." The prize: one year of access to the complete Safari Books Online Library, a digital library of technical books from the likes of O'Reilly, Apress, and Addison-Wesley.

We were absolutely amazed by the entries. There are some incredible bits of code in there. But we had to pick one, so we did. Or rather Joel Johnson did, because this whole thing was his idea to begin with. So we are pleased to announce that the winner of the inaugural Boing Boing/Safari Books Online: MCD. The entry was pithy, clever, and got the job done (see above). Congratulations, MCD! And thanks to Safari Books Online for sponsoring the contest!

In the comments section about the Pagan Love Song video, Haineux pointed to this fantabulous video of "Alvino Rey playing his pedal steel guitar in an early talk-box-like situation, with an anthropomorphic guitar puppet and a guy in a really odd hat." Truly, what more could you want?

Pygmy tarsiers, long believed extinct, have been found in Indonesia, according to a story in The Globe and Mail. In August, researchers from Texas A&M, led by Sharon Gursky-Doyen, trapped two males and a female in moutain-top mist nets on Mt. Rore Katimbo in Lore Lindu National Park in Central Sulawesi, Indonesia. With distinctive eyes, the pygmy tarsiers are primates; they are"about the size of a small mouse;" they have claws instead of nails, which is a distinguishing feature.

Here's a short video from the researchers showing the pygmy tarsier running up a tree.

link to Texas A&M article.

Jack Imel playing the marimbas and tap dancing to "Pagan Love Song." (Via Filled with Chocolate Pudding!)

Michael Minelli is suing Simon & Schuster because he does not think his photograph belongs in the book Hot Chicks with Douchebags.

In the book, Louis noted that Minelli's "popped-collar, spikey-haired presence was so far beyond regular douche, so far beyond uberdouche, he could spontaneously create a new element on the periodic tables--Douche Nine." At the time he was photographed by Louis, Minelli was working the door at the popular "Rehab" party at the Hard Rock Hotel & Casino. As first reported by Courthouse News Service, Minelli's Clark County District Court lawsuit seeks unspecified financial damages and legal fees. Last month, three New Jersey women sued Louis and his publisher over their appearance in "Hot Chicks with Douchebags," which they claimed was "vulgar" and presented them as "females who date dubious men."

Alleged "Douchebag" sues author

While on the trail to the falls in Johnston Canyon, which is a wonderful walk off a road that runs between Banff and Lake Louise, we came across this beautiful snow-made creation that declares a couple's love for each other. The snow-made man and woman were starting to melt but here's good wishes to their anonymous creators.

Lidija Davis on ReadWriteWeb summarizes current VC advice for startups and entrepreneurs:

Go back to the garage. That's the message venture capitalists at the Dow Jones VentureWire Technology Showcase in Redwood City CA today, are offering to entrepreneurs and startups.

In the midst of one of the worst economic crises the world has seen, investors are in the main optimistic, and agree that to weather this storm and come out on top, today's entrepreneur's need to change their mindset and go back to basics: go back to the garage, and success will follow.

Expect to hear startups saying "yeah, we've gone into 'garage-mode,'" modeling after the term "stealth-mode." The only trouble is what to do with all the boxes?

image source.

Brian Francis Slattery's novel Liberation is a magical, riveting poetic story of a post-economic America where the dollar has vanished and slavery has sprung up in the resulting economic chaos. It concerns the adventures of the Slick Six, a gang of fun-loving super-criminals whose unbeatable fighter, Marco, is at sea on a prison-ship when the nation falters. The guards on the ship kill the warden, begin to trade prisoners to slavers for food and fuel, and Marco kills them all, sets the ship free, sails the world, and comes back to what's left of America.

America has dissolved. New York is now the barony of The Aardvark, the crimelord who put Marco away in the first place, as punishment for the Slick Six's incursions against his territories. The Aardvark presides over the capitalization and enforcement of slave-farms across America, and he hunts all of the Slick Six with a mindless, unwavering determination to wreak perfect vengeance.

Marco resolves to find and reunite the Slick Six and to use them as a spearhead in a war on the institution of slavery and on The Aardvark, who reaps a fortune from it. And therein begins the tale, a road-novel that tears back and forth across America, told from the point of view of The Vibe, or fate, which guides the hands of all the dozens of remarkable characters in the story.

Slattery's prose style is complex, poetic, visionary and reeling, a cross between Kerouac and Bradbury, salted with Steinbeck. His people are all magic -- a tribe of stoners called the Americoids, a resurgent Sioux nation led by a visionary war-chief, a hive-like murderous circus, a free-state in Asheville presided over by an American Brahmin-turned-mayor, the prisoners on the liberated ship.

In Marco, we meet one of the great tortured heroes of fiction: an unstoppable badass who is haunted by his past as a child-soldier and who hunts now for peace with his past and a future he can be proud of. There is action and dashing in the story and true love and music and cooking and acrobatics and commerce and economics and crime and nobility. It's a heady stew, a road novel shot through with mysticism and a love of freedom that soars over the pages.

In case it's not clear, I loved this book. I can't wait to read more (I've just ordered Spaceman Blues, Slattery's first novel). This is a book to fall in love with.

Liberation on Amazon

Michael Holloway from the UK Open Rights Group sez,

Today we're proud to release ORG’s annual Review of Activities. It’s been a bumper year for digital rights. From HMRC posting half the UK’s bank details to the Darknet, to the ongoing campaign against Phorm, to three strikes and the rightsholder lobby’s so-far thwarted attempt to take control of your internet connection, this year was the year digital rights went mainstream. Thanks to generous support from the ORG community, we’ve been there giving an informed perspective on the issues to the natonal press, working with policymakers behind the scenes and mobilising the grassroots into effective action.

Threats to our digital liberties continue to menace us. 2009 will see new challenges, such as the Government’s proposed Intercept Modernisation Programme. That’s why, as we celebrate ORG’s third birthday, we’re also asking the community to renew their support for ORG. The ORG-GRO campaign is delivering excellent results (huge thanks to all the people who have contributed so far). But the leap from 750 to 1000 fivers received each month is not yet enough to guarantee us long term financial stability. We must reach our target of 1500 fivers before the end of the year. And we can’t do that without you.

ORG review of activities, Join ORG (Thanks, Michael!)

(Disclosure: I co-founded ORG and am proud to serve on its advisory board)

Today on Boing Boing Gadgets, we took Google's new iPhone voice search app for a spin, and reflected on the nostalgic smell of old NES cart sleeves, as well as the analog fluttering of old clocks.

Brownlee wrote a post in morse code about a morse code watch, and admired an ad-hoc iPhone number pad for MacBooks. Meanwhile, Joel flustered about Apple's crappy hardware DRM and made an Arrested Development connection in regards to a busted philanderer's dirty iPhone pics, which he swears are a firmware "glitch."

Guest blogger Tony Hightower gave us the scoop on organic motion: motion capture without the suit. A carbon-fiber acoustic guitar was attractively lute-like. Covert gamers cram old GameBoys into their graphing calculators. Joel deeply inhaled the miasmic retch of a Stitch himidifier.

Also in the day, Joel invited readers to goatse his new picture frame (email 2062270093 DERP tmomail.net if you'd like to get in on the fun). Brownlee wanted to play his complete Tiny Tim collection on a horrifyingly surreal SpongeBob SquarePants dock. We took a Tesla for a spin by proxy, and made a call on our banana phones.

Otherwise, Beschizza ripped apart a Boeing 788 in a stress test. and discovered a surprisingly cheap MacBook Air prototype that may not be all it seems. And Dan Lyons, aka "The Real Steve Jobs", is now being censored by Newsweek for doing exactly what he was hired for.

Oh, also. The Zune? Prepare for its imminent release.

Link

Here's Far Cry 2 technical director Dominic Guay talking about the importance of "procedural content generation" for massive online games -- basically, using software to create worlds that had previously been hand-built by artists. It makes a lot of sense, but what fascinates me is the narrative possibilities for fiction about games: these procedural systems have or will shortly attain a level of complexity that makes it impossible to predict their outcomes. It's the Halting Problem -- worlds where software off the rails could generate impossible situations, upside-down worlds, treasure heaps, cowardly monsters and brave grass. I'm thinking especially of abandonware worlds where only a few players remain and the gamemasters have stopped paying close attention. What odd maps might be drawn as the die-hards explore the outermost reaches of these worlds?

"Another big benefit [of procedural content creation] is that you end up being able to do stuff you simply couldn't do otherwise," Guay continued. "It opens up innovation fields. If you're creating things through code, you have a deeper understanding of what you're doing, and you can bake in some limitations."

"Our artists needed to be able to build not a random tree, but a type of tree," he said by way of example. "It's actually much closer to building a particle system than building traditional art assets. Artists play with parameters more than they play with vertices."

Creating those tools allowed artists to define trees based on characteristics gleaned from extensive photo reference, more than to create a number of discrete tree variants based on those references...

When a team member made a seemingly minor after-hours change to the ecosystem, it ended up increasing the asset density of the game world by 25 percent -- resulting in more than a few headaches.

"If I'm tweaking a jungle procedurally, maybe I'll just tweak it in my test map," Guay said. "But when I integrate it into the game, somewhere in the 50 square kilometer game world, maybe in just three small areas, it might cause problems, and we won't find those problems until QA uncovers them."

MIGS: Far Cry 2's Guay On The Importance Of Procedural Content (via /.)

Wagner James Au sez, "Not only are [Obama's FCC Transition Team leaders] Kevin Werbach and Susan Crawford great Net Neutrality advocates, they're also into online games/virtual worlds-- Werbach belongs to not one but *two* WoW guilds, and Crawford calls herself a "big fan" of Second Life. Agreeing with his guildmaster Joi Ito, Werbach's also a big supporter of WoW as a model for the future of work and software development."

“What [Warcraft] does,” he continued in that post, “is provide an incentive for people to develop new software and ideas for collaborative production. Many of those ideas will translate to other group activities, including those within the business world. I think MMOGs will be, at a minimum, a significant testbed for these new technologies, because users see a direct benefit and are willing to experiment with new things.”

Unsurprisingly, this perspective extends to virtual worlds like Second Life, which has been an important component in Werbach’s Supernova technology conference. On her own blog, Professor Crawford, a board member at ICANN, also counts herself “a huge fan of Second Life” for the way it lets users retain IP rights to their content (though she confesses to difficulty when it comes to moving her SL avatar around.)

Obama’s FCC Transition Team Co-chair a WoW Player

See also: Net Neutrality fighters to head Obama's FCC transition team