Today’s idea is a terribly simple one – so much so, I’m astonished nobody else seems to have thought of it: Tamagotchi Gardening.
Instead of looking after a pet, you tend a garden. Dig it over, choose what to plant, care for it, water it, and reap the rewards.
But it’s not simply about the satisfaction of growing your own (virtual) food.
I’ve been giving a lot of thought to New Year Resolutions for 2010, and of course, I came up with a lot of the usual stuff. I also came up with some stuff that was less usual, but not the sort of thing I wanted to spend a whole year doing.
For instance, in 2010, I would like to go without wheat, dairy, gluten, sugar, yeast, alcohol, caffeine and meat. But not for a whole year – and quite probably not all at the same time.
I’d also like to do some fun, cultural stuff and make resolutions about that sort of thing – more meals with friends, more movies, more books, etc.
But I didn’t want to make any of the usual New Year’s Resolutions – partly because it’s a bit boring, but also because I’m reluctant to commit myself to 365 days worth of something I’m not really going to stick at. A short burst would be okay – or perhaps a high-intensity kickstart into a more sensible habit.
And so I’ve come up with a plan. And it’s just as daft a plan as my one about photographing everything I eat and drink for a year which, incidentally, I’m still doing. People are going to roll their eyes at this plan, just as they do about the food one – but I’m getting used to that.
We’ve been back from Shambala a few days and it was, once again, a very laid-back and relaxed affair. Good music – mostly by bands we’d never heard of, but occasionally there’d be one or two that one of us had heard of (or, on occasion, met).
Here’s a quick glimpse of some the bits I managed to catch:
Jake summons his minions to lay waste to Hannah’s troops
For some reason, after about a five year hiatus, Jake suddenly went digging through our never-unpacked boxes of stuff from New Zealand for his Magic The Gathering cards.
He and I used to play and collect a long time ago and he’s got the bug again. Fortunately, we’d hung onto them.
We have thousands. I’m not exaggerating either. Thousands. Which is just as well, because half the fun is assembling the decks. You stack your deck with combinations of creatures and spells that you think will work together well in a particular strategic way to crush your opponent. And when it all goes wrong, you go back to the drawing board and re-tweak your deck, adding and removing cards.
I’ve had a really busy few weeks since Christmas. A lot of it has been work-related – writing, mostly – and lining things up for the new year – and a lot of it has been festive and fun. A really good mix, actually.
One of the better days recently was spent at the home of Dr Nick, who I work with in the Treehouse (our nickname for the rather mundane bit of office block we have as our research base). He’s a board and card game enthusiast – far more so than I am – and he’d organised a full-day gamefest with six people around the table.
Tah-dah! It’s a Spore creature
Somehow, alongside a bunch of celebrities and A-list bloggers, I was invited to have a play with the Spore Creature Creator.
Spore is a new game developed by Will Wright – the guy who came up with The Sims and Sim City. Watch this video to get a sense of what it will do – pretty amazing.
I’ve been reading about it for a long time in Jake’s PC Gamer magazine, and it really looks pretty awesome. Essentially, you create creatures and they develop colonies and live their lives.
But the trick (and this is the really clever bit) is that all of the game’s creatures are created by the users.
I'm the Director of MTF Labs, a Senior Researcher at the Industry Commons Foundation, advisor to ArtEO and founder of New Music Strategies.
I'm an author of books about technology, culture, music and radio. I'm also an award-winning broadcaster and filmmaker, a public speaker and lecturer, record producer and festival director. I am closely following developments in emerging technologies and the cultures and ethics surrounding them, and my projects typically focus on issues of justice, inclusion, and sustainability.
Most of my work involves surrounding myself with incredibly smart and talented people who would have no other reason to ever be in the same room as each other. That's when amazing things happen.
I tend to talk a lot about music (often jazz-adjacent and particularly on vinyl, but also playlists and mixtapes). I'm enthusiastic about food and cooking, the intersection of art and science, new technologies, vintage technologies, education, social progress, silence, innovation, narrative, data commons, culture, sound art and the spoken word. This blog will continue to reflect those diverse and shifting enthusiasms. I may also digress.
I'm from Tāmaki Makaurau / Auckland in Aotearoa New Zealand, I have Scottish ancestry, I've spent a decade in the south of Birmingham UK, and another in a forest in the north of Sweden.
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