Month: June 2013

WORK: Music Festival Collectible Card Game

I turned the whole European music festival season into a collectible card game. Next week I am playing Tetris with religions. Nah, seriously. Working with the hard data set from music community site Tastebuds, I came up with card designs for 16 European festivals (most of them UK-based, obviously) - focusing more on representing the demographic data than coming up with actual gamification. Still, if any of you guys wants to work with me on mad gamification designs or mechanisms, I'm actually up for grabs.

Just posting four of these cards here, those for Benicassim, Download, Sonar and Sziget festival. Spotify playlist links included (thx to Nisha of Storyboardmusic for prepping those!)

Read more

by damage

PERSONAL: XXXIV

While learning how to take photos like they curve bullets in Wanted (that, or I've finally managed to summon up spatial distortion demon fields that'll appear attached to a new Instagram update), I incidentally turned 34. I never wanted to grow older than 25, to be honest, and when someone very much like an end-level boss to me said Vancouver was a godawfully amazing place and I should really spend my 30th womb extraction day there, Skinny Puppy and William Gibson aside, I ended up by a lake where the sky was grey (good), it was cold (good) and me being a Martian was undeniable (still not sure whether it's good or bad). There's a hidden conclusion here somewhere. Four years later I'm warping space by the Thames (the whole Big Ben is an Enochian watchtower, notice how it warps tourist speech centres into ooohs and aahs and devoted, yet incomprehensible mumbling?), Vancouver's a tentacle's reach away, cEvin Key's Facebook updates mostly holler at me from Tokyo and I'm mostly bored with how things are because restricted technical evolution keeps me duller than usual, so I end up writing essays of thousand words mostly containing fuck you. Welcome to another day in the life of.

Note: also going full-on Snake Eyes over the London tech/subversive scene after my six months at Tastebuds as a community manager. Conclusions about startups, psychographic profiling, user channeling and manipulation, human shallowness, redemption and guitar/pop bands that make my heart retch up further uncontrollably retching hearts are by the bucketful.

Music? Injections of noise, amygdala waves & black glaciers - the more compatible with silence and more well-suited as soundtracks, the better. These often coincide. Ambient releases from Glacial Movements Records, Soleilmoon, Staalplaat, Raster-Noton or Tympanik. Mostly. A bit of black metal for old times' sake, always had a soft spot for Absu, Forgotten Woods or Wolves In The Throne Room and that also led to more majorly fucked up moodsetters, but I'll get back to these later. A newcomer to the fold is minimal wave - Farah's Law of Life (soundtrack for Dawid Marcinkowski's amazing interactive movie Sufferrosa) was the first hook and now Phantom Love is the next - surprise vinyl from my birthday came from TheLastLaugh Julie). Note for the detailspotters: yep, that's some promo material from La Mort Clothing right there and yep, a few lucky events led to another and I've managed to grab hold of the Mage Tarot as well. And to be honest, the Invisibles omnibus is not exactly commuter-carry material.

Loving how the London Eye actually looks like Pripyat when you look at it like that. Left out the pictures about the Thames looking like an oversized oil pond with dead pigeons... OH WAIT.

Yep that's us, Polly and me, and I'm sparing you all five days' pictures of constant restaurant-hopping - but clearly Peruvian restaurant Ceviche was the best of all (sea bass in tiger's milk is quite unbeatable!) - Polly's quite good at bringing surprises by the vatful, because vatful's a standardized dimension of quantity now - and for the interested lot - Ceviche is right next to Garlic & Shots!

Tricky question: what's the fourth book from the top?

by damage

BRAINFOOD: My Five Minutes Being A God (appears in Machete Girl 8)

Here's my lead article from cyberpunk magazine Machete Girl issue 8 a.k.a. the cyber mage issue, on how technology and magick overlap. Read the first half of the magazine on Issuu - part 2 and PDF downloads coming soon! And now, drop the reality warp drinks, pills and basslines, the warfare for the new Zeitgeist IS ON! (According to chief ed Comwedge, Machete Girl is back after a year of misdirection and lack of cyberpunk sexual drive. This is the first part of a two parter issue exploring the sigil punk method of the Cyber Mage!)
Read more

by damage