… Or is it just a criss-cross of associative meaning in your head? Where does one end and the other begin?
Click the picture.
Tags: modernity
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The prize for most successful start-up so far this year must surely be Color, the real-time photo-sharing app that drew the attentions of midas-touch investors Sequoia to the tune of $41m – more than the same group ploughed into Google ($12.5m, fyi). This immediately drew the ire of quite a lot of people, who widely expressed the belief that the company had lucked out more than a mosquito in a nudist camp. Bloomberg noted that the depth of talent might be the rationale for the hefty price tag, but I can’t help feeling this all slightly misses the point. It’s not really about whether the price was right, it’s that Sequoia clearly believe enough in this product to feel quite comfortable reaching that deep into their pockets in the first place.
Crysis 2 is not a game that lends itself easily to review. This is in part because Crysis has always felt less like a game and more like a leap of faith. The first instalment in the series was legendary for its specs requirement, and ended up being pirated en masse by gamers who felt that it wasn’t worth paying for something that would make their systems have a nervous breakdown.
In the last few days, in between enjoying the unseasonably sunny weather in this fair capital, I managed to put paid to two games I had been waiting to play for a while: Portal 2 and Crysis 2. As videogames turn more and more toward the cinematic, sequels are less of an anomaly than in earlier years. Actual sequels, that is: not just 30 more levels with some exposition as to why they’ve changed the sprite a bit. No, these are – or aim to be – rather more sophisticated affairs, with arcing narratives and thematic evolution. So let’s see how they did.
This post contains spoilers.
Welcome to Sunday Semiotics. The items in this posts will be presented without comment. Please feel free to say what these things mean in your world.
For a crash course in semiotics, click here.
I have been away. Now I’m back. And like everyone else I should be playing Portal 2 so that I can get my review face on. However, I would instead like to talk about one of the best services of the last three years and how we are all terrible people.
Maps are brilliant, and if you are a decent human being you will carry one at all times. If you an excellent human being, you will have been to the magnificent maps exhibition at the British Library. These codifications of land are more than just guides; they imprint an individual understanding on the world, for better or worse. Slums are glossed over, areas exaggerated, streets taken liberties with. It’s an important thing to realise, before the age of rigorously geo-indexed OS data, just how important these subjective viewpoints were. After all, an influential surveyor could completely write you off the map.
London
If you’ve not yet heard of Near Field Communications, you will do soon. Telecom groups, banking conglomerates and tech giants alike are scrambling to be ready for it, with the usual business rivalries cast aside as each sector does its level best to stamp on the fingers of the opposition. O2 and the newly-minted Everything Everywhere are trying to cut banks out completely by applying to the FSA for an e-money license; Verizon, Sprint and AT&T have formed some sort of godawful unholy alliance in America to fund the rolling out of NFC-enabled terminals. Google is killing off QR codes before they’ve really even come on to the radar in favour of NFC.
Simply put, it’s because they know it’s worth billions. Maybe hundreds of billions. And everybody is going to want a piece.
In case you hadn’t heard, the remake of Ocarina of Time for the 3DS is being handled by an almost completely unknown Australian developer with one WiiWare release to their name. Again, that’s Ocarina of Time, widely heralded as the best game ever made. So no pressure, guys.