Category: Entertainment

No need for Napster when you can just grab the songs from a stream

Replay Music
Although I have appreciated this type of functionality in software such as FreeAmp, I am not sure that I like this as a commercial product. Not only does it add fuel to the music industry’s assault on online music services it deals a major blow to streamers who don’t encrypt their streams (allowing greater player and platform choice) or do it just for fun without any hope of profit.
From the site:
Just play music from your favorite online radio station or streaming music service, and every song is saved on your PC as a high quality MP3 file, automatically tagged with the artist and song title, and perfectly separated into individual tracks.

Who wants to play Pac Manhattan

Pac Manhattan
This looks like fun, the pictures of Dens are hilarious. Hope they put up the videos soon!
From the site:
Pac-Manhattan is a large-scale urban game that utilizes the New York City grid to recreate the 1980’s video game sensation Pac-Man. This analog version of Pac-man is being developed in NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications graduate program, in order to explore what happens when games are removed from their “little world” of tabletops, televisions and computers and placed in the larger “real world” of street corners, and cities.

mini GNU/Linux distro for the Via EPIA boards

freepia
Yea! Now I will have something to do with my M-10000 once my thesis is done ;-)
From the site:
Freepia is a small GNU/Linux distribution designed to run on Via Epia-M Mainboards. It currently runs on the M-9000 and M-10000 (ezra and nehemiah cpu) but with some modifications like kernel and X11 modules it should run on others too. (if someone has get it running on other Epia¥s let me know). The main motivation behind this project is to build a full featured, low noise media box to play movies/mp3s/images etc. For this it uses freevo but in the future there maybe support for others like mythtv or vdr.

re-work, re-tell and release..

Video
I feel like this is something like bringing the oral storytelling tradition to modern media. It allows for change, critique and so forth.
From the site:
Wizard People, Dear Reader is an unauthorized re-envisioning of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Ston, by Brad Neely. To experience it, viewers need to get a copy of the first Harry Potter movie and watch it with the sound off, replacing Neely’s narration with the original soundtrack.

Now THESE are TV’s

transvision
Chekout the Flash version of this site as well: http://www.transvision.us/
From the site:
Transvision’s intent is to change you’re relationship with what you are seeing rather than simply mindlessly relaying information. Each of the fully functional televisions proffers new prototypes for watching and reconceptualizing our ideas about television. These new schemes of interface problematize the act of watching TV by imbedding interaction into a medium traditionally resolved to the goal of complacency. The individual transformations in Transvision expose the power of the mediating object, reanimating both the content and the viewer while cutting through the static and stasis of media. Whatever you do, don’t sit back and relax.

The Experimental Gameplay Workshop

The Experimental Gameplay Workshop
From the site:
The Experimental Gameplay Workshop is a forum for the demonstration and discussion of innovative game designs. It provides a place for designers to showcase challenging, unproven work, and discuss it with peers.
By explicitly acknowledging the existence of a community of experimental game designers, the workshop helps legitimize gameplay-oriented research and development.

A related festival is The Independent Games Festival at http://www.igf.com/

Thanks Josh

The infamous WFMU, freeform radio

WFMU-FM 91.1/Jersey City, NJ; 90.1/Hudson Valley, NY
WFMU is an independent freeform radio station broadcasting at 91.1 fm in the New York City area, at 90.1 fm in the Hudson Valley, and live on the web in Realaudio, or in Windows Media, as well as two flavors of MP3, and all programs archived in Realaudio.

Go Larry! Hope the book makes people THINK.

Wired 12.03: Some Like It Hot
From the excerpt:
If piracy means using the creative property of others without their permission, then the history of the content industry is a history of piracy. Every important sector of big media today – film, music, radio, and cable TV – was born of a kind of piracy. The consistent story is how each generation welcomes the pirates from the last. Each generation – until now.