Detroit Photographer Stephen McGee

Detroit-based photographer and cinematographer Stephen McGee, collaborator of the Imagination Age, has been doing some amazing work. His new website, featured above, has launched and is stunning.

In addition to chronicling the story of Loveland, which we blogged about recently, he has been working for almost a decade as a humanitarian cinematographer. He produced a documentary in Uganda on an orphanage that harbors child soldiers and raised $50,000 for the orphanage at the opening showing in Paris, France. His most recent project focusing on an organization’s 20-year impact in Vietnam was premiered in Ho Chi Mihn City in 2008 and was used in fund raising attempts by model Petra Nemcova.

Look for more of Stephen McGee...

An Animation of Spirit

An intriguing animation by Louis Lefebvre chronicles the evolution of Consciousness from its inanimate state into human form and then back through spiritual seeking to Oneness. The inspiration is the spiritual teaching of Wayne Liquorman and Ramesh S. Balsekar.

(via André Blas)

Fighting Against the Funerals of Angels

When I heard that my friend Camila Girardelli's grandmother had passed away, I sent her an email in Brazil, where she is grieving with her family, and she sent me a link to this video. For the first couple of minutes I thought it was a touching story about a grandmother who had once been a beautiful young woman memorably teetering around town on seven (that's right, seven) inch heels. But at 6:15, the real story begins when the spectacular Alice Girardelli, who was not only gorgeous but passionate and kind, starts saving the lives of countless children.

Hilarious Back-of-the-Twitterverse Game Design Twitter Comic

"All Flash Games ideas I don't have time to make as I am making some amazing SANDWICHES right now" reads the bio of my new favorite Twitterer, KBsGamesTOILET, which should really be considered a Twitter comic strip.

KBs uploads hand-drawn concepts for video games and then Twitpics them. It's microblogging at its finest. The games, incidentally, have a wry, but oddly believable wit to them. I could actually see some of the games being played ... in an alternate universe.

Get thee to KBsGamesTOILET

Via @wonderlandblog.

Eating Halal in Tokyo

Hala Eldemellawy, an Egyptian living in Tokyo, has launched a new blog about the experiences of an Arab Muslim living in Japan. The blog has just started but it's a great concept. And it's a great insight into the cultural relations experience of an Arab going to an Asian country. The blog covers everything from finding Egyptians in Japan to finding Halal food to the oddity of Fridays feeling not feeling like Fridays without the call to prayer.

Read: [Arab'eya in Tokyo]

Via @joi

Jason Silva on the Future of Nanoaesthetics

A classic monologue by Jason Silva.

Detroit: Shrink a City with Wild Imagination

Co-owner of the Imagination Station Jerry Paffendorf leads a tour of the space and explains the future of the Detroit project.

I just returned from Detroit, where the Loveland crew continues to blow my mind while working on creative reconstruction of a shrinking city, Detroit.

The Imagination Station, depicted in the video above, is an empty building in Corktown next to a burnt-out house destroyed by arson, as many places in Detroit are, and an old defunct hotel. Jerry co-owns it with Jeff DeBruyn. Jeff believes that Corktown is ripe for development but that development must not only include input by locals but empowering of the locals. There are over 20 ground-up developments ready to go.

"Our community has entrepreneurs, beautification projects and plans shovel-ready," he says. "To serve us, empower us."

Across the street from the Imagination Station, beyond a grassy field, is the desolate, majestic Michigan Central Station, which stopped operating in the 1980’s and now looms tall and gray in a grassy field, full of broken windows and occasional hidden interlopers exploring the emptiness.

The cumulative effect of so much neglect makes it seem from an outside perspective that Detroit was abandoned all at once, as if a nuclear core had melted down and the entire city had to be evacuated. Vacant skyscrapers look almost normal by day, but at night, the city masterminded by Henry Ford, once the richest person in the world, is a ghost town of darkened windows and squatters.

When we meet Jeff for the tour of Detroit's Corktown neighborhood, starting at the Imagination Station, he’s chatting with squatters, Mike and Kevin, who have taken up residence in the future Imagination Station. They have big news--the three buildings were boarded up and the city is planning to come through and tear them down the next day.

Of all of the countless structures that could have been scheduled for demolition the very next day by the city, it seems absurdly odd that these buildings, two of which are now being tended by mindful new owners, would be first up. Next to the houses is the Roosevelt Hotel, a brick building with broken glass, graffiti tags and squatters. Through busted shades on the third floor, the outline of a man appears briefly in the window.

Next to the Roosevelt Hotel is the first of Jeff and Jerry's two houses, which is burned out by arson and brought back to life for a fleeting moment by the artist Marianne Audrey Burrows. A few months ago, Marianne was in a group of artists and friends from the Loveland crew who came from Detroit to visit the Imagination Age Salon in New York City. I run the Imagination Age Salon, after a lifetime of dreaming about it. Marianne had never been to New York before, and she was wild and wide-eyed with energy.

She said she needed to paint and I commissioned her to paint a mural on the double doors of the garage at the bottom of the garden. It was late spring, with hot pink rhododendrons in full bloom. Over the course of the hot day, she painted a full cityscape in the background and the blooming rhododendrons in their full rebirth in the foreground.



Since then she has painted six other murals in or on buildings around the city including inside and outside this burned-out shell of a house, which has become in its last days a canvas for her great work “Reclamation.” The hot pink rhododendrons are reborn again on the charred walls along with the blue silhouette of the black-windowed city skyline.

Paint A Burnt House from Imagination Station on Vimeo.

Now the ruined house is boarded up, and no more visitors can see the art inside. Yesterday, the day I toured with the artist herself, was the last day of the life of the house. We stepped over black bricks and burnt sticks on the shelled stairway to the second floor, where we tiptoed across damaged floorboards to the explosion of sky blue paint spreading from the corners of the rooms to the broken windows and beyond, out into the world.

After this structure is removed, The Imagination Station will be left standing across from Michigan Central Station, which was designed by the same firm that created Grand Central Terminal. While it’s hard to imagine Grand Central not existing in Manhattan, it almost happened. The structure was under siege by would-be developers in 1968.

Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis intervened:

"Is it not cruel to let our city die by degrees, stripped of all her proud monuments, until there will be nothing left of all her history and beauty to inspire our children? If they are not inspired by the past of our city, where will they find the strength to fight for her future? Americans care about their past, but for short term gain they ignore it and tear down everything that matters. Maybe… this is the time to take a stand, to reverse the tide, so that we won't all end up in a uniform world of steel and glass boxes."

Before we get in the car to explore Corktown, Jeff points across the street to a barbecue restaurant next to pawn shops and a half-painted Banksy on the last brick building, near the roof. Apparently one of the world’s greatest living artists was chased off like a common thief before he had a chance to finish, leaving only the dark faded silhouette that somehow suits the location perfectly, making me wonder if maybe that’s what Banksy intended. Across the empty grassy field, in the silent darkness of the Michigan Central Station, the shadowed perimeter of bobbing heads popping up over the edge of the roof looks like the painting came to life in the form of mysterious explorers.

There’s danger and romance in the creative anarchy of abandonment and empty space for people who have a roof over their heads but want to explore, and then there’s stark necessity for people like Mike and Kevin who have run out of other options. What they’re doing could be considered giving in or fighting back, depending on where you sit.

“In 2002 I graduated from law school,” Jeff says as he pulls away from the curb. “Six years ago, a priest brought me to Detroit. Father Tom. I moved into the shelter to run the soup kitchen and live a monastic existence, living simply, serving the poor.”

“You’ve been living there ever since?”

“Ever since. But now I’m ready to expand, that’s how I got involved with Loveland and the Imagination Station.”

He explains the nature of the divisions that tore the community apart, starting with freeway construction in the 1960’s and then riots in 1967, commencing after a police raid during a party for two returning Vietnam vets in the very place we now sit in an idling car.

“This is ground zero for the riots,” he says. The dusky night has cast the quiet street into a jagged ring of shadows on the horizon. My eyes haven’t yet adjusted. He rolls slowly past vacant lots, some bound by hurricane fences, some gone to seed, others covered in remnants and junk. “Some of the houses burned down. Crime drove people out. The city is shrinking. Detroit is 143 square miles but the population is down from over two million to under 800,000. I believe that this city can and should be used as a model for how to shrink a city.”

Some of the blocks we pass are blown out completely, empty of people and hope, with sagging roofs and rusted gates swinging open on overgrown fields of Queen Anne’s Lace. These areas, he suggests, can be turned into community parks, farmland and incubators for social entrepreneurialism.

“Wait and see what’s going to happen in the next few years. The Imagination Station will be the center of a major shift. We’re going to make it real. Community organizing through social media. I’m excited to learn these new skills and see how they can have an impact on fundraising. We don’t want to kiss ass or beg. We just want to raise the funds to make this real.”

Next Big Thing: Lightning Love

Our new favorite band here at The Imagination Age is Detroit band, Lightning Love. Two-thirds of Lightning Love consists of a brother/sister duo, Leah Diehl and Aaron Diehl along with Ben Collins. Their track "Friends" is evocative of the whimsical poignancy of Beat Happening's "Indian Summer."

Lightning Love played at the Big Inch Block Party this past weekend.
"Friends" also has a cameo on Jerry Paffendorf's post-Big Inch Block Party recap video, which I've embedded below.

The Big Inch Block Party Heats Up While The Detroit Ice Potato Melts from Jerry Paffendorf on Vimeo.

[Lightning Love]

Guillermo del Toro on Storytelling Engines

Image credit: Jurvetson.

Mexican film director Guillermo del Toro in the June 2009 Issue of Wired magazine offered some provocative thoughts on the future of storytelling and games. I look at this through the prism of storytelling's role in telling a culture's story and the opportunities to improve the work of cultural relations, and against the backdrop of having worked for many years tilting against the windmill of the death of journalism as editor of the Online Journalism Review.

del Toro: In the next 10 years, we're going to see all the forms of entertainment—film, television, video, games, and print—melding into a single-platform "story engine." The Model T of this new platform is the PS3. The moment you connect creative output with a public story engine, a narrative can continue over a period of months or years. It's going to rewrite the rules of fiction.

Wired: It sounds like you're talking about an entirely new form of storytelling.
del Toro: Think about the way oral tradition became written word—how what we know about Achilles was written many, many years after it made its way around the world with different names and different types of heroes. That can happen when you allow content to keep propagating itself through different kinds of platforms and engines—when you permit it to be retold with a promiscuous form of mythology. You see it when people create their own avatars in games and transfigure their game worlds.

Wired: How is that interactivity going to change Hollywood—and the way directors like you make movies?
del Toro: [Legendary B-movie producer] Samuel Arkoff once told me there are only 10 great stories. That's where the engine and promiscuity come in. Hollywood thinks art is like Latin in the Middle Ages—only a few should know it, only a few should speak it. I don't think so.

Wired: So how will the public story engine tell those same 10 stories differently?
del Toro: We are used to thinking of stories in a linear way—act one, act two, act three. We're still on the Aristotelian model. What the digital approach allows you to do is take a tangential and nonlinear model and use it to expand the world. For example: If you're following Leo Bloom from Ulysses on a certain day and he crosses a street, you can abandon him and follow someone else.

He also offers some choice words about how games are failing to maximize the storytelling potential of the medium.

[WIRED: Q&A: Hobbit Director Guillermo del Toro on the Future of Film]

Bioneers Radio Show: From Soap Operas to Avatars

[Updated: Bioneers Radio informed us that the link I posted is no longer active, so I've uploaded the audio to the Dancing Ink Productions website. You can download or listen here.]

This past fall Rita J. King and I had a great time speaking at the annual Bioneers Conference. Our panel included Bill Ryerson of Population Media, who does amazing work around storytelling, especially developing soap operas with fact-based educational content for developing countries. And their work is having amazing impact.

The Bioneers conference organizers turned the panel into a radio program with supplementary interviews that is being aired on 320 stations worldwide.

You can listen to it here: From Soap Operas to Avatars.

RECLAMATION at the Imagination Station

Paint A Burnt House from Imagination Station on Vimeo.

In preparation for the Big Inch Block Party this Saturday in Detroit, Queen MAB has again worked her magic.

Artist Marianne Audrey Burrows first blew my mind when she showed up at the Imagination Age Salon with the Loveland crew. She'd never been to NYC before and she wanted--needed--to paint. Watch the video and see for yourself what she did to the garage.

Queen MAB paints energy. In RECLAMATION at the Imagination Station in Detroit, she owns that place, even though it's about to be torn down within days.

The above video, beautifully shot by Stephen McGee, captures Marianne's magnificent willingness to spend so much intense effort (with cracked ribs, by the way) to create beauty in a house that has experienced "death due to incomplete arson."

If you want to know more about Loveland, click here or watch my recent presentation.

Thank you Jerry, Mary Lorene, Alan, Larry, Josh, Marianne and everyone who works so hard to make Loveland one of the most amazing projects happening on planet earth right now.

And please consider supporting public art in Detroit, starting with Monumental Kitty.

Pretending to be an Avatar You're Not

My Second Life avatar, Eureka Dejavu, with a friend request from Khannea Suntzu.

An avatar I've never met is trying to get me to agree to pretend I've been playing her all along.

This reminds me of the trailer that I just watched for the new Angelina Jolie movie, Salt, in which Evelyn Salt, a hard-edged interrogator, grills a captured Russian for intel. The link below is in Russian because the "official" trailer had embedding disabled.

Anyway, it sounds way more hardcore in Russian.

Here's all you need to know to follow along:

Russian: "The name of the agent is Evelyn Salt."

Angelina: "My name is Evelyn Salt."

Russian: "Then you are a Russian spy."

Inexplicably, Evelyn Salt then instantly flees to prove that she is not a Russian spy. It's worth a look just to see Angelina go back to brunette after the blonde intro.


Anyway, back to Keanna Suntzu, the avatar who has pinged me across multiple mediums to "enter into formal negotiations that you'd leak the rumor here and there that in fact you are 'my primary' i.e. you are the player of 'khannea suntzu.' The remarkable thing is we are spitting image duplicates. :)) You IRL (in real life) and me ISL (in Second Life)."

Wagner James Au blogged over at New World Notes about Keanna Suntzu back in 2006. She didn't look like me then although if I don't get away from this keyboard soon I might get glowing red eyes.

New Article in Saudi Aramco World: Al Andalus 2.0

I have a new article in the current issue of Saudi Aramco World Magazine called "Al Andalus 2.0." It tells the story of an experimental community in the virtual world of Second Life called Al Andalus that has spent the last three years exploring new ways that we can use virtual worlds to co-exist as different cultures.

I spent nearly four months with the Al Andalus residents, who in the physical world live in Canada, the United States, Russia, the United Kingdom, Singapore, Saudi Arabia, and Brazil among many other countries. I attended parties, Flamenco concerts, Compline Prayer Services, and morning prayers at the Grand Mosque. Each experience informed how individuals around the world from different cultures are using virtual worlds to create better understanding between cultures. Special Thanks to Al Andalus's Rose Springvale for tirelessly answering all my questions. (Though I still managed to get her kids wrong -- she has four children, not two as is listed in the article.) Most of all, thanks to the residents of Al Andalus for sharing their stories with me.

I had a great time writing the article and I hope it does justice to the important work of Al Andalus. The Al Andalus community is cultural relations at its finest. As Rita J. King says often, "Peace is not the absence of conflict: It is your attitude toward it."

[Saudi Aramco World Magazine: Al Andalus 2.0]

New Channel 4 Game, SuperMe, Treats Life as a Game

Channel 4's new game, "SuperMe" begins with the above video.

Channel 4's newest game, SuperMe, which just released today, is a game about achieving happiness. Like many of their games it is a web-based interface that connects with various social media, such as facebook. The story of the game is how to hack life. More specifically, perhaps, it reiterates the point that Life is a Game. It's another project commissioned by Alice Taylor and it has the fingerprints of a veteran gamer all over it.

SuperMe begins with the above video, which describes different ways that people achieve happiness illustrated by opinions from experts to first-person accounts. The solutions range broadly from choosing the right relationships to meaningful work to exercise. About midway through the video, game elements begin to appear, signaling to the viewer an additional lexicon for how to achieve happiness: Wisdom (shown below with one of the speakers meditating on the London Tube), Ability, Influence and Connections.

One of the speakers in SuperMe says he achieves happiness by meditating on the London Tube.

Players score and level up by doing things that can contribute to greater happiness. Scoring and linkages cycle through Facebook.



This is another provocative piece of work that indicates a trend that is finally coming to its own: Life is a game. If you play it like a game by choosing quests that are good for you, you level up in ways that are good to you.

[SuperMe]

Alice has a good write-up on her blog.

Man Replaces Eye With Video Camera

Canadian Rob Spence, who lost his eye in a shooting, has replaced it with a video camera.

Body hacking will let us turn ourselves into avatars with superpowers.

Tod Machover and Dan Ellsey: Releasing the Music in Your Head.

A few years ago MIT Media Lab hosted an event that took a look at the "new science of human adaptability" (this link includes live webcasts from the sessions).

In June 2007 MIT Media Lab and MIT held a think tank "Virtual Worlds: Where Business, Technology and Policy Converge," at which the topic was also well covered.

The fact of the matter is, whether it's Rob Spence or Aimee Mullins and her "cheetah legs," the human body is a work in progress. As ever, we're one step closer to the day when I can upload my consciousness into a snazzy new fembot. I know, I know, it's not that simple! But a cyborg can dream, can't she?

Big Bang Big Boom

BIG BANG BIG BOOM - the new wall-painted animation by BLU from blu on Vimeo is spectacular! Thanks to André Blas for posting it.

This video is high art. Check out Alexis Madrigal's post for the Atlantic, "A Poet's Take on Turning YouTube into art."

From Gov 2.0 to the Imagination Station

Earlier this spring Rita J. King gave a presentation at the O'Reilly Gov2.0 Expo and Summit. Her speech, "Technology is a Prism Held Up to the Imagination: A Vision of Reality for Gov 2.0 Looking Forward" in her speech she described the concept of the Imagination Station, a community art, education and economic redevelopment project in Detroit under the auspices of Jerry Paffendorf.

The project is one step closer to becoming a reality. A website has appeared with a more detailed project summary and Jerry has begun documenting the process on his blog. Check out the description:

Imagination Station of Roosevelt Park is a nonprofit whose first job is to clean up 2236 and 2230 14th street, two blighted structures on the park facing the epic ruins of Michigan Central Station in Detroit's Corktown neighborhood. The house on the right will be renovated using sustainable green practices. The burned out shell of the house on the left will be disposed of and its boundaries used as a public art space. Through this process, the Imagination Station aims to create a replicable model of redevelopment fueled by traditional partnerships and grant practices, as well as new social media techniques for fundraising, storytelling, and volunteerism.

Community engagement will be an essential element every step of the way as we reclaim these properties for the benefit of our neighborhood.

[The Imagination Station]
[The Great American Pixel]

Another Brick in the Wall

Image credit: Chris Vander Hoek.
NPR pinpointed a trend today that's been evident since at least last year: major media lamenting so-called "qualified" grads who refuse to take jobs that they perceive as beneath them. This isn't the first time The New York Times has published a woe-is-me article about "perfectly qualified" grads refusing to take jobs. I was an a panel at Ernst&Young's Entrepreneur of the Year event last fall to talk about this issue--after I read the extremely long article about the unemployed twins I had no idea what any employer would even hire them to do. These grads aren't perfectly qualified for the reality of the modern workforce just because they have degrees, and continuing to perpetuate this myth is doing far more harm than good.

The worst part is that entrepreneurial solutions are seldom if ever mentioned in such articles, which is as inexcusably egregious as New York mag's cover story about the suicide of Dalton's Teddy Graubard in which the reporter hacks away at all the possible reasons that this promising young man might have killed himself but never bothers to mention, even in passing, that one of his prescription medications has a known possible side effect of increased "suicidality." I learned this myself in ten seconds of Googling.

The education system still pits individuals against each other and the administration (Teddy Graubard, it should also be noted, jumped to his death after he learned that Dalton had been secretly monitoring his laptop, suspicious that he might cheat on a Cicero exam because he was out sick for a week when the material was taught) rather than fostering a spirit of collaboration necessary for thriving in the modern workplace. According to these articles, many young people perceive a "low rung" as being "beneath them" instead of understanding that any and all opportunities can be segued into better positions, greater challenges and more contributions.

NY Mag also reported this week on why parents hate parenting, which again seems to amount to a vicious circle created by the outdated American education system. In the effort to perfect the child's solitary, competitive academic life, the parents are forced to browbeat their children into doing massive amounts of homework. The workforce, however, is no longer predominantly solitary. It's collaborative.

The most successful careers are built on the adventure of the process. It isn't so much the idea that you're on a low rung at the start, but rather that you're a character in your own story and it has to start somewhere. As long as you can get yourself out of your parents' basement, put a roof over your head, feed yourself and begin your adventure toward whatever heights you'll ultimately prove capable of, you'll get somewhere. You may not know where, or how, and it might not be super glamorous at the very beginning, but no adventure would be as fun or rewarding if the conclusion had been revealed by a crystal ball at the onset.

The idea that a degree alone qualifies anyone in such a competitive world is laughable in itself, a remnant of an outdated model of "success" and completely beneath the publications that insist on reporting it as fact just because that's the way they're used to thinking. This isn't to say that a degree isn't a fundamental part of future success in many (but absolutely not all) cases. Many of the most employable young people have been forced to educate themselves, find mentors or use the internet to learn skills related to technology.

Very few college students find fabulous jobs immediately upon graduation, and often, the reality of those jobs, with their bureaucratic shackles and other reality-based limitations that tend to prick the balloon of a young person's idealistic expectations, aren't as great as one would have expected, leading to nostalgic longing for the relatively carefree existence of, say, living with your parents or in a dorm with a bunch of other people between the ages of 18-22. The media trend toward pitying the young grads creates the impression that disillusionment is utterly unique to this generation when in many ways this generation has it better than any that came before with regard to creating their own realities and finding meaningful work.

Why not report on the great success of young entrepreneurs who collaborate on improving reality and in so doing, surprise themselves by seeing that they've improved their own lives? There are lots of them. While many of their peers remain out of the game through self-imposed exile to parental safety, such young people with vast amounts of get-up-and-go will be the bright stars of the new global culture and economy. There's nothing to wait for. Just try something, especially if your parents are still picking up the tab into your twenties. Create it yourself if you can't find a place where you seem to fit, and find people to work on the project, idea or business with you. One thing is for sure--not much is ever going to happen when you're alone in a basement.

Interview with a Robot

"Friendship is when we team together to accomplish something important," said the robot when interviewed by a reporter from The New York Times. This must-watch interview reminds me of my summer of AI, when I spent weeks chatting with various AI programs and came away realizing that many humans actually seem like AI programs, which is almost more disconcerting than a robot's abilities resembling those of a human.

Milton Cook, "Deadication" & #TCOT

Sometimes on Twitter I want to follow someone, "just because." I discovered Milton Cook, shown above, via @deadvoter. I don't even know how I first came across @deadvoter, to tell you the truth. His or her profile: "#TCOT Political blog deadicated to Chicago and Illinois politics where the dead vote early and often."

The only thing I really know about #TCOT is that once in a while @queenofspain fires back at its ideology. But what is its ideology? When I searched, I discovered this report from the "Top Conservatives on Twitter." It's worth reviewing.

Top headlines for breaking news from top conservatives on Twitter (by the way there are nearly 7,000 of them and counting, according to the report--what's the criteria for designation at the top, I'd love to know), include the perception that President Obama's Independence Day address hurled an insult at the Founding Fathers by referring to them as "men of property and wealth." Which they were.

Anyway, Milton Cook, I will follow you and see how it goes.

Computer Chess Mind Melds with Adorable Brainiac

My friend Christian Renaud posted this image of his daughter with an amazing caption:

"She's scary good at chess, Just like her sister. Out of the blue during this game, she executed a rochieren (queen side/long castle). When I asked her where she had learned that move, she said, 'The computer does that when I play it sometimes.'"

Punk Jews in NYC

Punk Jews-Work in Progress from Evan Kleinman on Vimeo.

Cool Hunting reports on a new documentary recently funded by a successful $10,000 drive on Kickstarter.

The documentary includes interviews with Jewish hip-hop artist YLove, so the definition of "punk" is cast beyond the 1970s and 80s-era definition. YLove is quoted describing how he has experienced racial prejudice within Judaism.

These kinds of stories are gateways to better understanding between people and cultures. Music, especially alternative music, provides a nexus point for shared interest across cultures. Similar to Josh Asen's I Love Hip Hop in Morocco, Punk Jews looks like it would be a great cultural relations piece.

Cool Hunting: [Punk Jews]

Prince Declares the Internet Over

Prince has declared that the internet is over, Mashable reports.

I love Prince--always have. Remember when he changed his name to an unpronounceable symbol and left it that way for seven years?

Five Interesting Observations by Alice Taylor

Image credit: Artwork_Rebel.


Alice Taylor, who we've blogged about before has been busy launching and commissioning new games per her remit at Channel 4. In the midst of that, she casually drops the below five games, culture and technology avisements:

1. Android is going to be glorious. Apple has fucked up, this year, bigtime.

2. Facebook games that are designed to push your "addiction" buttons (c.f. Farmville) rather than your general-enjoyment buttons may make money in the short term - and are training wheels for the gaming masses - but will backfire on their creators over the long term. Like pop-up ads. "Ugh".

3. There is yet another giant gaming supernova in our near future, somewhere. The speed of success these days is extraordinary (and the speed of crashes, too: like Bebo). Like giant waves. Lots of paddling too fast at the last minute to attempt to get on.

4. Romance/love, the genre, is spectacularly underexplored.

5. It's finally - finally - time to buy a PS3. Joe Danger! LBP2!

Since my Xbox appears to have met the red ring of death recently, I find her last words of advice very exciting.

Wonderlandblog: [5 things I'm thinking right now]