Picture Blog: Transport vs. Technology

The near future sees a big battle between the need to transport and the use of technology.  A face to face meeting or a conference call?  A trip to the cinema or download a film from the Internet? Work in an office or at home?  Take a city break or play computer games for a weekend (surely not!)...?

Inform

I seem to be increasingly valuing information as more important than objects that I own.  Particularly unique and original information.  Having spent weeks this year sorting through files, papers and what seems like (but unfortunately is far from) everything in my room, I have refined my ideas on what I actually want to keep.

If it means something to me, it is important to me to keep it.  It seems that far to much does though, so its difficult to sort through my things.  Firstly, tackling those useless "objects", those things that aren't paper or have a use basically, there seems no point in keeping them unless they are on display.  Yet I still keep several collections of things since ts nice to look at them.  Yet they will be meaningless to anyone else and most likely binned when I'm gone.  So I have found myself taking pictures of things I know if I keep it will be even harder to get rid of them next time I do a sort out is helpful.  I can keep pictures of these things on a hard drive taking up an increasingly negligible space as technology progresses.

The information of the picture lasts far longer than the object that's now in the bin.  Ultimately this is true for everything on the Earth.  When the Earth is destroyed, its existence will still be noticeable to people in the future from the light that has been emitted from the sun and its consequential distortions.  An object can't be transmitted as light but a picture can be easily.

This works brilliantly well for all the paper I have lying around.  Its possible now, although its far too time consuming or expensive, to scan in and even have an OCR program read and index all these pieces of paper and have them searchable - accessible to everyone online perhaps - and have them actually utilised rather than stuck in the boxes on top of my wardrobe.

They will also be kept for a lot longer  - once transferred over the Internet, sent out in radio signals to satellites, broadcast across the whole galaxy.  Hopefully it will easily be possible to scan objects in the future to preserve them fully in the future.  If there is actually any value to any of the "information" we produce.

A quick thought (oh dear!)

To add to the "because I was bored" label, I was looking at the map of the underground in the back of my diary and for some reason wondered if it was possible to traverse every tube line by changing at every station (i.e. not staying on any of the trains for more than one stop).  I found one way if you count the DLR (it goes in a tunnel into Bank so I think thats okay) but couldn't do it without it.  Theres the difficulty of teh Waterloo & city only having two stops and the East London Line being very short.  Anyway, don't read this, there should be more interesting stuff on this page.

You could also get on at Old Street to add the other arm of the Northern Line to the trail.  If I do this I'll update this.

Locations (a 20min-ish blog)

As no one seems to read this, I might as well announce that I plan to set up a website about locations. I plan to have general locations which I find promote certain emotions and circumstances. Classic ones for me are in the built environment for example underground railway stations and multi storey car parks.

That is not really the subject of this post, but more the opposite - the irritation of the recurrent use of these in media - especially computer games. Although I personally love the underground stations that pop up in many RPG games, could we have something a bit more original? Some of the old classics, in particular I was thinking of Deus Ex, Rainbow Six, Metal Gear Solid & Half Life, there are many similar locations in the games:

• Warehouses
• Heliports
• Prison Cells
• Snowy Mountains
• Tunnels with or without trains in / air vents
• Lifts
• Ports / dockyards
• Generator Rooms
• Hotels
• and many more!

But we do we get fed up with dodging lasers and security cameras in what really could be almost anywhere without the graphics? I personally seem to play the games with a high priority to explore new virtual worlds, sometimes to annoyingly high detail!

A lot of the above involve transport systems - perhaps due to their generic set up and required functions that we are all familiar with but also because it adds a dynamic feel to the game. Certain locations, however, do seem to create certain moods and when done in the right way with a half decent story line they can be fairly emotional. The industrial style and scale of many, such as the furnace in Metal Gear Solid or the warehouses in Deus Ex add to the significance and dark side of the stories. This presumably helps suck the player into the world which is presumably what we want when we play games. Notably similar situations occur in films where the stories and moods are more vital, but I'm thinking of computer games today. Games give you the opportunity to play about in environments you may visit (or may just know about) such as a warehouse which you wouldn't get to do in real life - so in a way fulfills a real life desire. That seems to be why most games are based on real life situations which most of us won't get to experience - car racing, combat, mass management etc.

Notably the locations often make the most of what a character in the game can do - climb crates, swim underwater, shoot from a distance etc.

So could we get some other good locations? Here are some of my ideas (which may be in games I haven't played):

• a level whilst parachuting in mid air?
• a level on an icy slope with ice buildings?
• more real life landmarks like in some early Rainbow Six games
• mines / construction sites
• fields of crops such as maize
• offices with particular purposes - e.g. stock exchange (okay, the bank in Raven Shield was good)
• a level on a motorway such as in Matrix Reloaded
• more sports grounds / stadiums

but I must admit that I still love the classic locations, especially the underground railways! I also wouldn't want to advocate pointless, purely made up and unrealistic locations (the inside of a plant that produces newspapers?)

Any more suggestions or are we limited?