material concern

The attack in Boston made me feel surprised and saddened, but when I saw video yesterday of the suspects, my initial feeling was of being totally sick to my stomach. Those images, and other information crowd-sourced from individuals as well as gathered from surveillance cameras helped authorities (and amateurs) focus the search.

It all brings up interesting questions about the future of how we share information, who accesses it, and how visual data can be misunderstood, and manipulated by bias. Fast Company has a really interesting article about how the site Reddit became a hub for amateur sleuthing using crowdsourced clues, with varying results. Image via.

I’m kinda obsessed…this site allows you to “design” your own shoes using a couple of their building blocks. I came across it because my friend Gretchen Jones did a great collab with them for Fashion Week. Hers is here:

unfortunately, the shapes they offer on the regular site are a little less interesting: but you can still have some fun, and the prices are very reasonable.

here’s what I made this am…and here’s the site.

last night, we were invited to check out XBox’s new game system.

Above: “flash mob” at the Galen Center due to so many four-square-ers checking in.

The night started with a pretty epic and totally over the top presentation of the new system: now called Kinect.

I say over the top because there was a moving couch, a fake elephant,

a suspendended, moving living room and oh, yeah, Cirque de Soliel.

But: since this presentation is all a part of E3, I’m guessing most of the people there will be at presentations all week and Xbox wanted something over the top to stand out.

But, I kinda feel that Kinect stands out all by itself.

It uses no controllers, it recognizes your movements, and you physically move to play or interact.

After the crazy show we headed to Loft 7 for the party, and to get to play the game.

below: Xboxed out the building.

We’d already played an earlier version: but it was pretty much perfected this time. I played a couple of the games and it was honestly really awesome. The graphics are really cartoony, which i kinda prefer on the sillier driving and dodge ball games, and you can now play with a partner. The games responded really, really well.

above: the driving game.

It was the most fun I’ve ever had playing video games.

Because you physically move with your friends: you feel like you are actually doing something and having fun together. Also: a bunch of the games like the driving game and the dancing game and really fun to watch too.

Above: watching from above while a kid played the dancing game.

My flip cam broke at the party: and I wish I had better pictures….the games were actually projected, as people were playing, all over downtown.

Probably horrible if you were trying to sleep: but pretty awesome for those of us playing on a roof.

i often feel like i have too much to do and miss things i should have gone to…but sometimes I feel like there’s nothing to do: which is almost never true.

Enter LuckyCal, which basically aggregates all your info: google calendar, bands you like, friends info, etc and tells you when and wht and what you are doing.

or what you are going to pretend you forgot.

I just think mail goggles, which prevents drunk emailing, is a great idea.

if it were april fools day I would think it was joke, but its not, so….this could come in very handy for some of my friends…you know who are….or i should say, yous knoe whooo yas ar (that’s my sober attempt at drunk typing).