Category Archives: Fun

The good things in life.

Dick Dale: ‘King of Surf Rock’ guitarist dies aged 81 – BBC News

Dick Dale: ‘King of Surf Rock’ guitarist dies aged 81

For me Dick Dale and the Beach Boys were “the California spirit” as seen from cold Germany. It was the future, where everything was sunshine and the girls were cool! It made me pull up my stakes and travel here before i knew what it meant and how hard it would be.

Just a couple of riffs get you there. All about the SLUDGE!

Thanks, man! I never met you, but I’ll miss you. Your music is an indelible part of my mind and journey.

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Simulation Conundrum I :: It Passed So Quickly

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“Odd,” he said.
“Odd?” She said.
“I think I am seeing something in the simulation!”
“Really, show me!”
“Oh, it passed. Interesting culture. Got all the way to meta communications. And there were several memes focused on empathy. But they degraded.”
“Sad…”
“The planet will recover. Let’s do lunch!”

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The rise of the ambient video game

zeldabotw-2018-04-21-10-471.jpgvia 3QuarksDailyTheOutline – The rise of the ambient video game – Link in the Korok Forrest ready to replace the Master Sword into the stone to start his Master Trials.

Lewis Gordon describes his recurrent experience with Nintendo’s hit and truly revolutionary “The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild.” He compares it to Ambient Music, which is also a genre I love.
Talking about the convergent emergence of video games and ambient music in the 1980s, he writes, “Shigeru Miyamoto, wanted to draw on his childhood experiences of climbing mountains and discovering lakes in the countryside around Sonobe, a town roughly an hour’s drive from nearby Kyoto and Osaka. His wish found expression in the original Zelda’s large, nonlinear and mythical pre-modern Japan. The designers, coders, and artists crafted a crude 8-bit landscape with the emerging computer-chip technology, the game’s deep, verdant greens a far cry from the concrete and steel dominating Japan’s cities and towns at the time.”

“Japanese ambient music of the 1980s reflected such concerns. Hiroshi Yoshimura released the album Green in the same year as The Legend of Zelda, crafting a work of almost unfettered naturalism, lush with shrubbery and the drip of water.”
“The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, […] has incredible grass. It undulates gently in the wind while the sun paints its tips yellow. Meadows turn into shimmers. Holding forward on the controller jostles Link, the game’s boy-hero protagonist, into a light jog, his weight only just displacing the greenery around him. In the evening I sit on the couch, letting the colours and sounds of the digital world wash over me, allowing my brain to slowly decompress. It’s a relaxation activity that slips nebulously into self-care, the video game equivalent of putting an ambient record on.”

This echoes my experience. I find myself drawn back into Hyrule after taking my time (more than 640 hours!) to complete the game and DLC in both regular and Master modes. I look for more Koroks (little surprises and puzzles hidden throughout the open realm,) help people in distress along the path ways, try to catch a better horse, or just watch a sun set on a mountain top with a dragon flying in the distance.

It’s the ambience of the game redeeming reality (to quote Kracauer) that draws me back and back again.

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Watching the painter painting…

With the sun hanging low on one of the last nice autumn days. Kate Bush singing about an Architect’s dream and painters in changing light.
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Chores done.
Sounds of birds, with Bertie, when her son was young. Indulgent? A parent’s right!
Being in the moment, all done and not wanting.
What a wonderful feeling to truly experience life.
All you have to do is be there.

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