“The next real literary ‘rebels’ in this country might well emerge as some weird bunch of anti-rebels, born oglers who dare somehow to back away from ironic watching, who have the childish gall actually to endorse and instantiate single-entendre principles. Who treat of plain old untrendy human troubles and emotions in U.S. life with reverence and conviction. Who eschew self-consciousness and hip fatigue. These anti-rebels would be outdated, of course, before they even started. Dead on the page. Too sincere. Clearly repressed. Backward, quaint, naive, anachronistic. Maybe that’ll be the point. Maybe that’s why they’ll be the next real rebels. Real rebels, as far as I can see, risk disapproval. The old postmodern insurgents risked the gasp and squeal:shock disgust, outrage, censorship, accusations of socialism, anarchism, nihilism. Today’s risks are different. The new rebels might be artists willing to risk the yawn, rolled eyes, the cool smile, the nudged ribs, the parody of gifted ironists, the ‘Oh how banal.’ To risk accusations of sentimentality, melodrama. Of overcredulity. Of softness. Of willingness to be suckered by a world of lurkers and starers who fear gaze and ridicule above imprisonment without law.”

– David Foster Wallace, “E Unibus Pluram” (1993), troisen

Elle est debout sur mes paupières
Et ses cheveux sont dans les miens,
Elle a la forme de mes mains,
Elle a la couleur de mes yeux,
Elle s’engloutit dans mon ombre
Comme une pierre sur le ciel.

Elle a toujours les yeux ouverts
Et ne me laisse pas dormir.
Ses rêves en pleine lumière
Font s’évaporer les soleils,
Me font rire, pleurer et rire,
Parler sans avoir rien à dire.

“The next real literary ‘rebels’ in this country might well emerge as some weird bunch of anti-rebels, born oglers who dare somehow to back away from ironic watching, who have the childish gall actually to endorse and instantiate single-entendre principles. Who treat of plain old untrendy human troubles and emotions in U.S. life with reverence and conviction. Who eschew self-consciousness and hip fatigue. These anti-rebels would be outdated, of course, before they even started. Dead on the page. Too sincere. Clearly repressed. Backward, quaint, naive, anachronistic. Maybe that’ll be the point. Maybe that’s why they’ll be the next real rebels. Real rebels, as far as I can see, risk disapproval. The old postmodern insurgents risked the gasp and squeal:shock disgust, outrage, censorship, accusations of socialism, anarchism, nihilism. Today’s risks are different. The new rebels might be artists willing to risk the yawn, rolled eyes, the cool smile, the nudged ribs, the parody of gifted ironists, the ‘Oh how banal.’ To risk accusations of sentimentality, melodrama. Of overcredulity. Of softness. Of willingness to be suckered by a world of lurkers and starers who fear gaze and ridicule above imprisonment without law.”

– David Foster Wallace, “E Unibus Pluram” (1993), via

It’s a play on the idea of friction. It’s a game about presence. In reality, you play by checking-in, and you check-in by loading the page. Stick around for long enough and you’ll see other people come and go. I think the game works best if you’re in London, I don’t know how it will appear if you visit from somewhere else.

With each check-in the world gets busier. If enough people are online near to the newest player, then a chain reaction begins, and the world comes to life.

If the opposite of foursquare is bliss, then bliss is a place where every check-in means something, and where every check-in disrupts the network. Where everybody means something.

Sometimes picking up the threads is harder than I’d imagine. There are pages of ideas in my notebook, pulling me in different directions for Bliss, but they all need the same basic platform.

Furthermore, there are other ideas that call out to Bliss. The same but different. Parallel implementations of the core idea (which has so many surfaces it’s fast becoming less of a patchwork and more of a kaleidoscope). So I’m pleased just to have the blinkenlights in place on Bliss.

Join the network and you’ll see every check-in gently pulsing away. I promise this has nothing to do with my desire to keep the Christmas lights up beyond December.

Although it has everything to do with harmony and companionship.

It appears that I am very interested in turning services upon themselves, getting inside and pushing bits out to the sunlight. The more I use Twitter, the more I see it as only a place to discover content (over blogs, RSS feeds and Facebook, for example). That’s where the value is, and the most useful discoveries I make on Twitter are links to third-party websites. However, looking at my notes for when I first came up with this idea (in a car, en route to Wales), I habour a clear desire to leave Twitter.

My workflow for using Twitter is this – pick through the stream, load interesting-looking links in tabs, send them all to instapaper. All of which could be easily automated. So that’s what I did.

Here’s a thing which scans your twitter stream and runs the relevant links through a instapaper/readability-style parser. The result is a list of articles which I read easily enough in one place, and if I do need to know who shared the link on Twitter, then I can find my way back without too much difficulty. It took just over a week to build.

http://give-good-sunflower.heroku.com.

Sign up, try it out, see if it works for you. I’ll go back to Bliss and maybe something about the broheimification of the internet along the way.

From a Ballardian death-echo, to an anonymous, location-less installation. There are so many ideas that inform what Bliss represents, and yet it’s difficult to articulate the ideas behind the idea.

I haven’t an elevator pitch for this thing, and as much as I like the determinate nature of an idea that can only connect instinctively, something needs to give.

Bliss is a platform of play, but not yet a game. A toy but not a toy set. It’s a precipitation of ideas, a patchwork of layered passivity.

It’s the oncoming wave of social fabric. It is patchwork, the sinews of London laid out in two dimensions, embracing the friction.

I have hundreds of reference points that inveigle themselves into Bliss, and in this instance I don’t want to deny their validity. Interestingly, most of them are musical, and music is love.

“The clouds were very participative, the crowd was very precipitative.”

Bliss.

Features from the last week include:

- Enjoying the Websocket support in Mobile Safari.
- Inspired by the success and genuine usefulness of trainee, came up with an idea for using the Twitter Streaming API combined with node.js and #uksnow to get an idea of what your train, bus and bike journey to work might be. There seem to be plenty of options out there.
- A staging server. Why I didn’t have one before, I don’t know.
- More sound effects. I spent ages listening to almost all of the free audio clips on the internet. I remember doing the same thing a while ago for http://www.hello-operator.co.uk/.
- Some refactored code for correct scoring, which led me to re-think scoring and start writing a better method of measuring activity within the game.
- Thought about node.js as a service, and ready plenty of articles about managing node.js too.

Elsewhere, some of my ideas are being published in a new newspaper, called Hackers!. At £4 it’s pretty cheap, so maybe you’d like to buy a copy?

Progress continues, websockets in Mobile Safari are simplifying things nicely. Current thoughts are:

- checking-in to a network of people, not a network of locations
- rather the anonymisation of people than the personification of buildings
- a critical mass of presence, still a hippie commune bonafide

“Everywhere you look, there seem to be increasing signs that we are living inside a novel that JG Ballard started to write at the exact moment he died, a novel that takes the form of a reverberating hallucination that just keeps giving. Perhaps the novel/hallucination ends when Ballard himself is the most followed character on Facebook, his brain radiating astounding time-bending realities at the centre of the new post-internet universe where the numerous and multiplying levels of our existence interact.” via.

I want to create a location-based game where every check-in disrupts the network, the opposite of 4sq. I want to know what London looks like from the other side, I want a hippie commune bonafide.

I think we’re entering an acute period of self awareness, perhaps that is why I want to soften the edges, a smear across the lens?