My sister and brother-in-law got us a new camera for Christmas, the Panasonic Lumix DMC-TZ1K. Our old camera was second-hand when I bought it and was starting to go. I really love this new camera. It's got a Leica lens, baby! And it takes pretty decent video, which is nice when der kinder get up to something cute and I don't have to run and find the video camera. (Recommended by Cool Tools.)

Most of all, I love walking around with a camera in my pocket. Because I start seeing more, framing shots in my head even if won't take them. I have found that the more depressed I feel, the less I look. I'll look at advertisements when I'm low, and people's faces when I'm not.

I usually don't like taking pictures of people, but this guy kept talking to me about the poinsettias perched on the dumpster while I snapped away:

After putting this on Flickr, I wryly smiled on seeing the ".gne" extension in the URL, referring as it does to Game Neverending, a game / MOO / social space that was started by Ludicorp which then went on to build Flickr. I spent far too much time playing around in GNE, swapping pieces of paper for gold nuggets, exploring strange places, combining things in silly ways. GNE, as its name implied, was an "infinite game," as put forth by James Carse in Finite and Infinite Games: "An infinite game has no fixed rules or boundaries. In an infinite game you play with the boundaries and the purpose is to continue the game."

This interview with Stewart Butterfield waaaay back in 2003 is kind of interesting. Most amusing part:

MS: If Ludicorp were forced at gunpoint to make an action shooter for the Xbox-or-something, and money were no object, what would you make?

SB: After a long discussion around the office we settled on three concepts - all of which should be available sometime in 2009.

* Paleolithica! - A "shooter" (slings, spears, rocks) of Cro-magnon vs Neanderthal, set in and around the Pyrenees, Catalonia, Basque Country and the Langedouc. Advance your combat skills by developing new linguistic practices to co-ordinate with your fellow fighters. (You could also get into hand-to-hand combat and rip out each others' throats! Quest for Clans of Cave Bear Fires!!)

* Library Bookbomber! - Set in the Library of Babel, you play Borges the nearly-blind Librarian battling a non-denumerable infinity of foreign-speaking janitors while hopping from low-ceilinged hexagonal room to low-ceilinged hexagonal room. Drop books on them, throw books at them: do anything you can do prevent them from kicking you out and bringing on the cataclysmic "closing time".

* Nanoswarm! - If the budget really allowed for exploration, custom hardware would be the way to go! Imagine some kind of consumer productization of a local positioning system [like a spatially tracked ring or stylus] that gave the players gestural expression. Then, the game could involve gesturally shaping the behavior of billowing swarms of nanobots dancing in the air between combatants.

But first, we will finish GNE.

Too bad we'll never see the Borges game, or GNE for that matter. But hey! Re-read the Nanoswarm bit, it looks like... Butterfield invented the Wii!

Hopefully, more pictures to come. The photo album here needs more stuff.

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