Month: September 2009

Rolling Stone

So get this, as if an injured spine wasn’t enough, now I get diagnosed with a kidney stone. Luckily it’s a relatively small one (2-3mm) so is supposed to disintegrate by itself, but along with the waiting process goes a lot of water drinking and some very painful interludes — pain medicine for the win.

But all of this, mixed with some serious stomach issues, means that I’m going ahead and cancelling next week’s PauseTalk — I just don’t have the energy or drive for it. Apologies to everyone who was hoping to attend, it should be back in November.

Assault Girls

The next film from Mamoru Oshii (Patlabor, Ghost in the Shell, Sky Crawlers) is Assault Girls, a live-action sci-fi flick starring Meisa Kuroki — who I must admit I have a crush on — and Rinko Kikuchi. It’s a follow-up to a planned trilogy that started with the short “Assault Girl ‘Hineko the Kentucky,'” below. Via Warren Ellis.

Happening in Tokyo

  • French-Cameroonian designer Serge Mouangue is hosting the “WAfrica: A Dialogue with Japanese Culture” event (October 3-23) at the French Institute in Tokyo, with the intent of “[introducing] Japan to Africa in previously unimagined ways.”
  • The Tokyo Game Show starts today at Makuhari Messe with two business days, but Saturday and Sunday (September 26-27) are open to the general public.

Web Trend Map

If you’re into the web and design, there’s a very good chance that you already know about Information Architect‘s annual Web Trend Map poster. Going one step further this year, iA teamed up with Craig Mod to create an online web app version of the map. The way it works is that when you populate a map with Twitter feeds, the system looks at all the links that are posted, and creates a “Trending Links” list, which appears in the sidebar on the left. It’s an awesome way to get a quick heads-up on what people — or “micro curators,” as iA and Craig describe them — are linking to and talking about. You need to have an account in order to create a map (and to do that, you need to purchase the original Web Trend Map poster), but anyone can access the maps already created.

My contribution comes in the form of my “Gamingsphere” map, which I describe thusly: “Tweeting games by people who play them, write about them, talk about them, and just plain love them.”