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The last lot of Lyddle End 2050 buildings go to the post office tomorrow. Then, that's finally it for the ones I'm sending out. You can still join in if you like, obviously, but you'll have to supply your own building. (And big thanks to the people who've already done that.) Deadline is the end of Feb. Then we need to think of a way of displaying them all, in the real world and online.
I've been playing Drop7 a lot recently. It's kept me up until 3 in the morning. I've missed tube-stops. I've stopped looking for work. It's extraordinarily good fun. But even I realise that walking along the street playing it is probably a stupid thing. However, the ability to play games on the tube, on the bus, in a queue leaves me feeling a little empty when I'm just walking along listening to music. I want to be doing something more. Maybe not playing a full attention game but I'd like to be playing a glanceable game.
WideNoise is quite like what I'm after. It's not really a game at all, it's a tool for measuring sound levels and sharing them on a map. But it's got just the right levels of interaction to make it playful while walking along. You poke at it occasionally, it makes some satisfying buzzing and you feel like you're engaged in something. It turns the walk into a project. It's another bionic noticing tool, encouraging you to pay attention to something about the city you're in. And the slightly nukepunk design helps too, it makes you feel like a technician and a member of Kraftwerk. If WideNoise had points, some kind of scoring system, it'd be perfect.
But of course it's not a game. It's a rather functional thing designed to crowdsource the measurement of noise pollution. And given the limitations of the technology it's only approximate. But it feels like a sign of something important - showing how simple sensors + people + lots more people can measure important things and make you feel good about doing it.
It snowed in London today. Not a big deal in some places but we've not seen this much snow for 18 years.
Good things:
Schools closed. The building we live in has been resounding with the extra-special laughs of children playing when they should be at school. Squared by their joy with the snow. Most of them have never seen this much.
London's delighted. There are snowmen all over Central London. People have come out of their offices and made snowmen. How splendid is that? Try as we might we can't be all cynical and miserable about snow. Not all of us anyway. This is enhanced because there are so many people living here from countries that see even less snow than we do. There was a regular flow of people outside the flat last night taking pictures of each other in the snow. Lovely.
Bad things:
People complaining about the collapse of the infrastructure. What do they expect? It doesn't snow much in London, should we be spending lots of money on the assumption that it might?
There are no other bad things.