Comic Report: Cages

This comic is famous and arty and not my thing. The characters are artistic types; they feel trapped, they must make art to be free... Wow, deep themes. I definitely felt like a philistine for not enjoying this comic book more.

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animated gif zombocom logo

The internet is not yet complete; there are still gaps. For example, today I tried to find an animated GIF of the zombo.com animated "flower" logo and couldn't find it. So I made one (with some blank space above and below for handy placement of caption text). Unfortunately, I'm a slowpoke at constructing animated GIFs, so I can no longer remember what I wanted this for. But if I ever remember, by golly it will be available.

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kinda-Puzzle-Hunts are everywhere, even SFMOMA

I went to SFMOMA today to play their ArtGameLab games that I mentioned a couple of days ago.

Though I only actually played the Bedcannon Game, a fun scavenger hunt in the permanent gallery plus a hide-in-plain-sight installation and a pretty darned cool thing at the end that dispenses a prize. Android programmers may get excited at one point. It was an excuse to move through the museum with focus and purpose. (Though I didn't make the same mistake that I did at the Brooklyn Museum Game. After playing this game, I took time to wander around the museum in a relaxed museum-browsing way, not in a blindered gaming way. And at the end, I found Waldo! Which just goes to show something.)

Super Going also had some material in the ArtGameLab. It was cool, but didn't seem like as much fun as the online version of their game. So if I was first encountering them at SFMOMA, I might have been excited. But since I've already had a chance to try it out, I thought "A museum ain't such a great place to be creative" and moved on. (When I wrote about Super Going before, it probably sounded bleak and empty. But it's not! I took on one of the "dares". And though I don't know other people on the service, there's a community there. And someone awarded me some points, I leveled up, I had the whole gamified thing going on there for a bit. Which can be satisfying.)

There was one activity that just seemed like a stinker and two that seemed more fun to read about than to participate in. Of those, one was a sort of Art Jargon bingo by Sudhu Temari and Benjamin Carpenter. But you couldn't just mark squares if you heard someone using an art jargon term. You had to carry out a sort of mime gesture for that piece of jargon. The other was a kind of Interpretive Text Mad Libs. That might have been fun if I'd come to the museum with someone else. But as it was, I would have been filling in the Mad Lib while being able to see what I was filling in. That seemed like cheating; worse, it seemed like it would lead to something not-funny.

Anyhow, I recommend the Bedcannon game; and if the other games sound promising to you, then you might like them, too.

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ArtGameLab, Super Going

@thacher has been interesting lately if you're a San Francisco person who likes pervasive games. (That's not unusual. If you're even halfway into ARGy stuff, yawta follow her.) She mentioned that the Elsewhere Philatelic Society would appear at ArtGameLab, a set of games set in SFMOMA, starting January 15th. Then she pointed out another contributor to that exhibit, Super Going. I visited their site and it reminded by of SFZero. Do you remember a few years back when I wrote about stumbling upon a game that ran like Mutual Dare with a scoring system? So I visited the SFZero site and it says... SFZero's been slow lately because a couple of the folks running it have been taking time to work on a new project, Super Going. So there you go.

If you're thinking of signing up for Super Going, friend me and let me know if you complete missions. I think you score in the game by completing missions and then getting points from your appropriately-impressed friends. So... I signed up before I found out about that. And now I'm thinking "What's the point of doing anything, I don't know anyone on this service." But if you sign up, I'll know you and I'll probably be generous with my points. Because who else am I going to give them to? ~~(Disclaimer: I'm not 100% sure that I, in fact, have any points to give out.)~~

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Just got back from the Mystic Fish interview with the folks from the Trenchwood Institute. Glad we weren't following Team Lowkey. It looked like they had some kind of art/science thing going on that ...