D’log :: blogging since 2000

Many were disappointed with the videogame Unreal Tournament 3, which was rush-released for the PC at the end of November in order to hit the Christmas market. The clunky demo was a warning. When the retail game arrived on my PC it certainly looked lovely, but there was still too much that was wrong and unfinished. And it simply lacked the fun of UT2004. If you ever played the earlier UT2004 (the best single-player shooter ever made) then you’ll know that it was some measure of UT3’s failure that it actually managed to make the ONS-Torlan map from UT2004 tepid and unexciting and anything but ‘classic’. But I didn’t eBay my copy of the game, in the hope that fan-made PC mods and official patches might eventually infuse some fun back into it. Many hoped the same. Yet, as Strategy Informer wrote on 24th June 08…

“The game is still available at a rock-bottom cost of ten dollars, yet the player base hasn’t improved. No-one’s playing the current versions”

But now, eight months after release, an important breakthrough seems to have happened. It’s the June-released WAR-Torlan Winter map, created by some blessed mod-maker by the name of Sanch3z. Unzip his Torlan Winter into your My Games folder, load it up — and you have a well-polished UT3 Torlan map that’s orb-less, river-less, has the same linked node set-up as Torlan does in UT2004, and is generally as close to the original UT2004 single-player map as we’ll probably ever get in UT3. And his Torlan is deliciously snowy, reminding me of the best UT2004 map (Arctic Stronghold). Wonderful. Suddenly UT3 is worth its current budget price, just to play this one map.

Oh, and if you do play UT3, you might want to choose to be the red team rather than the blue. Why? Because the red team wins more often, it seems…

“In an analysis [ in the journal Cyberpsychology & Behavior ] of 1,347 matches between elite teams playing Unreal Tournament 2004, researchers at the University of Denmark in Copenhagen found that the red team won 55 percent of the time.”

Darn. I always play the blue team.

And while I’m on the subject of patching up the PC version of Unreal Tournament 3, and generally trying to rescue it from dumbed-down console-port hell — there’s a new free Community Bonus Pack (8 new fan-made levels) from the same people who made the Community Packs for UT2004. There’s even a sophisticated pseudo-mod (in beta) that attempts to junk a great deal of the horrible console-oriented menu system, and to make it more PC-centric.

Even Epic Games seem to be showing some corporate responsibility for their ill-formed game. A new official v1.3 patch is due early next week. And Epic are putting $1-million toward the Make Something Unreal community competition, phase one of which has just finished. It promises a shed-load of new fan-made maps, maps that can’t help but be better than most of those that shipped with UT3.

Maybe we’re finally starting to move towards an overhauled UT3 that’s actually fun and has some genuinely exciting maps to play — like UT2004 was and still is. Let’s hope so.

Visiting Britain:— Jeff Randall argues in favour of stay-at-home British tourism. Just don’t forget to pack your ultra-lightweight waterproofs and an umbrella // Cider-making courses at The Shropshire Apple Trust. Also their annual Apple Day on 11th Oct 08 // A new direct train to the seaside. Stoke-on-Trent + Wolverhampton + Birmingham all have a new direct (no-changes) inter-city train service to Weston-super-Mare. The train (just the one) seems to run only on Saturdays, and is likely to be summertime-only. Times:- 11:06am from Stoke, pulling out of Birmingham at 12:06 — pulling into the seaside at 2 o’clock // The AA Book of the Seaside. Every mile of the British coastline mapped and described for landlubbers, as if in a road atlas. A little old now, but the coastline’s (mostly) still there // Literary Landscapes of the British Isles: A Narrative Atlas (2nd Edition, 1981) — although it seems the author had never heard of Tolkien, Auden, Kilvert, or Mary Webb. And you won’t find more than a one-line mention of Arnold Bennett and the Potteries // The encyclopaedic Guide to Staffordshire and the Black Country, The Potteries and the Peak (2004) // A technical manual for walking in London, a free wiki version of a 280+ page book by Simon Pope // Old men’s bicycles // 12 Go To The Hills: a weekend break to the Clent Hills “for artists working in live art from the West Midlands conurbation. A chance to play in the great outdoors, and to explore how our city-based practices fare when set free in an “open space” without walls”. 9th - 10th August 08. Deadline: 21st July 08.

West Midlands:— I hear that Culture West Midlands is to be scrapped within the next 12 months, and their remit is to be absorbed into Arts Council England: West Midlands and partners // The East Midlands and West Midlands offices of Arts & Business have been merged // Wolverhampton’s Light House has a new FLIP Animation Festival blog. FLIP is calling for proposals for participation in the 2nd ‘Drawing in the Digital’ one day-symposium // Birmingham’s Hunt Emerson brings Edward Lear’s famous nonsense poem “The Owl & The Pussycat” to The Beano in comic-strip form // Couldn’t get a ticket for WordCamp UK? You might just be able to lig the pubmeet social-event // BIAD is currently validating a fab new M.A. degree in Queer Studies in Arts and Culture, although it seems it’ll be taught wholly within Fine Art at Margaret St. so applicants probably shouldn’t expect a great deal of history // Walsall Council is listening // Back when I was reading weekly Judge Dredd strips in 2000AD I never imagined that Mega-City One was located in a near-future West Midlands // The geo-located M6-motorway comedy sketches from “230 Miles of Love” are being made available shortly for the iPhone2.0, through iphonetours.com // Quel surprise! The Jewellery Quarter is not on the list of new UNESCO World Heritage Sites // The 2nd West Midlands Meadow Gallery, of landscape/outdoors art, will be staged at Attingham Park in Shropshire, in September 08 // “The best day out I ever had in Birmingham city centre” (video) // The 2nd Open University Creative Writing Workshop in Birmingham, for advanced creative writers. “Going Further, with Tim Reeves” is at the Central Library, 26th July 08, from 10am to 3pm. It seems to be free, but your ticket is dependent on submitting some quality scribblings beforehand // The Midlands Textiles Forum biennial exhibition “Common Threads” is now accepting submissions. Deadline: 31st July 08 // I finally found Birmingham’s “Play Me, I’m Yours” website // Flatpack unpacks £70k of development funding // I’m told that Walsall New Art Gallery will open seven days a week during August. No more turning up on a Monday only to find the place shut and bemused tourists knocking politely on the doors. Although the Walsall-Wolverhampton train service that would get me there is to be axed // British Design Innovation: West Midlands // I saw the Juginder Lamba retrospective exhibition a few days ago. He’s giving a free carving demonstration in Birmingham on 7th August 08 // New fears for The Public’s ongoing funding // No.17 Temple St., Birmingham city centre // Imaginary cultural cross-pollinations No.1: it could be interesting if Brummie Hair + Brummie Bonsai = Bonsai Hair? // Five new arts venues in the Midlands (sadly, not in our half), at a cost of £90-million // A sci-fi fan visits Birmingham for the first time. “It’s as though you know that there’s a proper city under there somewhere, you just can’t quite see it any more.” // Birmingham(Leamington?) photographer Ben Sutton: 26 Found People set, 50 Women in Their Cars set, and 37 Games Developers set // Very ’serious games’ at the The Flight & Train Simulator Show, at Birmingham’s Millennium Point, 8th Nov 08. You can knock me down with a feather if there’s more than three women there who are not booth-babes //

Knowing Cities:— The Arts Council has cancelled all the Architecture Week events across the UK — but London has still managed to put on a very vibrant-looking Festival of Architecture. It’s on now // GeoPress, a geo-tagging plugin for WordPress weblog postings. Now working on D’log, and working well — see a few test-use postings below. To be reserved for postings about less obvious places, or specific “hard to find” venues // Not Yet There, a blog by Emma Cocker, a Senior Lecturer in Fine Art at Nottingham Trent University. She’s the author of, among others, the new review article on mapping and walking-based art practices in the UK, “Wandering: straying from the habitual path” // The first lengthy report on Manchester’s recent festival of psychogeography // Shrinking cities. The UK has 27 such cities, it seems. Although some of the ‘loss’ is probably because an illiterate underclass is binning the census forms // There’s to be a special themed issue of the Journal of Location Based Services, on neogeography (PDF link) // A comprehensive noise-map of all outdoor places in Paris // “Manifesto: Towards a New Humanism in Architecture” (2008) (PDF link). “It is clear that modernity, reason, and the notion of progress itself have come under intense attack from those disdainful of the humanist aspiration to transform the world.” // GeoTourGuide has a beta automated GPS audio-tour generator // Interesting use of Microsoft Virtual Earth to enhance a crime report from West Bromwich //

Publications:— Enemy of The People (PDF link), by Maurice Saatchi, wittily sets out a range of charges against New Labour // art.signal, a tasty free PDF art magazine from Spain. Five issues are available, with articles in Spanish and English. The latest issue is especially strong and promises great things // Colophon 2009 // Seen in W.H.Smith, the U.S. Extreme Weather magazine. I’m looking forward to the British version, Extreme Drizzle // Handmade blank leather books // RIP Michael de Larrabeiti, author of the Borribles trilogy //

Foto:— Old 35mm colour slides of early 1950s America, scanned by one person and placed on Flickr // The 3D renderings of Natalie Shau // The Saudek-influenced Russian photographer Sergey Belov // “Glass Photography for Dummies” is one of the many workshops and talks that are part of the British Glass Biennale in the Black Country. 23rd and 24th August 08, £35 // Big Mosaic unveiling event, 23rd Aug 08. Millennium Point, Birmingham // Wolverhampton photographer wins mountain photography gong // A new British GPS chip, AirWave1, should be in new digital cameras from spring 2009. It’ll auto-tag every photo with location information //

With two days to go before release, the British game The Lost Crown has risen to No.10 on the Amazon PC Games bestseller chart, on pre-orders and word-of-mouth alone. Congratulations to developer Jonathan Boakes, who’s shown us that a one-man home-brewed point-&-click adventure game can still mean business. Better, the game was made with free software, and so the game’s profits seem likely to be substantial.

The game’s U.K. cover art is now on Amazon, and the pre-order price has been reduced a little. And Matthew Bennett (who I know is local; he teaches videogames in Worcester) has written an Amazon review of the well-reviewed U.S. version of the game — although his review does have some plot spoilers.

Update: The day after I posted this, and with not a jot more publicity than my posting, it’s gone up to No.5.

Update: By noon on Saturday, the day after release, and sales are holding up well. It’s at No.6, and yet a search of Google News and Google Blogs for news/reviews of the game doesn’t even show up a basic press release. It’s entered the Amazon Top 100 of all videogame sales across all platforms, at No.94.

The weekly bookmarks digest (normal service will be resumed in Sept), and a day earlier than usual….

Fight!:— Birmingham’s twitter-fight // The Airship Destroyer (1909), a silent short in which fleets of German naval airships invade the British Isles // The history of contemporary water-pistols //

West Midlands:— Jake at MADE calls for a Birmingham datacentre to rival London’s Telehouse. Apparently, they don’t need to cost billions — a new Telehouse Europe data centre of 2,000m² recently opened in Paris, costing just 10 million euros. Although it reportedly requires the same electricity supply as “a town of 35,000 people” — perhaps something of a stumbling block // A potential new studio/gallery in Digbeth, Birmingham, called Moo Studios… “are looking for committed artists to rent space and exhibit together. The rent will be £35, all inclusive.” Interested? Submit a bio and pictures of some of your artworks to: moostudios *at* rocketmail.com // Congratulations to Deb, who’s been invited to design an “edible garden” for the autumn Malvern Show. My LOLcat-ish suggestion for the name:- “I haz a fud!” // Grab a Multipack; their next pubmeet is Sat 12th July 08 // A new EU-funded High Definition (HD) production studio in Coventry // Yet another local ‘monsters & fabulous creatures’ themed exhibition to add to my list. “Seeing Dragons In The Clouds: the art of imagination” is now on at the Bilston Craft Gallery, until 9th August 08 // RIPE Showcase at The Light House in Wolverhampton (there are publicity photos on Flickr), featuring the work of 16 West Midlands photographers. Until 7th August 08. There’s a tasty 12-page colour booklet for the show, but it doesn’t appear to be online as a PDF. Get networking at the “RIPE Party” on 1st Aug 08, from 7pm // Ben Neal reports on being Fluxed and flummoxed in Birmingham // The magnificent “St. George’s Horse” sculpture, part of a Flickr set of Michael Sandle’s September 07 exhibition in the grounds of Ludlow Castle in Shropshire // BINS blogs a well-informed letter in favour of keeping the present Central Library — although I can’t help weighing it against this plea from someone who worked there // The International Festival of Glass and British Glass Biennale 08, in south Staffordshire at the end of August 08 // Gigbeth music industry one-day conference, 6th Nov 08 // Want to deliver Birmingham’s Cultural Strategy? You have until 21st July 08 to apply for the job. A tip for the first day in the job:- put the existing Cultural Strategy document online, so we can all read it // I’m told the 4IP fund should open sometime in late July, which will allow Midlands new media companies a chance of between £20,000 to £1.5m of project finance. Adam Gee at Channel 4 has described it as… “quick and dirty seed money” // Moodle Wrestling, a horrible blood-sport in which puny academics are forced to battle against a wild Moodle. Free techie event on how to manage such bouts, on 7th Aug 08 in Wolverhampton // Birmingham’s IXIA is considering putting together an artist-led “Supplementary Planning Document” for Eastside. I’m wondering if this could be done in the form of an open-access wiki? // Rescue Geography: Exploring Eastside with mobile technologies, part of the lead-in to something called “LabOne: October Laboratory” in the Autumn // Rescue Geography blogs that the… “Big Plan for the city is currently being finalised” by consultants Turner Townsend and others // Rescue Geography also blogs that… “Richard Clay, one of my colleagues over in the [University of Birmingham] History of Art department, has just pulled in a big grant to work with archivists and curators in the city on the [architectural? history? of the] development of Birmingham’s suburbs” // Play Fair 08 is the UK’s main trade-fair for play. Yes, play is an industry and it’s booming. Play Fair is on 15th-16th July 08 at Stoneleigh Park in Warwickshire. “This highly focused, two-day event has free seminars, organised by Play England” // The Public gets an extra £3-million //

Objects and machines:— The Science Museum has a wiki that’s the seed of a universal dictionary of objects, although there are only 133 at present // A map of the future of making new objects (PDF link) // Sid Check’s “Machine Age” (1952), complete. For its original audience, this must have been a gripping bit of epic storytelling, compressed into just a few pages. I owned a copy (filler in some circa-1980 B&W Marvel reprint) as a child, lost it, and have been looking for it ever since. I think the Kirby-style machines in the first frame must have been a big draw for me, but now I find that the strip was originally published in 1952. So does that mean that Jack Kirby’s approach to drawing machines was inspired by this strip by Sid Check? // A blog with a heart. Literally // Big Executive Balls (video, 50mb) // MIT has a cloud //

Educashun:— I’ve long been deeply skeptical about most structured and test-based “e-learning”, especially for the post-14 age groups. The research shows that e-learning projects nearly always fail, although I admit that £1m+ high-budget ’serious games’ that seek to convey complex and tacit knowledge might be a very different matter. Tara Brabazon expresses her own doubts about e-learning, in the THES newspaper. Although, as an old leftie, she predictably and somewhat bizzarely blames… Mrs Thatcher. One might more plausibly suggest that the rise of a certain kind of dumbed-down “e-learning” (from the late 1980s onwards) was a by-product of Thatcherism’s historical failure to wrest state education from the iron grip of the “all must have prizes” brigade // “Schools kill creativity” (video) (hat-tip: Joanna Geary) // Simon Woodroffe says the paranoid “cotton-wool culture” in our schools… “will rob Britain of the next generation of entrepreneurs” // A report by the Children’s Commissioners said that Britain is failing children in numerous key areas — who knew? Including cutbacks in the arts services and youth clubs. As the DEMOS think-tank reported in 2006… “79 per cent of local government arts officers were expecting their budgets to be at standstill or to be cut. Eighteen English local authorities - one in 20 - have dispensed with their arts services completely since 2002″. Then in early 2007, and without any consultation, Arts Council England cancelled all arts match-funding agreements with all local authorities. Then the Spring 08 cuts hit // The declining birth-rate has already caused thousands of schools to close and there are hundreds of thousands of empty desks in schools that stay open. Now the same trend seems set to cause serious recruitment problems at British universities by 2020. And this will come on top of: increasing overseas challenges; variable quality of university management; ever-more rapid changes in industry requirements; the lure of the private sector for under-valued lecturers; and the ongoing retirement of the ‘baby-boomer’ generation of lecturers //

Censorship:— Loopy new legislation in Russia seems set to ‘ban’ goths and sundry other teenage subcultures, Halloween, St. Valentine’s Day, and the sale of toys that look like monsters, among many others. Should a nation spinning into a demographic death-spiral (U.N. figures: 148 million people in 1992, 100 million by 2050) risk massively accelerating the process by encouraging the more imaginative kids to psychologically “pack their bags” for a better life in the West? // Blog or die? How about blog and die? A new law in Iran would punish those setting up a weblog — with the death sentence // Following the recent legal ruling on a censorship case there, an Australian artists’ magazine tries to turn Prime Minister-baiting into a national sport // In The Guardian:- “censors were once sent packing. But now they’re back”. He’s talking about the UK // Tate Liverpool has pinned up a notice suggesting under-18s shouldn’t see some of the Klimt paintings on show at Gustav Klimt: Painting, Design and Modern Life //

Knowing cities:— “A short enquiry into the origins and uses of the term neogeography” (PDF link) // A new Birmingham blog, Rescue Geography + interactive map // Ctrl-N slow-blog // Your personal clip-on urban sonar kit // Flickr neogeography pool // “Me, My Spouse and the Internet: Meeting, Dating and Marriage in the Digital Age” // Rethinking Space and Production: Henri Lefebvre today conference; Delft, Holland, 11th-13th Nov 08 // Playing shooters may improve your spatial orientation skills; or so says one of those dismal bits of psychology fluff that rests on a sample of a mere 20 people, all of them U.S. students // A computer can automatically geo-tag any photo by comparing it with those on Flickr // Still time to catch the 2nd international OpenStreetMap State of the Map conference. Limerick, Ireland, 12th-13th July 08 // Google Earth in a holographic? touch-sensitive interface (video) //

Foto:— At last! Nu-real photocompositing meets LOLcats. I buyz print-on-demand photobuk, plz? // How to open and flex a newly-arrived oversized print-on-demand photobook // An exhibition of Japanese photography monographs (aka photobooks) at the British Museum // The UK’s make-it-up-as-we-go-along ‘laws’ on photography get Boinged // “Eminent Domain: contemporary photography and the city” in New York // Iran launches missiles Photoshop //

Perfect holiday reading for your isolated cottage:— Having seemingly slipped out-of-copyright in the U.S. and Canada (?), the Midlands novel Cold Harbour (1924) has been reprinted as a fine new limited-edition hardback of only 400 copies. Cold Harbour is a macabre psychological horror novel set in the Black Country to the west of Birmingham, and the novel drew praise from no less than H.P. Lovecraft… “told with singular skill through the juxtaposed narratives of the several characters … an ancient house of strange malignancy is powerfully delineated … approaching absolute perfection.” Sadly, it seems that while the old copyright regime (life+50) saw Cold Harbour out-of-copyright in the UK by 2004, the new regime (life+70) means it’s back in copyright until 2024. // The author, Francis Brett Young (1884–1954), also set a long series of other novels in the Black Country, south Staffordshire, Birmingham, and the Welsh Marches. // More information from The Francis Brett Young Society // There’s a decent entry on the man on Wikipedia.

I’ve finished bumbling my way through writing “A short enquiry into the origins and uses of the term neogeography” (PDF link), and it’s now online.

(larger version, 220kb).

I went down to the Open 08 exhibition in Wolverhampton today. Open 08 “showcases some of the best artists based within the region”. It’s a neatly-presented exhibition and there are many pleasures in the two rooms. There’s also a more general pleasure to be found in Open 08, in that the curators have mostly avoided one of the main problems — a superb technique applied to humdrum subject-matter — seen in many county and tri-county ‘open’ art shows.

One work in particular gave me a physical shiver — the magnificent large canvas “Black Country Night” by Robert Perry (7′ x 6′), although the frame was mediocre. Jessica Callan’s semi-interactive sculpture “Portrait of a Living Dog” also raised several chuckles. The rest of the works noted below only worked for me intellectually, but work they did. By the entrance, David Miller’s large photograph “Doom 3″ sums up both the ‘chrysalis’ essence and the ’shut-away’ conformity of the goth subculture. Also take a look at Miller’s “Theatre” series on his website. Caroline Ali’s “Bee and Fly Studies” is magnificently detailed, and evokes the best pencil & watercolour nature studies of the 19th century artists who took Ruskin’s dictum… “go to nature in all singleness of heart” to heart. Unsurprisingly, Ali was shortlisted for The Jerwood Drawing Prize in 2007. Her “Bee and Fly Studies” is neatly paired with Sandra Masterson’s large and deliciously-earthy hanging “Haldon Forest (Soil Samples)”.

It was good to see a half-dozen works with strong pop surrealism / lowbrow leanings, fitting choices for a gallery with perhaps the strongest collection of Pop Art outside London. Ryan Patrick Everson’s fabulous painting of a boy and his monsters (6′ x 5′) was for me the most impressive of the lowbrow works, and it repays close attention to the details. Amazingly, Everson’s distinctive name is almost completely unknown to a Google search — someone please get this artist a website.

The show also squeezed in some video art and installation, but so far as I could tell there were no interactive / computing-powered works. Of the two installations, Sabrina Stumberger’s “Memories No.2″ was the most intriguing — a tiny room with a wall of glass rods, onto which was projected a beautiful video loop of an almost-never-glimpsed face.

I went around the show twice, and was very pleased I went — although I don’t think that Wolverhampton have the lighting-design in their impressive and newly-built extension quite right yet.

Quirk:— Device Gallery: the Fantastic Contraption exhibition + Stephane Hallieux’s contraptions // The amazing Cadbury’s Creme Eggs contraption (video) // A short illustrated survey of gay androids // Unintentionally surreal medical mannequins // The 6th Buxton Puppet Festival, 28th July - 2nd Aug, in the nearby Peak District — includes master puppeteers from India and Japan, and a… “shadow puppet retelling of Beowulf” // The Bicycle Film Festival, from 9th-12th July 08 — yours for a plane ticket to the U.S.A. Or you could just DIY, by strapping a camcorder to the handbars of your Pashley Guv’nor and heading off on the 500+ rider bicycle trip from Birmingham to Oxford, on Sun 6th July 08 // Mapping caffeine intakes // The teacher voice //

West Midlands:— My Flickr photo-set from the opening day of the £55m Public art gallery in West Bromwich. More pics here // The Custard Factory’s ‘Rhubarb Radio’ station (from Dynamic Arts) seems to be firming up. I met Dan at the Public opening, and he tells me it’ll include interviews as well as music. A handy Created in Birmingham posting later filled in the rest of the details // Work has started on building Worcester’s new £60-million library and history centre. I’m guessing it might have a corridor or two serving as an arts exhibition space? // The Telegraph rounds up the multi-million new-build property developments in the West Midlands, although a slightly over-ambitious sub-editor has slapped on a headline declaring that we’re… “the new Beijing”(!) // The Artists’ Access to Art Colleges scheme now has places available at Wolverhampton, Hereford, Worcester, Derby, and Birmingham City University // West Midlands allotment holders notice more thefts of food from allotments, as poor families become even poorer // Killriculum, a proposed new £175k horror/sci-fi feature-film that seems to originate from Hereford, and is pencilled in for a premiere at the October 09 Birmingham Film & Media Festival // The Ansel Adams exhibition is now on at the The New Art Gallery Walsall, and the West Midlands Open 8 biennial exhibition opens at Wolverhampton tomorrow // Rousette has blogged about attending the annual ‘Happiness Lecture’ at the University of Birmingham, this year given by the Poet Laureate, Andrew Motion // The new Custard Factory website is live now, and very nice it looks too // Birmingham International Comics Show invites writers to pitch an idea for a Tharg’s Future Shock. The final three will face an audience vote at BICS 08, with a prominent 2000AD artist illustrating the winning idea for publication. The winner will be paid at 2000AD’s commercial rate. To enter send full contact details, the title of your story, and a one line description in less than 8 words to: shane *at* thecomicsshow.co.uk // A report from the London launch of Channel 4’s £50m 4IP media production fund, a chunk of which is set to be spent in the West Midlands // Submerged magazine is in development by Emma Wooley, and it plans to cover electronic music in Birmingham and thereabouts // Edward Burne Jones: Magnificent Dreamer, a two-hour walk around Birmingham’s famous son, with Antony Clayton. It’s on Sunday 6th July 08, starting at 3pm // Birmingham websites seem to be sprouting faster than dandelions in a wet summer — another three this week, Digbeth.org: Digbeth is Good (goodly creative doings in Digbeth), LOLitics (dull Birmingham local politics photos, enlivened with LOLcat captions), and Eclectic Connections (images of beautiful young models from the Midlands and beyond, by a BIAD graduate). Many more, of the blog variety, at birminghambloggers.com, which is currently mailing out a survey for local bloggers to complete // Take a peek at the fine 2006 street-art murals inside Birmingham’s Gamestation shop // Yes, that looks like Broad Street to me… // Following the major 2006 report Making it to Market: developing the market for contemporary craft, the support org Designer Maker West Midlands now requires a freelance consultant/researcher to research the potential for the development of markets and showcasing activities for West Midlands designer makers. Pay is £11k for “approximately 35-45 days work” during Aug 08 to Jan 09. Deadline: 18th July 08 // Starting on 1st Aug 08; the annual photography competition at the Birmingham Botanical Gardens // Birmingham’s annual Poet Laureate competition is now open for nominations. Deadline: 31st Aug 08 // Wolverhampton: gleaming city of the future, or so says a narrator who sounds deeply unconvinced (video) //

Publications & films:— Ten years too late, plans for another UK-localised version of the tired Wired magazine // The definitive book-length history of curry, now in paperback from Oxford University Press // A copy of the long-lost ‘long version’ of Metropolis appears to have been found, in South America // The three winners of the Jerwood Moving Image Awards, chosen from “a longlist of 30 films”, Sadly, no interactive media such as websites or games ever seemed in prospect // A new book, weighing in at 450 pages, Dungeons and Desktops: the History of Computer Role-playing Games //

Apparel:— The anti-paparazzi, anti-CCTV pair of sunglasses (video) — possibly a spoof? // Damir Doma menswear: I’ve blogged the fantastic Autumn/Winter 2008/9 collection before, and now here comes the Spring/Summer 2009 collection // Given the likely costs of fuel next winter, you may want to stock up on some of these //

Foto:— Covering photography examines the use of photographs as book-cover illustrations // The emoti-camera which only takes pictures when you’re, er… aroused // Photographers looking for backup storage could do worse than a portable terabyte (i.e.: 1000Gb) USB 2.0 hard-disk from Maplins, for £139.99 // The re-education police want to outlaw airbrushed photos in the UK // UK Press Gazette reports that police officers and community plods are still routinely ‘exceeding their powers’ with photographers. And in London the police are building a secret database of photographers (I can think of better uses of police manpower during wartime), which the courts have apparently just had to rather-too-hastily square with the Human Rights Act // Useless CCTV cameras //

Arts policy:— Conservatives outline their initial arts policies, including “a review of Arts Council England to clarify its role” and an “Arts and Parliament Trust” as a sort of cross-party think-tank to inform MPs about the arts // Lottery organisations ’sit on £1.7bn surplus intended for good causes’ // Following a Facebook campaign, The English Heritage Blue Plaques committee met couple of weeks ago and… “have agreed to undertake further research into potential locations where they can honour Kenneth Williams” // A summary of the new report “Creative Futures: building the creative economy through universities”. The report itself doesn’t seem to be online — is this another depressing instance of think-tanks publishing a press blurb without publishing the actual report online? // The many hidden costs of art attendance. Consider, also, the 2006/07 taxpayer subsidy that averages at £5.19 for each arts attendance (excluding nationwide events) // “Patterns of Arts Attendance in England” (2008) (PDF) // The Creative Scotland Bill crashes and burns under the weight of its own jargon // National Audit Office concluded in June 08 that… “Arts Council England does not have a clear understanding of the costs or efficiency of its grant-making” // The Progress on
Public Service Agreements review concluded in June 08 that… “The DCMS has failed to meet eight out of its 12 targets for culture and the arts” //

Knowing cities:— Will Google-style applied mathematics replace theory? // The Hidden City Symposium: Mythogeography, Writing, & Site Specific Performance (University of Plymouth, 4th October 08) // “Digital Yet Invisible: Making Ambient Informatics More Explicit to People” (2008) (PDF link) // Unimpressive websites for early geomicroblogging tools: ByNotes and Yahoo’s FireEagle // An abstract for “Wayfinding with a GPS-based mobile navigation system: a comparison with maps and direct experience” (2008) — the… “ineffectiveness of the GPS-based navigation system [ for urban walking in Japan is ] discussed”. Yes, you read that right — ineffectiveness //

Structures in landscapes:— Imagine if Andy Goldsworthy worked with artificial light, and was German // “I am so sorry. Goodbye” //

Pics from today’s grand opening-day at the £55m+ The Public gallery & building:— an opening-day set on Flickr // some pics on West Brom Blog, with an earthy review // A set from Volunteer Photographer // A small gallery of opening-day pics from The Express & Star // And Fused went to the press preview and took pics, as did The Guardian which has a few nice exterior shots.

The annual Garden Moth Count for the British Isles, until 6th July 08. Part of National Insect Week, which has a fine website // A paranoid hat-o-phobia stalks the West Midlands // “Civility wears a hat”, writes a Birmingham doctor // Forgotten Fruits. Mmm… gooseberry pie… // The joy of not knowing how to drive a car // John O’Groats to Land’s End by tractor // British boffins invent the power-steering suitcase, with built-in umbrella // In Search of the English Eccentric, a new book, published 15th June 08 // A West Midlands’ photography student, Amanda Jackson, photographs British eccentrics — and has just won a gong for one of her pictures // Sunny Snaps, the art of the commercial beachfront photographer // An Art History of British Surfing //

Typographica blog — which once sported a nameplate I designed for them, hem hem — chooses “Our Favorite Typefaces of 2007″ // Elastic lists demo (some Documentation) and Elastic tags demo // Lassie, a no-programming alternative to the excellent Wintermute adventure game engine, with Flash output and pre-built Director modules to handle the required game code. I’m thinking this could be useful as part of an introductory game design course, hiding most of the scary programming from newbies. No parallax scrolling, though — you need Wintermute for that // Memory-mapping with Silverlight //

Wired reviews a new book on videogames, This Gaming Life: Travels in Three Cities. It examines: the London game mod scene; the Icelandic developers of the free-market EVE Online science-fiction universe; and South Korea’s fervent StarCraft fan culture (it’s their national equivalent of “football + gambling”) // The UK’s Retro Gamer magazine // Birmingham’s ZX Spectrum orchestra // Gamasutra has fresh European statistics on videogame players // “Virtual Cities: Digital Mirrors into a Recursive World” (PDF link) //

The Public, the new £55m+ arts centre in West Bromwich, finally opens to the public on Saturday // Birmingham’s Fused magazine has used the Issuu service — which was blogged on D’log a few weeks ago — to put Fused No.35 online for free // Now the dust has settled…. an unsurprising vacancy for Head of Performing Arts at Arts Council England: West Midlands. Deadline: 7th July 08 // Birmingham’s Electric Cinema pushes steadily toward its 100th birthday (31st Dec 09) with a £100k refit and a new sound system, with the second screen re-opening on 4th July 08 // Ballet Hoo! presents “Wrosne: an Underground Experience” (20th-25th July) — a unique new piece of local theatre, performed in the ancient caverns and canals beneath the town of Dudley // Four places are now available for the media strand of Insight Out. West Midlands applicants need 18 months of solid work experience in producing moving-image media, to apply. In March 09, trainees will have a chance to pitch for funding to complete their film. More info from: helen.brown +at+ bcu.ac.uk // Birmingham Central Library is again being mooted for ‘listed building’ status. There’s a blue-sky suggestion that it could be turned into a museum of modern art, and that the neighbouring Conservatoire / Adrian Boult Hall be demolished instead. Personally I think the ugly, cramped, stuffy and crumbling Library needs to be demolished asap — but I fear we’ll get a gimmicky and dumbed-down replacement, and sad pictures of skips full of ‘no longer wanted’ books // A new Custard Factory website “goes live on Friday”, writes Pete // Birmingham’s Jewellery Quarter Arts & Designer Crafts Festival, 5th July 08 // Daden mashes Google Earth (Birmingham) into Second Life (video) // Birmingham’s Ben Neal has a brilliant new door // Laundry has new Creative Laboratories bursaries on offer to West Midlands’ artists // BINS reports on the recent “Birmingham: Second City?” debate // An American’s view of the 119th West Midlands Show. Cue the LOLsheep! //

Architects have erected a giant aggregator for their collective bloggery. No doubt they’ll soon clad it with brutalist concrete and plate glass, then scamper off to their dinky little cottages in the countryside // Telephone sex-line operators: what do they really look like? // How nerds are treated by I.T. managers, and why it has to change // France to tax the internet… to pay for… the mass digitisation of knowledge prime-time TV — “Internet companies will pay a tax of 0.9 percent of sales to finance public television”. Which is no doubt planned as a stalking-horse for 1.5%, then 2.5%, then 5% and beyond // The silent decline of school and college libraries // The coming talent-crunch // Philip Longman’s lecture on “The Depopulation Problem” (direct MP3 link) //

A quick stab at a list of the most important published scholarly papers and books, which would aid in producing a timeline history of visual arts production in Birmingham and the Black Country. In approximate chronological order. Additions are welcome…

Late 18th century:

Hargraves, Matthew (2006). Candidates for Fame: The Society of Artists of Great Britain, 1760-1791. Yale University Press.

Heleniak, Kathryn Moore (1982).
“John Gibbons and William Mulready: The Relationship between a Patron and a Painter”.
The Burlington Magazine, Vol. 124, No. 948 (Mar., 1982), pages 136-141.

John Gibbons (1777-1851) was a Birmingham ironmaster who created an extensive collection of British art, and was friendly with many local artists as part of a “sketching club with other collectors and painters”

Robinson, Eric (1953).
“Matthew Boulton, patron of the arts”.
Annals of Science, Vol. 9, Issue 4, December 1953, pages 368-376.

Fraser, David (1990). “Joseph Wright of Derby and the Lunar Society: an essay on the artist’s connections with science and industry’” — in Egerton, Judy (Ed.), Wright of Derby (1990).

Early 19th century:

Fawcett, Trevor (1974). The Rise of English Provincial Art: artist, patrons and institutions outside London, 1800-1830. Oxford Studies in the History of Art and Architecture, Oxford University Press.

Author? (2009). Sun, Wind, and Rain: The Art of David Cox (1783-1859). Forthcoming exhibition catalogue.

Robinson, Leonard (2007). William Etty: The Life and Art. McFarland & Co.

Chapter 18 has a short account of the history of: Birmingham Academy of Arts (1814-) / Birmingham Society of Arts (1821-) / Birmingham Institution for Promoting the Fine Arts (1828-, “for the encouragement of artists resident within 30 miles of Birmingham”).

Dent, Robert (1918). The Society of Arts and The Royal Birmingham Society of Artists: A Century of Local Art History, 1812—1912. Publisher unknown.

Morris, Sidney (1974). Catalogue of Birmingham & West Midlands Painters of the Nineteenth Century. (Self-published).

Photography in the 19th century:

Wigh, Leif, et al. (1998). Oscar Gustave Rejlander: 1813(?)-1875. Moderna Museets Utstallningskatalog.

Founding member of the Birmingham Photographic Society.

Harker, Margaret (1988). Henry Peach Robinson: Master of Photographic Art, 1830-1901. Wiley.

Important later member of the Birmingham Photographic Society.

James, Peter (2006). A Record of England: Sir Benjamin Stone & The National Photographic Record Association 1897-1910. Dewi Lewis Publishing and the Victoria & Albert Museum.

A major Birmingham photographer, and his famous Warwickshire Photographic Survey and National Photographic Record Association.

James, Peter, et al. (1998). Coming to Light: Birmingham’s Photographic Collections. Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery.

Substantial scholarly survey that details the history of photography in Birmingham, with an emphasis on art and documentary photography, rather than on commercial portrait studios. Has an account of the history of the Birmingham Photographic Society, among others.

Victorian and Edwardian art circles, societies, art schools:

Hill, Joseph (1897). The Artists and Art Workers of Birmingham. Midland Arts Club.

Hill, Joseph (1928) The History of the Royal Birmingham Society of Artists. Royal Birmingham Society of Artists.

Dent, Robert (1918). The Society of Arts and The Royal Birmingham Society of Artists: A Century of Local Art History, 1812—1912. Publisher unknown.

Morris, Sidney (1974). Catalogue of Birmingham & West Midlands Painters of the Nineteenth Century. (Self-published).

Gere, Charlotte (1975). The Earthly Paradise: F. Cayley Robinson and the Painters of the Birmingham Group. Exhibition catalogue, The Fine Art Society.

Author? (1977). Frederick Cayley Robinson A.R.A., 1862-1927. Exhibition catalogue, The Fine Art Society.

Author? (1980). Joseph Southall 1861-1944, Artist-Craftsman. Exhibition catalogue, Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery.

Swift, John (1988).
“Birmingham and its Art School: Changing Views, 1800-1921″.
International Journal of Art & Design Education, 7 (1) , pages 5–29.

Swift, John (1999).
“Women and Art Education at Birmingham’s Art Schools, 1880-1920: Social Class, Opportunity and Aspiration”.
International Journal of Art & Design Education, 18 (3) , pages 317–326.

+ the mass of books and papers on Edward Burne-Jones.

+ the Public Catalogue Foundation catalogues for Birmingham and Staffordshire. (These cover oil paintings only).

The Arts and Crafts Movement:

Crawford, Alan. (1984). By Hammer and Hand: the Arts and Crafts Movement in Birmingham. Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery.

164 pages, a book rather than a catalogue.

Gammage, M.T. (1978).
“Art and Industry: the origins of the Birmingham school for jewellers and silversmiths”.
Journal of Educational Administration and History, 1978.

Pevsner, Nikolaus (1937). An Enquiry into Industrial Art in England. Cambridge University Press.

Pevsner used research he had done at Birmingham University, during 1934 and 1935.

+ the mass of books and papers on Edward Burne-Jones, Morris, and the Arts and Crafts Movement 1870-1914.

+ the Bromsgrove Guild of Applied Arts.

+ this could also reference the art glass of South Staffordshire, and the art ceramics of North Staffordshire.

Surrealism:

Levy, Silvano, et al. (2001). Surrealism in Birmingham, 1935-1954. Exhibition catalogue and book, Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery.

Also has scholarly essays and chronologies.

Levy, Silvano (2003). The Scandalous Eye: The Surrealism of Conroy Maddox. Liverpool University Press.

Remy, Michel (1990). Emmy Bridgwater. Paintings, Drawings, Collages. Exhibition catalogue, Blond Fine Art.

The late 20th century:

Author? (1998). Birmingham Arts Lab: The Phantom of Liberty. Exhibition catalogue, Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery.

Of course, there will also be information widely-scattered in the many biographical dictionaries of British artists, the various magazines and newspapers that were produced over the centuries, and buried deep in archives.

I was very interested to hear that old-school Myst-style adventure games can still be commercially viable for game developers. One example is the new British home-brewed ghost-hunting game The Lost Crown (Jonathan Boakes / Darkling Room). The UK’s PC Gamer magazine gave it a review score of 85%, and a “must buy” tag. It’s set to be released in the UK in mid-July 08.

It was created using the completely free Wintermute Engine v.1.8, a sophisticated and well-polished royalties-free engine for making point & click adventure games. With no licences to buy for the game-engine or IP, and no expensive console royalties to pay to Microsoft / Sony / Nintendo, the potential for pure profit from well-made Wintermute-based games must be excellent. Although that should be balanced against the fact that it seems to have taken the developer a little over two years to write, code, and finish The Lost Crown. My back-of-an-envelope guess would be that an investor would be looking at about £50k to £80k to bring such a substantial game to market, from script? That would include paying a wage, and paying for top-quality voice-work. That’s not at all beyond the reach of a small 24-person ‘hobby investment circle’, each member investing £3k (£1k each year, over three years).

Also fascinating is the article “Making of The Lost Crown” (warning: article has some minor plot spoilers). It shows how the developer transformed photos of the real Cornish fishing villages of Looe and Polperro, and their ancient hinterland, into working game locations in the Fens of the east coast. Elsewhere, an article by the game’s author mentions that his first game, DarkFall, sold 2000 copies in the first few months, with 95% of web sales going to the U.S. So I’m guessing that, now he’s better-known and has a fan-base and publisher, Lost Crown could be looking at 5,000+ copies in the first six months?

There’s also a long interview with the project’s writer and director Jonathan Boakes.

Ghost-story games are not really my cup-of-tea, but this is such a uniquely British product — a lot of the screens seem to be in black & white, and the central character even appears to wear a knitted cardigan and a flat cap — that it’s just too deliciously eccentric to pass up. And you can’t argue with an 85% review from PC Gamer. My copy has been pre-ordered from Amazon.

More sample games made with the Wintermute engine are listed here. Wintermute seems a little under-documented and manual is old, but if you dig around the forums you’ll find that the developer has a new online lessons book that keeps pace with the software’s new features. Would-be back-bedroom game producers might want to investigate this software. Especially since future web browsers will run sophisticated code without needing any plug-ins like Flash — potentially opening up lucrative new niche audiences for point & click adventures.

I also found another nice bit of authoring software. If you wanted to easily prototype your interactive narrative first, without fiddling with the pictures and asset-management and the code scripting involved with Wintermute, then the British text-only interactive-fiction engine Adrift v.4.0 is exactly what you want (site is very slow to load). It’s mature and intuitive software, and I made a satisfying short interactive-fiction game with it, in just a few hours. Celtx v.1.0 is another free application, one that might serve as a half-way house in taking a production between Adrift and Wintermute — it’s a free media pre-production tool.

I haz a bookmarkz…

Boris hums along, when Rufus warbles “There is a river running underground / Underneath the town, towards the sea…” // Closer to home, a more intractable waterway is set for yet another makeover attempt // How to subvert a bus-stop with a child’s swing // Two different approaches to grot-free new urban centres: Leon Krier’s new towns vs. Singapore-style instant mega-cities // Iain Sinclair watches as the runaway Olympics juggernaut plays havok with the East End of London // Stoke-on-Trent has just secured £10-million of funding, for 2009-2011, to further boost the 100+ miles of superb off-road bicycle paths that run around the city. Also in the West Midlands, Shrewsbury gets a share of the £100 million cycling pot, to become a ‘Cycling Demonstration Town’. // London’s designer-solutions to bicycle theft // No off-road cycle-paths near you? You could always turn your rusty old bike into a working grandfather-clock //

PricewaterhouseCoopers’ weighty Global Entertainment and Media Outlook 2008-2012 reports that the global videogame industry will be worth $68.4 billion by 2012, overtaking all other forms of entertainment media // A large set of widescreen PC screen-captures from the hard-SF videogame Mass Effect — although beaten in visual quality by pictures from real spaceflight, and in alien weirdness by the creatures of our own oceans // the anti-piracy measures for the PC version of Mass Effect held up quite well. Pirate crews took 21 days, after the game’s U.S. release, to collectively scrape together an ugly set of kludges that together would adequately crack the game // As Edge magazine confirms that Brits are still the world’s no.2 videogame content producers, behind the U.S., the British game industry launches the ‘Games Up?’ campaign. It’s headed by David Braben (Elite, LostWinds), and aims to try to prise some support out of the UK government. But since the government is severely strapped for cash, I’d imagine it’s likely that subsidies would have to be taken from existing film industry subsidies? // This coming Autumn/Winter sees the 15th anniversary of ‘recognisably modern’ desktop gaming — Return to Zork (Aug 93), Day of the Tentacle (Summer? 93), Myst (Sept 93), Frontier: Elite II (Oct 93), SimCity 2000, (Nov 93), and Doom (Dec 93) // The New York Times profiles the Emotiv gaming headset, a device that lets you control videogames just by thinking (it reads your brainwaves) or raising an eyebrow (it’s also a consumer-level motion-capture rig for your face) // British videogame production degrees “a waste of time for all involved”, an opinion echoed by the round-table interview published in the latest Edge magazine //

Birmingham City University rises to the No.71 slot in the The Times Good University Guide 2009 — the BCU profile in the TGU Guide 2009 is here. Seems fair, although there’s a huge howler:— “A new city-centre campus in the Eastside district, near Millennium Point, will open in 2008″. More like 2012 // The Birmingham Mail’s new ‘Speech Balloons’ comics blog profiles Birmingham’s Hunt Emerson // CAAN do // Introduction to Second Life event (10th July 08, Wolverhampton Science Park, £30) // The new Handsworth music/media technology centre (video) // Advance news of a major retrospective at Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery — Sun, Wind, and Rain: The Art of David Cox (1783-1859) will open 31st January 2009, showcasing the life’s work of a Birmingham artist who was one of the finest painters of our ever-changing British weather. Cox on Wikipedia // Wolverhampton’s CADRE — read some of their work in full-text form // Wolverhampton’s DeafFest (Deaf Film and Television Festival) bags £50,000 development funding from the UK Film Council //

“The Internet will overtake television as the biggest advertising medium in Britain this year” // Two hundred years of archives from The Times newspaper, for free, for a limited time only // OFFART? “The Arts Council has announced that it will be sending teams of ‘inspectors’ into the organisations it funds, every three years” // The instant shared work-table // 14 x ‘3D’ printers profiled // 16 x latest digital audio recorders profiled // Jonathan Meese, meet Mad World (video) // Death by coffee, or not. Probably not. //

Some bookmarks, found this week…

The Museum Vaults graphic novel, part one // English lanes with steep banks, un-noticed havens of the wild // the new-found respectability of literary horror and science fiction // Steampunk crafts rising // To the lighthouse! // Britain’s bicycling tribes //

The freedom to photograph // A nation of swaggering traffic wardens and sly informers // Sinister BBC TV licence spy vans: the gallery // Nick Cohen: No-one wins in modern-day academia // Boris has auditors investigate London’s past spending — criminal charges pending, community-arts projects prominent //

Brumcast No. 100: 50 tracks from Birmingham & West Midlands bands, selected from the previous 99 podcast shows (185Mb) // Lead Artists wanted for Birmingham’s Gallery 37, more info from david _at_ gallery37.org.uk // The Big Debate: “How can big media keep its hold on power?” (as the event should have been titled) via the Birmingham Post’s live video archive // On the Edge — BIAD’s B.A. Visual Communication 2008 website + the PDF catalogue (46Mb) // Birmingham City Council is listening //

Issuu // PicLens // TrueCrypt // Getty MoodStream // Visual TwitterSearch // Ubik // Big Buck Bunny invites you to play with his enormous assets // Arse Elektronika 08: Critical Perspectives on Sexuality and Pornography in Science and Social Fiction //

My DVD of Mass Effect for the PC arrived on Monday. Runs as smooth as silk even at 1920 x 1200 widescreen + all eye-candy on. Squeeek! // NASA’s Stanford Torus space-station an obvious inspiration for The Citadel location in Mass Effect, among others // new nVidia graphics-card drivers released May 08, the first since Jan 08 // Mass Effect PC performance tweaks //

Urban mapping fab-ability: London Mayoral Election map, by ward // Real-time data flows in cities (MIT researcher’s video lecture, part of a series) // Augmented Reality conference (not on augmented web servers, apparently, since the site seems dead) // The City is Here for You to Use (forthcoming POD book) // “Urban Computing and its Discontents” (PDF pamphlet) // “Some Elements of Romantic Places” (PDF pamphlet) from the UK’s Rethinking Cities // How can we map smells, heat, taste, touch, noise, velocity in useful representations of urban spaces? Can such elements be planned and even ‘choreographed’ by planners within an urban space? // Citysense // On the joy of paper maps // “A brief history of the future of urban computing and locative media” (2008, thesis intro, PDF) //

Some bookmarks from this week:

New-build £30-million media production centre for Stoke-on-Trent // MPs fear for future of BBC in Birmingham // Mobile phone tracking service launched in the UK // Hay-on-Wye lit crit.

BBC Radio 4: In Our Time: on Lysenko, Stalin’s charlatan biologist // File on Four: ‘Culture capital, basket case’ // Analysis: on government involvement in the arts (waffle-factor: high).

Interesting conferences:— Ambience 2008: making ‘atmosphere’ and spirit-of-place in urban spaces // Sustainable Cities and Creativity // Tate Liverpool postgrad symposium: ‘Mapping Exclusion: Social Control and The Politics of Zoned City Space’ // Underground Spaces 2008 in the New Forest // Music, Metal and Politics: a conference on heavy-metal music.

Well…. I have a mountain of books to read over the summer, places to be (not least the starship Normandy), and things to do. There may still be the occasional set of links, and pictures here, but don’t expect much more until near the end of the summer. Have a good one.

The Moggies of Moseley, Birmingham. Moseley, an area historically more inclined toward a woolly “knit-your-own-organic-muesli” thinking than rationality, pioneers objective scientific rating of the neighbourhood cats…

[ Hat-tip: Pete Ashton ]

Remember the days when bikes had coloured-tassles hanging from the handle-grips, and a folded-up business card stuck through the brake-blocks could make it sound like it had a motor? These days the designers are giving bike accessories a makeover…

Flute handles for musical cycling…

Leave a trail of soap-bubbles behind you. Each bubble contains one or two tiny wildflower seeds…

Speedblend tyres, which give a shimmering “speed-blur” colour effect as you move…

And the bike-lawnmower, because you can’t have a wildflower meadow without mowing it…

This last one not a commercial product, I suspect.

Funky helmets too. For motorbikes, but they could no-doubt be modified…

Although bicycle helmets are, of course, actively dangerous…

“the largest survey of cycling casualties ever undertaken concluded that helmets did not prevent injury; indeed, increased use correlated with increased risk of death.” — The British Medical Journal.

Simon of Birmingham Eastside has been pumping the architects of the new Birmingham Institute of Art & Design (BIAD) for information…

The “central feature” will be the Library. By which I assume they mean the central lowest building, the one that’s connected to the circular building with the tree inside it…

“they are looking at only including limited parking spaces (200-250)”. Which is probably a bit more than at present at Gosta Green + Conservatoire.

Apparently no thinking yet on new/better pedestrian paths from New St. and Moor St. stations?

No mention of any off-road path via the canal to the Custard Factory, but “several hundred bicycle bays” for the new BIAD. Which won’t be much use if it’s life-threatening to venture more than 20 yards off-campus on a bike — central Birmingham being notoriously bicycle-unfriendly.

Phase one is BIAD in 2012, Phase 2 will be the Conservatoire.

No mention of the proposed new 14-18 grammar school (‘Eastside Arts Academy’) + three new concert halls (now only one, within BIAD itself?) alongside Curzon Street station. Instead(?)…

“residential apartments, two hotel buildings will be built next to Curzon Street station”

The latter being, of course, completely the wrong choice as we head into what will probably be a five-year recession.