Lax, Slack and Lazy

None of which are terms I would ever use to describe me...I just happen to have neglected write-up duties for the last two episodes. Luckily breed_prime covers mission six here and mission seven here. Phew! Thanks breeda_prime - will aim to get on the ball with this week's episode.

Now - what shall I do with all this space?

Well, the Loose-Fish Project wrapped up Good Captain this week. This was an adaptation of Benito Careno, a novella by Herman Melville that was broadcast via Twitter, the Twitter page for the project is here. Twitter is a sort of microblog/meet in the pub for a drink/status update tool that I'm rather fond of - see my feed to the left there <-. I really liked the idea of producing the novel as a feed of tiny snippets, the first person narration lent itself well to Twitter. I must admit though, I found it difficult to follow what was going on at times - mainly because I followed the feed on my phone which didn't always send me sequential tweets. Occasionally the 140 character limit on twitter updates seemed a little bit too prescriptive and updates came in threes. Despite this it did lend a sense of anticipation for the next segment, I didn't notice whether the frequency of the updates changed during the progress, but you could use the feed in this way, increasing the frequency to match the pacing of the action at those points.

I did look forward to those tweets though and miss them now that the project has finished, though it seems there will be forthcoming projects. The Wiki of the Dead was mentioned in the final tweet from goodcaptain. I doubt it will be as useful a source of reference as wikipedia, consisting of the single entry "BRaaaainnnnzzzz"?

Other fictional uses of twitter include Zombie Attack, (guess what that's about) and Madame Zee, silly horoscopes that give a cheery boost. I'm not sure I've ever been referred to as Pumpkin or Muffin as many times as I have been by Madame Zee. Twitter is also handy for ARGs, its immediacy and ability to alert lots of people simultaneously made it a central part of a live event at the BBCs One Big Weekend in Preston when Perplex City and Frozen Indigo Angel combined (that's one link to lots of links to save my link fingers). More recently it's been used in Project Ophiuchus/Locatemyfriends alerting players of what a character is doing and emphasising the realtime nature of the ARG.

Encouraged by Mima liking the last song - here's another, also with a video I like (and an album I like and a way of presenting the album I like). Laura Marling's band are really spindly.