Welcome (10th July 2018)

Procter Periodical #14

 
 

Welcome | 10 July 2018

Procter Periodical #14

Sept - Dec. (and more)

Hello ,

 

Apologies this is number 14 ! I sent the last one too early ! A few missing links and mega typos.

This was original detailed to come out in Jan… ! So I’ve mixed in an updated version. I did a number of updates around Easter time and some more recenyly but decided to just getting this out the door, so less links more chat. Hopefully you enjoy some of the rambling!

I also have a new weekly updated site called thelast7 which has my weekly shares from across media. So this newsletter is now the long format Quartly(ish) version, with more commentary.

Like what you read ? I most certainly accept coffee as a thank you 🙂

Buy Me a Coffee at ko-fi.com

 

So another few months have flown by and boy what a semester (I think this maybe a recurring theme). We have a new member of staff Vanissa, 2 days a week with us on Games Design & Art which has been great. This semester Vanissa has mainly been shadowing staff and getting up to speed, it has been amazing to have another person on hand to take some of the Year 1 load. Going forward this will be Vanissa’s main role in GDA, which is excellent. After an amazingly huge increase in applications (400%+) we saw our new student numbers land at 29 which is just over our target which was great news. The new students are now all settling in and you can catch up a little with a blog post written by Vanissa here!

This increased staffing has meant that my PhD has thankfully sustained a much better level of attention this semester (Sept-Jan). I also moved into a new office which has proved to be an excellent change, I am no longer sharing and although this has down sides, the pros for the work I need to undertake, managing the course, staffing and thinking about research out-way any cons. I even treated myself to a digital coffee machine which has probably paid for itself 2x over with less trips to buy coffee out and my 4k screen for my MacBook Pro 15” finally arrived after a lot of ordering hassles.(its the one on the left)

QUICK inline UPDATE I am moving office again this week !

This PhD focus has meant that a number of things have started to really happen, firstly my micro.blog discursive has become my default place to write short, medium and long text. I hardly look at twitter now even though I still syndicate out from discursive. All my Photos from Instagram now appear on discursive too firstly via Ownyourgram . Pretty pleased as micro blog made the concept of POSSE (Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere) so easy.

I started a microcast (short form podcast) , called Fragmentum which is a much more regular podcast and I dedicate episode's to what I’ve been up to within my PhD day, so please do subscribe and let me know what you think (each episode has discourse feedback links). I use the hashtag #procterphd to organise related materials.

I turned on my upgrade document site, Delightful Design Led Learning,

this site is very much a work in progress until Feb16th (still in progress!) so I would really encourage comments and feedback on the topics and text, this site will be part of a package of work I “hand over” and present for my PhD upgrade(MPhil to PhD). I feel like I am a year behind but glad that I finally feel like I am moving ahead. If you are able to comment that would be amazing. At the end of March the site will be frozen (not yet!) in terms of editing and additional content being added but commentary and feedback on discourse will continue to be open. On going updates will be open as will all of my PhD work via researchnot.es, discursive and fragmentum all connected to discourse for discussion. Most sites have have direct topics automatically created for discussion in discourse, however this is the place for general comment and feedback, so feel free to log in and join the conversations.

Of course the code I am producing for my PhD will all be open source and so I upgraded my server stack slightly and turned on registration at my gitlab server which houses all the related code.

I plan to create a series of short videos that intro various part of these sites and sections. Ill be hosting these on a new youtube channel for embedding. I will of course make Creative Commons licensed copies of all the videos freely available on researchnot.es.

I appear to have quiet a number of irons in the fire for 2018 and throughout the end of 2017, although stressful in many ways this seems to be setting up for a productive 2018. (it hasnt been as good as I hoped so far)

So below are some links that still stand out for me over the last few months, remember you can keep up with them via dctr.pro, my micro.blog and pinboard on a more regular basis if you want to see everything I save and link too.

UPDATED

I stopped syndicating to any other networks in April from micro.blog, all my photos and short comments, and some longer ones now appear through micro.blog onto discursive, I’ve downloaded all my Instagram photos and may import the pre micro blog photos into micro blog but as I’m not shutting down accounts I may just keep the archive safe. I am now using Sunlit to Photo blog . This also relates to the site thelast7 I mentioned in the outset.

Although I feel I have taken a few steps back since March, up until then I made a number of productive breakthroughs. It's mainly the writing that is causing me such bother (typical). However I am excited about the interface demo progress I made seen here and this short video explaining my research. Along with some super positive feedback at a PhD training week. See more related stuff on this blog link here.

 

Silicon Valley

One area many of you will know I have been keenly tracking and debating is that of Surveillance Capitalism, the default model of practice undertaken by the large technology companies. This model in short, is to mine the data you give over (for free) in return for the ability to share photos and messages with friends. This data is mainly used to target advertising but the data could be used for many more purposes such as a social index score such as in China already (Wired Article) this in turn could effect your ability to get health cover or insurance.

This data is also used to manipulate the timeline you see. This is to accomplish two main things, keep your attention, so you see more adverts and to encourage you to input more data, a continuious feedback loop.

It however looks like main stream media is finally starting to realise this might be bad. I am glad this is finally happening.

Aral Balkan has a neat way of expressing why this is a concern for everyone and I think it encapsulates my thoughts well. I’ll paraphrase;

When we use a smart device or service to augment are brain, by say saving events, creating to dos or notes we are extending ourselves into the system, we are thus a cyborg and so this data must be owned by ourselves not by a corporation. We should then choose what we do that data.

When we use a service to converse with friends via text to individuals or groups that data should be private. Why we have gotten to a situation where everyone thinks it’s ok for corporations to effectively wiretap every “phone call.”

The suggestion that you can make free phone calls so long as you allow someone to listen in and then every so often they ring you up trying to sell you something related to previous conversations coupled with the fact you can’t even hang up. It just seems wrong, wrong, wrong. Yet this is what Google, Facebook and most of the web services we use now do.

 

UPDATED

Cambridge Analytica

Violence created by Facebook

Cravings for Social Media

Silicon Valley cant fix itself

The above was written before the Cambridge Analytic reveal, so this year is certainly hotting up, but will things change, GDPR is going to make some attempt and obviously I am following with keen interest indieteam. This newsletter already had double opt in so I know you all choose to sign up, there are a number of GDPR related updates for Sendy which is good. Link tracking in this newsletter is turned off, opening is still on as it gives me a clue as to whether people are even looking at the email, but I may turn that off soon.

There was a new Mozilla fellowship call looking to keep the web open and seemed like a good fit connected to the next phase of my PhD which would also bring huge gravitas to the project. So after a hesitant start I applied. I will share the entire form once I know whether I made it into the fellowship or not. It was a great exercise in synthesising as the application had strict character counts that where unyielding in any way!

The project intro is here and would welcome feedback and critique here. I shared my application with a few people on closed Slack groups before submission and such. But welcome more feedback regardless of the Mozilla Fellowship outcome.

The outcome of this came at the end of June - I was unfortunately not accepted but would welcome feedback and discussion. The application I submitted will be online soon.

 

Facebook UPDATED update

I dont think Facebook won’t change no matter what adverts and stuff they try and tell you, there is nothing left to say on this, find alternatives seek better ways to connect to people without giving up your rights.

Can Facebook clean up its act? - Guardian

This quote below from Cory Doctorow's article is great.

Facebook doesn’t have a mind-control problem, it has a corruption problem. Cambridge Analytica didn’t convince decent people to become racists; they convinced racists to become voters.

Ok on to some links. Not to many this time. But do keep an eye on the last 7 as I hope to use this to curate the links I comment on every quarter. Which will make this newsletter much more interesting and easier to keep regular 😊

 

Design Thinking

Hurry Slowly - Hurry Slowly is a new podcast about how you can be more productive, creative, and resilient through the simple act of slowing down.

I also found an article about having time to stare out the window and that lots of great ideas are this space to allow concepts to synthesise but our ever distracted world makes this much harder… If I can locate the link I will, lost in the ether!

 

Design Making

GitKraken - Super amazing Git GUI interface, I can actually use and understand this one! Cross platform too (Mac, Linux and Windows) - Its free for open source, early-stage startups and non-commercial use but the Pro version is free for Github Student account holders too !

 

Games

GT SPORT - Is out and good, not played as much as I would like but PS4 means my steering wheel is not compatible (which is a joke)

Paradise City - Remaster for PS4 yes indeed!

AlphaPutt - This is the name of a game soon to be launched by Sennep makers of OLO and one of our Games Graduate is the developer! Exciting times and the game is pretty great too! You can also follow their dedicated Games instagram now Sennep_Games

Tetris Effect looks UNBELIEVABLE. This is what I want VR for !

I was quoted in the Guardian about games design and games addiction.

Teaching

There was a nice article on use of project based learning at MIT but link is lost ! Will try and locate 😊

Seeing the “Big Picture” - Really Nice paper on representing curriculum design visually. Something I have been working on here, not in the same level of visuliation yet but just having documents that really visualise the learning. In both a graphic style and then a sketch that is discussed. Some of my examples below.

This is nice look at what does an ‘Active Blended Learning’ programme look like. Recommended reading indeed.

 

Productivity

I’m still toying with the idea of moving to a decent task system. Having left Flow a while back due to costs and team changes. I am tempted to look at again as I know my fav app for this developer moved there back in the day but Microsoft have introduced tasks (free with work) and GitKrakin have introduced Glo Boards (which I need to look seriously in terms of games course documentation and my gitlab projects)

In other news FoldingText 3 was announced and Writeroom 4 is a year+ into development.

Work / Life Blend might be a good concept. Im sick of trying to balance.

 

Music & Film

2017 Music Year End List Aggregate - Pretty good list of albums curated from aggregating across a set of reputable sources. Well worth checking out.

Good guy Cole Henley also made his own list here which is pretty neat too.

Even with the introduction of friends in Apple Music. The streaming services still lags behind where Rdio was which is a major shame. Hopefully the summer update to iOS will help but again Apple needs to decouple the music apps from iOS, and provide many more updates in a year.

I use Apple music (I;ve discussed why before) but I would love an automated way to share the things I find with my Spotify Friends at the moment I need to have Spotify installed and repeat my search and share, this is of course to lock you into a service but frustrating that there is no easy interoperability for sharing. If I figure a way to make a sustainable web service using Spotify’s API to do some automatically translation from a link found in Apple Music to Spotify Ill let you know. But as I have said before I think there is only one horse to back on the music front now and thats Apple. Spotify will continue to have to diversify its business to make money and as we know most tech business go down the Valley route of data gathering, which is not for me (and shouldn’t be for you either)

This concept film is interesting, please note I wouldn’t consider it safe for work.

Dirty Computer - Is an Emotionpicture for the Album of the same name.

Oh and Gig going makes you live longer too. (Excellent)

 

Randoms

I got an iPhone X (ten). I really like it a lot and will be using this to film my youtube channel videos. There are some oddities to get use to with the UI and the notch still seems to have some apps in confusion.

UPDATED

Love the iPhone X some apps still get confused by the notch. Expected speed bumps and more Edge to edge in this autumn Apple event for sure. WWDC news was that iOS 12 is all about speed (which is great)

These two WWDC video are funny and moving.

Final Random

I started a Patreon page as well so you can support my stuff on a monthly basis if you like, take a gander at the options.

 

My Pateron page 😀 Support me pcm

Please feel free to @mention me on micro.blog with comments or ideas and please do share this newsletter if you think others would enjoy the read.

All being well next newsletter will be first week in Sept and Quarterly (in theory) Dec, March, June.

UPDATED

Well done for getting this far as that was a bit of an updated version of this one ! 🙂

Oh and readers we had our Games Design & Art private view events in Winchester and/or London. Another awesome year check please just check out Instagram and the hashtag #WSAxARCADE.

Thanks for taking your time to read this.

Adam

World CUP VR  - More on this later

 

Me elsewhere

discursive - micro.blog

fragmentum - microcast

researchnot.es - long form writing

inkubator.io - long form podcast