Month: August 2005

Plat Du Jour

A guy called Matthew Herbert has created an interesting sounding album called Plat Du Jour. “I am tired of having to tolerate the international language of cheap convenience food – convenient mainly to those that make and serve it. The bright pinky orange of farmed salmon in aeroplane trays, the branded waters 1000 times more expensive than tap water, the dismal spread of the hotel breakfast buffet, with its pre-formed meat slices, pasteurised juices, mechanically produced bread and nestle yoghurts full of sugar and potassium sorbate… This record then, aims to tell some of the hidden stories behind the overly-elaborate and wasteful packets. It looks at what’s on the menu and asks you to makes decisions based on criteria other than taste. The album will include tracks made from a grain of sugar, 30,000 chickens, a salmon farm, the sewers below London and water.”

 

Whizzball!

I’m not crazy about interent games but I’ve found one that’s done much more than just grab my attention, I’m obsessed! Whizzball! is a “make the ball hit the target” game with a huge online community that have created around 15,000 puzzles (at the time of writing there are more and more as you play, you can’t keep up with the new ones!). You get a blank, or partially blank board that you have to place specific tiles onto. Each tile does a specific task, such as make the ball roll forward, backward etc, turn a corner, get catapulted or sprung into the air, be UFOed onto another location on the board, be punched forward etc. Your task is to place the tiles in the correct place to make the ball travel the board and hit the target. Go play. If you like it you can join the community and create your own challenges for others to play. Find mine by looking for “ektopia”. Like I don’t have enough to do with the job, the website, the art, the marriage (in no particularly order Em!) and now I’m a Whizzball! player and creator, I need more time damn it! I nearly forgot to mention it, it’s for kids!