The trading bots visualized in the stock charts in this story aren’t doing anything that could be construed to help the market. Unknown entities for unknown reasons are sending thousands of orders a second through the electronic stock exchanges with no intent to actually trade. Often, the buy or sell prices that they are offering are so far from the market price that there’s no way they’d ever be part of a trade. The bots sketch out odd patterns with their orders, leaving patterns in the data that are largely invisible to market participants.

These bots are making 56,000 offers a second. It sure looks to me like something not-human is actually happening here, though it could be the result of gross incompetence, I suppose. Or maybe that was a test run.

But it looks to me kinda like an attempt at saying “hello.”

Alana Nichols and her hydraulic suspension system

I think Mike Pondsmith would have some unpleasant things to say about it, but these amazing pictures of the Paralympics don’t seem to be lacking in humanity.

40:30 long & 37.1 MB big

In this episode, Robert Bohl (designer of Misspent Youth) and Joshua A. C. Newman (designer of shock: social science fiction) end it all. Just in time for your Dreamation 2010 drive/flight!

- You can’t cut a piece off something living unless it wants you to, like one of those happy cow-like aliens from Resturant at the End of the Universe or a German suicide
- The TV show Dollhouse by J.J. Abrams
- Rob’s a bad designer and Joshua doesn’t like people
- Game Chef
- Shock: Human Contact by Joshua, and In a Wicked Age…. and Apocalypse World by Vincent Baker of Lumpley Games
- Meguey Baker of Night Sky Games
- Behavior-based questioning in interviews, and how it relates to game design
- John Wick and Ed Healy also are doing a project like Oo!
- AXE COP
- Another project: Ludic Jibber Jabber (no link yet)
- The Podge Cast shows up on iTunes when you search for Oo!
- Our negative review on iTunes
- Our requisite Radio Lab reference
- Sons of Kryos, Science Times, Brilliant Gameologists
- HOW TO FAIL!!!!!
- An NPR story referencing public administration and dead horses
- Kevin Smith’s The Mountain Witch

You can subscribe to the show (if you still want to) by plugging the RSS feed URL into your preferred podcatcher. You can also use the one-click iTunes button thingie:

The intro music is “Gotta Whizz” by Boris the Sprinkler, from the album Mega Anal. The outgoing music is a live version of “The End of the Tour” by They Might Be Giants from the album John Henry.

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Arthur C. Clarke died early this morning.

It’s hard to express the affect his writing had on me. 2001 was the first movie I saw and the scale of his vision really influenced the way I think.

“Happy Counterterrorism Day” is an article in Harper’s Magazine that, if you haven’t read, you must. I think this one’s going on my imaginary bookshelf with Umberto Eco’s Eternal Fascism: Fourteen Ways of Looking at a Blackshirt.

Remember: sooner or later, we’re all subject to the iron boot. If you don’t stand up for your neighbors, they won’t be able to stand up for you. Religious fanaticism, political ideologies, and handwringing about what will happen to our children are tools of the powerful to gain more power. They’ll use flags and icons to get us to oil their machinery with our blood.

These words and the ones that followed meant a lot to me. They highlighted the difference between “equal” and “the same” by showing what it meant to conflate them.

Thank you, Mr. Vonnegut, for giving me these words.

THE YEAR WAS 2081, and everybody was finally equal. They weren’t only equal before God and the law. They were equal every which way. Nobody was smarter than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than anybody else. Nobody was stronger or quicker than anybody else. All this equality was due to the 211th, 212th, and 213th Amendments to the Constitution, and to the unceasing vigilance of agents of the United States Handicapper General.

Some things about living still weren’t quite right, though. April, for instance, still drove people crazy by not being springtime. And it was in that clammy month that the H-G men took George and Hazel Bergeron’s fourteen-year-old son, Harrison, away.

[Edit: It's a little sad, losing RAW and Kurt Vonnegut in such rapid succession. They helped me form a lot of who I am and make up a good bit of my formative thought in my teenage years.]

Robert Anton Wilson just died. It’s sad, despite his wishes. I’ve loved his writing since I was a teenager and had just discovered Illuminatus! and Cosmic Trigger. He was a friend of Timothy Leary, Anton X. LeVey, Philip K. Dick, and lots of others from that crowd.

He’s the source of my skepticism and the reason I find it so beautiful. In the front flap of Shock: there’s a paean to Doubt, the source of learning. That’s a perspective I gained from him. His indulgence in the ridiculous was an exercise to see how much of the ridiculous was true, and how much perceived truth was just a somber mask over absurd reality.

He was a wild experimenter with his own nervous system, taking LSD every day for decades. He was a week short of 75, having survived polio as a child and considering every day to be an opportunity for a new perspective on life.

The Houdini thing below is having its first protoplaytest in a couple of weeks. We’ll see how that goes. But there’s one other project I’m excited about that I forgot to mention. It’s about war journalism in the era of the citizen journalist, the blogger. The date is 15 years from now. The civil war has entered your town. Some of your friends took up arms. You took up a cellphone camera and a secure server. The inspirations are Max Headroom and DMZ. The concept’s got a lot to be worked out, but most of the game will likely have to do with dealing with information suppression and figuring out how to make and fight propaganda.

In the interest of that, check out the war reporter action figure pictured at the top of this post. Think about how cool it is that there’s an action figure who comes with a camera and laptop. Notice that you can stick different logos on the camera to subtly distinguish your perspective on the war and its reporting.