Clinky Clonky Marble-Droppy Thing

Thinking Machine *** Honourable Mention Prix Ars 2008 *** from Masahiro Miwa on Vimeo.

via

Interesting because it’s ternary rather than binary, but is still a Turing-Machine.

Is “makerness” old hat yet? This thing is… from the context of how I felt about this stuff a couple of years ago – amazing… A programmable Rube Goldberg machine that plays music. That is amazing – but it kindof feels like yesterday’s news already. Rube Goldberg Machines are so Ok-Go-Video, nerd-viraly.

You know what the big problem with “maker culture” is? It’s the same problem that geek-culture has always had. There’s no sex in it. The male-female ratio is about 20 to 1. Nerd-culture has been given a mega-boost, because the internet, and then the blogosphere was written by nerds… so stuff that nerds like floats to the top. Stuff that nerds are good at floats to the top. I mean the sub-title of Slashdot (goes off to check it) is “News for Nerds. Stuff that matters”.

It don’t matter to girls. If you want girls, you’ve got to do art. Or music. Music is even better because the social milleau is so much more engaging. Personally, I’ve found hanging around in bars to be a waste of time as far as that goes – although you do get to be quite drunk, which is fun for a while. Eventually, I’d hoped I’d meet someone at an AA meeting – but that was all blokes as well, so I only went the once. Nice people though. The sorts of people you’d like to have a beer with.

But anyway, don’t take advice from me. Just don’t spend your whole life watching television – now that really is a waste of time.

I’m going to Australia in Feb. That’ll be something to do.

To rekindle the innocent joy of simply doing stuff. Making something.