This is some Actionscript that should allow you to connect to last.fm radio and tune into a station based on tag or artist.

I was working on my other Flash project using the last.fm XML and realized it would be cool for artists' music to start playing when the user clicked on their album. Luckily I found some unofficial documentation on the last.fm radio protocol. Basically, sending the correct HTTP request will get you a response with a url to the appropriate streaming radio station. I wasn't able to find any good information on how to do it in Actionscript and had to write up the code myself. All the response parsing is in the Actionscript so there are no external PHP files.

You'll need to add your last.fm username and an md5sum of your password to the Actionscript for it to work.

There's a demo, but I've noticed my cpu usage goes through the roof when I run it (which doesn't seem to happen when I run the swf locally) so be careful. If anyone knows why this is happening, let me know.

You can also download the fla source and the Actionscript is pasted below.

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As a RTS gamer, I find John Klima's The Great Game an interesting project to use as a starting point for examining how we relate to these games. Klima's project (which unfortunately crashes my browser, so I can't actually watch it) takes US Defense Department briefings and reproduces them in a simple 3-d map similar to what one might see in a RTS game. The user however, has no control over the movement of units. This has the disconcerting effect of pulling control away in an environment where a user might be accustomed to having control. As soon as any war game or simulation is based on real data, control is lost. But not completely. Moving troops in a virtual war is a simple as a mouse-click or keystroke. In real war you must convince whoever happens to be in control to make the necessary action, and as we have witnessed recently, this is exceedingly difficult.

Klima's project also demonstrates, and strives to make us aware of, our detachment from the reality when it comes to modern warfare. Raw data and statistics can never tell the whole story, and too often that is all we're given. A number is less likely give us a visceral (perhaps extramedial?) response than a photograph or video. Not only that, but the killing itself is becoming a more mediated experience: missiles are launched remotely from drones, bombs are dropped from thousands of feet up and soldiers fire looking through night vision goggles.

The majority of RTS games are inherently unrealistic, regardless of the quality of the graphics or the theme of the game, due to the fact that the player is floating omnisciently over the battlefield (such as in the Command and Conquer series). One game I've found which departs from this convention is Defcon. The premise of the game is simple: global thermonuclear war. Defcon's graphics are reminiscent of (and obviously inspired by) the 1983 film WarGames: simple 2-d vector outlines on a world map. 'Unrealistic' in terms of modern computer graphics. There's no blood, no graphic violence, no cut-scenes of nuclear explosions.

But the experience itself is more realistic than any other strategy game, because the player is put in the exact position of a fictional commander directing nuclear strikes. Playing the game is a pretty creepy experience, the only sound being quiet ambient noises, alarms and a deep rumbling bass when a bomb hits a target. By pulling players back from the action, similar to how Klima does, they can actually become more immersed in the game. At the same time, you sometimes have to remind yourself it's just a game and you're not actually wiping Chicago off the map. This is an interesting method, to strive for realism in gameplay rather than graphics. And of course, no matter what strategy you use in the game, the result is a huge deathtoll and the disturbing feeling you just nuked the entire world into oblivion.

What happens when this detachment is applied to real life? As Klima implies, commanders are looking at charts, maps, statistics. There must be a level of detachment in that process and one has to wonder what an 'acceptable loss' or 'acceptable collateral damage' is for someone in that position. I would hope that those distinctions don't even exist in real life. (Is there ever an 'acceptable loss'?) However, we know they must exist, otherwise war would at the very least be much less frequent. In a computer game I'm more than willing to sacrifice units in order to win, it's abstract strategy to me, no different than sacrificing a pawn to win a chess game. But the less abstract and closer to a real experience a game gets, the more reluctant I am to do so. I suppose this is why I find playing Defcon a disturbing yet enlightening experience; it forces you to consider how far you would go to 'win' a game in reality.

A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic. - Stalin
A strange game. The only winning move is not to play. - Joshua

I finally got around to redesigning the entire site with Wordpress as the backend. I had been meaning to do it for a while, but since my New Media class requires a blog I finally got off my ass and did it. Getting Wordpress to work as a portfolio was surprisingly easy, even with my limited knowledge of PHP. There are, however, a few things that still need fixing. A more detailed post about the plugins and PHP snippets I used will follow soon. The old site is still around for archival purposes.