Weblog Entry
Flickr Vu
June 27, 2006flick•r vu, noun
a feeling of having already seen your current surroundings somewhere on the web.
Case in point, my recent visit to Neal’s Yard, in London.
It gets worse: I’d never been to San Fransisco until after I’d played a few hundred hours of Tony Hawk Pro Skater 4. It was strange to know your way around places you’d never been before. Like coming out of amnesia and beginning to remember your old home town.
That’s about the only reason I’ve been thinking about picking up True Crime: New York. GPS-accurate maps of Manhattan sound like a great way to play virtual tourist.
I remember playing Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas and driving around the various fictional cities, when I’d suddenly recognize a real-life intersection from LA, San Francisco, or Vegas. It was a very strange sensation.
I was out in Santa Monica for my brothers wedding and staid in a gaudy looking place called the Shangri-La. Years later I’m playing True Crime: L.A. and find the character standing in front of the same hotel. In the game I walked up two blocks to find the hotel where the wedding was actually held. The didn’t replicate the building’s architecture but they did recreate the tree in the front that the hotel was known for. I found it a little sureal.
I remember watching Scarface and thinking, “is Tony going into that hotel to save his game?”
The flip side to this is “Slacker Vu,” which comes when a city you’re familiar with is distorted to save time for movie characters – named for Richard Linklater’s Austin-based “Slacker,” in which characters go from a coffeehouse near the UT campus to a bar next door, which is in fact south of the river on Congress Ave.
The game to set the “driving around with GPS” trend was Driver for the original playstation. I was amazed not only by how beautiful Miami was and how large New York is, but also by how athletic Americans are; every time I tried to run one of ‘em over they always seemed to somehow spectacularly dive out of the way.
Extremely sorry to go O/T, but Dave, I really miss the daily fix of CSS/Web Standards news and recent happenings I once got at this blog.
Any chance of a future return?
Computer games for me too: on a recent visit to Tokyo I find myself walking down a road I distinctly remembered racing down in MSR :)
Wow, I’m getting ready to take my vacation and was preparing to experience the Flickr Vu. Glad to see I’m not the only one!
Looks like it was a beautiful afternoon. I really love Europe this time of year, was so upset I was no able to to attend this years @media event but look forward to next years and maybe being in a couple of your photos as well as getting a couple of my own.
Beautiful pictures @ Flickr, I were in Paris last year and I made similar pictures of the sightseens. Funny. By the way: You have a formidable layout on your Website.
This year I´m going to Paris again because of the Tour de France, what a event.
Beautiful pictures!