Links & notes for this month

• • A Turing Machine Overview
    Just beautiful: an implementation of a Turing Machine, as described by Turing; not only is it ingenious - reading characters written on tape with pen via OCR - but it's also a beautiful piece of hardware; it feels as elegant as the point it is illustrating.
    (tags: turingmachine computing computer computerscience hardware mechanics machine beautiful )
• • Maps, Books, Spimes, Paper: Post-Digital Media Design at SXSW | booktwo.org
    "...books are souvenirs of themselves." dingdingding.
    (tags: books paper jamesbridle materials souvenirs markmaking )
• • Specter Spelunker Shrinks - A Online Platformer Game | Game Jolt
    Lovely little Unity game all about scale. You navigate the level as usual in a platformer, with one twist: the up and down arrow increase or decrease your size. And time goes faster when you're big, and slower when you're small. And from there, some fun begins. A short game - about twenty minutes, I reckon, to finish - but ingenious throughout. Worth your time.
    (tags: games unity scale platform ingenious )
• • Less Talk More Rock- Boing Boing
    "A videogame is a staggeringly beautiful canvas. It's a window into another world. A world that lives only as long as the machine is on. A living breathing world with depth and soul that actually exists, right there onscreen, limited only by the vision and imagination of its creators. Seize that thought, and don't let it go." Less talk, more rock. (And: I am enjoying the BB one-off feature art).
    (tags: games inspiration rock superbrothers design designaboveall justmakeit )
  • D Nye Everything: The two and a half deaths of Miranda Lawson
    "I got my Miranda. I also found out how many times I'll kill the same person in order to get my way, which is also helpful." Great stuff from Dan on Mass Effect 2, and the hoops we go through to make NPCs like us.
    (tags: games masseffect2 choice narrative dangriffiths )
• • Game Design Advance » The Truth in Game Design
    "Shouldn’t games be an opportunity for players to wrap their heads around counter-intuitive truths?" Yes, they should.
    (tags: games probability chance learning understanding franklantz )
  • what you loved when you were nine or ten « fenced lot
    “I’ve found that your chances for happiness are increased if you wind up doing something that is a reflection of what you loved most when you were somewhere between nine and eleven years old. At that age, you know enough of the world to have opinions about things, but you’re not old enough yet to be overly influenced by the crowd or by what other people are doing or what you think you “should” be doing. If what you do later on ties into that reservoir in some way, then you are nurturing some essential part of yourself.” And now, I love Walter Murch even more.
    (tags: quotations waltermurch childhood ambition life )
  • Hand Signals for Johannesburg Taxi Directions [pdf]
    Depicted as a grid by artist Susan Wolf; to circumvent the large number of languages spoken in Joburg, taxi drivers have official hand signals to take you from A to B. This PDF shows all of them. (via Bobulate)
    (tags: southafrica johannesburg handsignals language signs system:filetype:pdf system:media:document )
• • Preview: Instapaper on iPad - Instapaper Blog
    "No huge surprises, except maybe that I changed to dark toolbars. No multi-column reading, no fake book-page animations, and no giant newspaper graphics." Great explanation of Instapaper on the iPad from Marco. And: I'm sure it'll be great; in the past two months, I've become a total Instapaper convert.
    (tags: instapaper ipad app design software )
• • Above 49: Poor Tools Make Us Shoddy Craftsmen
    "By decoupling their data to minimize exporting, they said their polish actually became fun, not to mention efficient. I think many projects would benefit from finding a way to similarly decouple their tunable data." Yup.
    (tags: tools games design iteration process micro )
• • Placehold.it - Quick and simple image placeholders
    "How does it work? Just put your image size after our URL and you'll get a placeholder." Nifty!
    (tags: web design markup mockup images dynamic service useful )
• • Into The Abyss: Teal and Orange - Hollywood, Please Stop the Madness
    "Those of you who watch a lot of Hollywood movies may have noticed a certain trend that has consumed the industry in the last few years.  It is one of the most insidious and heinous practices that has ever overwhelmed the industry... I speak of course, of THE COLOR GRADING VIRUS THAT IS TEAL & ORANGE!!!" Oh dear. An entertaining follow up to that great Stu Maschwitz post on 'porange'.
    (tags: film grading porange colour trends pop retinaburning )
  • The day the music died - Vox
    "10 years ago, on this Friday in March of 2000, the Dot.Com bubble burst in the UK." [This is very good, Simon Wistow!]
    (tags: uk dotcom bubble internet crash newmedia simonwistow )
  • Chris Heathcote: anti-mega: post-digital media design, an introduction
    "Institutions are platforms / Sketching in things". Chris' introduction from the #mbsp SXSW panel; really good stuff, and that was only the introduction! Would have loved to have seen the whole thing.
    (tags: mbsp design chrisheathcote media services curation )
  • Raiding Eternity - Myspace - Gizmodo
    "Somewhere in the future, a picture of David Minor—in jeans and a tie, face beatific under a studio light, sleeves rolled up to expose the Eugene Debs quote tattooed on his arm—is berthed in a database table in off-system storage, waiting to be remade." Lovely, sharp, writing from Joel Johnson.
    (tags: joeljohnson memory internet technology writing )
• • Penny Arcade - Subterfuge And Social Media
    "If there is a bigger Splinter Cell fan than myself, I haven't yet met them; but in their zeal to promote the newest iteration, Ubisoft has caused Sam Fisher to tweet. And I don't mean they've made him chirp, which would be preferable. They've given him a Twitter account where he tweets in a supremely earnest way about how tormented his shit is.<br /> <br /> *No.*" Oh dear.
    (tags: marketing socialmedia splintercell games ohdear ubisoft )
  • Scientists supersize quantum mechanics : Nature News
    "A team of scientists has succeeded in putting an object large enough to be visible to the naked eye into a mixed quantum state of moving and not moving." Oh boy. That's quite a thing (and: quite a sentence!)
    (tags: science physics quantummechanics blimey )
  • Copying Code from Textmate to Keynote with Style @ Bamboo Blog
    "I've been using Copy with Style command, which I took from this blog post. It copies text selection as RTF so when the code is pasted into Keynote, it looks exactly the same as it looked in TextMate, including font style, size and colors. Code can be then modified in Keynote, while the style is preserved." Useful!
    (tags: textmate keynote presentation code formatting )