Links & notes for this month

• • Walking in Holden's Footsteps - Interactive Map - NYTimes.com
    "Trace Holden Caulfield's perambulations around Manhattan in "The Catcher in the Rye" to places like the Edmont Hotel, where Holden had an awkward encounter with Sunny the hooker; the lake in Central Park, where he wondered about the ducks in winter; and the clock at the Biltmore, where he waited for his date." Lovely.
    (tags: visualisation geo jdsalinger catcherintherye newyork manhattan map literature )
  • Hilobrow | Middlebrow is not the solution
    "Dreamed up by American and European SF writers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries — at a time when Lamarckian evolutionary philosophy, which posits a tendency for organisms to become more perfect as they evolve (because such change is needed or wanted, e.g., by “life”), remained popular — many of the first fictional supermen were portrayed by their creators as examples of a more perfect species towards which humankind has supposedly long aimed. Radium-Age superman was, that is to say, homo superior, an evolved human whose superiority was mental, physical, or both." Lovely essay; a nice bit of SF history (and originally published on IO9, I believe).
    (tags: olafstapledon fiction sf homosuperior supermen sciencefiction )
  • Serious Jazz, Celtic Punk on RBN | Plastic Axe
    "I saw these two videos of Rock Band Network tracks over at RBDLC and couldn’t resist sharing them. The first is a serious jazz tune: “Footloose and Fancy Free” by Bill Bruford’s Earthworks. The thing that’s interesting about this is that the “guitar” track is actually piano — something Guitar Hero has done in the past but Rock Band has generally shied away from. But what’s even neater is that the “vocal” track is actually a sax line, intended (one would assume) to be played with a sax or other horn; the “lyrics” are simply the notes being played." There's no question that building tunes for RBN is hard wokr, but god, this Bill Bruford video is stonking, and the sax-as-vocal idea is cracking.
    (tags: jazz rockband rhythmaction music games rockbandnetwork )
• • xkcd - Spirit
    "Maybe if I do a good enough job, they'll let me come home." Jesus, this is not far from making me tear up. I really need to do something about my sympathy-for-small-robots thing.
    (tags: xkcd comic mars space rover sad )
  • The Best Xbox Indie Games Releases 2009
    If you're anything like me, you probably never go near the "Indie Games" tab on Live marketplace. Which is a shame: there's some great stuff amongst all the chaff there. This post points to some good stuff from last year; Leave Home is cracking, as is "I maed a gam3..." (don't be put off by the title).
    (tags: xbox xna marketplace indie games )
  • hermitgames - games - leave home
    "Abstract shooter with dynamic difficulty and metaphorical explosions. Fixed length game session. Score points. Increase difficulty. Split shots. Leave Home..." 240MSP, for your Xbox 360, and it's out now. That's, like £1.50 or something. It's bloody marvellous; great soundtrack, tough difficulty, lovely use of the analogue trigger, super-pretty in high-def. No excuse not to buy it, really.
    (tags: games indie xbox360 leavehome hermitgames abstract shooter )
  • Reknit - January: Sweater = Scarf
    "You send an old sweater to my mom. She unravels it... and knits you a scarf." This is brilliant.
    (tags: knitting recycling clothes diy wool granufacture )
• • A new class of content for a new class of device « Snarkmarket
    "In five years, the coolest stuff on the iPad shouldn’t be Spider-Man 5, Ke$ha’s third album, or the ePub ver sion of Annabel Scheme. If that’s all we’ve got, it will mean that Apple suc ceeded at invent ing a new class of device… but we failed at invent ing a new class of content. In five years, the coolest stuff on the iPad should be… jeez, you know, I think it should be art."
    (tags: ipad media content design epub books innovation )
  • FLOTILLA
    Gorgeous retro-styled, genuinely-3D space combat strategy game for PC and (hurrah!) Xbox 360 Indie Games. Love the jaunty, Jetsons-y typefaces, the gentle piano music as combat plays out, the turn structure, and the hints at what's to come in the preview video. (Although: why anyone would make ships with weak bottoms (as opposed to bottoms & tops) in a genuinely 3D game seems strange. Gravity Bone was delightful, so this could be great; will buy it as soon as it's out.
    (tags: flotilla games strategy space retro beautiful indie )
• • Bit Battalion » gnop
    gnop is pong, except up/down move the ball, and you're trying to avoid the right-hand paddle to scroll right to the next screen. It is hard.
    (tags: games pong gnop flash )
  • Suit up, son! You're going to Mars! - The Decade in Board Games
    A nice round-up of the past decade in boardgames; one to return to.
    (tags: games boardgames list 2000s )
• • The Daily What
    "Commander Keen Cosplay of the Day: This guy knows what time it is. (Awesome o’clock.)" Epic, epic bonus points for *Commander Keen* cosplay. Stunning.
    (tags: commanderkeen cosplay idsoftware shareware games thosewerethedays )
• • YouTube confirms worldwide deal for live Indian Premier League cricket | Media | guardian.co.uk
    "YouTube has confirmed its first live major sporting deal, announcing today that it will host live Indian Premier League cricket matches in the UK, and casting into doubt the value of British TV broadcast rights." Wow. Awesome!
    (tags: google youtube cricket ipl media tv licensing )
  • Life Starts Here: High Society
    “This is who we are.” Duncan Fyfe is writing again; twelve short stories - presumably, one a month - set in the world of games. Writing fiction about something as a way of writing about something; he ends up with not only good - and acute - games writing, but just good writing, plain and simple. So good to have him back.
    (tags: duncanfyfe games fiction shortstory )
• • nvie.com » Blog Archive » A successful Git branching model
    "In this post I present the development model that I’ve introduced for all of my projects (both at work and private) about a year ago, and which has turned out to be very successful. I’ve been meaning to write about it for a while now, but I’ve never really found the time to do so thoroughly, until now. I won’t talk about any of the projects’ details, merely about the branching strategy and release management." It's a detailed strategy, but well thought-through; I'm certainly going to bear some of this in mind in future (and, indeed, the way the release branches are handled is familiar).
    (tags: git dvcs versioncontrol strategy branching development tips )
  • The 4 Big Myths of Profile Pictures « OkTrends
    More brilliant data-analysis and writing from OkTrends - perhaps my favourite data-blog out there, and one of my favourite discoveries in 2010 so far.
    (tags: dating data analysis okcupid photos )
  • H. G. Wells on "Metropolis" (1927)
    "I suppose there are multitudes of people to be 'drawn' by promising to show them what the city of a hundred years hence will be like. It was, I thought, an unresponsive audience, and I heard no comments. I could not tell from their bearing whether they believed that Metropolis was really a possible forecast or no. I do not know whether they thought that the film was hopelessly silly or the future of mankind hopelessly silly. But it must have been one thing or the other." He did not like it too much.
    (tags: writing hgwells cinema history metropolis sciencefiction scientificromance review )
  • intercourse with biscuits - the anti-coren market
    "Unless your surname's Coren you're going to need some help getting into the journalism industry." Great advertising from the Press Gazette
    (tags: nepotism journalism pressgazette advertising )
• • Auto-appendectomy in the Antarctic: case report -- Rogozov and Bermel 339: b4965 -- BMJ
    "The Russian surgeon Leonid Rogozov’s self operation, undertaken without any other medical professional around, was a testament to determination and the will to life." Rogozov was the surgeon on a Soviet Antarctic expedition, on the ice for a year. When he developed appendicitis, his only choice was to operate... on himself. This remarkable BMJ article draws on his diary to explain what happened. (There are two moderately icky photographs, should you not like that sort of thing).
    (tags: surgery science antarctica survival appendicitis russia history )
• • Commander A. Shepard « falling awkwardly
    "Over at The Border House, they’re having a bit of a backlash against the constant presence of Stubbly White Male Shepard in the marketing for the Mass Effect series.  (Seriously, who is that guy anyway?) Border House writers are posting details of their Shepards, and I was asked if I’d post mine. So, here is something that might give some idea." I'm rather enjoying this series, although this entry in it is probably my favourite.
    (tags: roleplaying games masseffect character whitemaleprivilege narrative )
• • Lasers would never have shone if Mandelson had been in charge | Technology | The Observer
    "The laser has become vital for our way of life, yet no researcher who worked on it after Einstein's paper could have predicted what would emerge. If Mandelson had had anything to do with it, we'd be reading barcodes by flashlight."
    (tags: politics funding technology research science )
  • YouTube - Mr. Gimmick - Annotated NES Longplay (Pt. 1/4)
    Via Waxy; a lovely, lovely, and very rare late NES game (from 1992). This is a lovely video, too - the annotation is well-done and entertaining. And it saves me having to play something that's clearly ferociously difficult.
    (tags: games nes video retro gimmick )