Links & notes for this month

• • Tuning Canabalt - Semi Secret
    "...in honor of Canabalt's first birthday (back on September 1st), why not write a guided tour of how everything works instead?" Lots of good tidbits on here; the stuff on hitboxes is particularly well observed and explained.
    (tags: design games canabalt tuning hitboxes )
  • 50 years of cyborgs: I have not the words. | Quinn Said
    This is all great.
    (tags: cyborgs culture quinnnorton prosthesis essay )
  • This isn't f***ing Dalston.
    I walked 4.5km down the A10, stopping every 200m or so to ask 10 unsuspecting passers by ... "Excuse me, what area is this?" This is what I was told.
    (tags: nomenclature places visualisation dalston hackney london )
  • Sound Sculptures Dentsu London Sound Sculptures
    "We’ve just launched a project in collaboration with biochemist/photographer, Linden Gledhill for Canon’s PIXMA colour printer range.  The project features surreal ‘sound sculptures’ made of dancing droplets of paint captured in extreme detail as they react to sound waves." Just beautiful.
    (tags: film colour paint slowmotion )
• • How to build a web widget (using jQuery) - Alex Marandon
    This is very good: well explained, the right way around of doing things, and some neat tricks to boot.
    (tags: widgegts embed jquery javascript tutorial jsonp )
• • dataists » Blog Archive » A Taxonomy of Data Science
    "Both within the academy and within tech startups, we’ve been hearing some similar questions lately: Where can I find a good data scientist? What do I need to learn to become a data scientist? Or more succinctly: What is data science?" Great starting point; looking forward to more from the blog.
    (tags: data machinelearning datascience blog )
  • On Book Guilt | booktwo.org
    "When someone with a bad case fails to finish a book, they don’t start a new one; they go into a holding pattern, crippled by guilt over their failure and unable to let go and start over. All reading stops. People have confessed to me that it’s been months since they last picked up a book, because they still haven’t finished the last one." Yup. We really don't have to finish this book, sometimes.
    (tags: jamesbridle stml books reading habit guilt )
• • The Prosthetic Imagination | > jim rossignol
    "By enabling the brain to manipulate with virtual systems, to engage with simulation, it creates systems than span the mental and the virtual, the biological and the electrical. Also, even more significantly to my point, our imagination is not a description as a book is a textual description, or a film is a visual description. It is, instead, a model." This is good, and the links are great, too.
    (tags: technology imagination games cyborgs jimrossignol prosthesis )
  • Living Epic: Video Games in the Ancient World: Halo: Reach as practomime
    "Reach, on the other hand, without its player, is an epic waiting to happen, a set of ludics waiting to be given enactment. More than any other comparison I could make, I think this one points out the value of thinking about games like Reach in the light of epics like the Iliad: these two kinds of practomime share the enormously important characteristic of living through re-performance, of gaining their meaning through iteration according to the rules laid down by the practomime." This is good: game as structure, the core loop as enacted by the player being what brings it to life, structures it according to its audience.
    (tags: epic halo games performance narrative )
• • Open Source is about the differences - Apache Asserts
    "One million changes, nearly three thousand developers... At the end of the day, we just sail and log our collective journey through the Sea of Changes to the software commons." Very nice, and as James said: yep, he gets it.
    (tags: software change history historiography development )
• • Fatalism in Leboa-Sako and Bowa-Seko | Five Players
    "Far Cry 2 invites fatalism, pessimism, and near-suicidal tactics because optimism and strategy went on holiday to Leboa-Sako and got murdered just like everything else. Hoping for the best doesn’t work. Being clever doesn’t work. Nothing good will ever happen to you in Far Cry 2′s Africa, and none of your carefully-designed plans will ever bear fruit."
    (tags: games writing farcry2 fatalism )
  • BLDGBLOG: Special effects of a timestretched present
    "The optical future of architectural ornament: light with content. <br /> <br /> That is, you get home with your digital camera and you click back through to see what you've photographed—and there are words, shapes, and objects hovering there in the street, or inside the buildings you once stood within, visual data only revealed through long-exposures." Brilliant.
    (tags: makingfuturemagic architecture bldgblog lightpainting motion )
  • Scrolling Ticker Display - Minecraft Forum - Official Minecraft Forums
    "After seeing there is a turing complete language in game, I felt like I should do something interesting with redstone in Minecraft. People already have done clocks and adders so I wanted to do something a little different while also be potentially useful. As a result, I designed out a ticker display." At least as crazy as those LittleBigPlanet calculators.
    (tags: minecraft games creation programming )
  • The Future of Books: why IDEO and I aren’t on the... | intercourse with biscuits
    "Nelson, as described by IDEO in the video above, does so much work for you. It throws multiple perspectives into the equation, killing the unreliable narrator with the gifts of foresight and hindsight. It does away with the unexplainable appeal of a surprising hit novel giving you a league table of books to pick from according to their “impact on popular opinion and debate.” You’ll struggle to form your own opinion as you jump through the layers that Nelson offers you, given a perspective like a student browbeaten by an overbearing A-Level tutor." I similarly disliked their attempts to not only redesign the book, but to try to redesign narrative, in "Alice" - as if people hadn't tried, and as if what narrative _really_ needed was just a good design firm to take a crack at it.
    (tags: ideo books narrative writing imagination )
• • Creating Interactive Fiction with Inform 7 - The Gameshelf
    "More important: the game, Sand-dancer, is a good game. It is not the sort of example that exists to have one of everything in the manual. It is the sort of game that exists to make IF better. Aaron puts it together on your workbench. You can see the parts going in, and I don't mean rules and action constructs now; I mean character, background, voice, theme, and narrative drive. He explains what he's doing, and what each game element is for. He talks about story structure and shape of interactivity. He discusses what you have to do to get the player involved and what you have to do to put the player in control." This sounds great. Add-to-cart.
    (tags: if inform7 interactivefiction books )
  • Philip Pullman calls time on the present tense | Books | The Guardian
    "I want all the young present-tense storytellers (the old ones have won prizes and are incorrigible) to allow themselves to stand back and show me a wider temporal perspective. I want them to feel able to say what happened, what usually happened, what sometimes happened, what had happened before something else happened, what might happen later, what actually did happen later, and so on: to use the full range of English tenses." There's lots in here. I think it might be good; it is definitely interesting, and worth returning to.
    (tags: philippullman writing tense english technique )
  • BBC iPlayer - The Archive Hour: The Feynman Variations
    "In this programme we hear from colleagues, friends and former students as well as the great man himself about the beauty of nature and the importance of science to our understanding of the world." A lovely Archive Hour on Radio 4, on Richard Feynman; only available for a few more days, so grab it whilst you can. Delightful, and nicely structured.
    (tags: physics radio bbc radio4 richardfeynman )
• • GameDevBlog: Story Games - My New Obsession
    Jamie Fristrom on collaborative-storytelling-RPGs. Lots of good links and thoughts here - especially the line about White Wolf's "disenfranchising" of the player by calling the GM (of all people) a "storyteller".
    (tags: jamiefristrom games storytelling rpg stories )
• • Oilfurnace - A Dwarf Fortress tale by Tim Denee
    You know, it's thing like this that make me really wish I had the time to devote to properly grokking Dwarf Fortress, because sod the pictures, it's just a brilliant _story_.
    (tags: games stories dwarffortress art )
• • Kanye West, media cyborg « Snarkmarket
    "We’re all Jamie Madrox now." (This is so good).
    (tags: media cyborg mediacyborg culture identity augmentation prosthesis )