Links & notes for this month

• • foto_decadent: John Rawlings
    A whole bunch of vintage Rawlings fashion photography from 30s and 40s Vogue. Something about many of these that's just magic; great direction, great pictures.
    (tags: photography fashion vogue johnrawlings )
• • YouTube - Wind Waker Unplugged
    Freddie25 plays the Wind Waker theme, on a selection of instruments, as a Christmas treat for you. It's delightful, and the bit when the nine-part vocals come in is lovely. Proper good, this.
    (tags: games music awesome video zelda legendofzelda windwaker )
  • dm fail!
    "..some tweets were destined for fail." - or, at least, not for public consumption. Oh dear.
    (tags: security privacy messaging twitter fail )
• • Chase Jarvis Blog: 5 Tips For Making Great iPhone Photos
    Nothing out of the ordinary, but the take-on-release tip is a good one, and I'll be checking out Pano.
    (tags: photography tips iphone )
• • The 25 Days of Newman | Paul and Storm
    For each of the 25 days leading to Christmas, Paul and Storm have done one of their Randy Newman theme-songs. Twenty-five pastiches of Short People, for your pleasure. Die Hard, The Godfather, and the Big Lebowski are stand-outs.
    (tags: music pastiche humor randynewman paulandstorm )
  • Chris's 1UP BlogEntry: How I Got My Sega Genesis: Remembering Christmas 1992
    "I'm not sure if I have made it clear about how much I want a Sega Genesis for Christmas. I have developed a way that the gift of a Sega Genesis for me will not only benefit me with many hours of enjoyment, but it will also benefit you with many clean bathrooms, clean rooms, and meaningful hugs." Chris Baker finds the evidence of how (he thinks) he managed to get a Sega Genesis for Christmas in 1992. At least they'd stopped shipping Altered Beast with it by then.
    (tags: games sega childhood christmas genesis megadrive parentalmanipulation )
  • ihobo: The Casual Players Aren't Coming to Your Party
    "Here's the most important thing to understand about the mass market for videogames: these players – the ones who aren't even remotely interested in the kind of videogames the hobbyists want to play – have very specific tastes, and when something takes off with them it continues to sell, and sell, and sell. But these players don't buy many titles – when they find the game they want, they generally just keep playing that."
    (tags: games culture marketing casual sales massmarket )
• • One More Go: Ranarama - Offworld
    "But in a game - or, at any rate, in the kind of game you used to get for Christmas - you’re literally the only person in the universe, and literally the only person with the power to fix things. No-one’s going to come and help, no-one’s going to come and tell you off or second-guess your choices: there’s just you and a world that will stay broken unless you fix it. What’s in the box isn’t a frog power fantasy - it’s a vibrant, momentary taster of the glorious pressure of being a grown-up." Margaret, being brilliant (again) on games, Christmas, childhood, and what it means to be meaningfully alone.
    (tags: games play writing childhood ranarama atarist christmas empowerment )
• • The Buzzwords of 2008 - NYTimes.com
    "Picking out political buzzwords from 2008 is like shooting moose in a pigpen. The fundamentals were so dizzyingly strong, it could be tough to keep them all straight." Good selection, though, both political and non.
    (tags: society language type nyt jargon words slang buzzwords )
  • sakurakoshimizu: 20071201
    "Waveform Series is the laser-cut shapes of the waveform of the sound in sound editing software environment. I used some human sound such as yawn, atchoum, giggle, wow, and the sound of church bell." Utterly, utterly gorgeous.
    (tags: design beautiful sound audio silver jewelry lasercutting waves )
  • HTTP Client - Mac Developer Tool for HTTP Debugging
    "A Mac OS X Leopard developer tool for debugging HTTP services by graphically creating & inspecting complex HTTP messages." Oh, that could come in handy.
    (tags: development web http debugging )
  • Pages Generator — GitHub
    Lovely way to generate pages for your github projects - and to do so as a branch of said project. Clever.
    (tags: opensource git versioncontrol sourcecontrol github )
  • Really, Really Big Bad Exploit found in Eve Online... after 4 years - PlayNoEvil Game Security News & Analysis
    "CCP Games has uncovered an exploit in Eve Online that survived in the game for 4 years and may have had a massive impact on the game and game economy." Read the links for more details; suffice to say, EVE is going through a major economic upheaval right now; exploits that have lasted for four years are no longer viable, and everything's getting very expensive. Sound familiar?
    (tags: games mmo mmorpg economy eve eveonline recession )
  • Hurt like HELvetica | Typophile
    "Semi-jestfully I would talk with my friends about how stupid it would be to get an I <3 Helvetica tattoo... an even stupider idea would be to get it as a tramp stamp. Well, I got good reviews from my posse and impulsively I got it last night..." Oh boy.
    (tags: typography tattoo uhoh )
• • Leapfroglog - Cities, systems, literacy, games
    A nice post to end the year from Kars - it feels like a top-trump of so many things that have risen to the surface in my head in 2008.
    (tags: games play design space ubicomp cities karsalfrink systems everyware place systemsliteracy readwrite )
  • Katz Got Your Tongue? » Rails and Merb Merge
    "Today is a fairly momentous day in the history of Ruby web frameworks. You will probably find the news I’m about to share with you fairly shocking, but I will attempt to explain the situation." Yehuda Katz weighs in with a great, informative post.
    (tags: programming development ruby rails rubyonrails web software merb )
  • Riding Rails: Merb gets merged into Rails 3!
    "Merb and Rails already share so much in terms of design and sensibility that joining forces seemed like the obvious way to go. All we needed was to sit down for a chat and hash it out, so we did just that." No, really. Not an April Fool. It sounds like the architecture changes that are going to be made are going to be a big win for Rails 3. Looking forward to it.
    (tags: programming development ruby rails web frameworks merb )
  • AlternateIdea: Textmate Vibrant Ink Theme and Prototype Bundle
    Not concerned with the Javascript bundle, but the Vibrant Ink syntax-highlighting link is lovely.
    (tags: programming development theme textmate syntaxhighlighting )
• • Left 4k Dead
    "Left 4k Dead was made by Markus Persson, for the 2009 Java 4k Competition. The entire game is less than 4kb." Impressive, and even a bit fun.
    (tags: games programming java left4dead small challenge )
  • Gamasutra - Persuasive Games: Windows and Mirror's Edge
    "Mirror's Edge is not a perfect game, perhaps, but it is something more important: it is an interesting game. It can be played and experienced on its own terms, for its own sake, if players would only allow themselves to take a single videogame specimen at face value rather than as yet another data point on the endless trudge toward realistic perfection." Ian Bogost taking a considered approach to Mirror's Edge.
    (tags: games play gamasutra innovation experience mirrorsedge ianbogost seeing looking )
  • Dubious Quality: Fire
    "'Why do you build your own computers?' Gloria asked earlier this week. 'Why don't you buy just buy one that's already built?' ... It's because computers are fire... If I was a caveman (I'd be dead, because I can't see clearly two feet in front of myself without glasses, but that's not the point), I wouldn't go to the guy who discovered fire and ask if I get a light off his torch. I might let him explain the process--documentation, as it were--but then I'd go off, hold the torch backwards, cut myself with the flint, and generally do it wrong."
    (tags: technology analogy progress computers billharris fire )
  • Headspace
    This appears to be some kind of 3D-tinged mind-mapping software; Flatblack were behind the rotoscoped look of Waking Life and A Scanner Darkly; this is clearly an interesting digression for them.
    (tags: 3D iphone software management productivity mindmapping spatial )
  • The Offworld 20: 2008's Best Indie and Overlooked - Offworld
    The Offworld 20 "...isn't just a list of independently made and under-appreciated games, it's a list of the games that celebrate what makes Offworld Offworld: the beautiful and the bizarre, and the games trying to push the medium forward and give us something we've never seen before, in whatever incremental way." Smashing. I love Offworld already, and this is a lovely list.
    (tags: games writing blogs offworld )
  • Monopoly Repackaging | Andy Mangold
    "Monopoly, in spite being the classiest of all board games, unfortunately is packaged just as boringly and uncreatively as every other garbage board game on the shelves. So, I decided to repackage it... turning the class up to 11." Very pretty, but I miss the original typeface: the 30s-style sans-serif was very important to the tone.
    (tags: games toys design product monopoly )
  • Versus CluClu Land: It's the Little Things
    "...my feeling is that the barriers to verismilitude in video games aren't technological-- lighting effects, texture work, mocapping-- but /technical/. They're matters of technique, mastering the extant toolset in order to produce the novelistic details that make for the feeling of authentic transport. Game design doesn't need a better camera, or a holodeck. What it requires is old-fashioned artistry and imaginativeness, an obsessive and nerdish Flaubert who will come along and show us how games work."
    (tags: games storytelling narrative design technique iroquoispliskin )
  • Sci-Fi Hi-Fi: Weblog: (via bradleyallen) If it looks like a leaderboard, and quacks like a leaderboard...
    "...it’s become apparent to me that social software is a medium turns all communication into a self-representation game whose ultimate goal is popularity."
    (tags: play design representation socialsoftware score statistics leaderboard popularity )
  • GameSetWatch - COLUMN - Chewing Pixels: 'The Nightmare Before Christmas'
    "I am a terrible gaming evangelist. Every time I think I’m onto something my mind’s invaded by Marcus Fenix and his sweaty, homoerotic pecs, by Cloud and his implausible sword and cod-philosophy and, most poignantly, by me, in my pajamas aged nine playing Tetris on the toilet and by me, in my pajamas aged twenty-nine, playing Tetris on the toilet." And Simon powers straight into /my/ favourite games writing of 2008. Bravo.
    (tags: games play writing culture videogames excuses evangelism )
• • GameSetWatch - COLUMN - Chewing Pixels: 'The Nightmare Before Christmas'
    "I am a terrible gaming evangelist. Every time I think I’m onto something my mind’s invaded by Marcus Fenix and his sweaty, homoerotic pecs, by Cloud and his implausible sword and cod-philosophy and, most poignantly, by me, in my pajamas aged nine playing Tetris on the toilet and by me, in my pajamas aged twenty-nine, playing Tetris on the toilet." And Simon powers straight into /my/ favourite games writing of 2008. Bravo.
    (tags: games play writing culture videogames excuses evangelism )
  • The weird science of stock photography. - By Seth Stevenson - Slate Magazine
    "I was startled to realize that stock photo and video purveyors actually create material in anticipation of demand... These suppliers of the world's commercial imagery are making bets on what life will look and feel like in the near future." But of course.
    (tags: advertising marketing photography prediction stock future stockphotography gettyimages )
  • Twitter-enhanced Derivé « Magical Nihilism
    "The city is here for me to use, and it tells me so." Indeed.
    (tags: ubicomp towerbridge twitter riverthames messagingbus )
• • LRB · John Lanchester: Is it Art?
    Lanchester writing about games, from the point of view of a smart person who's actually played the games he described. I certainly don't agree with all his points, but I don't disagree with them all, and he's not mouthing off: he's making smart connections and indicating more than a passing familiarity with the medium. Might write a tad more on this.
    (tags: games writing culture criticism art lrb johnlanchester )
  • Cabestan: Winch Tourbillion Watch (Monoscope)
    "1352 components driven by a 450 link chain and nickel silver drums, prices range from $275k–$400k." Ignoring the price: do want very much.
    (tags: engineering beautiful watch horology clockwork cabestan )
  • SEGA :: GAMES :: OutRun™ Online Arcade
    It's basically Outrun 2 SP, but in hi-def, and on XBLA and PSN. And it looks like it has all the music intact. Very exciting!
    (tags: games awesome download sega driving xbla outrun2 magicalsoundshower sumodigital psn )
  • Achievement Unlocked | Armor Games
    The metagame is the game. Use the elephant to earn achievements. Apart from earning slightly /too/ many instantly at the beginning, it's a lot of fun. Don't reach for the hints too early.
    (tags: games play flash reward achievements metagaming )
  • Weightbot - Tapbots
    Yes, it's an app about weight loss. But: the UI is superb in its touchability and suitability for task at hand, and the reporting functionality is solid (and looks like it'll get much better).
    (tags: interaction design application iphone ui usability weightloss )