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A remarkable book – and resource – from Chris Brejon. All on lighting for CG animation, but as usual with this sort of reference, so much to say about cinematic lighting fullstop.
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A deeply personal obit that will likely be lost to the sands of Facebook, but hey.
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Via Phil G, a nice modern boilerplate for HTML pages – notable because of the excellently narrated explanation around it. Always useful to have something like this to refer back to.
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Marvellous writing on one of Infocom's most notably experimental works, and its relationships to the present.
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Bookmarked as the least horrible pd reference I could find.
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"It’s hard to believe that there was a time when any of these weren’t conventional wisdom, but there was such a time. Unix combines more obvious-in-retrospect engineering design choices than anything else I’ve seen or am likely to see in my lifetime.
It is impossible — absolutely impossible — to overstate the debt my profession owes to Dennis Ritchie. I’ve been living in a world he helped invent for over thirty years."
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List of all 58 fonts now in iOS, mainly for reference. (Although, eesh, Zapfino AND Papyrus? Really?)
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Critical, critical, to the world we live in today.
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"And all this time I can’t help thinking that this was because I’m working with games. If I was a fimmaker, this is issue would never crop up. But games have to constantly defend their status as a way of creative expression. When creating games, you are by default suspected of either selling out or producing nothing of value what so ever. Or both." Seriously, Vimeo need to sort this out: it's embarrassing, and contrary to the messages they send out.
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"I wanted to talk about the Occupy $CITY movement here (in fact, that’s where this post started); a protest movement that is not about the event, or the movement through the city, or even the disruption per se. It is protest as part of the fabric of the city; a constant questioning and reassessment of a conversation with both the fabric of the city physically, economically and politically; taking the concept of Wall St and Main St and making it suddenly concrete, forcing a conversation to take place."
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"If this doesn’t seem like a big issue imagine the state of cinema if film students were only able to study films made in the last two decades? Or if English Literature students no longer have the ability to examine the works of Shakespeare or Twain? What might be lost?" Seriously, companies: stop turning servers off. Processor power is cheap.
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"Q: I don't imagine that a design meeting with Takahashi is a typical PowerPoint affair.
A: He has singlehandedly invented the animated GIF as the design spec. It's fucking hilarious." Animated GIF as design spec. Superb. (And: nice interview with Stuart Butterfield about Glitch).
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"JavaScript Garden is a growing collection of documentation about the most quirky parts of the JavaScript programming language. It gives advice to avoid common mistakes, subtle bugs, as well as performance issues and bad practices that non-expert JavaScript programmers may encounter on their endeavours into the depths of the language." This looks really, really good. Alas, unlike Phil, I'm still not quite fully up-to-speed on Prototypes, but it's a great piece of documentation nontheless.
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The beginnings of an encyclopedia for Roguelikes; some useful stuff in here, given current interests.
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"The book — by which I mean long-form text, in any format — is not a physical thing, but a temporal one. Its primary definition, its signal quality, is the time we take to read it, and the time before it and the time after it that are also intrinsic parts of the experience: the reading of reviews and the discussions with our friends, the paths that lead us to it and away from it (to other books) and around it." James, as ever, is very, very sharp. This is good.
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Open source DAW for Linux and OSX.
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"I keep coming back to EoPS (I am re-reading it as I write this) because it’s short, it’s easy reading, it’s funny, and much of its advice is timeless. In a way, you could say its age is even a plus-point, because it makes it obvious which of the rules are of their time and which are fundamental." Sounds great.
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"Today, we wanted to give you a heads-up about a new service now in development that will let players access the Auction House directly through the Armory website or Armory App for iPhone or iPod touch." And bingo, that's the killer out-of-world application for WOW players. (This is something I suggested in my talk at Develop last summer; glad to see Blizzard do the obvious. Which I really ought to put online).
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""Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo." is a grammatically correct sentence used as an example of how homonyms and homophones can be used to create complicated constructs." And: what a URL.
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Some good stuff here; the tips on the stash were new to me, and particularly handy.
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"This guidebook is a practical “how-to” manual on the conduct of effective nation-building. It is organized around the constituent elements that make up any nation-building mission: military, police, rule of law, humanitarian relief, governance, economic stabilization, democratization, and development. The chapters describe how each of these components should be organized and employed, how much of each is likely to be needed, and the likely cost." Not your average "for dummies" book, then.
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"In collaboration with Bungie and Microsoft we are bringing the artistry and almost infinite content of the Halo 3 world into your world. For the first time ever, custom screenshot images created on the Xbox 360 console during Halo 3 gameplay are available as remastered fine art products, and delivered ready to hang on your wall." Single-click from the Bungie.net screenshot viewer to buying prints (or canvases) of your screengrabs. Superb.
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…That Periodically Go Bad. Somewhat useful, surprisingly.
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"this is good level design." A lovely dissection of a couple of screens from Super Mario Land; detailed, spot-on, carefuly analysis from Anna Anthropy. Amazing what you can do with four types of block.
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"Why are so many people getting divorced today? It’s because most of us don’t have extended families anymore. It used to be that when a man and a woman got married, the bride got a lot more people to talk to about everything. The groom got a lot more pals to tell dumb jokes to." The rest of the quotation is where the magic happens.
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In which photographers, or, more likely, their assistants, upload lighting test shots. Some are striking; some are practical; some are made of awesome. Fun!
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The last keffiyeh factory in Palestine is going out of business; they're all made in China now. Well done, hipsters!
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Recommended by Matt Haughey.
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Fantastic, all of it.
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Sneeze is the latest minigame inside Routes to be released. It's a bit like Boomshine and Every Extend, except using the common cold as your weapon. Children are easy vectors, the elderly are slow but you get more points for infecting them. Lots of fun, and great splatter effects.
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"This story clearly illustrates the problem with ordering over the phone." Oh dear.
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"A set of rudimentary exercises intended to prepare students of rhetoric for the creation and performance of complete practice orations (gymnasmata or declamations). A crucial component of classical and renaissance rhetorical pedagogy. Many progymnasmata exercises correlate directly with the parts of a classical oration."
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"Our team of investigative journalists has compiled a database from four years' worth of company accounts to show how much the FTSE 100 companies make in pre-tax profits, and how much they pay in tax. We have published this data as a user-friendly interactive guide at guardian.co.uk/taxgap/data." But, as well as the user-friendly guide, there's also all the data. Bravo.
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"Unlike other games, L4D brings this entropy to the surface — there's a palpable feeling of dread throughout, as if the world is relentlessly and mercilessly trying to turn you into a red mist as fast as possible." Not convinced entirely, but this is a really important point: the best games expose their mechanics in plain sight. The systemic nature of the game – the entropic tension between survivor and zombie – is clearly critical to it, and there's no point where that's not made clear.
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"FreeAgent is an easy online accounting tool, perfectly suited for freelancers and small businesses." Lots of good support for UK-based business, especially when it comes to tax calculation.
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"Templates are simple ruby files containing DSL for adding plugins/gems/initializers etc. to your freshly created Rails project." That looks very handy.
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I've had this bug for ages. Basically: when you upgrade to Lightroom 2, keywords from Lightroom 1 aren't exported by default, making exporting to Flickr irritating, because you end up having to rekey some (but not all) keywords. This magic Lua script fixes everything.
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"During Condition 1 weather, winds gust at speeds of anywhere from 50 to 60 MPH and the wind chill hits anywhere between 75° F to 100° F below zero. Ouch. Not surprisingly, personnel are prohibited from leaving their buildings during these storms." Which gives them ample time to make videos like this.
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"Most usability experts will agree, Dr. Donald Norman’s book “The Design of Everyday Things” is required reading for any aspiring user experience or product designer. But it’s also an excellent resource for game creators – even if it’s less commonly found on studio bookshelves." NGMoco's blog, on POET, and what it means for game designers. Not rocket science, but really well explained to a non-specialist audience.