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More comprehensive notes from Gavin Bradley – this time, on the legacy of Funky Drummer.
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"What fascinates me about this evolution is not just the multiple levels of cut-and-paste that went on through these productions, but the fact that this exposes a clear example of the sort of rewriting/rethinking that sometimes must happen before a song hits its apex. Cherry’s rap on the b-side of ‘Looking Good Diving’ isn’t the fully realized version of the lyrics she went with on ‘Buffalo Stance,’ and neither is her confidence in place, yet, vocally." Marvellous, fascinating deconstruction of the mighty "Buffalo Stance"
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Marvellous. Can't say any more – you need to read this (very) short story – but it's really, really lovely: shivers down the spine, and something heartwarming, all at once. And: set in a slightly magical part of the world.
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"…the insight I had playing Indigo was that map-based games, while non-linear in gameplay, are inflexible in narrative. There’s nothing variable about the story that emerges in the player’s head: it’s authored, split up, and distributed across the game like pennies in a Christmas pudding. All that changes is the pace at which it appears. But in time-based games, everything the player does is story, and so that story is constant flux.
To put this another way:
Map-based games are ludicly non-linear but narratively inflexible.
Time-based games are ludicly linear but narratively flexible.
(Of course, these are spectrums: some games, like Rameses or Photopia are ludicly linear and narratively inflexible, and some, like Mass Effect, at least endeavour to be ludicly non-linear and narratively flexible.)
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Do readers want to interact, toy and play with fiction, or alter, bend and shape it?" Jon Ingold is smart. -
Really ought to make some of this sometime; I'm a sucker for onion jam/marmalade, ad it's so easy, I have no idea why I haven't tried it before.
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"…what I see in Matt and Alexis’s writing is a growing mastery of this balance. I think it’s an important emergent skill, maybe even a new liberal art. When you articulate it, it sounds almost like a koan, or part of some samurai code: Work in public. Reveal nothing."
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"A Scope & Engine based, clean, powerful, customizable and sophisticated paginator for Rails 3." Looks interesting; neatly designed, it seems, and will_paginate's refusal to get to a final 3.0 release has always been frustrating. Might try this out.
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Completely remarkable; a quest to decipher what's going on with a particular piece of malware ends up revealing a campaign to commit large-scale industrial sabotage of Iranian nuclear processing plants. Gripping, dense; it's a real thriller of an article.
Being With Each Other
17 July 2011
From this week’s Cardboard Children, over at Rock Paper Shotgun:
I don’t know if Subbuteo is a great game. I’m sure it is. It just wasn’t really a game to me. It was just one of many things I shared with my da. Like Star Trek and in-depth conversations about the nature of the universe. Now, as a father myself, I realise what was actually happening when we were playing that game we didn’t know the rules of. We were just being with each other. Flicking plastic. Shooting the shit. Playing.
What’s the point of all this?
Being with each other – for me, that’s the key element of board gaming. When you get that occasional person who openly tells you they see board games as “sad”, I feel a bit sad that they don’t get it. If I want to play a board game with you, it really just means I want to sit with you a while. That’s not a bad thing, is it?
No, Rab, that’s not a bad thing at all. And this is why some of my favourite boardgame memories are from afternoons and evenings sat in pubs around the country, rattling through game after game of Lost Cities, or Blue Moon, sat by a welcoming fire or bright window, pints in hand. It’s just a way to spend some time with a friend.
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"I think there’s a lesson here for a lot of transmedia, augmented reality, and other buzzword-based story-telling forms: it’s not what you do with the technology, it’s what you leave to the imagination." This is nice, and right, and Matt's point is right because it was true for every other kind of storytelling anyhow. We just have new ways to leave it to the imagination.
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"His base is too good, and I don’t have the choke. He proceeds to take a more dominant position, scores points, and my body is burning from the effort. The choke he applies toward the end of the match is almost a formality, since I’m far too tired to do much more than hang on. Second place. Second place because I’m learning the triangle choke, not learning Jiu Jitsu. Chipp never wins tournaments." A fantastic piece of writing, about beat-em-ups and combat sports, and the mindset you get into as you play both. I'm not a combat sports man, but it nails some of the inside of your brain when you've played a lot of beat-em-ups, for sure.
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"But to my eye, GIF is the most popular animation and short film format that's ever existed. It works on smartphones in millions of people's pockets, on giant displays in museums, in web browsers on a newspaper website. It finds liberation in constraints, in the same way that fewer characters in our tweets and texts freed us to communicate more liberally with one another. And it invites participation, in a medium that's both fun and accessible, as the pop music of moving images, giving us animations that are totally disposable and completely timeless."
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"My wife and I talk about this. We talk about the protocol of the fertility clinic. We talk about her support group, and failure to produce. We talk about adoption, which is expensive and ambiguous. We talk about giving up on the process and living our lives without the ghosts of unconceived children (the most adorable ghosts there are). We talk, and talk, and wait." Powerful, sad, brave writing from Paul Ford. Sometimes, you wish things were nice for the good people in the world.
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"I needed to get up to speed with doing recursive node structures so I coded up a project that would put a dot on the screen. When you tapped this dot, it would create a bunch of orbiting child-dots. These children could also be tapped, creating even more child nodes. This prototype took less than a day to create and I naively thought we would be done with the whole thing in a week, max. Silly me."
Marvellous, dense post from Robert on designing Planetary: lots of show-everything, material exploration, and plussing. What detail looks like.
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"Years later, when recounting his conversations with Beckett (which he did often), André the Giant revealed that they rarely talked about anything besides cricket."
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"In this scenario one sunny day you're working on low-level NoSQL projects at the Gootch or wherever, and you get an email from Facebook and you go for the interview and Zuckerberg is talking about scaling PHP and suddenly pauses, gets this look in his eye, pulls his hoodie over his head and says “You have sixty seconds. You should be running.” Because engineers, as we are often reminded, are the ultimate prey."
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"A problem with the human mind – your human mind – is that it's a horrific kludge that will fail when you most need it not to. The Ugh Field failure mode is one of those really annoying failures. The idea is simple: if a person receives constant negative conditioning via unhappy thoughts whenever their mind goes into a certain zone of thought, they will begin to develop a psychological flinch mechanism around the thought. The "Unhappy Thing" – the source of negative thoughts – is typically some part of your model of the world that relates to bad things being likely to happen to you."
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"Designers get handed a tool kit that has as many tools as a good swiss army knife, and the maps reflect these tools. Millions of people use them to make appointments across town, find restaurants, and drive home for the holidays.
But what if, instead of a swiss army knife, we used a box of crayons? Or charcoal and newsprint? Or play-doh? What would those maps look like? What could they tell us about the world?"
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"One thing that I learned during the launch of the original Macintosh in 1984 was that the press usually oversimplifies everything, and it can't deal with the reality that there are many people playing critical roles on significant projects. A few people always get too much credit, while most people get too little, that's just the way it has always worked. But luckily, it's 2011 and I can use the service that I helped to create to clarify things." This is Good And Proper. (Also it's good management).
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How ads used to be made. Some beautiful photographs here.
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Useful notes on the modern way of deploying Rails applications with Bundler and Capistrano.
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'"The expectation is slightly weird here, that you can do this stuff without killing yourself," added McNamara. "Well, you can't, whether it's in London or New York or wherever; you're competing against the best people in the world at what they do, and you just have to be prepared to do what you have to do to compete against those people."'
This is what McNamara considers responding to controversy. I'm furious that men like this are allowed to manage other human beings.
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"This is an atlas, then, made by that other nature, seen through other eyes. But those eyes have been following me, unseen and without permission, and thus I consider provoking breach a necessary act." This is good.
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"csvkit is a library of utilities for working with CSV, the king of tabular file formats." Ooh.
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"Synapse is an app for Mac and Windows that allows you to easily use your Kinect to control Ableton Live, Quartz Composer, Max/MSP, and any other application that can receive OSC events. It sends joint positions and hit events via OSC, and also sends the depth image into Quartz Composer. In a way, this allows you to use your whole body as an instrument." Oooh. OSC into anything; really nice, dead simple, and exactly the sort of thing I've been considering poking.
If you’re working in Ruby, you’re probably using Bundler. And if you’re using bundler, you’ll probably know that typing bundle install foo will install your bundle to a directory called foo.
Of course, the problem is that Bundler remembers this configuration, and if you now run bundle install, you’ll install your bundle to… foo.
This is annoying. It’s especially annoying if you never meant to install to foo, and that was just a typo.
So: if you want to reset bundler to installing to the default location – which is your system’s current gem folder – you’re going to spend up a good hour messing around on Google looking for a plain English solution.
Can you guess who did this, and who this article is written for? That’s right, it’s me in the past!
Your solution: just run bundle install --system. That’ll install your bundle to the default system location – and continue to do so in the future. Problem solved.
(As usual, when I write about how to do something technically, it’s because I couldn’t find the answer. That’s all.)