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" I think Zemeckis and Gale knew all the timely accoutrements signifying "the present" in Back To The Future would inevitably look like 1985 within just a couple of years; in fact, they were banking on it. Zemeckis and Gale were trying to create an archetypical representation of 1985 just like they did for 1955, with its soda fountains, social repression, and subjugated black people. In this way, Back To The Future only gets better the further we get from the '80s. Everything that defines Marty McFly—how he walks, talks, acts, and dresses—acts as instantly recognizable shorthand for the year he comes from." This is great.
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"Let’s own the work that goes live, understand and explain why it is as it is, and work on the skills we need to make sure more good design actually makes it over the line. Otherwise, what’s the point?" Yes.
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"Unsurprisingly, having recognizable cartoon characters on the boxes caused kids to rate a cereal as better tasting, affecting their subjective assessment of it."
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This is working well for me: rapid calendar input, not too big on the menu bar, and yet nice support for multiple calendars and the like. Pretty much meets my calendar-input requirements, and leaves iCal to do the heavy lifting.
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"Johann Sebastian Joust! is a no-graphics wiimote dueling game prototype for 3+ players. We developed it at the Nordic Game Jam 2011." Fun: electronically-enabled, no-screen gaming, which in this case is primarily about putting other players off and interfering with their controls.
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Gosh, what a lot of topics: fashion, fabrics, architecture, space, cybernetics, cities, all spinning out of the development of the spacesuit. Cracking interview, impossible to pick a quotation from.
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"Get great articles delivered to your Kindle without any extra effort." Curated content, delivered direct to your Kindle via the email interface. Will try this for a bit: it's a really obvious opening in the space, and scope for there to be many of these.
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If you're going to write a review for a digital medium about a recursive game, this is as good a way as any to do it. Bravo.
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"You wouldn’t think you could get homesick for a simple button. You’d be wrong."
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A lovely piece from Dan on Meek's Cutoff and Oregon Trail.
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"My daughter was first sued in the womb. It was all very new then. I'd posted ultrasound scans online for friends and family. I didn't know the scans had steganographic thumbprints. A giant electronics company that made ultrasound machines acquired a speculative law firm for many tens of millions of dollars. The new legal division cut a deal with all five Big Socials to dig out contact information for anyone who'd posted pictures of their babies in-utero. It turns out the ultrasounds had no clear rights story; I didn't actually own mine. It sounds stupid now but we didn't know. The first backsuits named millions of people, and the Big Socials just caved, ripped up their privacy policies in exchange for a cut. So five months after I posted the ultrasounds, one month before my daughter was born, we received a letter (back then a paper letter) naming myself, my wife, and one or more unidentified fetal defendants in a suit. We faced, I learned, unspecified penalties for copyright violation and theft of trade secrets, and risked, it was implied, that my daughter would be born bankrupt." This is marvellous
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'"Piracy these days on PC is probably less problematic than second-hand sales on the Xbox," declared lead Fable III combat designer Mike West.' Oh dear.
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"It is – perhaps – at once a fascination with the raw possibility of a technology, and – a disinterest, in a way, of anything but the qualities of its output. Perhaps it happens when new technology becomes cheap and mundane enough to experiment with, and break – when it becomes semi-domesticated but still a little significantly-other. When it becomes a working material not a technology." This is all great stuff.
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"Patrick Stump survived The Scene, then." I went to see Patrick Stump play some music. Then I reviewed it for Londonist.
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Nice little collection of indie pen-and-paper RPGs; Dread sounds a lot of fun, and yet another reminder how much I need to get Fiasco.