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Lovely trailer from BBC America for Law & Order UK. Sadly, it illustrates roughly what the British trying to make American-style procedural drama looks like. Lots of slamming things down. And tea. (Although: they don't know what "knackers" means, clearly.)
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"The iPad is an intensely personal device. In its design intent it is, truly, much more like a "big iPhone" than a "small laptop". The iPad isn't something you pass around. It's not really designed to be a "resource" that many people take advantage of. It's designed to be owned, configured to your taste, invested in and curated." On the assumptions built into devices, and what understanding them requires.
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"Ships will subscribe to the service through a third party, and receive the latest copy of the book when they dock at port. They tear out each page, and apply the relevant changes to their paper maps with a pencil and transfer paper. They’re paper map diffs, if you like." Awesome. And, as Tom said, it's a beautiful book.
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"Here at the Cow Clicker ranch, we've learned an important lesson about cow clicking: people don't just want one chance to click a cow every six hours. They want as many opportunities as possible to click a cow every six hours." And then Ian launches the API. And Connect. And everything else. And wins again.
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"Giving a PS3 owner of Portal 2 the ability to also play their game on the PC and Mac is an extension of this philosophy. From our perspective, it's not two copies of a game; it's the same game, but with Sony's help we've worked out a method to allow that Portal 2 PS3 customer to also play their game on the PC and Mac." …is the right answer. Well done, Valve.
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"The nature of an interactive medium should be the feedback loop between the player and the game; to not explore (or, at least, consider) the expression space of this cycle seems to be a missed opportunity." Trent raises some good points about the relationship between narratives and the systems that tell them.
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"I set myself a half-day project to write music specifically for shuffle mode – making use of randomness to try and make something more than the sum of its parts… Over an hour or so, I wrote a series of short, interlocking phrases (each formatted as an individual MP3) that can be played in any order and still (sort of) make musical sense." This is brilliant, and I do like Matt's ear.
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"And I don't think games are happiness engines, either. They are complex, rusty machines built to show us that the world is so much bigger and weirder than we expected. I play games to remind me of this. I make them for that purpose too." Lots of great stuff in here, especially the stuff about "winning" versus "coming to understandings". As someone whose happiest experiences of media are often the slow, subtle, dawning ones, I think I might be on Bogost's side here. But: I haven't read the book yet.
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Library to send appropriate pulses to an IR LED to trigger Nikon cameras
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"TimedAction is a library for the Arduino. It is created to help hide the mechanics of how to implement Protothreading and general millis() timing. It is sutied for those actions that needs to happen approximately every x milliseconds." Aha.
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"This library is a collection of routines for configuring the 16 bit hardware timer called Timer1 on the ATmega168/328." (Timers look hard).
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"NewSoftSerial is the latest of three Arduino libraries providing “soft” serial port support. It’s the direct descendant of ladyada’s AFSoftSerial, which introduced interrupt-driven receives – a dramatic improvement over the polling required by the native SoftwareSerial."
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"A sense of achievement without the capital ‘A’ is a better reward than anything Microsoft’s Funpoints can throw at you, and the very best Achievements are ones which reward actual achievement. When a player does something he or she know is awesome and the game agrees with them , it only makes the sense of achievement greater. Success in a game is better when you have an audience – in the absence of nearby friends, Achievements should be your audience."
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Visualising Guitar Hero notecharts in pillars of fire. Daft, brilliant. I particularly like that it visualises the act of playing – the note chart itself, the keys pressed.
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"That is the point that I am trying to make. The web is not, despite the desires of so many, a publishing medium. The web is a customer service medium. “Intense moderation” in a customer service medium is what “editing” was for publishing." Paul Ford is great.
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"I have worked for an hour to create this sight, shedding the mistakes of my previous drafts as I go. But each ill-fated Meat Boy, each mistimed jump and buzz-saw victim, deserves to be here in the replay with me. Without each of them, my successful run would not exist. By collapsing my attempts into one moment, Super Meat Boy depicts not time wasted on failed runs, but experience gained as I slowly perfected my craft." Like I said, one of my games of the year, and this deftly explains why.