Advance-Wars-inspired tabletop game.

"…there is something far more interesting at work in Heavy Rain: its successful rejection of the primary operation of cinema. The game doesn't fully succeed in exploiting this power, but it does demonstrate it in a far more synthetic way than do other games with similar goals. If "edit" is the verb that makes cinema what it is, then perhaps videogames ought to focus on the opposite: extension, addition, prolonging. Heavy Rain does not embrace filmmaking, but rebuffs it by inviting the player to do what Hollywood cinema can never offer: to linger on the mundane instead of cutting to the consequential." Ian Bogost is smart, and this is brilliant (and also provides a citation for "film is editing", which is something I've blathered about before).

"The unix-jun72 project has scanned in a printout of 1st Edition UNIX from June 1972, and restored it to an incomplete but running system. Userland binaries and a C compiler have been recovered from other surviving DECtapes." Blimey, etcetera.

"Today the first three production non-Latin top-level domains were placed in the DNS root zone. This means they are live! Here is one newly enabled domain with a functional website that works right now: وزارة-الأتصالات.مصر" Which means we can now have right-to-left domain names as well. Impressive, and clearly very important.

"So you want a facebox that shows a form which does an asynchronous submission and updates the facebox with the results of the submission showing error or success messages." Yes, I do. This worked. Thanks, Wes Gibbs.

It's a guide to Dudley in SSF4. Looks like a good one, and, given it's a few years since I've played Dudley (and that was in a different game)… much welcome. To read in the near future.

MarsEdit 3 is out; the headline feature is the WYSIWYG mode, but for me, the headline features are syntax-highlighting, support for WordPress Pages, and integration with Lightroom's library. Sadly, it's 10.6 only, and my knackered MBP is 10.5… but it's an upgrade I'll be making asap.

Blimey, ReBirth, entirely ported to iPhone and on the App Store. Looks finickity, but it was loads of fun, and for $7… I might end up with that.

"Fortunately, for the first time in my life, I know the way forward. The way forward lies in my having the courage that I did not know I had a decade ago to bid farewell to those tragically comforting habits. I need to walk on hot coals and sleep on a bed of nails. I need to chew on broken glass. I need to drink paint. This post has gotten long enough and I am still afraid to come to the point, but what I really need more than anything is to write these words;<br />
<br />
I gave notice of my resignation to Ubisoft on Monday, April 26th, 2010."

Engine Yard have a new blog about Rails, consisting of screencasts and tutorials, and it looks good. One to subscribe to.

"This information describes how Free Range operates, both as a business and as a culture.<br />
<br />
We're open-sourcing our business, from the site to the contracts to the philosopy. Value does not come from these things, but from putting these ideas into practice. These ideas are not assets – we, the people, are.<br />
<br />
Fork this." Free Range have put their manifesto and operating principles onto Github.

And, with their 119th update, Valve helpfully included the list of all their previous patches, as well. Just look at the amount that's changed – and how swiftly. A proper, living game (unlike the stillborn 360 version). Can't wait to play it on the Mac; it's almost like a different game to the one I played at the beginning.

"Ben Gimpert is a friend of the Open Library. He and I got together over lunch a few months ago to talk about big data, statistical natural language processing, and extracting meaning from Open Library programmatically. His efforts are beginning to bear some really interesting fruit, and while we work out how we might be able to present it online, we thought you might be interested to hear what he’s been up to." Answer: good things. Ben is awesome, and this work sounds great. (I can't quote a suitable passage, so George's intro will have to do).

A few short tips on find; one of the bash tools I use least, and should probably use more.

"Diller, Brill, and Murdoch seem be stating a simple fact—we will have to pay them—but this fact is not in fact a fact. Instead, it is a choice, one its proponents often decline to spell out in full, because, spelled out in full, it would read something like this: “Web users will have to pay for what they watch and use, or else we will have to stop making content in the costly and complex way we have grown accustomed to making it. And we don’t know how to do that.”"

I could, charmlessly and redundantly, expand on that to say: when life surprises us, making the everyday strange and wonderful, our first impulse is to make stories. These are of course personal stories: the volcano itself is too remote, too vast, to fit into our little narratives. Like Vonnegut’s glaciers, they just exist: human lives happen around them.

"An inquisitive family have uncovered a bizarre church which has been hidden under their Victorian home in Shropshire for 100 years. The Farla family made the discovery while investigating what was under a metre-long rectangle metal grid in their hallway." Wow. Via BLDGBLOG

Lovely interview with Danny Trejo about many of his roles. If you like movies, totally worth a read. He's really quite a guy.

Mecha-choreography, filmed in Armored Core 4 Answer. Pretty, and I'm not really one for Machinima, but there's something about the jet-trails that just works.

"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.

Open source DAW for Linux and OSX.

"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.