-
"Corridors make science-fiction believable, because they're so utilitarian by nature – really they're just a conduit to get from one (often overblown) set to another. So if any thought or love is put into one, if the production designer is smart enough to realise that corridors are the foundation on which larger sets are 'sold' to viewers, movie magic is close at hand."
-
"Thunderbirds is Rescue Fiction. All kids respond to rescue scenarios. Rescue Fiction is emotionally maturing – it removes the wish for magic, religion or flying people to zoom in to save the day; it confirms that it is a far more glorious and dazzling thing to invent ways to rescue ourselves."
-
"I've recommended Fruit Mystery to other people more than any other game. I've spent more time playing it than Gears of War, Call of Duty and Pro Evo put together, despite the fact it's 38 seconds long. Yes, it's completely stupid, but that's why I like it. Most videogames are stupid – at least Fruit Mystery is honest about it." Yup.
-
"Ikea Heights is a melodrama shot entirely in the Burbank California Ikea Store without the store knowing." Amazing.
-
"What's needed, from a gameplay perspective, is a romantic partner who is sometimes also functionally the villain. There's a reason people write buckets of fanfic about the secret love of Draco Malfoy and Harry Potter: passionately clashing with someone is a form of intimacy. It raises the emotional stakes between those two characters _far_ more reliably than attempts to portray attraction in interactive form." Emily Short on fine, fine form, about the difficulties of writing romance into games. An excellent piece of writing on game design.
-
A good list of tips – lots of compiled stuff needs to be recompiled to x64, and this will be confusing. I am not upgrading quite yet.
-
A quite nice monochromatic icon set, including both dark-on-light and light-on-dark options.
-
"The camera itself will trap Harry, leaving him all the more vulnerable because he is alone." But of course. A wonderful opening to a wonderful, wonderful film; still, perhaps, my favourite film, and one so rooted in editing and film-making. The camera, constantly trapping Caul, boxing him in, is worth paying attention to, and this short description of the opening captures its predatory nature.
-
Animated gifs made of three frames of film. Not all are safe for work, though none are obscene. You might love it; it might make you feel a bit ill.
-
"…the ongoing charm and usefulness of the animated .gif lies in this very economy. Like a good one-liner, the animated .gif can tell a joke with the impact of a one-inch punch, trimming away the fat of unnecessary frames to deliver its message with streamlined effectiveness." All too true. And Simon gives me my own discovery of the day
-
"What an incredible thing. He and The British Experimental Rocket Group have become ideas – vague, powerful concepts that have all the potential to change the world or dissipate trying. Who wouldn’t want to be a part of that?" It is awesome when people write about your company the way you only imagined they might.
-
"In fact, when Dust 514 launches, the map of EVE, currently divined only by player structures owned in the PC game, will also take into account infantry successes and failures within the console game. Players in the PC MMO can "fund mercenaries and give them goals" in the console title." Oh, now that is nice: CCP build a multiplayer game for consoles, and tie it – with data and everything – to the PC MMO, but it's only an indirect link. As a 360 owner without a PC, I shall have to be proud to serve in the mobile infantry.