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"With the help of Prezi you can create maps of texts, images, videos, PDFs, drawings and present in a nonlinear way." Oh. Now that looks interesting.
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"See, you're doing that zany goofball routine, but Xander and Wash never made sex slaves, so it kind of doesn't work." Seriously, this is the most accurate summary of Dollhouse you can imagine. If I'd been playing the drinking game, my liver would be dead by now.
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Jolly good, this, with lots of sensible points and a real clarity of thought for what otherwise could just be Powerpoint-by-numbers.
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Cordell Barker's 1988 cartoon. I didn't even think this might be on Youtube.
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After yesterday's stop-motion, this is perhaps even more remarkable and strange. Seriously, it's jaw-droppingly clever; daren't think how long it took.
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"For the next few decades, journalism will be made up of overlapping special cases. Many of these models will rely on amateurs as researchers and writers. Many of these models will rely on sponsorship or grants or endowments instead of revenues. Many of these models will rely on excitable 14 year olds distributing the results. Many of these models will fail. No one experiment is going to replace what we are now losing with the demise of news on paper, but over time, the collection of new experiments that do work might give us the journalism we need." Late to link to this, but as everyone else who has done already would point out: it's great.
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"The truth is, I think I’m famously awful at developing games. Before, I’d walk into the office, wave my arms and say ‘I’ve just had a cool thought’ – usually after severe alcohol abuse – and that lead us to spending a lot of money very foolishly on things that weren’t going to get anywhere. Quite a while ago now, we sat down and thought, well, this is ridiculous – we can’t keep this notion that game development is a purely creative process, and that you have to build it to be able to see it. There’s got to be another way." Peter Molyneux becomes a bit more self-aware, possibly a little too late.
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How did I miss this when Lee first wrote it? This is all-encompassing, wonderful stuff about visualisation, exercise, comics, futurism, privacy, and the whole shebang. Top notch stuff, worth a read.
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"Clatter is a wireless IM Lens instant messaging system built on to a soft contact lens. Clatter differs from other, commercial lens services by being open source and "riding" other services to create free cross-platform access." From Warren Ellis' Doktor Sleepless.
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"The question of responsibility and accountability gets sticky here – especially if we consider that technologies are too often viewed as neutral tools or isolated artefacts. If we draw out these flows, these networks, these interconnections, we find ourselves faced with the possibility of being connected to people/objects/places/activites/ideas that we may never see. And with intimacy always comes risk."
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"Commissioned by the advertising agency Nordpol+ Hamburg I designed the origami models and consulted the stopmotion as well as the computer animators of this world wide corporate movie that tells the story of the japanese sports brand ASICS. The movie won a Grand Prix at the Eurobest, gold at the New York festival, gold at the London International Awarts, silver at the Clio in Miami and two times bronze at ADC Germany." And it deserves all those awards; a beautiful piece of animation and paper-folding.
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"Not to be outdone (well, maybe a little outdone), we've combed through hours of imaginary data here at Consumerist HQ and put together a similar animation that illustrates Starbucks' explosive growth over the past 20 years. Enjoy." I did.
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Obvious, when you think about it; if you're going to mash up one track in five, why not find another? What's remarkable is how well Brubeck's piano and Paul Desmond's sax fit the melody, as well as the stilted rhythm, of Radiohead's "Fifteen Step".
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"SmartSwitch doesn't restrict the user from turning on a light, but rather it passively encourages behavior change. SmartSwitches can be programmed to respond to either personal or communal electrical usage. In a home wired with SmartSwitches, lights can become harder to turn on during hours of peak demand." Just right.
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"Designing a game for a limited platform is not only a great exercise for a development team, but can often give real insights into how to take an existing product into a whole new area — often with great improvements to controls and the whole user interface and experience." Denki on porting from low-spec digital TV boxes to even-lower spec digital TV boxes. Some good stuff in here, particularly around constraint.
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"…once WoLK came out and half the guild went completely insane and started chasing the really silly achievements, it was clear we were going to need an RSS feed of the things. So I built one. It’s based on the Armory, like most WoW tools, and is a complete kludge, like most of my tools. But here are my notes anyway." Hurrah! Tom wrote his magic tool up. It's great, it's daft, and I love the Armory's crazy XML. Alas, my achievements are few and far between…
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"it seems to me Criterion, in particular, has identified and implemented a strategy that works remarkably well in the current games marketplace: release the best product you can and stand behind it; improve the quality and player experience with frequent upgrades; offer additional value-added content worth charging for; nurture the relationship between your consumers and your development team; and give folks what they want."
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"Translator 'tempestas_caput' doesn't seem to offer any explanation as to why he's translated Zelda II into Latin, so we just won't ask. But it's not the only game getting his "sleeping language" treatment: he's also he's also gone alone, dangerously with the original Zelda, and is making his way, even more ambitiously, through Final Fantasy III." Brilliant!
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"…if the future of games is to become entertainment services, then are subscriptions going to fall away in favour of upfront payments and free updates?" Some good thinking from Duncan.
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"Google PowerMeter, now in prototype, will receive information from utility smart meters and energy management devices and provide anyone who signs up access to her home electricity consumption right on her iGoogle homepage."
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"So, you finally caved. You've accepted a friend request from your Mom, Dad, crazy Aunt Ida, and your college roommate’s newly divorced mother. Well here's your chance to get back at them for taking away your public privacy."
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Daft, lovely, and hypnotic to watch.
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Gosh, this is beautiful. I watched it, and the world stopped for a moment.
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"Teams from around the globe have analyzed figures and come up with a secret formula for App Store success. I share these findings today, ABSOLUTELY FREE. Success is made up of: a FLASHLIGHT…. and DIRTY WET FART SOUNDS!!! Tweetie is the only app that bundles together these two incredible features FOR THE VERY FIRST TIME." Amazing. I must get this!
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You'll need to sign up for Issuu to download it, but basically: it's a zine, it's aimed at men, so it's a men's zine, I guess. Some nice spreads, a consistent tone, and a hand-drawn map. Not ironic, just full of things.
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"I mentioned I’ve learned some rules of how database apps change over time, now that I’ve done a few dozen. They are:" Some interesting thoughts on how cruft builds up over time in database-backed web apps; I can't say I disagree entirely.
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"Imagine it: instead of text adventures and MUDs being designed to entertain MIT students and 23-year old computer engineers, they fall into the hands of bored housewives and teenage girls… This time there are romantic text adventures, digital doll's houses, dating games. Card deck games where you collect friends, or Versace. The trend continues and the licences that get picked up are not action movies, but those of popular soap operas: Not just hot teenage stuff like 90210, but Guiding Light, Days Of Our Lives, and One Life To Live. This is a games industry completely different to our own, and yet somehow… plausible." Jim Rossignol on the soap-as-game.
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Leonard Richardson's talk from QCon, about REST, his work on Canonical's Launchpad and its web service, and some useful history for anyone wanting to contextualise web services as part of the web.
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Daily git tips. So far, they've all been rather handy, and given they're nice and short makes recommending this as a subscription easy.
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A "museum" of Flash site loading screens. Not sure what to say, really.
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"IE 6 is a riskier proposition, but can show improved image resizing when the AlphaImageLoader CSS filter is applied, the same filter commonly used for properly displaying PNGs with alpha transparency." Oh, that's interesting.
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Mirror's Edge 2D flash game – which look, by all accounts, to be an official spin-off. Can't wait to see the full version; it's a very impressive little game.
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"You want to know what I think? I'll tell you what I think. Here's what I think: Java Java Java is is is too too too damn damn damn verbose verbose verbose. That's what I think. And I'm sticking to it. So there."
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"The Nietzsche Family Circus pairs a randomized Family Circus cartoon with a randomized Friedrich Nietzsche quote." This one is particularly good.
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Wonderful, wonderful, stop-motion trailer for a Megaman 9 built out of the real world. Hypnotic, and lovely.
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"Director Ridley Scott will helm the bizarre big screen adaptation of popular boardgame Monopoly… According to the Hollywood Reporter, Ridley will give the Monopoly movie a futuristic edge akin to his 1982 epic Blade Runner… The unlikely subject matter is just one in a line of Hasbro games to get big screen makeovers as part of an exclusive pairing with Universal Studios… Transformers filmmaker Michael Bay is producing a Ouija Board feature, while a film version of beloved classic Battleship is also in development." I know what "development" means, but still, this is the craziest games-to-film news I've seen for quite some time. Hollywood is strange.
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Some really beautiful in-house design from Criterion here.
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"We’re just topping it off with the last few drops of smooth liquid goo, but the Mac version of World of Goo is running beautifully, and should be out this week!" Very excited.
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"Japan-o-glitch + Interactive Flash graphics = D.V.D. (x OMG)." Wow.
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Welcome to GPSTagr. Our service allows you to geotag your flickr photos using a track file from a GPS device in 3 easy steps.
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"We’ve just finished a project for Yahoo called purple pedals (a.k.a. the yBike). In a nutshell, it’s a bike that takes pictures and uploads them to flickr in real time."
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"This year, I have no apologies about any of my top five. Here’s my list of the cream of the crop…" Emily Short on this year's IF competition entrants.
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"This project installs menu items into the Adobe Lightroom interface that allows photos to be tagged with geographic information through the Lightroom interface."
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"# Find links to audio files on the Web. # Huffduff the links—add them to your podcast. # Subscribe to podcasts of other found sounds." It's like delicious for audio, but it spits out a podcast. Some really lovely work from Jeremy.
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Adam's a smart guy and all, but god, most of this just really rubs me the wrong way. He's correct about business (or rather, he's correct about many of the things I hate about Web Entrepreneurship at the moment); I don't really think his views on product design ring true, though.
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"Bandai will soon be releasing two new hybrid pedometer games to keep you entertained while racking up the miles as you go about your life. … [The] idea is to set personal goals of exercise and achieve them in a fun way."
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Jordan Mechner is serialising – and backdating – his journals from making the original Prince Of Persia. This post is a corker, if only for one of the early videos of Mechner's brother running and jumping. If you've played the original game, you'll understand what I mean the second you see the video.
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"In this chapter I'll try to shed some light on the creative and technical decision-making processes that went into crafting the story and narrative elements of Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (POP for short). The team's approach was practical, not literary; our challenge was to find the right story for a mass-market action video game." Jordan Mechner on writing Sands of Time; well-crafted, and very pragmatic.
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"The Unfinished Swan is a first-person painting game set in an entirely white world. Players can splatter paint to help them find their way through an unusual garden." Beautiful.
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"After all, what is science? It's a technique for uncovering the hidden rules that govern the world. And videogames are simulated worlds that kids are constantly trying to master. Lineage and World of Warcraft aren't "real" world, of course, but they are consistent — the behavior of the environment and the creatures in it are governed by hidden and generally unchanging rules, encoded by the game designers. In the process of learning a game, gamers try to deduce those rules. This leads them, without them even realizing it, to the scientific method."
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Jason Kottke republishes the supposed rules that Chuck Jones and other Road Runner animators stuck to whilst making their cartoons. Perhaps a little apocraphyl, but I like the idea of rules for things that aren't games.
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"Merb’s routing shiznits needs some serious documentation love. Whilst I have a shot at getting some proper docpatches together here’s an overview of how to use routing in Merb 0.5." Thank god for that – was finding Merb's docs a little patchy in places.
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Cannot believe I only just discovered this: it's a sleeping bag with arms and legs. Incredible.
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"…it’s my feeling that experiences can’t really be designed. You can only provide the resources for people to have an experience; then it’s the people (users) themselves who create the experience." Dan Saffer hits the nail on the head at his new studio's blog. Can't wait to see what comes out of Kicker.
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"This leads into something else that felt very clear after the conference; the need to look outside of what we already know. If, as Matt Jones, posited, execution is more important than ideas, we’re going to need an understanding that is based on people who are not us, and that understanding is going to have to incorporate all the richness of what they know, how they model their worlds, and how they model their interactions with the world around them." Looking forward to more from Alex on dConstruct
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"The Box is an ambitious and unique year-long project for BBC News to tell the story of international trade and globalisation by tracking a standard shipping container around the world." Awesome. What's better is that it's a working container, which means it's not significantly contributing in a negative way to environmental damage any more than other containers. Could be interesting.