-
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.
-
Post-Eyjafjallajökull microfiction.
-
"Primarily, spaghetti code is a literary failing. Through my observations of the developers responsible for these wrecks — they often turned out to be poor prose writers and some were very arrogant about their coding abilities. I believe the core skill that these cowboys lack is that of editing – an instinctive drive towards pruning and tweaking that all good writers know is one of the most important components of literary creation." Some good stuff in here, especially around technical literacy (and, by extension, literate programming).
-
Quick tutorial in add_meta_box – the way to add custom fields to WordPress forms.
Blank sheets
19 February 2010
Rod’s been exploring writing fiction with Twitter, exploring its “office-desk rather than kitchen-sink realism“. He goes on:
Or rather: I wanted to start from that realism, because no-one, when they write “running” on Twitter, is actually running. They’re reporting after the fact, announcing an intention, or fabricating. Which is the second interesting thing – Twitter’s performativity. Twitter is as much theatrical performance as conversation. Un-realism.
So: a story empty of character and reasonable plot, and a blank-sheet MacGuffin. A story for an audience of 85, and a tentative use of direct messages that only a few of the audience will receive.
I didn’t know it was happening until it was, if you get my drift; messages from a commute slowly turning into narrative as the day went on. Seeing it all joined together is both a revelation and a dilution: a story laid out, but divorced from the trickle that made it so compelling.
(Rod also tips a hat to my Twit 4 Dead bots, which is very kind of him. I’ve slowly been poking at a new set of zombie-hunting narrative bots; the new ones have a few new features to enable better storytelling – notably, the ability to have responses specific to one another, rather than only specific to the situation. The main use is so that they can tell Ellis to shut up, but I’m thinking I’d like to apply the acting framework to an original work. That might be a long way off, though. But: thoughts worth jotting down).
-
"Trace Holden Caulfield's perambulations around Manhattan in "The Catcher in the Rye" to places like the Edmont Hotel, where Holden had an awkward encounter with Sunny the hooker; the lake in Central Park, where he wondered about the ducks in winter; and the clock at the Biltmore, where he waited for his date." Lovely.
-
"Dreamed up by American and European SF writers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries — at a time when Lamarckian evolutionary philosophy, which posits a tendency for organisms to become more perfect as they evolve (because such change is needed or wanted, e.g., by “life”), remained popular — many of the first fictional supermen were portrayed by their creators as examples of a more perfect species towards which humankind has supposedly long aimed. Radium-Age superman was, that is to say, homo superior, an evolved human whose superiority was mental, physical, or both." Lovely essay; a nice bit of SF history (and originally published on IO9, I believe).
-
"I saw these two videos of Rock Band Network tracks over at RBDLC and couldn’t resist sharing them. The first is a serious jazz tune: “Footloose and Fancy Free” by Bill Bruford’s Earthworks. The thing that’s interesting about this is that the “guitar” track is actually piano — something Guitar Hero has done in the past but Rock Band has generally shied away from. But what’s even neater is that the “vocal” track is actually a sax line, intended (one would assume) to be played with a sax or other horn; the “lyrics” are simply the notes being played." There's no question that building tunes for RBN is hard wokr, but god, this Bill Bruford video is stonking, and the sax-as-vocal idea is cracking.
-
"YouTube has confirmed its first live major sporting deal, announcing today that it will host live Indian Premier League cricket matches in the UK, and casting into doubt the value of British TV broadcast rights." Wow. Awesome!
-
“This is who we are.” Duncan Fyfe is writing again; twelve short stories – presumably, one a month – set in the world of games. Writing fiction about something as a way of writing about something; he ends up with not only good – and acute – games writing, but just good writing, plain and simple. So good to have him back.
-
Anne on New Zealand's Snapper card, and getting used to the rhythm of its RFID reader. I found the fact that the government will sell you a USB reader – so you can top up at home – fascinating.
-
"I have to print my bed, so that I can lie in it." Lovely BruceS fiction; not just futurism, but hyperlocal futurism at that.
-
"Welcome to Microdungeons.com. I'm still getting this thing ready, but here's the plan: starting in the first week of January, I'm going to post 3 new microdungeons a week." Dungeons drawn on 4" x 3" stock, three a week for a year. Yet another 365-style project I'm going to end up subscribing to.
-
"convert man pages into PDF documents and save them to a specified directory; (batch) print or view PDF man pages from the command line". Which is, you know, clever.
-
This comment (linked) on this Stack Overflow thread is the clearest explanation of this yet, and it made things very clear – and doable – for idiots like me.
-
"Handcrafted wooden toys of recently extinct animals. I selected these four creatures for their beautiful shapes and patterns. Choosing an anthropomorphic approach, I designed them with simplified, humanistic shapes and statures. Once unfolded, the packaging becomes an information graphic about the animal inside. These toys are meant to incite wonder and interest in creatures that existed only a short while ago." Beautiful.
-
IGF Finalists are announced. That's a not-half-bad list.
-
"Some pages from Willard Cope Brinton's second book (1939)". Very, very lovely.
-
"You tell these stories to Your People without reservation. Your People love your stories — fiction and all. They love how you tell them, they laugh about the lies you tell yourself, and then they stop and they tell you the truth." I like his point about us turning our experiences into stories. To be honest, I like the whole thing; one of my favourite Rands pieces in a while. And he's right: it's always worth finding Your People.
-
"Photographer James Balog shares new image sequences from the Extreme Ice Survey, a network of time-lapse cameras recording glaciers receding at an alarming rate, some of the most vivid evidence yet of climate change." This was really, really good – both in terms of the photography on display, but also Balog's delivery, and the message at the heart of it. Well worth your time.
-
"When I'm using the USB, I just leave my finger inside the slot and pick it up after I'm ready." Well, quite.
-
"pc_user is a lightweight authentication library for CodeIgniter. It focuses on simplicity and security." Indeed it does.
-
"Metalosis Maligna is a fictitious documentary about a spectacular yet chronically disabling disease which affects patients who have been fitted with medical implants. Sourcing from such implants a wild metal growth ultimately transforms human patients into mechanical looking constructions." If you're squeamish, particularly when it comes to surgery or prosthetics, this is NOT for you. Otherwise, it's a remarkably good piece of animation/effects work, wrapped in a remarkably straight documentary wrapper, that perhaps makes the effects-work even more effective.
-
"It’s totally fantastic. It’s like someone’s got totally shitfaced on logistics-booze and then sat down and written an email." I think it all depends on your definition of "best", but Iain gets bonus points for "shitfaced on logistics booze".
-
"It’s an incredible precedent to set: making a game a success almost 18 months after a poor launch. It’s something that could only have happened now, and with a system like Steam." Well, of course. Well done, Epic.
-
"KNiiTTiiNG uses the Nintendo Wii to knit. KNiiTTiiNG was created by an artist and an engineer turned behavioral scientist." Says coming soon; presumably some kind of homebrew – Wii or Wii controllers, I ask? – but worth a link for the delicious pun in the title.
-
"Scans of sandwiches for education and delight." Yes.
-
Some interesting links here, but I swear: could people please find something OTHER than *that* Daigo Umehara video to link to when they talk about fighting games? There's this massively rich space to be explored, and it goes beyond 15-hit parries.
-
How to get proper HD out of iMovie 09, which is something it makes surprisingly difficult.
-
"I copy-and-pasted the text of my unread articles from Instapaper into a PDF, uploaded it to Lulu.com, and ordered a single book. Naturally I thought about scripting all of this but Instapaper doesn’t provide an API to retrieve articles, and I didn’t really want to bother with authentication headers and screen scraping and all of that hackery. I just wanted the book." Emmett makes an analogue version of Instapaper for himself.
-
"One of the great things about working at a company with both interaction and industrial designers is that when collaboratively designing a device, you have better control over where bits of its functionality are located: in the hardware or the software. At Kicker, we call the activity of figuring out where a feature “lives” Functional Cartography."
-
A story, between two people, told through email. Not looking like email; actually, originally, told over email. Now, it can only be read in order – but once, it would have been delivered. Can't imagine how striking it might have been.
-
"Watching classics like The Apartment and Manhattan made me wonder at the romances we’d write about some cities, and Slumdog Millionaire bizarrely seemed like a continuation of that: a romance of the maximum-city." Yes; my favourite thing in that film was the growth of the city around Jamal, Bombay becoming Mumbai, and the skyscrapers growing.
-
"The thing that caught my eye about the Unbook was the idea of accepting a book as a version: an evolving beast that spits out periodic iterations of itself before crawling away to mutate some more."
-
"See, the RAF reckons research has shown them that the best drone pilot candidates are those who are experienced video game players, rather than experienced pilots. Sounds crazy at first, but when you think about it, pilots are experienced at actually flying. But flying something remotely via a 2D monitor? That's a gamer's area of expertise."
-
"And so my holiday was spent with games on the opposite ends of the spectrum: World of Goo's patient instruction versus Shiren's school of hard knocks. And despite their different approaches I felt that each, in their own way, did credit to the core competence of games as a medium: inspiring the pleasure of finding things out."
-
"Bio i am a house elf but no one understands me. i like wearing black tea cozies, listening to my chemical romance, and bdsm. sometimes i do emo weed with hermione." Fanfic invades Twitter.
-
In its entirety, on Google Video.