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Andrew Plotkin on some of the design of Inform 7, and rule-based programming as it applies to IF. Long story short: everything is exceptional, and designing systems to support the kind of stories IF authors want to tell is hard.
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"Flickcurl is a C library for the Flickr API, handling creating the requests, signing, token management, calling the API, marshalling request parameters and decoding responses. It uses libcurl to call the REST web service and libxml2 to manipulate the XML responses." I did not know about this, but it looks nifty. Now, to compile it on OSX…
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"Gee says he's been struck by the lack of age grading in successful communities — people of all ages are participating. Another feature is the lack of distinction between the "mentor" and the "mentors," within the community. "On one day you'll teach and another day you might learn… everybody is in one role or the other all the time and there are no fixed statuses in that regard."" James Gee in conversation with Henry Jenkins.
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"The Queen has told you to return with her heart in a box. Snow White has made you promise to make other arrangements. Now that you're alone in the forest, it's hard to know which of the two women to trust. The Queen is certainly a witch — but her stepdaughter may be something even more horrible…" An interesting take on conversational IF, even if some of the most interesting endings – and best writing – his relatively cryptic to access…
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"70 year-old Buddhist monk Hua Chi has been praying in the same spot at his temple in Tongren, China for over 20 years. His footprints, which are up to 1.2 inches deep in some areas, are the result of performing his prayers up to 3000 times a day. Now that he is 70, he says that he has greatly reduced his quantity of prayers to 1,000 times each day."
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"bringing japanese arcades to you" – a blog about the Japanese Arcade scene. Videos, new releases, and lots of tournament videos. Not bad!
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Need to finish watching this, but: for all you can ridicule this, a lot of it isn't half bad; the two modes of videophone (share face/share document) are interesting, if only for how useful the latter is. Also, interesting to see how futurism was represented on film at one point.
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"The Bryant Collection is an interactive anthology: a collection of ’story worlds’ by Laura Bryant. They were found at a yard sale in an old strongbox. Five pieces of interactive fiction written by someone who never used a computer. It is interactive fiction, which means that the player types commands in text, and the game responds with text descriptions." This may or may not be true, but the games are very much real.
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"You are a web programmer. You have users. Your users rate stuff on your site. You want to put the highest-rated stuff at the top and lowest-rated at the bottom. You need some sort of "score" to sort by."
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When this is on Threadless, I am getting it ASAP. (Although: Ken's super should be a Shoryureppa, not the Shinkuu Hadouken that belongs to Ryu). I think this might be called "splitting hairs", though.
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Some great notes from Dan Heaf on Clay Shirky's talk a week or two ago; I particularly like the notions of building not-quite end-to-end functionality, forcing the user to do something for themselves.
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"“The User Illusion” is what Alan Kay and the PARC designers called “the simplified myth everyone builds to explain (and make guesses about) the system’s actions and what should be done next.” Nørretranders says the user illusion is “a good metaphor for consciousness. Our consciousness is our user illusion for ourselves and our world.” The world we experience is really an illusion; colors, sounds, smells, tastes, etc. are interpretation made by our brain." This sounds interesting, if a challenging read.
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This looks very, very interesting. Yes, it's IF, but it looks like it's pushing that genre quite far.
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"There are no cut scenes, no uninteractive passages, no portions where the characters are essentially "switched off" and indifferent to what the player does. Everything counts. Everything is part of the story." Excellent Emily Short piece on Blue Lacuna
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Weird; point-and-click adventures, but where each command requires the artist draw a new image. A lot of it seems pre-determined, but there's obviously slow evolution at work. The game is _released_ frame by frame, though, which is interesting.
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"So that’s what I would like: software you can live with. Software that feels like music." Contextual software.
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It's not Tetris, but it's something like it. This game is getting worryingly essential.