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"Magic as Interface, Technology, and Tradition" – Greg and Dan's course sounds great.
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This is marvellous: Tog on magic and software, and what one can teach the other. The stuff about perceived time periods, and also on distraction, is particularly great. It's not just about the functionality: it's about how you present it; showmanship all the way down. (And: I like the reminder about the kinds of honesty that are important, in order that dissimulation still works0.
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Excellent, thoughtful article from John Allspaw on what experience in software engineering really looks like. Valuable reading both for software engineers, and also for the people who work with them.
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"Twenty-one years later, an anonymous software engineer pulled together various digital artifacts to create a multiplayer game for his son.
Tonight, while playing that game, I ran into my 15-year-old self."
What magic smells like.
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"Smells like Dwarf Fortress". An illustrated account of a the nightmares of one particular fortress of dwarfs. Pretty, funny, and I still can't quite get my head around that game.
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"Money is just a type of information, a pattern that, once digitized, becomes subject to persistent programmatic hacking by the mathematically skilled." (Lots of other good stuff here, but I wanted to note this one down).
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"Oddly, it feels a bit weird to watch the videos from inside MAST. There’s something about the combination of these being taken in the visible light spectrum inside a reactor, at super high speeds, with a CCTV-like aesthetic, makes me feel like I shouldn’t be able to observe what’s going on. Somehow reams of sensor data is fine, but watching the actual reaction feels… wrong. Like you’re looking into the soul of something amazing."
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"High time resolution video of a MAST plasma showing the L-H transition (transition from low to high quality confinement) and ELMs (a form of instability in the plasma)." Wow. And: this is visible-light spectrum. Double-wow.
Cardini
20 March 2010
The only known footage of Cardini performing. And what a joy it is; it’s not just sleight of hand, not just a clever skit, not just great timing; it’s magic. Ten minutes! And, most remarkably: he’s wearing gloves for the first three minutes.
Marvellous.
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"Magick is all about naming and control. So is journalism, and software engineering—related disciplines." yes yes yes a thousand times yes (the most wonderful sentence in James' write-up of a non-conference I didn't attend).
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"It still amazes me that with the Practical Application of Codes and Pictures, 1145 lines of gobbledegook and 554KB of compressed images can be turned into this." Making stuff is awesome.
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"MISO by Mårten Nettelbladt is a heavy duty typeface for the construction industry." Ooh, that's quite nice.
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"While the two games have similarities, the consensus is that the collective poker success results more from the experience competition provides than the tactics and skill set utilized in 'Magic.'" Successful Magic: The Gathering players are moving over to professional poker. I particularly liked: '"I never want to play poker in my free time. 'Magic' you can. You can't make a living at 'M:TG,' but it's just the more enjoyable game.""
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But they weren't _using_ the 'rating system for films', beyond the age ratings themselves; they had specialist examiners and criteria and were, basically, quite smart about it all. I have never really trusted PEGI when it comes to this stuff, and I guess now we're just going to have to get used to it.
Katrina: The Gathering
15 September 2005
Katrina: The Gathering. Possibly tasteless. Possibly a little spot-on. It’s funnier if you can play Magic, obviously. [from dan]
Paul Daniels has a blog
02 September 2005
Paul Daniels – yes, the Paul Daniels, is keeping a blog. It’s rather good; he writes in a friendly, personal manner – just as you’d expect him to, really – and he combines interesting chat about magic with fairly traditional (for blogs) personal anecdotes. It’s quite fun; I may well subscribe.