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"Players stand in front of a green screen while the game films them and creates a music video background while they sing. Their performance is then emailed to them or burnt onto a DVD players can take home." Awesome. Unfortunately, the project has been canned. Still, it's worth watching the slightly cringey videos of the developers playing it, because it's a nifty bit of code.
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"It all boils down to a Ruby script that runs on OS X only and uses OS X’s really awesome typography and subpixel antialiased font rendering. Why not tap into this to make those headline graphics? With Rubycocoa you can easily whip up a small app that draws some text, and save it into a PNG file." Um, blimey.
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Icebergs and Shorelines; I love the Icebergs series particularly. What a rich page for a gallery.
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"3. Take Notice: Be curious. Catch sight of the beautiful. Remark on the unusual. Notice the changing seasons. Savour the moment, whether you are on a train, eating lunch or talking to friends. Be aware of the world around you and what you are feeling. Reflecting on your experiences will help you appreciate what matters to you." All very good advice – and, frankly, what I knew already – but this one felt particularly appropriate, given Noticings.
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This is a pretty good guide – made sense, got me up and running fast, and nice and clearly written.
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"In a sense, a child, by definition, shrinks Scribblenauts’ scope: the game’s potential solutions are necessarily limited by vocabulary, so players with a smaller vocabulary have fewer options open to them. But, free of the dry, efficient logic of adulthood, a child’s imagination also opens the game up in ways beyond most adults’ reach." Simon makes a strong point about Scribblenauts.
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'"We studied these online gangs at the same time I was looking at the offline gangs and it turned out the model we were developing to explain the behaviour of the online guilds began to coincide with the offline gangs," says Johnson. "We could explain the data using the same mathematical ideas."' Which all makes sense, you know, but it's still interesting to see this stuff being done and taken seriously.
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"In this project, we consider the problem of reconstructing entire cities from images harvested from the web. Our aim is to build a parallel distributed system that downloads all the images associated with a city, say Rome, from Flickr.com. After downloading, it matches these images to find common points and uses this information to compute the three dimensional structure of the city and the pose of the cameras that captured these images. All this to be done in a day." Woah.
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"This is my boot fetish Pong game". I first saw James at OpenTech demonstrating his prawn-sandwich powered BBC Micro clock. It is good to know he is still building brilliant things. And: more Ellie Gibson interviews in the world is never, ever a bad thing.
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Mainly for the photography, I think; iconic images of icons, by and large, and some nice curveballs from time to time.
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"Syncing is easy and reliable – as simple as you'd expect from a games company rather than as rubbish as you get from a GPS company."
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"Suddenly, an enemy plane bursts over the remaining vegetation at the top with an incredible roar. I nearly trip backward as I crane around to see where it’s going, only to see it explode behind us. My breath catches and I zip my view back to the crest of the hill and see a second plane, one of ours, howl over it in victory." It's so good. More to come!
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"this is good level design." A lovely dissection of a couple of screens from Super Mario Land; detailed, spot-on, carefuly analysis from Anna Anthropy. Amazing what you can do with four types of block.
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"Why are so many people getting divorced today? It’s because most of us don’t have extended families anymore. It used to be that when a man and a woman got married, the bride got a lot more people to talk to about everything. The groom got a lot more pals to tell dumb jokes to." The rest of the quotation is where the magic happens.
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In which photographers, or, more likely, their assistants, upload lighting test shots. Some are striking; some are practical; some are made of awesome. Fun!
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The last keffiyeh factory in Palestine is going out of business; they're all made in China now. Well done, hipsters!
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Recommended by Matt Haughey.
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"An obsessive meeting schedule is an investment in the boring, but by defining a specific place for the boring to exist, you’re allowing every other moment to have creative potential. You’re encouraging the random and random is how you’re going to win. Random is how you’re going to discover a path through a problem that one else has found and that starts with breathing deeply." Oh. That's an interesting way of looking at it.
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Alan Taylor on a year of the Big Picture. It's been a successful one, if you ask me, and it's a wonderful site; there are few updates in my RSS reader I look forward to as much as it.
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If you want a wrap-up of the Microsoft keynote, you could do no better than Brandon's wrap-up for Offworld – spot on, nicely detailed, and covering all the facts with great illustration. Whilst their titles – L4D2, Forza 3, etc – are obviously real assets, it's their commitment to the 360 as a platform in the living room that was impressive.
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"A year with a single Leica and a single lens, looking at light and ignoring color, will teach you as much about actually seeing photographs as three years in any photo school, and as much as ten or fifteen years (or more) of mucking about buying and selling and shopping for gear like the average hobbyist." This is not a bad point.
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"It will [violent metaphor] you." Mitch has seen one too many press releases, methinks.
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"High-resolution renders of gameplay from Shadow of the Colossus, including earlier versions of the game (where the colossi had differently-shaped eyes, as one example). Most of the screenshots are at or around 2048×1526 resolution – perfect for making wallpapers of any size." Ooooh.
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"Video game designer Robin Hunicke, noticeable at any gaming event for having the reddest hair of anyone in attendance, is trading her big-company background for ThatGameCompany, a sign that the small studio behind Flow and Flower is growing its ranks." Oh. That *is* interesting.
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Someone will come.
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"The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation announced today that The LEGO Group is now the exclusive licensed manufacturer of Frank Lloyd Wright Collection® LEGO Architecture sets." Hmn. Not sure what the market for these is, beyond curios; they're not particularly high-resolution, for starters.
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"Professional photographic & art printing with great value? theprintspace delivers. At the printspace we understand what professional quality means, and we also offer 48 hour turnaround time & guaranteed satisfaction." As recommended to me by Jon.
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"I gave a presentation on Treetop last night at lrug – seemed to go down well. There aren’t many examples of treetop grammars I’ve seen, so it might be useful if you find the main site’s documentation a bit impeneterable." Roland drops some Treetop science, and it looks very useful. Good stuff!
Gigs: The Effras
18 May 2009
The Effras are a rather lovely band from the Norwood area, and they sing rather lovely songs about South London. Actually, they sing songs about lots of things, but being named for the river that links Norwood to the Thames. They’re also friends of mine, and when it turned out they were playing the Plough, just down the road, as part of the Dulwich Festival, I thought I’d swing by; needless to say, I took my camera.
Rather pleased with these. There was, unsurprisingly, almost no light – nothing dedicated, given it was just an area in a bar – so I was pushing the sensor to its limits. On the plus side, that did mean I was nice and close to the band.
And: what a set they put on! Lovely songs, and great performers; if they’re passing by your area, do check them out.
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Yes, it's advertising, but that's really, really, really clever. Nicely done.
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"The Whole Earth Catalogue, our bible as self-builders of our residences in the hippie-ish days of the 1970s, was subtitled ‘access to tools’. ‘With tools,’ ran the editorial preface, ‘you can do more or less anything.’" Lots of good quotations, including this, and also on fires.
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I've linked to a single photo, because it makes me think: what it must be, to be taking photographs for Science, millions of miles away via radiowaves, and to have them not only be useful, but to turn out as beautiful as this one. How wonderful to know that the universe is as beautiful as the world, and that even in the name of research, we can take such beautiful pictures.
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'London police are now deleting tourists' photos because "photographing anything to do with transport is strictly forbidden."' Oh god.
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"Protovis is a visualization toolkit for JavaScript using the canvas element. It takes a graphical approach to data visualization, composing custom views of data with simple graphical primitives like bars and dots."
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"[within the games industry]… the creativity-medium-invention and attitude-practice-deconstruction models often hold no water. Rather, there is only importance placed upon the “talent-meiter-immitation” model that is still in practice in the industry today." An interesting analysis of the nature of education (as it relates to the games industry) and models of learning. I have often lamented the depressing state of how career progression in the industry works, and this article helps quantifies it.
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A thoughful post (as ever) from the L4D team detailing some of the balancing and planning that's gone into the Survival Mode experience. Looking forward to firing this up next week…
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"The genre of the palindrome, playful and ludic as it is, nonetheless has a strong implication of violence. In the work of its foremost practitioners, Velemir Khlebnikov and Vladimir Nabokov, as well as some of their postmodern successors, the palindrome is closely linked to death, cannibalism, beheading, and murder."
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Tom Francis posits an alternate ending to Bioshock, that makes sense of the Vita-Chambers switcheroo, gives the player the agency they've craved, fixes some of the issues with the original ending, and asks you kindly to DROP THE GODDAMN RADIO.