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"You wouldn’t think you could get homesick for a simple button. You’d be wrong."
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"‘In the winter dusk, at successive stations, we peer out to see the wives waiting behind steering wheels, children scuffling in back seats. Daddies descend and are met. Each set of participants knows only of its own little scene … Each welcomed father ought not to learn of the existence of dozens of others along the line, any more than a prisoner should hear of the execution of his fellows.’" Joe Moran on "Notes from Overground". This sounds great.
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“Cartography used to be both an art and a science. I wanted to return to that.” This was my present to myself, as a souvenir, from SF. Looking forward to reading it properly – especially all the areas I never had a chance to visit – and can already confirm the maps are gorgeous. But really, it's about the whole package.
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"If thousands and thousands of people are making games, then it's entirely unimportant if 99% of them are absolute garbage. That top 1% will still consist of plenty of games for us to play, and they'll be great." Lots of great quotations in this smart post from Bill Harris; this is just one, but I recommend the whole thing.
Off to San Francisco
07 February 2011
Quick heads up: from tomorrow (Feb 8th) until the this coming Sunday, the 13th, I’ll be in San Francisco. Hurrah!
Thursday and Friday I’ve been invited to attend Stamen’s Data and Cities conference; a small, two-day event, that I’m looking forward to a lot. Very flattered to be asked, and it’ll be interesting to see what emerges. I’m hoping to write some of it up over at the Berg blog as it happens.
Otherwise: I’ve no plans yet for Wednesday daytime, so feel free to drop me a line if coffee sounds interesting.
The weekend holds some exploration of the city and then, rental cars and my fear of US roads willing, Monday-Thursday I’m off to Marin a few days quiet and R&R. Back next week.
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"The premise is simple – it's the 1920's, and you're a guy on a decadent cruise liner, one of four you can pick from the outset. Something goes wrong, of course, and the ship begins to sink. You have one hour, in real time, to escape the ship, while rescuing as many survivors as possible. Halfway through the game, the ship begins to sink and floods with water. If the time runs out, you're dead." Wonderful sounding Clock-Tower-y survival game for the SNES.
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"This is my Sony Ericsson MBW-150 bluetooth watch, showing the next few SF Muni bus arrival times for a nearby stop. The code to fetch the arrival times is running on my Droid phone, and communicating with the watch using Marcel Dopita’s OpenWatch software for the Android platform."
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Dan interviewed Tale of Tales for Wired; this, published on his blog, is the full interview, and it's got lots of great stuff in it. I'm really not sold by them – indeed, I'm less sold by the firm than I am by their work – but it's interesting to hear something from the horse's mouth, as it were.
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"This jQuery plugin generates sparklines (small inline charts) directly in the browser using data supplied either inline in the HTML, or via javascript." Nifty.
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"…when we step into the shoes of that avatar, be it 1st-person, 3rd-person or otherwise, we exit the darkened movie theater paradigm and enter an intricate, performative, exploratory lab of untested ideas and speculation. We enter a playful space that feels and responds much more like a live theater rehearsal than an interactive movie or a triggered series of movie clips." Michael debunks the games-as-cinema analogy with an interesting take that considers them as more like theatre rehearsal.
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"This is not a book about the VCS, nor breakout, nor video games and video game culture; it is a chronicle of the experience of that entity we might call “the player.” Oddly, there is little I can take from it in terms of approaches to video gaming or thoughts on the VCS Breakout. But it did enlarge my perspective and help me think about physiological, cognitive, and, let us say, monomaniacal aspects of video game play. Nervous, very dreadfully nervous Sudnow has been, but why would I say that he is mad?" Sudnow passed away very recently; I really ought to read his book, more than ever.
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"[s3fm]… lets anyone run a streaming radio station, with just a folder of MP3s. Put those MP3s in an Amazon S3 bucket, and give your friends the S3 FM link."
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Matt's talk (in English) from Lift 09, on scientific fiction, stories, and the design process. Good stuff – not too long – and wonderfully filmed: the cameraman focuses on his hands as much as his face, which is just perfect.
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NeoGAF users band together to make a perfect, eight-stage, LittleBigPlanet rendition of Contra. Remarkable, especially the behind-the-backdrop puppeteering that makes the walking-into-the-screen levels possible. This had better not get a takedown slapped on it, because it's phenomenal.
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"Perfect gift for any World of Warcraft player or other MMORPGer in general. You get one "main" glass and one "alt" glass. Serving idea: fill your main with your alcoholic beverage and your alt with your chaser since mains are typically stronger than alts." Oh dear. (But: good gag, and dangerous for drinking games).
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"SFZero is a Collaborative Production Game. Players build characters by completing tasks for their groups and increasing their Score. The goals of play include meeting new people, exploring the city, and participating in non-consumer leisure activities."
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"One of my enduring passions is exploring graphic design with programmatic and generative systems. While some aspects of design require the skilled hand of the designer, others can be formalized and explored by computer. For those tasks, Mathematica is an exceptional tool." Some lovely thinking around generative design.