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This is a really good checklist for what modern URL design looks like.
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"In the process I came up with “Network Realism” which may or may not have legs, but I think it does and I like it. What it was, of course, was what I’d actually been talking about all year: time, and how it’s just as broken right now as our business models—broken by the network—but what’s interesting is how we’re coming to terms with it, artistically, culturally, and technologically, and what that might mean in the future. 2011 is going to be all about time."
James has had a good year.
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"Too many times proponents of interactive fiction talk as if it’s a new thing, as if interactivity were never part of the reading experience. How many of us has written in the margin of a book, turned down a corner of a page or smoothed the book back at a particular passage, felt our attention wander as we gaze out the window? We each interpret a story in different ways; it’s how we can re-read a book without getting bored, or watch the same film twice." This is cracking stuff from Kat; I am glad she's written it down.
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"…the internet’s endless pathways turn our simple discoveries into expeditions that reveal the worlds in which those things have lived, taking the role of archivists and archaeologists of pasts that overlay and intertwine." This is lovely.
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"That's why guys like Tarn Adams or Vic Davis are a thousand times more interesting. They're making games, not DLC or marketing or anything else. A game, to them, isn't the launching pad. It's the rocket."
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"It’s important to note that this number does not reflect either the number of people owning a mobile phone and that the United Nations Millennium Declaration remains a crucial milestone to reach for the mobile industry. However it shows that homes, bridges, cars, laptops and netbooks, white goods, plants, spimes, and other objects have a mobile phone subscription and are likely to become the most important target segment for mobile operators around the world." Which begs the question: how do you market to things?
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It Just Works and is good.
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Learning datamining, using the WoW Armory as a data set.
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"This page documents the web API calls that allow you to retrieve information from the item system in Team Fortress 2." Steam now has a Web API. Ooooooooh.
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"How does it work? Just put your image size after our URL and you'll get a placeholder." Nifty!
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"All true Londoners have a south London past. There they experienced their first flat, their first date, their first taste of city life, with nothing too exotic. They dallied in Clapham, flirted with Dulwich, tested their mortgage muscle on Stockwell. (I lived awhile in Upper Norwood.) South London is the kind of place, as was said of George Bush, that “reminds every woman of her first husband”." I enjoyed a lot of this article by Simon Jenkins, although he goes *way* too far when he mentions Cyprus and Yugoslavia…
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Much as I respect their output, I do find Tale Of Tales attitude towards games is increasingly… asshole-ish, frankly. Their behaviour (reported) at Art History Of Games only makes them seem like trolls; I fear their ultimate end will be obscurity, more than anything else. Which is a shame, because there really is value in what they're doing. There's just no value in trolling anybody else.
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Ooh, this is interesting: reviews of screenplays circulating around Hollywood; well-written, incisive thoughts on the writing process, and some great links (from time to time).
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"Glitch is a massively-multiplayer game, playable in the browser and built in the spirit of the web. It is currently in development and will launch late in 2010. Private alpha is beginning shortly and a public beta period will begin this summer." Exciting!
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Daniel Terdiman interviews Stewart Butterfield and Cal on Glitch, which is what Tiny Speck are making. Good interview, and worth noting just how often they threw things out.
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"If / when telly people complain that their industry was blind-sided by the internet/interactivity I think it might be fair to point out that this was made in 1990. And that it was shown – ON THE TELLY. Or would that be mean?" Douglas Adams' documentary "Hyperland", a crash course in hypertext written and shown pre-the-web.
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"The best games communicate their systems to us in ways that feel satisfying, and the quality of this dialogue between player and game often determines the success or failure of the game." Michael Abbott's been playing Demon's Souls.
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"Raphaël is a small JavaScript library that should simplify your work with vector graphics on the web. If you want to create your own specific chart or image crop and rotate widget, for example, you can achieve it simply and easily with this library." Looks really rather interesting, and potentially beautiful.
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Jones has the keys to the helicarrier: "in summary: Schulze is spending the week in zero-g combat training, Tom is playing with an orangutan genome that he got from some guy in Zurich and I’m building a laser-harp."
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Really rather good, from what I've read so far, especially for prototyping.
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Really excellent presentation on the basics of SPARQL – lots of good examples, lots of hands-on stuff, and clear. Worth going back to.
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"Designed by London architect Julian Hakes, the Mojito shoe is made of carbon fiber—to give it strength and spring—and laminated with rubber on the bottom and leather—from furniture manufacturers in High Wycombe, England—on top." Gorgeous.
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"Here is a needlework sampler I’ve made based on the tradition of needlework samplers and the processes used by producers to create contemporary musical compositions."
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"…we roped in Nate McFeters, another local, and put together a security talk for indie Mac developers with no budget for security. What does a security talk for Mac developers look like? As it turns out, it’s very much like the talk we think every indie developer, Mac or not, should see, and it’s very much unlike the talk the rest of the security industry is giving." Good stuff: simple, clear, well-thought out, and very hard to argue with.