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"However I am just as impressed but the extent in which Scarry’s work has in fact not dated very much at all. While the book covers an almost bafflingly broad range of occupations and includes sections on the extraction and transformation of raw materials, there is one notable omission: large-scale manufacturing. And without industry, from a Western perspective the book seems in fact almost presciently current. Some of the jobs the author describes have evolved, very few of them have all but disappeared (you can’t easily bump into a blacksmith, much less one who sells tractors); the texture of our cities has changed and those little shops have given way to larger chain stores; but by and large we still do the things that occupy Scarry’s anthropomorphic menagerie: we fix the sewers and serve the meals and cut down the trees and drive the trucks and cultivate the land and so forth. It’s almost as if Scarry made a conscious effort to draw only the jobs that could not be outsourced overseas, and had thus future-proofed the book for his domestic audience." I read this when I was very small, and loved it; fond memories, and sharp analysis
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"This is the S2H replay; an activity monitor/pedometer thing that does a similar job to the fitbit. Except it feels way more like the future than the fitbit because it's cheap, fashiony and simple. And you they'll actually deliver one outside the US." I like "fashiony" as both an adjective and a watchword. The S2H sounds pretty nifty, too, and Russell's write-up is great…
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"Get an accountant, abstain from sex and similes, cut, rewrite, then cut and rewrite again – if all else fails, pray. Inspired by Elmore Leonard's 10 Rules of Writing, we asked authors for their personal dos and don'ts." Huge, two-part article (presumably from Saturday's Review) with a great deal of advice – some sensible, some common sense, some insightful, some entertaining – on writing. And: much of it applies to other creative disciplines, too.
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"Schell took this game-life integration to the extreme, describing a world chock-full of sensors, where you could earn experience points from a toothpaste company for brushing your teeth, or points from health insurance companies for walking to work instead of driving. Companies and even the government would have a vested financial interest in engaging consumers and citizens through game-like elements. It would be a world fraught with "crass commercialism," Schell said, but it would also be a world of opportunity for game designers." Hmmmmn.
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"I'm imagining that Curling is project management: sweeping in front of the stone to both clear a path and influence the direction, but without touching it; a good curling strategy is to both knock the competition out of the way and get closer to the target, sometimes with different stones; …plus you can drink and smoke while you play"
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"Some pages from Willard Cope Brinton's second book (1939)". Very, very lovely.
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"You tell these stories to Your People without reservation. Your People love your stories — fiction and all. They love how you tell them, they laugh about the lies you tell yourself, and then they stop and they tell you the truth." I like his point about us turning our experiences into stories. To be honest, I like the whole thing; one of my favourite Rands pieces in a while. And he's right: it's always worth finding Your People.
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"Photographer James Balog shares new image sequences from the Extreme Ice Survey, a network of time-lapse cameras recording glaciers receding at an alarming rate, some of the most vivid evidence yet of climate change." This was really, really good – both in terms of the photography on display, but also Balog's delivery, and the message at the heart of it. Well worth your time.
This is BERG
20 August 2009
Two short notes about work.
A little over six months ago I joined Schulze & Webb on a six-month contract, working four days a week, as a developer and writer.
That turned out pretty well, both for me, and for the company. So much so that, as of the end of that contract, I am both full-time and permanent. I am both pleased and excited by this.
That was note one.
Note two: as of today, we are no longer called Schulze & Webb.
We are BERG.
Matt’s written an excellent blog post on the new site detailing a little history, and a little of the present, which should explain the rationale behind the rebrand, and which, I think, marks the change very well. I am very happy and very proud to be part of this.
Exciting times ahead. I’m looking forward to them a lot.
What good shall I do this day?
16 August 2009
Benjamin Franklin’s daily schedule, as reproduced on Flickr by Nick Bilton. There are worse ways to structure your time than this, that’s for sure.
I should spend more time addressing Powerful Goodness. That’s where I’m going wrong, I think
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"YOU CAN ONLY WORK FOR PEOPLE THAT YOU LIKE… I discovered that all the work I had done that was meaningful and significant came out of an affectionate relationship with a client. And I am not talking about professionalism; I am talking about affection. I am talking about a client and you sharing some common ground. That in fact your view of life is someway congruent with the client, otherwise it is a bitter and hopeless struggle." All of Milton Glaser's points are worth thinking on, but this one feels particularly acute.
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"So there seems to have developed a general consensus in the iPhone development community that if you’re planning to develop a sprite-based game, the cocos2d-iphone framework that we mentioned waaaaaay back when and a bit later on is the way to go. So since we’re planning on doing exactly that, here’s a roundup of resources for your cocos2d development!"
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"Here’s a round-up of the top 10 readily-available monospace fonts for your coding enjoyment, with descriptions, visual examples and samples, and download links for each." I think I roughly agree with Dan on these.
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"Get over your ridiculous programming-language prejudices and stop endorsing real prejudices. It's this crazy little microcosm/macrocosm mirror effect. You never find bigotry in people with options. It's true in programming and it's true in real life as well, and it looks as if it's true in both places at the same time and for the same people." Giles is right, and the idiots who reached for their retweet button are definitely wrong. Less of this, please.
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"No. That would be your mother." Valve drop the next "Meet The…" video, and it's perhaps the best yet – certainly in terms of editing and choreography. And I love how the other characters – especially the Soldier – are still being developed in this.
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"This is a mod. And that’s kind of relevant, for two reasons. Firstly, we don’t want to pay for this kind of thing. Hell, look at The Path: people are upset that even exists, let alone that its developers had the guts to charge seven quid for their remarkable efforts. But this is the sort of thing I’d love to pay for. It seems illogical that we’ll all happily splash out fifty pounds for the same old story of science-fiction revenge, yet aggressively avoid anything that encourages us to engage our brains and challenge ourselves a little."
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"What’s fascinating about Grifball is how well it emulates a sport (or rather a sport game.) Like basketball or hockey, players must alternately think offensively and defensively as the bomb changes possession. Movement suddenly trumps aiming, as players must gauge distance for successful attacks and create openings to score. The best players are the ones who can move in tricky, unpredictable ways and psych out their opponents. In terms of skill and strategy, Grifball has much more in common with virtual rugby than it does a shooter." Matthew Gallant on Grifball, and more forms of consensual play.
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"In this piece, each of the departments involved in making a videogame are examined and accused of one particular vice. In making these assessments, the assumption behind each is that the purpose of the videogames industry is to make games that players want to play, and not to make the games that developers want to play." It is good, and I'm looking forward to the second part.
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"…as developers, we need to deal more honestly with the disparity between our reach and our grasp – which is to say, what we tell ourselves our games are about, versus what they are actually about. History will see this decade as the period when games struggled with their destiny in this way." 2K Marin's JP LeBreton with a smart, insightful take on the road ahead for games design, and the many positive steps being taken along it (and: a decent commentary on the "shooting people" issue).
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"With limited influence, unlimited hands in the pie, a low barrier to critique, and the perception of triviality, frontend engineers are the janitors of software development. Rather than cleaning up trash, the boulder they toil beneath is skew: the distance between team member's conceptions of a project." This really feels very familiar: it's the most under-appreciated art in the stack of software development, and the one that takes the brunt of the crap.
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"Best of all, for impatient gamers the developer plans to conceal load screens with a mini-game where players can connect a USB keyboard and write an undergraduate thesis on the illustrations of Gustave Dore." Seriously, this already sounds much better than the Redwood Shores version…
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Farbs quit 2K Australia. This is his resignation note. It's fun, and not in any way mean.
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"The reason for [Singstar's relatively "low" Metacritic scores] is also the reason that this is an article about SingStar, and not a review of SingStar Queen and the new wireless microphones: SingStar is now basically unreviewable. Unlike Guitar Hero: Metallica, or AC/DC Live: Rock Band, SingStar has morphed from a game into a service, and defies traditional critical judgement."
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"I think issues of power and governance are going to swiftly rise in importance on internet communities, as they expand to include more different kinds of people. It's interesting that some of the best, most resonant ideas on these topics that I've encountered over the years has come from political writers and may have been produced even before the internet." Mike has read lots of books, and his quotations/sources here are great.
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A wonderful old postmortem – on Shadows of the Empire for the N64. As a launch title, there was lots of working with unfinished hardware, prototype controllers, and SGI workstations; it's long and detailed, and a fantastic portal to a world that seems eons ago, even if it was only 12 years away.
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"In fact the propeller is really rotating. Russians fix a magnet on their helicopter blades. The device sends a signal to synchronize a movie camera, allowing to visualize efforts and deformations on the blades." Hypnotic, and unnerving.
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"Looking in, it’s clear that the game industry is broken and not getting fixed anytime soon. I will not be joining the game industry. I’m interested in building a profitable business making fun games in a good working environment, and that’s simply not what it does. Maybe I could hoist one more flag in the indie games parade, but I think of myself as building a Micro-ISV in the web software business. It’s a much nicer community." As usual: anyone with a degree of sanity looking in from the outside comes to the same conclusions.
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"Usenet, IRC, forums, blogs, and now media like Twitter have all been black-marked as houses unfit for reason to dwell within. And so we roll our eyes, sigh, and quietly accept the idiocy, the opportunism, and the utter disrespect for our peers and ourselves that is technical discussion on the Internet. This need not be the case. It is possible to have a reasoned technical discussion on the Internet. People do it every day, particularly in smaller online communities where social norms are easier to enforce. We can do it."
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Mike Kuniavsky being really good, again, about avatars, physical mashups, and mashups as opportunistic design. Loads of great stuff inside the pdf.
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"…yes, if I’d gotten a Lenovo when you all suggested it, I’d have a spill-proof keyboard with drains. That’s my plan for the next time something horrible happens to my laptop, which should be any day now." Randall Munroe's laptop died. I blame the package management, rather than the milk, personally.
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"They took the trailer from "WestSide Story" and made it look like "28 days Later", hillarity ensues." No, that's bloody brilliant.
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"I would urge everyone to start looking at the world in a different way. Spend some time looking at everyday objects, at their design, their shape, their individual characteristics. Think ahead and imagine their significance. Many are interesting and aesthetically pleasing in their own right, if you just give them some attention." Martin Parr on noticing the everyday.
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"The problem is that what made GoldenEye so good was a fleeting, transient quality that can never be grasped again: it's not that the game was especially brilliant by modern standards, but rather that it utterly eclipsed its contemporaries. These days, the FPS is as comfortable on consoles as it is on Windows, and for a Bond shooter to have the same impact as GoldenEye it would have to outperform Call of Duty 4, Halo 3, BioShock, and Half-Life 2. In short, it would have to be revolutionary." Although: a big part of what made it so good was the social side of the jerky split-screen multiplayer, and Live just isn't the same. Yes, there was the context, but there was also some kind of magical glue holding it all together. Still, there are lots of smart, sensible points here, about emerging from the shadow of Goldeneye.
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More on the phenomenon that is Ken Fighter Ken.
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This is a pretty accurate explanation of the state of the majority of SF4 online. It's also quite funny, and is the reason the phrase "Flowchart Ken", used to described a particular kind of player, is already entering the SF4 Lexicon.
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"Ryanair can confirm that a Ryanair staff member did engage in a blog discussion. It is Ryanair policy not to waste time and energy corresponding with idiot bloggers and Ryanair can confirm that it won't be happening again." Ryanair's social media strategy is pretty much on-brand, it seems.
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'A morose-looking guy stood at the bar talking to his friends, wearing a Flashbang Studios t-shirt. Emily leaned across the bar next to him, and shouted giddily over the music: "hey, I like that developer."' A lovely piece of speculative writing from Duncan Fyfe.
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A first, rather long, post on the S&W Blog, in which I talk to Jack about a project he's been working on for a while.
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"This summer will you be, or not be? It's Resident Evil meets House of the Dead, IN DENMARK." Epic Eegra thread taking the Dante's Inferno-shaped ball and running a very, very long way with it.
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Full version, no out! The beta was lovely, so I'm looking forward to this a lot.
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"[Wrestle Jam is] completely playable. There was an intro screen, character select, win / loss conditions, opponent AI, eight different attacks," Furino explained. "It was as close to a genuine old-school wrestling game as I could make it in the time allowed. I even mapped an old Nintendo controller to the input system so they could play it that way." Gosh, that's lovely, if not totally unexpected from Arronofsky. Lovely interview, too.
What’s next
06 February 2009
Today is my final day working at Headshift. I don’t talk about work much on this blog, but this felt worth a post.
I’ve been here nearly a year and a half, and it’s been a fun ride: my first job in an agency/consultancy environment, rather than an internal role. That’s been a learning experience in and of itself. There have been lots of good projects, some of which are live already, and others which should be live very, very soon; looking forward to being able to point at one of them in particular. There was also a lot of good skills-learning, too; really getting on top of Rails, levelling up in sysadminning a bit, and lots of opportunities to balance all the code with some great interaction design work. It’s been great to have such a flexible position, and work on most of the levels the application stack, from initial design to code.
And, of course, there are the people; Headshift’s greatest assest really is its people, all of whom are fantastic in many ways, and all of whom have lots left to give. I’m going to miss them a lot; it’s always hard leaving a small company.
So what’s next?
What’s next is very exciting. Next week, I’m going to be joining Schulze & Webb, where I’ll be making and writing. More on the specifics of what I mean by “making and writing” will be coming shortly: it’s a really interesting role, and it’s the details of it that make it so.
Suffice to say, I’m very excited; Matt and Jack’s reputation precedes them, and I hope we’re going to make a lot of good stuff (and perhaps a little trouble) together.
The other interesting part of all this: although I’m a proper employee at S&W, my contract with them is for four days a week, and so I’m going to have a “spare” day, which I’m hoping to fill with all sorts of things: time to tinker on the many projects that I just can’t fit into the evenings; time to work on interesting things for interesting people; time to play. That’s going to be exciting, too. More on that another time, because the real focus for now is on the new job.
This, for me, is where 2009 really begins. It’s going to be exciting, I’m telling you.