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"Apple has already built its TV. It’s called the Apple TV and that’s why it’s called the Apple TV. Because we’re supposed to be rethinking what a TV is. The TV is not the screen with seven different inputs for your players and boxes and game machines. The TV is the content and the buttons we touch to get to that content."
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" A physical model of Eindhoven rolled onto a drum and attached to a piano. A form of player piano with the city as the score." Just beautiful.
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MeFi thread spun out of my Roguelikes post; some great comments and insight, and what a cast!
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"There was one guy on the steps of a building and proselytizing the end of the world. My guess is that he was doing it for jokes, but if you’re in the middle of it with your friends exploring a world covered in blood, then there’s something in our understanding of the Black Death in the Dark Ages and people announcing the coming of the end that plays into the social fear." Kill Screen interview on the Corrupted Blood outbreak in WoW.
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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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"Today, we wanted to give you a heads-up about a new service now in development that will let players access the Auction House directly through the Armory website or Armory App for iPhone or iPod touch." And bingo, that's the killer out-of-world application for WOW players. (This is something I suggested in my talk at Develop last summer; glad to see Blizzard do the obvious. Which I really ought to put online).
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""Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo." is a grammatically correct sentence used as an example of how homonyms and homophones can be used to create complicated constructs." And: what a URL.
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Some good stuff here; the tips on the stash were new to me, and particularly handy.
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"Everyone seems to be compiling lists of the best games of the decade, so here, with minimal special pleading or argumentation, is mine." Steven Poole's list is good, though two entries for the MGS series is one too many, IMHO. I'd swap one of them for something Harmonix-flavoured.
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"This is a list of old game releases. These games were priced at nearly $50 a year ago, now probably a lot less. Why buy a new game when there are plenty of fun games out there worth renting or buying for less?" Games released twelve months ago this week, by Andre Torrez. He's right, you know – games don't have to be about nowness all the time.
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"It’s pretty difficult to talk about what you’ve got wrong. When you’ve been working on something like School of Everything very intensely for two years you can’t really blame the mistakes on anybody else. But the truth is that we need to rethink because we haven’t managed to make the idea financially sustainable yet." And so they're doing out loud. It's a big move; I hope it works out OK for them, because they're definitely Good People.
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"In the desert 100 miles northeast of Los Angeles is a suburb abandoned in advance of itself—the unfinished extension of a place called California City. Visible from above now are a series of badly paved streets carved into the dust and gravel, like some peculiarly American response to the Nazca Lines (or even the labyrinth at Chartres cathedral). The uninhabited street plan has become an abstract geoglyph—unintentional land art visible from airplanes—not a thriving community at all."
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"On the contrary, the quick wins of some big ticket consulting sessions sell our discipline short by pretending that design is some magical elixir that can be poured into a situation and zammo everything is fixed up. Like accounting, medicine, and just about every other profession, design is a practice which is persistently useful at regular intervals. If anything, during this transitional period where business and government are slowly coming to terms with the potential yield of having design as an integral part of the conversation it behooves us to collectively seek longer engagements, not shorter." Some excellent stuff from Bryan Boyer.
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"As a real-life pro skater, you might spend three hours out of every day practicing. Three hours trying new tricks, screwing up and the ground abruptly slipping out from under you. Imagine living your life in that fog of frustration, embarrassment, adrenaline and pride. Now let's imagine you got really sick, swallowed, like, nine Paracetamols and passed out in bed. THPS2 is what you'd dream." Quinns goes misty-eyed over THPS2, and he is right to do so. It was wonderful.
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"It’s pretty common to want SQL queries against a particular table to always be sorted the same way, and is one of the reasons why I added the ordered scope to the utility scopes gem… Well now you can specify default ordering, and other scopes, in edge rails directly in your ActiveRecord model." Hurrah!
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"With the recent addition of dynamic scopes, however, you now have a way to both quickly specify query logic and chain further conditions. The naming works in the same manner as dynamic finders and the chaining works in the same fashion as conventional named scopes." Ooh. New in Rails 2.3, and passed me by a little.
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Really rather good series of tutorials on the FCE4 basics.
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"So here's my theory: WoW doesn't resemble a film. It resembles, rather, a medieval cathedral. And a magnificent one: it is the Chartres of the video-game world. Like a cathedral, it is a supreme work of art that is, on a brick-by-brick basis, the creation of hundreds of artisans and craftsmen, many of whom will be long gone by the time it comes to completion; indeed, since WoW is in a state of permanent expansion, it may not ever be "complete". All those programmers are the modern-day equivalent of stonemasons, foundation-diggers and structural engineers."
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"This December, the Eisner-winning artists behind such acclaimed projects as "Sugar Shock," "Umbrella Academy," and "BPRD: 1947" will present "Daytripper," their first original title from DC Comics' Vertigo imprint… The comic, which jumps around moments in the life of Brazilian aspiring novelist and newspaper obituary writer Brás de Oliva Domingos, will follow the main character as he explores and evaluates his own existence and attempts to discover the answer behind the mystery of the meaning of life itself." Oh. This sounds good!
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"You'll need several thousand gold to launch the business, and then keep it up for many weeks before you make a steady good profit every week. And you'll need to log on every day and spend several hours per week just to keep your glyph business up and running. In the end, getting rich in World of Warcraft works exactly like getting rich in the real world: You need a venture capital to start up a business, hard work, and perseverance. And this is exactly why getting rich with inscription works so reliably in World of Warcraft: It is hard work, there isn't all that much you can actually do with an income of thousands of gold per week, and thus the large majority of players simply can't be bothered doing it."
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"It may be a little hidden but Git actually comes with auto completion, you just have to set it up." I did not know that. Useful!
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"The program seeks to accommodate up to 15 students who are considered "at-risk for dropping out or poor performance in core classes", focusing on themes such as literacy and writing, mathematics, 21st-Century technology skills, leadership, and more. The site argues that students who are considered "at-risk" usually haven't reached that point because they lack the capacity to learn, but because school no longer holds any relevance to them or it bores them…" …and so it uses WoW to provide them with relevant usage-examples of the subjects they need to get better at. Not entirely convinced, but interesting that they're using a wiki to collate lesson ideas/plans.
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"In the case of European Air War, what management wanted was a very cool game to sell that customers would love. What the lead programmer did was present it to them so that they could see, clearly, that this was exactly what they had on their hands already. They, too, were having trouble digging through all those details and seeing the big picture." Lovely story about the importance of presentation on any kind of project.
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"Being a light-hearted look at the world of story and writing in games." Written by Richard Cobbett, it's quite a lot of fun. And he's played Realms of the Haunting, too. Awesome.
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"And that is the best definition of casual that I can come up with: Casual players cannot be rated better or worse than other players." Torres finds a nice overlap with the Hicks/Hudson duality; I like his suggestion that casual players don't have metrics for comparison, because their primary goal is fun, and you cannot compare types of fun.
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"File under Career, Future, Success"
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"Little command line REST interface that you can use in pipelines." Ooh. That looks nifty.
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"See why I say I can't play like a player?" Richard Bartle dives deep into Stranglethorn Vale to explain what he "sees" when he plays MMOs, and to try to explain why he can't play them like, say, I can. It's a nice reading – even if I'm not sure the zone works as well coming from the Horde perspective – and his insights are strong.
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"See why I say I can't play like a player?" Richard Bartle dives deep into Stranglethorn Vale to explain what he "sees" when he plays MMOs, and to try to explain why he can't play them like, say, I can. It's a nice reading – even if I'm not sure the zone works as well coming from the Horde perspective – and his insights are strong.
Family Album
19 April 2009
So: the funny thing that nobody tells you about World of Warcraft is that your "screenshots" folder becomes like a family photo album, and things that felt ephemeral or daft over time gain significance.
So: this is me, around level 10, because I’ve just got the cat. He’s quite scrawny; I’m not exactly dripping in kit, but I was really proud of My First Pet, etc. And I found this this morning…
…as I took this picture, which is me today, wearing My First Mail Armor. The cat has grown up somewhat, and there’s a bit less manbull flesh on display. And: suddenly there’s progress; I can see what I came from, and I feel proud again (rather than like a failure for being such a slow/casual player).
Sometimes, you need to see the deltas, the comparisons, between where you were and where you are now. My screengrabs folder really is a family photo album for my avatar and my friends.