Our shared subconscious is burning
Large fire devours movie sets at Universal Studios.
My first thought on reading this was how, for years to come now, we will watch a movie and think "something looks off about fake New York."
June 01, 2008
April 28, 2008
Interactive Fiction Miscellania
Three links, in order of length (from longest to shortest, so if you're feeling ADD click on the bottom link first, and work up).
This is from a few years ago, but it's been getting reblogged a lot recently: Let's Tell a Story Together (A History of Interactive Fiction). It's an engaging read, and includes some recommendations of modern IF works to check out. I bought the Infocom Masterpieces collection back in the day, though -- it may be time to bust that out again and enjoy some old friends.
Also reblogged from a few different sources: Milliways: Infocom's Unreleased Sequel to Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. This guy has a copy of Infocom's shared drive from 1989, and does some archeology on it to find out some of what happened to HH2. And then -- a bunch of Infocommies descend in the comments section to reminisce and correct. It's fascinating. The comments have the usual amount of Internet e-thuggery, but they're still worth skimming over for the Infocomments.
Finally, an interesting read on the process of delivering a hotfix for an MMO.
September 01, 2007
Zero Punctuation
Zen of Design points us at Zero Punctuation, the only useful thing Escapist has ever associated themselves with. Go check it out.
August 22, 2007
Decline and Fall
If forum posters really behaved that way in real life: Internet Commenter Business Meeting (audio contains swearing and is probably NSFW without a headset).
(from kill ten rats)
In other news, I played BioShock some last night. I really like what I've seen so far. The introductory sequence is beautiful -- put me right back onto that tram in Half-Life, but even better. If you like System Shock 2, this will feel very familiar. I confess I was a little surprised they finally got away from their obscurely sophisticated leaning system though :).
December 02, 2006
SketchFighter 4000 Alpha
SketchFighter 4000 Alpha is a side-scrolling shooter of the finest old-school trapper keeper stylings. If you've got a Mac, try out the demo! (Found on Joystiq, where the "Mac-only" note naturally caused the stupidest of flame wars in the comments.)
November 28, 2006
Asteroid's Revenge
Asteroid's Revenge (found on del.icio.us). Flash game genious: You're an asteroid, and you're trying to blow up ships.
October 20, 2006
PicLens
PicLens, a plugin for Safari on the Mac, is pretty darn cool. It only works with a few sites (Flickr and Google Image search, notably), but it gives you a really cool way to navigate through image search results. Basically, if you're on a page it knows how to parse, when you click on an image it'll scale up to take over your full screen. Other image results will show up as thumbnails along the bottom, and you can search through them, kind of like iPhoto's full screen mode.
The only minor annoyance (other than that it only works with a small handful of sites) is that it seems to screw up the tab highlighting in Safari, so it's hard to tell what your current tab is. Boo :(.
August 03, 2006
Media Update
Boing boing points us to The Amazing Screw-On Head, a pilot that the SciFi channel is airing on the web. It's brilliant. If you like Mike Mignola (of Hellboy), you'll like this.
Also found -- Jim Butcher's Dresden Files series of books, which I like immensely, appears to finally be being turned into a TV series. You can find a promo on the SCIFI web site. I'm not superthrilled about the casting, but... we'll see.
August 02, 2006
Photosynth
PhotographyBLOG has an interesting post on a technology demo from Microsoft called Photosynth, which stitches together photos into a 3D panorama that you can navigate in. There's some cool -- but still pie in the sky -- thoughts about the massive indexing you might do to navigate the entire world of photos in this way, using your own snapshots as entry points into exploration. The promotional video is at least 50% fluff (you can skip most of the first half), but has some interesting nuggets.
July 18, 2006
Freedom to Tinker » Blog Archive » Taking Stevens Seriously
Ed Felten better expresses what was bugging me about this whole thing: Freedom to Tinker » Blog Archive » Taking Stevens Seriously. He also does an excellent analysis of how Stevens was probably trying to defend big telcos with his argument, a subtlety which I confess completely passed me by in my rush to try to comprehend at all.
June 09, 2006
The Texas NOW Blog is live!
The blog of the Texas National Organization of Women (NOW) is now live. This has been the sekrit project of my lovely wife Carrie for quite some time now, so I encourage you to check it out!
June 06, 2006
Second Life has too many servers, in danger of eating Internet
Second Life has too many servers, in danger of eating Internet (Broken Toys.)
The "3 users per server" bit is particularly surprising. It sounds, though, like that's comparing apples and oranges. The servers are responsible for bits of land, which -- in SL -- can be pretty complicated beasts. Since the game now charges for land use, not for character use, it actually makes some kind of sense to have your servers scale with land. It's the actual revenue stream, after all.
Still -- 2,579 servers seems crazy big for an environment that's still essentially a novelty until it gets a substantial UI revamp.
April 26, 2006
Crazy
Gnarls Barkley - Crazy - "Original" -- haunting music video with a Rorschach blot theme. (via cwp.)
April 24, 2006
AMF, pt 2
A followup to my previous post, which Skye brings to my attention: Wired News: How Lara Croft Steals Hearts
April 20, 2006
Trying to get a refund
Trying to get a refund on a video game...or, My policy differs from yours: "Yeah, that's a good policy. However it no longer applies to me. I have my receipt and an unopened game. I would like a refund." (via Kotaku)
Tee hee.
April 17, 2006
Participant Culture Ate My Dog
From the inimitable scans_daily community (it's Warren Ellis-Approved™), a couple of terrifyingly entertaining videos:
Watch 'em now before they go back in the vault!
February 20, 2006
A Scanner Darkly
"A new and much, much improved trailer for 'A Scanner Darkly' has been posted on Warner Independent's site. I'm so excited about this movie now that I've gotten a better feel for its visual look. Wow. Thanks to Georgia Tech classmate and 'Dazed and Confused' star Wiley Wiggins for the tip."
I, also, can't get over how awesome this trailer looks. Except that Keanu Reeve's face jars me out of the dreamworld every time I see it. Still -- let's hear it for the possibility of a good PKD movie!
January 24, 2006
Auto Assault Beta
This almost slipped past me -- Penny Arcade has Auto Assault Beta codes for a beta event this weekend.
Auto Assault is a post-apocalyptic car-drivin' MMORPG. Think Car Wars.
Booth Babes banned at this year's E3
January 18, 2006
City of Heroes offline character creator
Special for peterb, who no doubt already read this Joystiq, since we all know he has no shame either: Create a superhero - offline (Joystiq)
(Note the instructions link for running it in English.)
January 17, 2006
This is the ultimate showdown
of ultimate destiny. (Flash animation.). (Been making the rounds.)
Bye bye Teen Titans
I just watched "Things Change," the final episode of the last season of the apparently now cancelled Teen Titans. It was a sentimental, bittersweet ending to a series I always had a soft spot for. The show was a fun mix of US and anime styles; it revisited a lot of the DC universe in interesting ways; and the sappy, aimed-at-12-year-olds endings never failed to bring a tear to my sappy eye. Plus, Starfire rules.
/biganimetears
January 16, 2006
Futurama to return from the grave?
Inside Move: 'Futurama' may get new lease on life (via Inner Bitch.)
Now, let's fix this whole Arrested Development cancellation problem.