Sep 01

• http://j.mp/bOERbY I consider myself a big fan of Conan O'Brien, but I haven't "watched TV" in probably ten years. Hope this comes to Hulu.
• ... Haven't "watched TV," including watching his show. What kind of "big fan" does that make me, anyway?

Sep 02

• It might please you to know that unlike Futility Pong, Futility Tetris, currently under development, has discernible gameplay.

Sep 03

• Synth binary for Droid: http://bit.ly/aFhNnb -- Don't ask me how to install it! Danny says you need the SDK or the "app installer app."
• I guess my original copy of Get Lamp got lost in the ether; I talked to Jason Scott and he sent me another which arrived very quickly.
• A little sad I'll never know what coin I would've gotten; pretty sure I was one of the first to pre-order. Certainly one of the first 342.

Sep 05

• Alex ordered the Lover Prawns at Thai Noodle on Shattuck. Turned out to be prawns wrapped in bacon, in sweet chili sauce.
• Got a used copy of "The Hills Rise Wild" at the Ashby flea market. Man, I'll buy any random box of Lovecraft-themed bullshit for $2.
• All the character tokens in "The Hills Rise Wild" are paper strips weighted down by pennies. One is labeled "Thuh Color Outta Space."

Sep 06

• Violet and Rameses are both about player-characters that fight your direction in the way your body sometimes fights your conscious intent.
• But in Violet it's a puzzle: http://bit.ly/8gv2tm and in Rameses it's just sort of nihilistic: http://bit.ly/agMgRr -- Both are excellent.
• By the way, you can run interactive fiction interpreters on most smartphones. (Not the iPhone, of course; virtual machines violate the TOS.)
• Inside the Mandelbox: http://bit.ly/970WMk
• @Sargent That is good to know. Do you know, is that an Apple-looking-the-other-way sort of situation, or is there an actual loophole?
• Gearbox is finishing Duke Nukem Forever. How it happened: http://bit.ly/ccp2gB
• http://j.mp/cAdGmw -- See what happens when you try to sneak legitimate critical thinking into the "enthusiast press"? See?
• http://bit.ly/8YY3GF -- "Metroid Franchise status: [ ] Dead [ ] Alive [x] Beach volleyball"
• http://bit.ly/aNA7gK -- "The FBI: Foiling its own [terrorist] plots since 2001"

Sep 07

• You know what might be a fun and possibly sensical scoring metric for Futility Tetris? Aspect ratio.
• Hm, the packaging doesn't seem to mention it, but there's a bunch of cool stuff in the Get Lamp disc 2 file system.
• Separated at birth? http://bit.ly/bswrQk http://bit.ly/9rZZF1
• @Laroquod Nothing by Adam Cadre in the games folder, oddly. I expected Photopia, at least.
• Ordered a ticket to TIGJam 3: http://tigjam.com/ -- Now I have to think of an appropriately-scaled project to build there.

Sep 08

• Mrr, the Futility Tetris code is getting pretty grotty, but I'm too close to done for cleaning up to feel worthwhile.
• Testers are asking to share the game with their friends, which I'm taking as a good sign.
• Terry Cavanagh's retro-styled platformer VVVVVV is $5 on Steam: http://bit.ly/9B3XQH -- The music alone is worth that much.
• Listening to Famicompo Mini 7 entries. http://j.mp/bZSciW -- Entry #1 is basically a 183k .mod that uses the PCM channel almost exclusively.
• Which is awesome, don't get me wrong. But it's not what I'm looking for when I pull out the NSF player.
• Restaurant dining area repeatedly reorganized as ocean liner hits heavy seas: http://bit.ly/amalUz
• Top 5 parental worries vs. top 5 actual dangers: http://j.mp/dvwNeM
• Oh it's a new feature of Google. I thought I was just going crazy.
• I'm not going to say you're playing Futility Tetris wrong, but you'd probably enjoy it more if you played it right.
• http://bit.ly/cIphGl -- The most white-male thing to like: Tom Clancy. The most asian-male: Taiwan.

Sep 09

• In my dream, Arjan Brussee wrote an article in Time magazine trying to convince readers to emigrate to "Dee," a hemispherical Venusian moon.

Sep 10

• It recently came to my attention that people I care about haven't seen "Look Around You." I was certain I'd brought it up! http://j.mp/5JgN
• Santa Claus fights entropy at the end of the universe: http://bit.ly/bOBAey
• Radio interview with the principal writer behind Deus Ex, recorded just after 9/11: http://bit.ly/cFVVh6
• A man must acknowledge that he has *no idea* what day-to-day fear of rape is like. He can only trust those who do. http://j.mp/4cz4om
• (Smartest thing about that essay: it never once uses the term "rape culture." Second smartest: it doesn't use "feminist" either.)
• PayPal decides they'd prefer to keep the $763,000 in Minecraft registrations rather than pass them on to the developer: http://bit.ly/bI5VaD

Sep 11

• Bowerbirds use forced perspective to appear larger to potential mates: http://bit.ly/d9u0q4
• http://bit.ly/rULth -- Books By You, for that special someone who always wanted to star in a novel-length mad-lib vampire romance!
• First-sale doctrine ruled to not apply to licensed software: http://bit.ly/9B82Ij

Sep 12

• http://bit.ly/boYFS2 -- "Ludio," huh? Sounds goofy, but it feels like only yesterday I was staring nonplussed at "Wii."
• (I believe I was trying to figure out whether it was a typo for "wifi" or for "World War II.")

Sep 13

• Southwest Airlines doesn't like when you put "/" in your address. Let's see how it feels about "½."
• I wonder if your average East Bay mail delivery person understand what I meant if I wrote .5 instead.
• Trojan targets porn downloaders, publishes personal information online, demands fee to remove it: http://j.mp/ds1NOo
• Podcast excerpt series: Idle Thumbs Puffin Adventures: http://bit.ly/amlogM (From http://bit.ly/c6GwFD)
• "Inceptionauts" trailer: http://bit.ly/bVIsD9
• Ron Gilbert explains why we're getting an unexpected Deathspank sequel unexpectedly soon: http://bit.ly/aJ8fA7
• Huh, Deathspank was intended to be a trilogy: http://j.mp/9mKT5X -- What odds do you put on the third game being released?
• Super Mario Bros. was released 25 years ago today: http://bit.ly/aDHdh9

Sep 14

• Podcast Excerpts Series: Giant Bomb cast member pitch range exposé: http://bit.ly/9xJnW5 (From: http://bit.ly/cQ7xSt)
• Foam printer makes flying art: http://bit.ly/9IfZh7

Sep 15

• http://j.mp/b39MDi "The NYPD street cop is expected to maintain high 'activity'—including stop-and-frisks—but to record fewer actual crimes"

Sep 16

• Radiant Silvergun coming to XBLA: http://bit.ly/9XetUg -- Finally, I can find out whether it's any good without buying a $200 import copy!
• Atlantis World's Fair 1962: http://bit.ly/bsGTFR
• Podcast Excerpts Series: Shawn Elliott vs. GTA San Andreas role-playing servers: http://bit.ly/9X6RP5 (From the 4/18/2008 1up Yours)
• Takashi Murakami's contemporary art installation at Versailles: http://bit.ly/d1N4T6
• Table upending simulator lets you get your rage on without harming any actual wives or children: http://bit.ly/d2yg8C
• And here's how you play the table upending simulator wrong: http://bit.ly/9kucH3
• In the wake of APB's sudden demise, Luke Halliwell's inside story on what went wrong at Realtime Worlds: http://bit.ly/cFa8s0
• "We lost our hunger, our fear of failure, our focus on staying lean and making do, on building the simplest thing that could possibly work."
• Also, evidently Dave Jones (Lemmings; Grand Theft Auto; Crackdown) has a Reality Distortion Field on par with Steve Jobs. http://j.mp/39ajBT

Sep 17

• Consciousness arises from certain patterns of computation performed on certain data structures. Output is incidental.
• A program need never produce any output, if sentience per se is the goal. The computation itself is everything.
• @Johnicholas Still trying to wrap my head around that one. (Was just reading about Boltzmann brains not so long ago, too.)
• http://j.mp/aM0zb6 -- It would be weird if the Ico/Shadow of the Colossus rerelease was what got me to finally pull the trigger on the PS3.
• Podcast Excerpts Series: The Idle Thumbs Meet Pyramid Head: http://bit.ly/bvbMsf
• That last is interesting to me because it crosses multiple podcasts and ends up being structured basically like a Lovecraft story.
• (Don't get used to these coming so regularly; I just had a bunch queued up that I wanted to do.)
• http://bit.ly/aWajhD -- "[Portland Press Herald] to Readers: Sorry for Portraying Muslims as Human"
• Jason made this: http://j.mp/9fNSjT Maybe my favorite kind of humor: nearly meaningless syllable salad, immune to my usual humor calculus.

Sep 18

• The Museum of Soviet Arcade Games: http://bit.ly/5mjkEx

Sep 19

• http://j.mp/4D7WR8 "A superintelligence hooked up to a webcam would invent Relativity as a hypothesis by the 3rd frame of a falling apple."
• Chris Cornell's design notes for Haiku Hero: http://bit.ly/akWloO
• http://bit.ly/bIgF7F -- "Wait... which is the yucky-looking part?" "I can testify that this is absolutely what phone-sex is like."
• Visual Transistor-level Simulation of the 6502: http://visual6502.org/
• http://bit.ly/dtpfYk -- Bah, this looks like a VB to me. Maybe a 5.4, on the YDS scale?
• Clean-cut-looking middle-aged dude shouts across the street to ask if I have rolling paper. Berkeley, ladies and gentlemen!
• (Also: my physical appearance, ladies and gentlemen!)

Sep 20

• Evidently being a meme is now worth good money: http://bit.ly/9F2Dqs
• Need a big glowy computer as set dressing for your 1960s-era sci-fi film? The Burroughs B205, for your consideration: http://bit.ly/9xfW3F
• What kind of game does a $1000 budget get you? What about $100 million? Craig Timpany breaks it down in powers of 10: http://bit.ly/b2qiLM
• I'm up to 5-back already, but my successes are almost all audial. Feels like cheating. I wonder if there's a Dual N-Back for the deaf.
• (Dual N-Back: the only activity, to my knowledge, shown to literally boost IQ: http://bit.ly/3ioZRd)
• @Johnicholas My theory: Capitalism is an exciting fantasy scenario Europeans can never attain in real life. (And probably wouldn't want to.)

Sep 22

• http://bit.ly/bb9zR7 -- "Western surge in obesity may have been caused by a virus"
• Cats and croissants: http://bit.ly/akSXcO
• Gog.com has established that they're willing to shut down their service without notice as a marketing stunt. De-sold.
• How The Atheist Stole Christmas: http://bit.ly/bfawyn
• In case you're wondering how much gog.com's customer backlash is going to affect them, here's a data point: http://bit.ly/1oHkIC
• Podcast excerpt: Ken Levine et al of Irrational Games, on the iterative design process: http://bit.ly/bRo8p3 (From: http://bit.ly/cIUqiX)
• "Everything is terrible until it's awesome." "Or until it ships terrible." "Or until it ships terrible. Or until it's cut."
• http://j.mp/GPBmK "Rheumatologists found the impact on the knees was 12 percent *less* when people walked barefoot than with padded shoes."
• Beer distributors oppose Prop. 19 to legalize marijuana in California: http://bit.ly/akRexh -- "Their mission is to drive people to drink."

Sep 23

• Playing The Ballad of Gay Tony, I'm reminded how good Rockstar are at dialog and setting, and how fucking awful they are at everything else.
• (Not that it'd been that long: Red Dead Redemption reminded me of the same thing a couple of months ago.)
• Gamestop getting in on DLC: http://bit.ly/dxrFeZ
• Optimal Cake-Cutting Algorithm for N People: http://bit.ly/bJHSY9
• In my dream, we built a dome above the city to filter out harmful UV, but we got the cheap filter with high resonance at the cutoff point.
• @mrasmus Do you remember what monitor it was you recommended to me?
• Note to self: when half your friends list "likes" something apparently inane, it's not secretly awesome; it's malware.
• @mrasmus Thanks!
• Australian Christians livid about proposal to offer secular ethics class as alternative to govt-mandated proselytizing: http://j.mp/9UF0gi
• My dad on Eminem: "Not as good with words as The Notorious B.I.G., but the nasty little rabbit boy has good musical form."

Sep 24

• Need to stretch the fadeout so your song will fit in the radio single format? Try the "truck driver's gear change": http://bit.ly/ajGsjP
• (Somebody really needs to start a MusicTropes wiki.)

Sep 25

• Dan Osman free-soloing Bear's Reach (400ft up, 5.7) in 4 minutes, 25 seconds: http://bit.ly/aJ7nwC
• Unsurprisingly, Dan Osman died in a fall in 1998. Surprisingly, it was because his rope failed.
• Brain Workshop recommends "20 sessions a day (about 25 minutes)." But at 6-back, 20 sessions takes about an hour. Time for triple n-back?
• Hunh, remember how Rock of the Dead ("Guitar Hero meets Typing of the Dead", Oct. 19th) used to be Wii-only? Now it's 360/PS3-only.
• Trying Brain Workshop's Jaeggi mode, which emulates the original N-Back research protocol. It uses 20+n trials per session, vs. 20+n**2.
• @Laroquod I don't think they think of it as downtime. Game writers often try to write cutscenes as climactic moments. (Which is ridiculous.)
• Half an hour in, Condemned 2 keeps popping up tutorials on how to fight. They really must think I'm playing for the combat engine, huh?
• Some tutorials are better than others, but they're all terrible compared to teaching the player via good design. http://bit.ly/14uAbx

Sep 26

• 2009 Ig-Nobel prize goes to inventors of bra that transforms into a pair of gas masks in an emergency: http://bit.ly/8XqX5H
• @mrasmus Man, a little short? When Pigs Fly is about 6 times as long as the mechanic deserves. If it was 2 minutes, I'd've come away smiling
• @mrasmus (It also would've helped if I'd found the mute button first. I don't appreciate being roped into Dessgeega's public BDSM sessions.)
• For lack of a better description, "auspice": http://bit.ly/b7WZwy

Sep 27

• Upcoming from Fantasy Flight, Mansions of Madness: http://bit.ly/abdxF9 -- Looks like they pitched it as "Arkham Horror meets Betrayal."
• Mansions of Madness is gonna be $80. Hopefully somebody I know buys it, because I just forked over $70 for Castle Ravenloft.
• National study: Abortion does not cause depression or low self-esteem in adolescents: http://bit.ly/am3arn
• Ron Gilbert hired on at Doublefine: http://bit.ly/dDfMH7 -- Heading up a new project. Not a remake or a sequel.
• Scenes from around the solar system: http://bit.ly/919u7B
• The reality distortion field is an essential attribute of great startup founders. Also of sociopaths and serial killers: http://j.mp/a5eT8i
• Sketches and watercolors from the World War I trenches: http://bit.ly/dtBJiB

Sep 28

• "Kinesic natural mappings are those that involve gross body movements." Sometimes I love how different word definitions interact in my head.
• "Building Megaobjects in Minecraft": http://bit.ly/dAqiUT
• Panic Shooter, the shmup based on cellular automata: http://j.mp/btRk9k (As you may expect, it's far more awesome in theory than practice.)
• It's competent overall, but nobody'd remember this if not for the MC-202's tightly-paced climb into ear-splitting treble: http://j.mp/aKaa51

Sep 29

• 16-bit ALU in Minecraft redstone: http://bit.ly/b5fKjy (Minecraft is running in the Java VM, so this is the next logical step.)
• Someone really just ought to just go ahead and implement a Verilog compiler that targets redstone.
• "They were caught on CCTV but were all wearing balaclavas." -- Wouldn't that leave them all sticky and easy to identify later?
• Panic Shooter -- http://j.mp/bmnbSi -- actually makes a really interesting metaphor for external forces acting on a deterministic universe.
• "Walls," "bullets," "flames" are natives to the universe. The player is an internally-inexplicable entity paying no respect to physical laws
• ... just as souls or gods must be.
• "'Talkie-walkie' is French for walkie-talkie." -- Never let it be said that Conseil Supérieur De La Langue Française has no sense of humor!
• Signs point to the Rock Band 3 stringed-guitar controller coming next year, costing $300+, and still requiring the $40 MIDI adapter. Mrgle.
• People are still looking for an MMO to best WoW's userbase by an order of magnitude, like WoW did to Everquest, and EQ did to Ultima Online.
• Each iteration growing simpler and more mainstream. But it seems clear to me that the successor has been with us for a long time: Farmville.
• Wow. I'd heard that a chunk of Beautiful Katamari's on-disc content was locked behind microtransactions, but some *achievements* are, too.
• Podcast excerpt: Tycho on awkward parenting questions: http://bit.ly/ay407B (From PADLC, "The Spore Cult": http://bit.ly/clRsVo)
• Surprise! Atheists know more about religion than the faithful: http://j.mp/cqtBxI
• In San Diego for the next week and a half.

Sep 30

• @Laroquod Yeah, that quote was actually from an article about Air. I'd thought they were just making with the wordplay!

On Twitter: @mogwai_poet