Oct 01

• The history of "three meals a day" as a cultural construct. alternet.org/food...
• My challenge to you, APE, is to provide me something worth tweeting about, *without* it being exciting enough that I forget to tweet. GLHF!
• One thing I'm enjoying about APE is that most booth proprietors are too introverted to try to engage you as you browse.

Oct 02

• Real-time face substitution: vimeo.com/2934853...

Oct 03

• Traditional news media in microcosm. i51.tinypic.com/2...
• 2D Boy's Ron Carmel on why XBLA's best developers are leaving, and what XBLA needs to do to stay relevant. 2dboy.com/2011/10...
• Game industry bitching about skill shortages is like the kid who murdered his parents asking the judge to take pity because he's an orphan.
• So, it turns out I'll be taking part in the Indie Games for Good marathon. Expect me to be shilling for the next month. iggmarathon.com/...
• I've... never seen this side of Mario before. ap.nintendo.com/...
• Gamification in the workplace, a case study: desmoinesregister...
• Ian Bogost and the Unbearable Lightness of Cow Clicker. kotaku.com/584608...
• "A lot of the serious players... just like clicking a cow sometimes. It's very innocent; they just like clicking a cow."
• "Ten Amazing Timelapse Videos," mostly of nature. dailygrail.com/Li...
• Hirokazu Tanaka, "Sky Palace," from the Kid Icarus soundtrack. youtube.com/watch...

Oct 04

• As rape metaphors go, this game looks pretty entertaining. youtube.com/watch...
• "BART Police to Get Officer-Mounted Cameras" -- A good first step. Why are we not recording all police all the time? sfist.com/2011/09...
• Hell, most of the time I spend awake, I'd categorize as R&D. How do I get in on this gravy train? supermariobook.co...
• Puryx, "Atrium" youtube.com/watch...

Oct 05

• "Some games let you pretend to murder other people, Cow Clicker lets you pretend to be a slave." gamedesignadvance...
• Unreal Engine 3 running on Flash 11. Why did it take this long for Adobe to add OpenGL bindings? unrealengine.com/...
• I'm accustomed to mentally compensating for a certain set of visual artifacts, but Rage is freakin' me out by giving me a weird new one.
• RT @AP BREAKING: Apple says Steve Jobs has died.
• Rage doesn't even have the common courtesy to checkpoint when you turn in a quest. This game has serious PC-itis.
• Amazon sees every page you visit in the Kindle Fire browser. techdirt.com/arti...
• Cake, "Short Skirt Long Jacket" youtube.com/watch...

Oct 06

• OG is like tenure. Once you have it, they can't take it away. youtube.com/watch...
• Alex's internship is done, and Indy and Chris just got real jobs. Where the hell did my social life go? Anybody have some spare friends?
• @fullbright I've seen it zoomed in so I know exactly what it is, but whenever I see it in thumbnail, it's clearly a dude wearing a helmet.
• Wow. My chosen brace style from like 1998 to 2005, that auto-formatting editors always fucked up, totally has a name! en.wikipedia.org/...
• Hey, shut up, it's a great style. It's great for the 24-line screens nobody uses anymore, where you need all the code density you can get.
• Photo set: startled Canadians. flickr.com/photos...
• Twinbeard needs a domain. Twinbeard.com expires at the end of October. Should I get excited? It's been registered, unused, for six years.
• Bang Camaro, "Pleasure (Pleasure)" youtube.com/watch...

Oct 07

• I don't know if you're allowed to deglaze a cookie sheet, but I'm a rebel.

Oct 08

• Wow. Installing the disc takes Rage from being one of the ugliest games on the 360 to one of the prettiest. The texture pop-in is just gone.
• Sad story: I doubt very much most 360 owners are even aware installation exists. Most players will only ever see the awful-looking Rage.
• At Noisebridge for today's game jam. Still haven't decided on a project. Checkin' my email.
• Nice fifth-interval pair of ambient hums in the 16th & Mission BART station. Sounds like the longest ever THX trail-off.

Oct 09

• In case you were wondering, Google Instant still insistently turns itself back on no matter how hard you click the "disable" radio button.
• Beating Wordpress into submission.

Oct 10

• Looking at the slow-motion replay, this CounterStrike anti-sniper tactic really does seem like it's viably repeatable. youtube.com/watch...
• Liquid Television, early-90s MTV at its best, streaming online. liquidtelevision....
• Jeff Gerstmann sings! youtube.com/watch...

Oct 11

• @whitney i hope you'll enjoy this package of cinderblocks
• For Quake's 15th birthday, a good piece at 1up on its influence. 1up.com/features/...
• "Out of Sight," a delightful short film about perception and keeping a mental model of the world. youtube.com/watch...
• RT @BARTSIMSON_REAL: "FUCK"""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""" ...
• @jonbeilin Take it to the Supreme Court if you have to! Futility Pong needs a good precedent.
• Yes, it's really dead. Apparently adding salt makes the muscles contract. This is why they invented food processors. youtube.com/watch...
• The government doesn't need a warrant to get your Gmail data. It just has to ask nicely. readwriteweb.com/...
• @mrasmus @daemerson I'm almost afraid to ask, but what game will the $150 be paying for nearly an entire day of?
• @mrasmus Oh, that's cleverly handled.
• @mrasmus @Satchamobob It's the Dreamcast fishing controller, right?
• Indie Games for Good donations are up. Go force them to play Don't Shit Your Pants for hours while it's still cheap! iggmarathon.com/d...
• @karamisaurus @fiskmeshi Good call. I only feel slightly guilty.
• Donated to Child's Play to get Futilitris onto the IGG stream. Somebody will regret this, and it might just be me. iggmarathon.com/...
• @mrasmus I totally put Futilitris in the "Request Game" field.
• @mrasmus I typed it in rather than selecting from the autocomplete/dropdown interface I just noticed. Not the clearest UI.
• @mrasmus Repro steps: click on "amount" field, type a number, hit tab, type "Futilitris," hit tab.
• @mrasmus But it is on your list?
• @mrasmus If I wait a couple seconds before starting to type, it works.
• @mrasmus Wouldn't it be simpler and more discoverable to have a drop-down / write-in text field pair?
• Serge Gainsbourg, "En Melody" youtube.com/watch...

Oct 12

• RT @fiskmeshi Watching Kinectimals+Bears; @karamisaurus:"I hope it'll be on PS3" Me:"It's KINECTimals" Her:"Why you gotta squash my--NYAWW IT'S SO HAPPY!"
• Feuding Wal*Mart shoppers throw cleaning products at each other; send 19 to the hospital for chlorine gas poisoning. baltimoresun.com/...
• A good summary of the Occupy Wall Street complaints: wages at a record low while corporate profits at a record high. businessinsider.c...
• So do we have any proposed solutions? No, not like the dumb-ass forum post that was making the rounds last week. I mean actual solutions.
• Related: "Elizabeth Warren Announces Her Bid for Senate" youtube.com/watch...
• Oh my. "Your Amazon.com... order of 'The Children of the Sky' has shipped!"
• RT @mikeash RIP Dennis Ritchie. boingboing.net/20...
• Boston, "Foreplay/Long Time" youtube.com/watch...

Oct 13

• @Johnicholas Hmm. Seems hard to measure. The existing tax codes already encourage hiding wealth transfer, and people are pretty good at it.
• RIP Dennis Ritchie. Print an unterminated C string in his honor tonight.????g??؇sΚ???@]Hȳ???If???T?Î??c?m???[???c?Ij?x?????7??JQ.?S????C?qJ?
• Yeah, Gabe Newell of all people doesn't get to bitch about closed platforms. develop-online.ne...
• When compiling to Javascript, Dart adds 550k of boilerplate to the simplest program. gist.github.com/1...
• (I'm sure that it'll take about a day to add the code path analysis to only link in the parts of the library that are actually used.)
• I like Steve Yegge, so I'd feel bad linking to his accidentally-public rant about Google and platforms. So I won't. But it's a great rant.
• @fistfulofsand Grats!
• Blackwater: The Game. If this doesn't involve raping your co-op partners, I'm calling shenanigans. wired.com/dangerr...
• "The myth of Apple as counterculture convinced people they were taking on the system when they were reinforcing it." english.aljazeera...
• For your consideration, a Pygmy Owl being tickled. youtube.com/watch...
• Photo set: microphotography contest winners. boston.com/bigpic...
• Bell Biv Devoe, "Poison" youtube.com/watch...

Oct 14

• Rob Pike on Dennis Ritchie's legacy. plus.google.com/u...
• @fullbright It's called the Geisel Library now. Named after Dr. Seuss.
• "Regulators are cracking down on computerized high-speed trading that crowds today’s stock exchanges." nytimes.com/2011/...
• Max Payne bundle for $3.75 on Steam today. store.steampowere... -- You know what? Just go ahead and skip the first one.
• And since you can't hover, a touchscreen gives you even less input than a one-button mouse. Art is born of constraint. penny-arcade.com/...
• RT @Harvey1966: Spoken in the design pit: "I have one foot in each grave." #Monteism
• Teeth too straight? Plaisir Dental Salon has your back! odditycentral.com...
• RT @zarawesome: The IGF divides itself between awarding game demos that never get released and games that sold a million copies already. ...
• "Police arrest man for child pornography after tipoff from burglars" articles.cnn.com/...
• The power of eyebrows. youtube.com/watch...
• RT @ActualPerson084: NEW KEYRING PRODUCT ALLOWS YOU TO OPEN ANY STANDARD DOOR. "OPEN A DOOR AND DO WHAT YOU WANT TO ON THE OTHER SIDE OF ...
• Miles Davis, "So What," arranged by Chris Hampton youtube.com/watch...

Oct 15

• Several days later, still staring at the Dark Souls disc. Scared to boot it up.
• Dude walking around in Downtown Berkeley traffic, holding sign: "Honk if you love peace!" They're honking, alright.
• Cal vs. USC quidditch game going on at Berkeley campus. They seem to have re-balanced the snitch mechanic to fit in the overall game system.
• (J.K. Rowling: not a game designer.)
• After waiting half an hour for internet to come back, I discover that only Chrome is broken. Pidgin, Firefox and Dropbox are working fine.
• Even after I kill every Chrome process and reopen it, it's refusing to load anything, and taking up an entire CPU core to not do it.
• @MarioMarathon I'd love to see MM5 be more participatory. Maybe a walkathon-style pledge type thing, where lots of people play the games.
• Also! Just picked up Elder Sign. My god, the box is so *small* -- and it's a third empty space! Probably going to break it in tonight.

Oct 16

• Played Elder Sign with Brian. The learning game took about 3 hours. Fun, good mechanics and tactical decisions, even with just two players.
• Not nearly as strong thematically as Arkham Horror, but you could finish a game in an hour, even with eight players, and that's worth a lot.
• Drum circle at Ashby BART has an action sequence feel today. Lends a certain frisson to waiting for the train.

Oct 17

• RT @ActualPerson084: LIVE SINGLES IN YOUR AREA CANNOT BE STOPPED BY ANY TRADITIONAL MEANS.
• Burning Man sounds awesome for like three hours, and then you're just stuck in the goddamn desert with a bunch of hippies for a week.
• "Being enraged at Corporate America for being greedy is like being enraged at Cracked for use of the list format." cracked.com/blog/...
• This is where the demoscene goes. If it hasn't already, while I wasn't paying attention. lights.elliegould...
• "Credit Where Credit is Due: New Study Confirms that Teens Behave Responsibly Around Sex" rhrealitycheck.or...
• "You're held down by a drooling dinosaur and impaled by his big phallic tail over and over until a man saves you." youtube.com/watch...
• Russian review of Rage transcends the language barrier. ag.ru/reviews/rag...
• "This isn't nonsensical. It’s a romanticized but internally-consistent depiction of an incredibly sick relationship." moonbase.rydia.ne...
• Jester, "Stardust Memories" youtube.com/watch...

Oct 18

• "In Dubai, traffic accidents fell 20 per cent on the days BlackBerry users were unable to use its messaging service." thenational.ae/ne...
• "TIL Keanu Reeves is one articulate motherfucker." reddit.com/r/movi...
• Speaking of Keanu Reeves, what a heartwarming story! i.imgur.com/qPoBT...
• The ultimate in bicycle security. thereifixedit.fai...
• Thinking more about aging, the longevity vs. quality-of-life discussion seems like exactly the same debate as pro-life vs. pro-choice.
• It would be very useful, I think, to see life expectancy data taking into consideration people who'd prefer to be dead.
• Foo Fighters, "February Stars" youtube.com/watch...

Oct 19

• If having more than two cats makes you a Crazy Cat Lady, I'm pretty sure having more than two children makes you a Crazy Child Lady.
• Jordan Mechner's "The Making of Prince of Persia." Essentially his diary from the era, transcribed. Amazing stuff. jordanmechner.com...
• Just about the happiest cyborg spaniel! i.imgur.com/tMHN5...
• When has this been you? Feeling guilty yet? paxvalkyrie.tumbl...
• RT @strutting: Listen, here's the thing: if you can't spot the third meat on your pizza in the first 30 seconds at the table, you are th ...
• Michael Abrash's Graphics Programming Black Book, downloadable from DDJ. Fascinating from start to finish. drdobbs.com/high-...
• "Google's statement [on supporting pseudonyms] is obvious bullshit, and here's why." jwz.org/blog/2011...
• William Orbit, "Atom Dream" youtube.com/watch...

Oct 20

• @jonbeilin The principles do still hold up really well. But to me the historical context is almost more valuable, e.g. the Quake chapters.
• Seth MacFarlane's second job: youtube.com/watch...
• Really enjoying On Being podcast. (It's a little more specific than the name lets on. It ought to be "On Being Human.") being.publicradio...
• On BART, heading to TIGJam. Earthquake causing delays. I've got a laptop here, I'll turn the train car into a jam if need be.
• Traffic planning in Mountain View: sidewalk ends on one side of the street; sign prohibits crossing to reach sidewalk on other side.
• At TIGJam. Already settled comfortably at a table full of people I already know. I'm seeing a problem here...
• Phubans is livestreaming the jam. Which is to say, mostly livestreaming his face. livestream.com/ph...
• Lytro light-field camera actually exists: lytro.com/camera...

Oct 21

• Beginning to think I seriously dodged a bullet skipping college: alternet.org/stor...
• In the cluster of tables at TIGJam that's all South Bay Jam regulars. Harshing my networking, but I'm getting lots of shit done.
• New TIGJam stream: ustream.tv/channe... -- Right now, at least, this is going on a tour of the room.
• "Cargo! The Quest for Gravity," surreal baby-kicking sim by the creators of Pathologic, $7 on Steam for 18 more hours. store.steampowere...
• TIGJam photos going up already: plus.google.com/u...
• @weasello I almost understand the score system, I think. It rewards crazy-go-nuts flying based on length of holding keys down, right?
• Just added an Indignity meter to Frog Defense. #tigjam
• Representative Frog Defense screenshot: twinbeardstudios....

Oct 22

• Totally should've livetweeted this, but Chris and I entered an impromptu one-hour game competition at TIGJam. Details in the morning.
• RT @ClickNothing: "a ship in port is safe, but that's not what ships are for"
• I don't know who the target audience of "shampooing conditioner" is, but I'm pretty sure he's entirely bald.
• The defruiters are working fine but the refruiters are going crazy! #FrogDefense #TIGJam
• I'm pretty sure that broccoli beef has been on the catering table for a full 24 hours now. #TIGJam
• Photo set: long exposures. weburbanist.com/2...
• Refruiters are behaving properly now, which is sad, because I no longer have an excuse to talk to my TIGJam table-mates about refruiters.

Oct 23

• Last day of TIGJam. Final push to get a demo ready.
• Now that I've stopped writing clean code and started hacking things up, progress is really fast. #FrogDefense #TIGJam
• Demo time at TIGJam. Frog Defense went over surprisingly well.

Oct 24

• Back from TIGJam. Amazing social experinence, incredibly tiring, and I can't wait to get to sleep so I can wake up and work on games again.
• TIGJam had swag this year! Brought back: Spelunky figurine courtesy of Derek Yu; Super Meat Boy soundtrack CD, signed by Danny Baranowsky.
• RT @burtonposey: Just saw a review of an iOS game. "At 5 minutes into the game, I was offered 500 gold to write a positive review. I qui ...
• Everyone who went to TIGJam who lives in the east bay, we should hang out more.
• RT @TNG_S8: Q shows up and acts like a total bastard until they give him Data's foot "for keeps". Troi senses the crew doubts her medica ...
• "Mummy brown was produced up into the 20th century until the supply of available mummies was exhausted." en.wikipedia.org/...
• When I started making Frog Defense I deliberately chose to code everything the easy way rather than the fast way, even if it hurt me inside.
• So it's almost a relief, starting to see performance issues from all the objects flying around. Flex/AS3 has a good profiler, right?
• Patent number 2,011,023,240: Patent to Track Users Even When They are Not Logged In to Facebook. schneier.com/blog...
• RT @jonbeilin: RIP John McCarthy, Artificial Intelligence legend. (He even coined the term.)
• Physics professor Tom Murphy explains why space colonization is fucked. physics.ucsd.edu/...
• For more, an excellent oldie by Charles Stross, going into much more detail on the same topic: antipope.org/char...

Oct 25

• GTA 5 announced. No details. Here I am talking about it like it's news.
• "Whether you support WikiLeaks or not, the blockade by Visa, Mastercard, Paypal is a sinister attack on free speech" guardian.co.uk/co...
• I'd dismissed Rocksmith as a serious competitor to Rock Band's pro mode, but it might actually be the better product. dubiousquality.bl...
• Have you ever tried salting food when it's already in your mouth? It totally works.
• PSA: the LAME encoder prepends about 50ms of silence to mp3s it creates. No wonder the Frog Fractions soundtrack wasn't looping properly.
• (PSA: Frog Defense renamed to Frog Fractions. Edu-tainment!)
• Metric, "Combat Baby" youtube.com/watch...
• @brantsteen And far more sanitary than removing it, salting it, and eating it again.

Oct 26

• Desktop machine refusing to output a video signal. No POST beep either. I hope my other RAM stick just went bad; otherwise I'm fucked.
• RT @ActualPerson084: A SEA OF WET CEMENT, PATROLLED BY UNPILOTED STEAMROLLERS. ATOP A SMALL MEDIAN IN THE MIDDLE DISTANCE, A FREE IPAD. ...

Oct 27

• Kirby Mass Attack takes about half an hour to get past the novelty of the controls, then all that's left is the "gotcha" level design.
• Speaking of Kirby, here's not-Tom-Chick's not-review of "Kirby Escape from Fantasy Realm": quartertothree.co...
• Hate raves but it turns out you can't constitutionally ban techno? Outlawing pacifiers is the next best thing. techdirt.com/arti...
• Photo set: Japan, six months after the tsunami. blogs.sacbee.com/...
• "Everyone watches Hitler eat." youtube.com/watch...
• Assemblage 23, "Awake" youtube.com/watch...

Oct 28

• An analysis of Super Mario World's camera control code. Watch for the arguably broken behavior at 3:37. youtube.com/watch...
• Stupid WebGL shader tricks: iquilezles.org/ap...
• Gave up on finding a functional profiler and wrote my own. Works great, but Flash doesn't support timing intervals less than a millisecond.
• ... so basically it doesn't work. At least I wasted less time writing it than I did banging my head on SWFWire and FlashPreloadProfiler.

Oct 29

• Photo gallery: splashes. flickr.com/photos...
• RT @petermolydeux: You are a Pigeon who must go around the city trying to persuade business men not to jump off buildings by retrieving ...
• Iterated Youtube auto-captioning is the new iterated natural language translation: youtube.com/watch...
• @mrasmus This will help youtube.com/watch...
• Goddamn, that's a really good Freddie Mercury. youtube.com/watch...
• What are they teaching students on porn classroom sets these days? blackboardsinporn...
• "Active coastal erosion." -- There's a euphemism if I've ever heard one. Too hot for TV! youtube.com/watch...
• Okay, after tweaking I may actually be getting useful data out of my profiler despite the pitiful resolution. Let's optimize and find out!

Oct 30

• I found out about the 0-hour game jam just in time! Maybe I'll spend the next hour "touching up" my framework. 0hgame.eu/... #0hgame
• Wait, Wikipedia says DST ends in in November in the United States. Thanks, Obama! #0hgame
• @icecreamjonsey Every man is guilty of all the good he didn't do.
• Vimeo hates game developers. If you are a game developer, Vimeo hates you. launch.is/blog/vi...
• Vending machine cooks pizza while you wait. youtube.com/watch...
• BitmapData.copyPixels() is *so* much faster than BitmapData.draw(), it's embarrassing.
• But to support even axis-oriented flips or 90-degree rotation without falling back on draw(), you need to cache every permutation manually.
• Maybe Stage3D will eventually supplant all of Flash's software rendering code, like every 2D game uses OpenGL now.
• Normal people probably won't notice the difference, but Frog Fractions now doesn't cause Brian's Macbook's fan to go crazy. I feel better.

Oct 31

• If you think an interface that jumps from "59 mins ago" to "1 hour ago" to "2 hours ago" is precise enough to be useful, I hate you so much.
• RAM came from Newegg. That was it. Rest of the system is fine.
• New Twinbeard post: "Indie Games for Good and the 0-hour Game Jam, Together at Last" twinbeardstudios....
• Illustrating "The Joy of Sex" in an era of oppressive obscenity prosecution. bbc.co.uk/news/ma...
• "High Altitude Rocket On-board Video." -- 0 to 36km in 60 seconds. youtube.com/watch...
• An awesome short story interpretation of the "JATO rocket car" myth. Very evocative of geek adolescence. the-clearing.org/...

Nov 01

• Time-lapse seasons from space. space.com/13068-s...
• "Magic Cards with Googly Eyes" magiccardswithgoo...
• The entire dev team of Bastion answers questions on Reddit: reddit.com/r/IAmA...
• Aurora Australis from space: earthobservatory....
• It's space day, evidently. "The Six Most Mind-Blowing Things Ever Discovered in Space" cracked.com/artic...
• Yuzo Koshiro, "The Poets," from the Streets of Rage 3 soundtrack. youtube.com/watch...

Oct 30

• Vimeo hates game developers. If you are a game developer, Vimeo hates you. launch.is/blog/vi...
• Vending machine cooks pizza while you wait. youtube.com/watch...
• BitmapData.copyPixels() is *so* much faster than BitmapData.draw(), it's embarrassing.
• But to support even axis-oriented flips or 90-degree rotation without falling back on draw(), you need to cache every permutation manually.
• Maybe Stage3D will eventually supplant all of Flash's software rendering code, like every 2D game uses OpenGL now.
• Normal people probably won't notice the difference, but Frog Fractions now doesn't cause Brian's Macbook's fan to go crazy. I feel better.

Oct 31

• If you think an interface that jumps from "59 mins ago" to "1 hour ago" to "2 hours ago" is precise enough to be useful, I hate you so much.
• RAM came from Newegg. That was it. Rest of the system is fine.
• New Twinbeard post: "Indie Games for Good and the 0-hour Game Jam, Together at Last" twinbeardstudios....
• Illustrating "The Joy of Sex" in an era of oppressive obscenity prosecution. bbc.co.uk/news/ma...
• "High Altitude Rocket On-board Video." -- 0 to 36km in 60 seconds. youtube.com/watch...
• An awesome short story interpretation of the "JATO rocket car" myth. Very evocative of geek adolescence. the-clearing.org/...

On Twitter: @mogwai_poet