May 2010
40 posts
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Preparation
Had an overload of dreaming last night / this morning, all clearly borne from my deeply embedded and only sometimes acknowledged anxiety of not being prepared to teach this summer.
There was no particular timeline, but all the basic fears were represented… coming in day one and having nearly none of my TAs arriving on time or at all. Worse, having a couple actually show and all they would...
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IT'S A TRAP.
I’ve used Craigslist in the past to mostly good ends… finding housing, buying a cheap GDC pass, selling an SC2 beta key…
… Been posting to it recently to try and find month-to-month housing starting from the fall and it’s turning out to be a really ugly process. Out of maybe five or six inquiries, at least two of them (didn’t follow up on all of them) have...
A Python Code That Makes Any Song Swing →
Hahaha, this is great!
We rarely write about coding projects, but this particular one is too wonderful to keep to ourselves. It basically makes any song swing by “time-stretching the first half of each beat while time-shrinking the second half.”
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Sorority Life: Playing Facebook's Mean-Girl Game →
Too much description of the game, not enough reflection. But oh well.
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Google offers Web designers hosted, open-source... →
Web typography just got a shot in the arm from Google, as the company has announced a free, open-source library of 18 typefaces that Web designers will now have at their disposal. Google hosts all the fonts on its servers, and offers a simple Web-based API that handles all the browser differences behind the scenes.
That’s kind of neat. Definitely something to mention this summer.
...
Spent a couple hours doctoring up some screenshots in order to update my portfolio to include Schism.
Actually I had no screenshots to work with whatsoever, so I had to check and see if my flowerspace setup was still running (which it is), so I could log into that and continue using the install there. XP Beats setting up my own in a pinch.
Video games score one for literacy →
His mom followed behind us and while I was browsing the S’s I overheard this incredible bit of dialog.
‘Hey, Mom! See this book?’ He grabbed a copy of Inferno, the first book in Dante Alighieri’s trilogy The Divine Comedy. ‘Remember that game you bought me? This is the book it was based on, but this book is even sicker the game! It was awesome!’
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Those Nefarious Acai Crimelords
Spam comments are getting to be a little too brilliant. I love MovableType and all, but I have to admit it’s pretty crappy at weeding out the bad from the good, when it comes to comments. Very aggravating.
But they’re getting uncannily brilliant. Check out this latest one that showed up on the Filmcraft site. Third one, by “George U”.
It refers to Sedrin’s name...
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“I know it’s ridiculous, but I feel like the forward-thinking, intelligent,...”
– Stevie, re: Taylor Swift
—
I very much feel this way too.
As far as Taylor Swift herself is concerned, well, I just remember driving once and hearing one of her songs come on and her reasonably-pleasant voice singing the line that Autostraddle disparaged… “when you’re fifteen...
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How MetaFilter Saved Two Russian Women From... →
The amazing things we could do…..
tumblographr:
Even knowing the eventual outcome, the actual thread is absolutely nerve-wracking to read.
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Casual gaming is not a disease.
Read this piece over at Kotaku and was, in a word, appalled. Instead Of Laughing At “Casual” Gamers, Try Helping Them! As if the title wasn’t insulting enough, the author has to write things like this:
If you know someone hooked on Farmville, someone you previously thought could or would not play video games, have a chat with them! Ask them what they like about it, why they...
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South Korea Rocked By StarCraft Betting Scandal →
Only in Korea.
In what some are already calling the biggest e-sports scandal in history, the still-unfolding saga has seen pro gaming teams accused of intentionally losing matches and even leaking their own team’s replay files to illegal gambling syndicates. It is believed to have started in 2006 and peaked in 2008.
The scandal is so widespread that it apparently reaches pro gaming...
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USC SCA 2010 Commencement →
Haha… meant to just find a transcript of Katzenberg’s keynote address, but found this instead. In case anyone is incredibly bored and wants to see. :x
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Night Fury!
Caught a showing of this with my dad, on Sunday. It was, let’s see… well, the plot and characterization was nothing extraordinary. But the animation and care of Toothless was freaking amazing! His eyes, his feline manner… sooooooooooo awesome!
… Yeah, that’s all I really have to say. :x
But I’ll link vladstudio’s Night Fury tribute, cause it’s...
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WatchLewis Black cracks me up all the time.
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Post-Mortems
Babysitting the show today, which leaves me with a lot of downtime. Fortunately (?) all of my stations are hooked up to the net (cause… they had to be), so this leaves me with easy access to various net-based entertainment. I suspect I will be spending a lot of time on Facebook, checking out new games. >_>
But first… figure I should write. You know, about… everything....
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Laryngitis
Tonight’s Glee episode kicked so much butt in terms of drama. That’s all I have to say.
Well, I could’ve lived without the Mercedes/Puck thing. But Kurt+pappy… oh, so beautiful. ::sniff::
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Singularities 2010 Schism Build →
If you sign up to play, please do not join the blue/red/gray games. >_>
Pictures of the exhibition space to come later. :x
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Hot glue is hot
::sucks on a finger::
:(
Game Seeds card game →
I want.
I have no idea if it’s actually effective at all, but even just the art is adorable. :X
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On second thought...
Reconsidering what I need for the exhibition towns…
… what might be better is to have six players who have this Saturday night free to play IN the games that the show participants will be playing in.
This would be 20-30 minute turns (yes, you can still get e-mail notifications) … from 6pm to 9pm. I’d give you specific rules to follow as far as what you should probably...
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CRUNCH
CODE CODE CODE.
DEBUG DEBUG DEBUG.
50 hours left until the opening of the exhibition… taking wagers on how many of those hours I’ll be sleeping. >_>
Actually, I’m not in that bad. I have monster sieges remaining to implement and last night, as I looked at my combat code that I first did nearly three and a half months ago… I realized my planning was such that...
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Want to know what web was like ... way back when?
… before Twitter and Facebook …
… and weblog comments …
… and like/dislike/stumbleupon/delicious/etc buttons…
… and even phpBB2 …
… there were guest books.
The saddest bit is that I found these again because I was sifting through my AOL e-mail and happened to notice an e-mail from Dreambook, which made me go “omg that service is...
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WatchOn Colbert last night, Michael J Fox showed up as a guest to promote his new book.
The sad thing is that, when he first showed up… it was as a video in the little porthole in Stephen’s desk, and it was small enough that I couldn’t really tell who it was at first…
… but I ended up recognizing him, not because of his voice, but because of the recognizable way that...
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7 Interface Design Techniques to Simplify and... →
Too basic, I think, for those who are likely to read this through this log… but may make a good link for this summer. :P
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Control Group
So I’m going to need 5-6 people, ideally, to commit to play Schism for a week in a “really active” manner during the week of the show, starting this Thursday or Friday and lasting through the 15th. (… probably Friday.) What that means is that you should play the game and chat on the message board and … pretend like it’s fun. ::lol::
Please let me know directly...
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This is not how you drink from the sink.
College students struggle to go without media for... →
Before you read the article, let me say straight out that I believe this study and its conclusions were either very poorly done or very poorly framed. I think that it’s completely obvious that if you take away “media” from normal college students and said students don’t have any non-media related activities to fall back on, then of course they are going to suffer...
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Firing on all neurons: Where consciousness comes... →
Consciousness is one of neuroscience’s long-standing mysteries. At its most basic, it is the simple question of why we become aware of some thoughts or feelings, while others lurk unnoticed below conscious perception. Is there a single module in the brain, a “seat of consciousness” if you like, that is responsible for awareness? Or is it a result of more complicated activity...