hello typepad

The Indie Dozen

So what's it like to work in indie development? How are the games made, and what are the problems and frustrations of coding alone or in small teams? To find out, I approached 12 indie developers and asked if we could track them throughout the year. We'll be reporting regularly on their progress, we'll get them to tell us about the life of an indie programmer, and we'll encourage you to get involved with the communities of the games you like the best.

via www.guardian.co.uk

Inspired by the recent success of Independent hits, Keith Stuart is tracking twelve game developers releasing new titles this year. Should be fun to watch. Follow them on twitter at @indiedozen.

28,236m

28,236m, originally uploaded by .tiff.

I love .tiff's comment about her Canabalt high score:

... the only thing in Canabalt that increases in difficultly over time is your anxiety. By 19k I had to pause the game because my palms were so sweaty and my heart was jumping out of my chest.

via www.parenting.com

Dennis Crowley on Foursquare

We think of check-ins as you check-in at Yankee Stadium or you check-in at dinner. But then people use it to check-in to traffic, to check-in to the back of a cab. The playground is a good example. It's not a use case we anticipated. Parents uses it to meet up with other parents with kids. I think that's perfect. Use it whatever way you want.

via radar.oreilly.com

Letting people make mischief or share experiences that aren't anchored to "place" is the cornerstone of why Foursquare is successful. With the explosion of blogs, facebook fan pages and Twitter accounts, Friendster's war against the "fakesters" (I was friends with the iPod and the F Train) seems like a turning point in the history of social networks.

Nathan Sawaya quit his job as a lawyer to build Lego sculpture:

The day my site crashed from too many hits I realized there was a viable career here. I was like, wow - this is it. So in 2004 I left the firm.

This One Doesn't Go to Eleven

Guitar Hero is a solid gold hit; a sell-out across all major gaming platforms with a booming ebay/craigslist trade emerging for guitars sans game. I enjoyed a perfect song recently, and I was rewarded with 5 embossed gold stars. But this got me thinking... I hate gold stars! Unfortunately I kept thinking.

I love Sonic Youth and The Stone Roses, but much of the game "play" feels like a chore. Shouldn't I be able to make my own playlist, instead of slogging through a music selection geared for alternateens? It's an mp3 and a guitar tab, it should be trivial to roll your own. With the Wii selling nearly two million units a month, and many of those sales ending up in the hands of older gamers (all the way up to retirement homes), there needs to some diversity in the musical selection and avatars.

The game also punishes you for improvisation - it's DDR in a guitar neck. This is the third iteration in the Guitar Hero series, and Mario and Katamari have shown us how satisfying games can be when you remove walls - shouldn't a game whose heart is live performance do the same? Instead we're mindlessly mashing buttons. We may as well be cup stacking. There's also a second level of performance in video games when playing games in a social setting. For spectators, there's absolutely no visual interest in following the action, unless you need a headache.

Guitar Hero is exhilarating and addictive because listening to music is fantastic. Considering this, it's remarkable that the music industry has still managed to paint themselves into a corner they probably won't get out of. There's a tremendous opportunity for music technology that breaks in instead of breaking down the more you experience it.

Where's the action, Wii?

Where's the action, Wii?
Originally uploaded by blackbeltjones.

Erika Hall: "Sweet! I think viewing this diagram just made our Wii tax-deductable."

Blog All Open Tabs, Part III

I am clearing out my Marsedit "draft" posts. Incoherence follows. As Chris says:

Away from my keyboard, I "write" exemplary posts to my mind's blog. It occurs to me that a shunt for the mentally unpublished would be nicer software for me to help build.

Hey Six Apart, get on that!

From The New Yorker:

"Superman" doesn't have enough conviction or courage to be solidly square and dumb; it keeps pushing smarmy big emotions at us, but half-heartedly. It has a sour, scared undertone. And you can't help being aware that this is the sort of movie that increases the cynicism and sense of futility among actors. In order to sell the film as star-studded, a great many famous performers were signed up and then stuck in among the plastic bric-a-brac of Krypton; performers who get solo screen credits, with the full blast of trumpets and timpani, turn out to have walk-ons. Susannah York is up there as the infant Superman's mother, but, though Krypton is very advanced, this mother seems to have no part in the decision to send her baby to Earth. York has no part of any kind; she stares at the camera and moves her mouth as if she'd got a bit of food stuck in a back tooth. Of all the actors gathered here—all acting in different styles—she, maybe, by her placid distaste, communicates with us most directly.

Pauline Kael's review of Superman could have been written about nearly any blockbuster between then and now, and indeed she wrote this message into her reviews and reviews over and over. Today Kael looks like a literary giant next to the numbskulls currently reviewing films for the The New Yorker, but here she is simply dead wrong. The original Superman is a masterpiece. (Via kottke.)

Neither your friend nor your boss will be impressed when you quote [Oscar] Wilde. Yet he has yet another one-liner to describe this process: “Morality, like art, means drawing a line someplace.” Asking students to draw the line was my lesson plan.

From a nice post by my Mom about a presentation she gave to other English teachers this month.

Nicolas Nova's essay "Guy Debord and how IT renews the urban experience" is an uneven but worthy read.

Rebecca has been compiling summer reading lists. They're all worthy, but the Interaction Design summer reading list caught my attention.

KRS One has a myspace page.

Bill "Spaceman" Lee, on when he hurt his elbow once and was given drugs by the Red Sox:

They're going, 'Here, take this, take this, take this.' Afterwards, I've got sterazolidin, butazolidin, Clenerol, Indicin. I've got everything in me. I can pitch in the American League, but I couldn't run in the Kentucky Derby. Holy cow, I'm glowing in the dark. Now all of a sudden (current players) are doing it on their own and now it's a crime?!

That's a quote from the Baseball Prospectus' 5000th article, a landmark worthy of note from the best sports site on the Internet. Bill Lee also said:

The other day they asked me about mandatory drug testing. I said I believed in drug testing a long time ago. All through the sixties I tested everything.

This should give you an idea of how dramatically the discussion around drugs in Baseball has shifted.

Finally, ramps pizza at Otto's.

randomwalks/dj

The front page of my my reblog is currently "fantastic". Today you'll find that the army is lifeblogging, how to judge asparagus, a rocketboom interview with Negativland, the craziest (best) use of bluetooth I've ever seen, and Star Wars bookends.

Here are the Star Wars Bookends, because it is really important that you see them:

I also finally dropped that garish layout. It's better now.

Wii Wii Wii

Alice from Wonderland loves the Wii: "You know what, I think it's a fantastic name. It's girly, metro, slinky, inoffensive, funny, cute, KAWAIIII, and it's got people really talking." Over at hello, nintendo we lack that vision. Wii?