February 2012
23 posts
The Star Wars Saga: Suggested Viewing Order →
If you’re someone who doesn’t give the Star Wars films a second thought, you have no idea how much thought us nerds put into the idea of what order we should make our kids watch them. This guy has perfected it.
I’d encourage you to read his whole post, but if you’re still all “TL;DR”? IV, V, II, III, VI. No Episode I at all.
“Visitors using personal computers spent an average of about three minutes a...”
– Whoa. The Mounting Minuses at Google - WSJ.com
Infovore » A Year of Links →
Tom Armitage:
I thought it would be interesting to produce a kind of personal encylopedia: each volume cataloguing the links for a whole year. Given I first used Delicious in 2004, that makes for eight books to date.
Beautifully done.
The 8 Most Opulent Gifts in the Oscar Swag Bags →
Each gift bag was worth about $60,000. And these got handed out to all the nominees. Reminds me of that line from Withnail & I - Free to those that can afford it. Very expensive to those that can’t.
Dear Esther
With no characters to interact with, no enemies to fight, no puzzles to solve, no way to manipulate the environment around you, Dear Esther is guaranteed to spark a thousand hand-wringing debates about what a game actually is. Can a game have none of the elements listed above and still call itself a game? Or is it enough to provide an experience to the player? Come to think of it, if...
Feltron Biennial Report →
Nicholas Felton has released the latest version of his “annual reports” - a collection of all the data that makes up his life. As someone who has trouble keeping track of the movies he’s watched, I’m very jealous of his ability to consistently keep track of this stuff.
After the internet design community started spooging over these things a few years ago, he set up...
The myth of the eight-hour sleep →
Scientists are arguing that the 8-hour sleep is unnatural, and that humans naturally fall into a more segmented sleep cycle. In other words, I should be treating every day like I treat Sunday, with a pre-sleep nap.
“The problem with Gamification is that it tries to solve a problem that...”
– Greg Costikyan nails it
WatchDouble Fine are using Kickstarter to fund their new adventure game. 140% funded in 24 hours.
Seriously, this is monumental.
Fountain - A Markup Language for Screenwriting →
John August:
Back when we announced FDX Reader, I got a lot of emails asking, ‘When are you going to make a screenwriting app?” Answer: Today. My hope is that we just made a thousand. Fountain turns every text editor into a screenwriting app.
This means flexibility. This means genuine collaboration - people in geographically different locations can edit the same Google Doc at the same...
El Wingador →
Errol Morris Op-Doc on Bill ‘El Wingador’ Simmons. I love that he has a cross-stitch by his front door saying “NOTHING EXCEEDS LIKE EXCESS”.
Crowdsourcing
One of the unfortunate effects of living in another country for almost five years is that you have to almost completely rebuild your knowledge of your home city. Specifically, I find that I need to find out where the best bars and restaurants are (because, honestly, there’s only so much Crackbird a man can handle).
In theory, this is where things like Yelp and Menupages are supposed to...
Russian scientists searching for underground... →
Sorry for linking to the Daily Mail, but HOLY FUCK.
Connecting nvALT and Address Book →
I use nvAlt (synced with SimpleNote) all over the place, from storing little code snippets to keeping track of ideas and lists over time. Brett Terpstra has come up with a great idea for linking notes with individual people in your address book. Love this.
The Dublin cinema manager who became the only... →
This post shows why Come Here To me is, by a huge margin, my favourite Irish blog.