malvasia bianca

My notes from the talks that I went to on Friday at GDC:
9:00am: Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap: Design Lessons Learned from Rock Band. Which began with the question: what do you do about the fact that everybody wants to have input into the design of your game? If a designer has tight [...]

Untangle, a flash game about representing graphs as planar with straight edges. (Hmm, are there planar graphs that can’t be drawn with straight edges? Not clear to me.) I linked to another game like this before, but this one’s better.
TypeRacer, if you’re curious how fast you type. (I’m usually in the [...]

I was happy when volume 11 of the DVD of Hikaru No Go included 5 episodes instead of 4 – more stuff, and we’ll make it through the qualifying tournament, right? Well, no: more stuff, but they leave us half way through Hikaru’s match versus Ochi. (Instead of stopping before the match, as [...]

I was in Japantown in SF today, and picked up copies of Tales of Earthsea and Ocean Waves. (Both in Japanese, with English subtitles available.) The former of which I’m wondering about: no booklet, bad printing, claims to be region 1, and now that I’m poking around, I’m not convinced that there is [...]

Following Steve Yegge’s recommendation, we just finished watching Last Exile; it, like Haibane Renmei, is excellent. It took a little longer to get into the story this time, but somehow we slipped from “hmm, pretty interesting, nice mix of computerized and hand-drawn graphics” to “just how many days to we have to wait until [...]

I think I’ve mentioned this before, but learning Japanese continues to increase my sympathy towards kids who are learning to read and misread words in ways which seem inconceivable to me. My brain is pretty much incapable of looking at a word in English and not reading it immediately; the same is far from [...]

Apologies for my recent silence; the cause is a combination of watching movies (well, DVDs, mostly Last Exile) and being pretty busy last weekend. But now I am, for once, caught up with my other odds and ends (i.e. reading blogs) early enough at night to actually be able to write something.
As I mentioned [...]

Forget Halo 3, GTA IV, and all that: it’s starting to look like the real reason I’ll get an Xbox 360 this year is that there’s an RPG coming out for it starring Frederic Chopin. Yes, that Chopin. From IGN’s capsule summary:
Three hours prior to [his death], Chopin saw a dream of [...]

What a glorious day yesterday was: the seventh Hikaru No Go DVD came out, and the ninth book. And now I have to wait another two months for the next DVD, another four months for the next book. Aargh!
We finished the DVD today, after which Miranda asked me if we could play through [...]

I didn’t realize that it had been four years since I added Divine Intervention to my list of movies to check out, based on a review in The Nation. (The link won’t work unless you’re a Nation subscriber, alas. Which I would recommend you all do, actually, despite that annoyance.) That list [...]

I didn’t realize it was possible to beatbox while playing the flute.
Gyoza stadium sounds awesome.
Star Wars in ASCII.
I spent a pleasant hour last weekend watching Ben and Fitz’s poisonous people talk. (And then caught myself exhibiting one of those symptoms on a mailing list last week. Sigh…)
I suppose you’ve already seen Peter Gutmann’s [...]

Miranda’s reading rather more comfortably now than she was in the past; at least partly because of this, she’s noticeably expanded the range of her desired sphere of competence.
Examples:

We’re finally letting her play Animal Crossing, because she’s reading well enough that she won’t constantly be nagging us to help her play. And she really [...]

Some random comments, after four weeks of Netflix membership:

One movie at a time works if you’re sure you don’t want to watch more than one movie a week, and if you don’t mind missing occasional weeks due to shipping vagaries. Neither of those proved to be the case for us, so we’ve switched to [...]

I signed up for Netflix today. It fits in well with my current philosophies; the reason why I’d been holding off was that Liesl and I don’t watch movies very often, and we have a fair number of unwatched movies around. So we wanted to go through the backlog first.
But it’s becoming clear [...]

What are good formats to use for purchasing and storing music and movies? I remember a time in the past where it was possible to pretend that Ogg Vorbis was a reasonable choice for many of your audio needs; that is, unfortunately, no longer the case.
Desirable qualities for a format, in no particular order:

Quality [...]

I can report that Animaniacs holds up quite well. Miranda approves, too.

I wasn’t sure what to expect from Whisper of the Heart. It’s a Studio Ghibli film, which is obviously a big plus. On the other hand, it’s not by Miyazaki or Takahata, and it somehow sort of shares a character or two with The Cat Returns, which isn’t the biggest recommendation. All [...]

The Cat Returns isn’t one of my favorite movies. I’m happy for Miranda to watch it, and I won’t normally leave the room just because she has it on, but Studio Ghibli has produced much better stuff.
The theme song, however, I totally love. (Miranda and Liesl agree with this.) Very catchy in [...]

Apparently there was only one AIDS death in Santa Clara county in 2004. A ways to go still, but that’s real progress.
We just finished watching the version of Angels in America that HBO did a couple of years ago; fabulous.

Anybody have any good Japanese pop recommendations? I suspect that there’s music to be found there that I would enjoy, but I don’t have any good routes in. So far, I’m dipping my toes in based on video games and movies, which is fine, as far as it goes. From the former, [...]