Some evidence for anybody curious how well being good at Rock Band drums transfers to real drums.
The neuroscience of illusion; I’ll embed one of the videos so you can see the kind of thing they’re discussing.
(Via Kelley Eskridge.)
A pleasant network logic puzzle game. (Via User Friendly, which makes it essentially impossible to cite them [...]
Malcolm Gladwell on spaghetti sauce: the power of choices, of market segmentation.
Two on folded paper: pictures by Simon Schubert (via @KathySierra) and a TED talk by Robert Lang on the origami that modern math and computers allow us to produce.
An abandoned island city. (Via @japanesepod101.) Or, if you want a whole blog about [...]
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 [...]
More links (and older links) than normal this time: Reader has developed a nasty habit of not showing me all the items with a given tag, so I didn’t realize that I hadn’t posted some of these already.
My favorite new blog: Dear Planetary Astronomer Mike. Learn about the history of the earth, or Pluto’s [...]
My iPod Nano has served me well over the last few years (though I could live without its habit of freezing on me after syncing), but it seems to be reaching the end of its life span. The menu button had been slightly iffy for a while, but not enough to be a real [...]
I’d been playing Rock Band with Miranda (my daughter) since we got it, but Liesl (my wife) had been resisting. She was clearly somewhat interested in the game—she would sometimes get caught singing along in the background—but somehow we never managed to pull her in.
But I kept asking; I tried not to be annoying [...]
I dipped into Rock Band 2 a bit more today. Miranda wasn’t in the mood, so I went through a few solo challenges; it turns out that the various marathon challenges provide a tour through all the songs on the disk, so my previous concerns are at least somewhat unfounded.
I wasn’t planning to be [...]
I’ve now finished the Rock Band vocals solo tour on Hard. To my family’s consternation / bemusement, I sung most of the songs in the second half in falsetto: it seems to pick up my pitch more reliably that way? (Dan Bruno says that I’m not the only one who does that.)
It didn’t [...]
I wouldn’t have thought that anything could get me more excited today than learning that Harmonix had gotten the rights to make a Beatles game, but then I learned that Google now has the right to sell copies of out-of-print but in-copyright books.
I am extraordinarily surprised, amazed, pleased by this. Books have been very [...]
When we last left our humble narrator, I was making my way through the Rock Band drums. I made it all the way through on Medium, and a fair distance on Hard. But all the skills aren’t there yet: in particular, my foot has a harder time sight-reading than my hands (should have [...]
As previously threatened, I tried out the drums in Rock Band today. And they’re fun! But mysterious.
It turns out that skill in playing plastic instruments does transfer, at least to some extent: I started on Medium, and I was passing the songs fine. For the first few songs, my leg hurt like [...]
When I last discussed Rock Band, I’d remembered the existence of the solo buttons, and thought I should give the hardest songs a try that way. So, the next weekend, I put down my GH3 guitar, picked up my Rock Band guitar, and gave Flirtin’ with Disaster a try.
It took a while to get [...]
Rock Band is the first game I’ve played in ages where I’m actively trying to improve my skills at the game, replaying challenges at harder difficulty levels instead of going through it once, enjoying it but moving on to the next game on my shelf.
I’m still trying to figure out why this is. It’s [...]
Hmm, been a while since I’ve done one of these; sorry about the length…
Visualizing the Python commit history.
Leadership, responsibility, and sausage.
Solving sudoku games via package management.
Japan, computers, appliances. (Via Niels ‘t Hooft.)
Breakpoints as a checklist.
Programmers, insecurity, source control.
I linked to a movie of strandbeests (amazing wind-powered sculptures that walk along beaches) before; the creator [...]
Miranda and I formed a band today on Rock Band. We are going by the name “The Brosstones”; perhaps not the best, but I’d neglected to think about possible band names in advance. (Alas, the other Bross has yet to join us; she did spend a fair amount of time this weekend playing [...]
Rock Band arrived today. Despite her lobbying for Mario Kart Wii as our next game purchase, Miranda was plenty excited to see it show up; she helped me carry it in from the car (which was actually pretty useful, the Amazon packaging makes it just bulky enough to be very awkward to carry by [...]
I was very sad to learn that Erik Ray died on May 14, after being hit by a car while riding his bicycle. He was more of a friend-of-a-friend than a direct friend, but I certainly enjoyed the time I spent with him when we were both living in the Boston area.
For those of [...]
A bit video-heavy today.
The power of continuous improvement.
A cool-looking physics “game”:
(Via BitWorking.)
Zefrank on complicated stuff:
Falco PA!
(Via Game|Life, which also links to a Guitar Hero version.)
An fun variant on presenting minigames.
Time to add The Muppet Show to my Netflix queue.
(Via Cosmic Variance.)
Brian Dettmer book autopsies. (Via Signal vs. Noise.)
Fun for your jailbroken iPhone:
(Via Pink Tentacle.)
I recently was charmed (?) to discover that Jonathan Coulton likes big butts and he cannot lie. For those of you who want instant gratification, here’s a YouTube version, but the studio version linked to above has somewhat better audio.
On that vein, I don’t believe I ever linked to Alanis Morissette discussing her humps [...]
I still haven’t figured out Cursor*10, but it has some neat ideas. (Via GayGamer.)
An ActiveRecord tutorial; a nice little introduction to the concepts, I liked the way they get their hands dirty with showing you the SQL.
Yeah, that’s kind of the way I feel about Obama…
For no particular reason, a random bit of Sesame [...]
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