malvasia bianca

Drowning Doesn’t Look Like Drowning. Scary; I’m very glad Miranda is now a competent swimmer. Epic Wimbledon reporting; start at around 4:05pm or so. (Via @dan_schmidt.) Memory hierarchies and algorithm analysis. (Via @mfeathers.) Interesting point of view on hyperlinks and footnotes. (Via @scottros.) For all of you Plato fans out there: (Via here and now.) […]

David Wiley’s talk at GLS got me feeling a little guilty about the lack of copyright license on this blog. Not, to be sure, about the terms that the blog was therefore licensed under but about the fact that the terms were implicit in the first place. Copyright law is horribly flawed these days, with […]

I had a great time at GDC this year, with one exception: halfway through the conference, my back started really hurting. My laptop isn’t that heavy, but it’s heavy enough, and something about the way it was sitting in my backpack put more strain on my muscles than they wanted. So I decided that, the […]

The reason why I got an iPad as early as I did was so that I could travel to GLS without a laptop. I’ll blog about how that went later, but I want to talk about one particular aspect of iPad life separately, namely using it as an RSS reader. I first tried to use […]

One of the rules I try to follow on this blog and on Twitter is to not talk about prerelease information for video games. (And, indeed, I don’t even follow prerelease information for video games too closely—why would I want to spend my time thinking about games that don’t yet exist in preference to games […]

9:00am: Rethinking Education in the Age of Technology, by Allan Collins. He began by talking about incompatibilities between schooling and technology: uniform learning vs. customization, teacher control vs. learner control, teacher as expert vs. diverse sources, standardized assessment vs. specialization, knowledge in head vs. reliance on resources, coverage vs. knowledge explosion, learning by absorption vs. […]

One bit that I forgot to mention in my writeup yesterday: one of the posters was talking about using a pressure sensor on the floor to detect how engaged players were in a game. Seems like a potentially interesting idea, though the analysis was flawed: they changed too many variables at once to be able […]

I’m at the Games, Learning, and Society conference for the rest of the week; here are my notes on today’s events. I started the day by finally getting to meet Roger Travis in person! I’ve been hearing his disembodied voice weekly for ages now at the VGHVI gaming sessions that I feel like I know […]

Some quotes from the hundredth anniversary edition of The Progressive: The income tax is the fairest and most equitable of the taxes. It is the one tax which approaches us in the hour of prosperity and departs in the hour of adversity. Certainly it will be conceded by all that the great expense of government […]

For its most recent game, the Vintage Game Club returned to its Tim Schafer roots with Psychonauts. Which I was curiously ambivalent about: many people speak highly about it, but I hit 3D platformer fatigue fairly suddenly several years ago, and only one game has really managed to break through that. Still, it’s a genre […]

As I mentioned earlier, I’ve been having a lot of fun at work playing around with JavaScript and CSS. But there is one area where I’ve been failing miserably: for the first time in years, I’m writing very few tests while programming. I’m working on a legacy code base, with all that entails, but that […]

Watch this illusion: Why can’t we make another Shadow of the Colossus? Super Mario World camera behavior. (Via @danbruno.) An Apple //e really does make a good iPad stand. Jupiter loses a stripe. (Via @stephentotilo.) Ruby Ramen? (Make sure to look at the different product pictures.) (Via @yukihiro_matz.) I’m not exactly happy to learn that […]

My WordPress dashboard tells me that this is my thousandth blog post. Which I find hard to believe; going through the archives, however, it really is true. I’ve been blogging for 2084 days, so I’m averaging almost a post every other day; I’m not managing that rate any more, but weeks when I do three […]