malvasia bianca

A cross-game comparison of play incentives. (Really via @smgrimes, though Twitter wants me to credit @john_carter.) Journalistic objectivity. Time for me to reread Manufacturing Consent? Massively collaborative mathematics. Game design as government. We The Giants. Kant’s Critique of Aesthetic Judgment and comics. (Via 37 Signals.) Going West. (Via Dubious Quality.) Omohide is going through all […]

I just got called for survey purposes (about the economy, health care, and the like); I thought that it was a bit odd when they asked me if I was a blogger (not just a journalist), but hey, maybe that’s the new best standard? And they seemed happy enough when I said that I generally […]

How to lose an argument online. I’d been thinking for a while that ‘hardcore’ was only useful as a term in a polemic I had no interest in making. Three false constraints on game design challenges. I’m reluctantly coming to the conclusion that I won’t be able to avoid playing Dragon Age. (But I’ll hold […]

Gerald Weinberg is, sadly, in poor health. Never tried doing Rock Band vocals this way… (Takes 15 seconds or so to actually start.) (Via @dan_schmidt.) R.I.P., Brother Blue. (Via @scottros.) The difference between motion and action. (Via @harlan_knight.) An unforeseen design problem. (Via @shawnr.) Nice perspective on slow programming languages. Glad to see non-Miyazaki Ghibli […]

I read a fair amount of blogs, and I listen to a fair amount of podcasts. In fact, one of the reasons why I’m walking to work now instead of driving is so that my commute will remain reasonably long, and hence I’ll continue to have enough time to listen to podcasts! And I spend […]

A selection from the Pomodoro Technique book that has, for some reason, stuck with me recently: According to the work of Bergson and Minkowski, two profoundly interrelated aspects seem to coexist with reference to time: Becoming. An abstract, dimensional aspect of time, which gives rise to the habit of measuring time (seconds, minutes, hours); the […]

So far, the talk I attended at Agile 2009 that has had the most impact on me was Renzo Borgatti’s talk on the pomodoro technique: I’d heard a bit about the technique before, enough to know that it tells you to break your work up into 25 minute chunks and to try to really focus […]

Michael Feathers on testable Java. Good advice, that is of course relevant far beyond Java. Quite the Venn diagram. (Via @kateri_t.) James Paul Gee on games and teaching. (Via @HackerChick.) Lots to think about here; I hope the VGHVI folks can help me figure it out. A remarkable meandering about games, genres, Japan, and countless […]

I’ve been working at Playdom for about a month now, and I’ve thoroughly enjoyed it so far. If any of my readers think it might be an interesting place to work as well, I wanted to point out that we’re hiring. (In a fairly big way, as the list of positions suggests.) Feel free to […]

I’m kind of thinking I’m not doing nearly enough to minimize waste. (Via @littleidea.) Playing a bigger game. (Via @DianaOfPortland.) Luck as a skill. (Via @superkiy.) A good list of tech blogs. This round’s Pink Tentacle link is an anatomy of folk monsters. Magnetic Ink: (Via Dubious Quality.) And on (rather than just from) Dubious […]

Sorry for the delay between posts; Miranda asked recently if she could watch Haibane Renmei (which I highly recommend), so we’ve spent many of our recent evenings going through that. And I don’t have a real post now, either, but I’ll at least give a link round-up. (Besides, the Zork walkthrough is much more awesome […]

Really, everybody should have their own domain these days. Rands on Your People. Cave photos. (Via 25 Times a Second.) A handy list of Rails security tips, and a lesson on timing attacks. Sections. Tetris meets Magic Eye. (Via Offworld.) Being a blogger. A different look at the Beatles. (Via @dan_schmidt.) Two on programming hardware, […]

I want to talk about a couple of talks I attended at Agile 2009. Both relate to experts, expertise, and how one develops the latter to become the former. The first was given by Jon Dahl, on “Aristotle and the Art of Software Development”. You can see video and slides of an earlier delivery of […]

I’ve been using a program I wrote to help me memorize stuff (mostly Japanese vocabulary) for more than a year now. And for almost all of that time, I haven’t modified the program at all: I had plans right from the beginning to add multiuser support (if for no other reason than to make it […]

I mentioned Roger’s Operation KTHMA last time, but it’s actually started now and sounds awesome enough that I’ll mention it again: day 1, day 2, day 3. Our whole household was playing Bunni Game: How We First Met last week. (You should be able to see my world at this link.) Victorian Homes of the […]

One of the GDC sessions I attended this year was a charming panel discussion including, among other people, Steve Meretzky of Infocom fame. Which got me curious what he was up to these days—I don’t generally expect people from that era to still be active in the game industry—and was pleasantly surprised to find out […]

Neither my wife or I has ever had a mobile phone. This marks both of us as somewhat eccentric, and it’s not a dogmatic choice for either of us; the truth is simply that neither of us uses a phone much, so why bother paying extra to carry one around? For various reasons, though (probably […]

Tanuki testicle art. One day in kanban land. Pixie Driven Development. A plain-text version of the Declaration of Independence. (Via Kelley Eskridge.) Rock Band as a music theory teacher. Maira Kalman on Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin. (Via @bos31337 and The Edge of the American West.) The red handprints are a particularly nice touch. Another […]

As far as I can tell, the last time I shaved was twenty years ago yesterday. If you’re curious what two decades of beard looks like, here’s a recentish picture of me: That’s actually from three and a half years ago (I don’t take pictures very often, and appear in them less), but while I […]

The last chapter of Galison’s Image & Logic is about the relationship between (breaks in) different strands of practice within physics. If you treat the notion of paradigms sufficiently seriously, you’re led to think that theoretical breaks and experimental breaks come hand in hand: the two sides of a paradigm shift are incommensurable, so the […]