Angry Robot

New king of Donkey Kong crowned

A plastic surgeon who only started playing last september. Don’t let anyone ever tell you you can’t be king of Donkey Kong!

Four Seconds

A frame-by-frame analysis of Crosby’s gold medal winning goal

Robot Facelift

The logo

The robot fist logo was an idea by Toku (remember him?). It may have been from 2008. He didn’t have a chance to actually execute it and for the past year I’ve been trying to get a designer friend to do it, but as it often goes with busy talented people and freebie jobs, it wasn’t happening. Finally I tried myself, for about the third time. I think it worked out pretty well despite my sub-craptacular vector design skillset.

I just love the idea of it. Despite loving both robots in general and the previous robot logo in the particular (designed by my friend Claire), I had come to dislike the obviousness of the image. The new logo is more indirect, visually striking (ha), and brings a number of new associations. The raised fist is of course commonly used by left-wing groups, and when combined with robots brings up SkyNet, the singularity, the idea of robot empowerment. In my mind, this is better and more on-topic than the association of kitschy 50s ray gun robots – not that there’s anything wrong with that.

As for the execution, I experimented with many things. I ultimately found that the closer I stayed to the traditional clenched fist logo, the better. What do you think, can you make it out okay?

The design

I wasn’t intending to go all-white like this. I had a design mostly finished that used propaganda imagery and textures and reds and browns, quite inspired by this poster:

stopthedraft

Which I goddamn love. So I’m not sure why I decided to try stripping pretty much every aesthetic design element away other than the logo. I think it’s from using a lot of minimal interfaces lately, like Instapaper, Taskpaper and of course the Kindle. And of course I consider myself a producer of stuff, not a designer of things that display stuff, so I like it when designs step back and let you get right to said stuff.

The result is what you see. I’m not sure I’ll keep it like this, but I like it right now.

While I’m on the site news tip, there are still a few problems – biggest for me is that the links (brief posts) aren’t displaying correctly in the RSS feed. I’m afraid I’m a little undermatched for that battle, but I’m still trying. The workaround is to subscribe to the articles feed and the pinboard feed separately – pinboard is what I use for the links. You’ll miss the odd picture and embedded video, but hey, life goes on.

If you see anything wonky will you let me know?

A Glimpse at BioWare's Philosophy on RPGs

“the average 300 page novel clocks in at approximately 75,000 words. By comparison, the original Mass Effect contains approximately 300,000 words, Mass Effect 2 adds to that total with 450,000 words, and Dragon Age dwarfs them both with some 1,000,000 words.”

Safe and Affordable Jetpack: Just $90,000

more proof that we’re in the future.

Moratorium on Toronto bike lanes? Speak truth to power!

Smitherman wants a “time out” from the Bike Plan, which was approved in 2001 and is already years behind schedule.

Variety Lets Two of Its Top Critics Go

including Todd McCarthy. Brutal.

The never-ending lament for Queen West

Queen street is never as good as it used to be. Surely the last half-decade has been the steepest decline yet

Sleep Is Death (Geisterfahrer)

new 2-player only conversational adventure game from the designer of Passage

Steve Jobs Says “No,” iPad Won't Tether To iPhone

that sucks.

Inkmesh

legal ebook search engine

'Lost': Go Ask 'Alice'

EW’s Doc Jensen considers the Lewis Carroll references in Lost 606, “Lighthouse”. Long and rambly but a fascinating example of the richness of allusion that’s common in Lost.

YouTube Launches Auto-Captions For All Videos

Wow. So if I want to get my footage transcribed I simply upload to YouTube? I’ll be testing the efficacy of this shortly.

iPaddery

That said, “just a big iPod Touch” is obviously not true. They are building up new things on top of the iPhone OS. As Andy Ihnatko points out, there is a filesystem after a fashion, and many new interface tricks. To say nothing of the apps that aren’t feasible on a little phone screen but could kill on a 10 incher – think of the live music apps, like mixers, that multitouch and big screens would make awesome.

Finally, the latest trend in iPad commentary is basically, “this gadget isn’t for you, nerd, it’s for your grandma.” While it may be true that the silverhaired set may want it as their only computer, are you nerds really so sure you won’t start drooling when you see Instapaper on the iPad? Tweetie? Aperture? An RSS reader? Don’t we all love our iPhones despite their popularity amongst people who don’t know what the hell an RSS reader is? This thing (and to be perfectly honest my still-awesome $300 netbook) are making me rethink my computer purchases. I might get an iMac next, despite being a strictly laptop kinda guy for the past ten years. I could never afford to have a full desktop and a portable as well, but now I can because the portables are $300-$500, not $2500.

A lot of that is that it will do most of the things you want a second computer for quite well. But a lot of it is the apps. I’ve always loved the Mac’s indie developer community and the great work they produce. Seeing them do their thing on the iPhone has been a great thrill. And despite all the bullshit that Apple dumps on them with the approval process, I’m really excited to see what they do with this whole new device.

Sony's Mythical PSPad a Combination of the iPad and PlayStation

rumors of upcoming Sony portable products – light on details. Could be both the PSP phone and/or some kinda pad thing. It’s all just as confusing as Sony is these days

A collection of favorite Mac OS X Hints tips

defective yeti — REWARD

heh.

Durian fruit | Taste Test

Read the office reactions: “The smell was like a mix of rotting garbage and a rapid gas leak.”

Asus officially unveils 9-inch e-reader, the DR-900

looks pretty nice

Penny Arcade vs. Jordan Jesse Go

How about some nerd gossip? Penny Arcade are in the midst of a book tour, and they appeared on Jordan Jesse Go, the lesser known podcast of the folks behind The Sound of Young America. Things do not go well, and Tycho posts this scather. I love love love Penny Arcade, and I’ve never gotten into any of the Jesse Thorn stuff; however, as a fan of You Look Nice Today, I know those guys are pals with Mr. Thorn and he’s unlikely to be as horrible as PA makes it out. You can read his own description here, and read the follow-up post from a commenter who mentions PA’s well-known anxiety problems. Who knows though. They haven’t posted the podcast evidence yet.

UPDATE, April 8 Gabe mentions they have posted the podcast here, but the link is nothing (right now?). However, the internets have come to the rescue. I haven’t brought myself to listen to it yet…

The Evolutionary Reason for Depression

I’m not sure I buy it.

Olympic hockey final draws big audience north and south of border – thestar.com

Olympic hockey final draws 80% of Canadians. Dudes, that was our first national meeting.

iPhone Feed Readers

Here’s an article by Shawn Blanc about iPhone feed readers. I find him pretty forgiving. I’ve tried NetNewsWire, Byline, and Fever, and am now using GReader’s mobile interface because none of the others did it for me. All of them are slow, Byline has interface problems, NNW is (was?) buggy, Fever… Just not a good iPhone solution is how I’d put it. I quite like GReader mobile. It’s fast, and as you’re probably going to be bouncing things to the browser I don’t mind the web-app-ness as much as I often do. Also, it’s fast.

I would like to try Reeder, though. Maybe when I haven’t blown my iPhone app budget on plants, zombies and waaaay too many to-do apps.

750 Words

Daily writing webapp