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…

I signed up for “social bookmarking for introverts” site pinboard back when it cost only $3- it’s now $6, and it goes up by a tenth of a penny with every user signup – make of that what you will, math fans!

I suppose at the time I did not see much of a difference compared to delicious, the service that invented the genre, so I put the account aside. I revisited it recently, and I can certainly see its advantages. Amongst others:

• you can post via email, making it a lot easier to use on mobile browsers
• pinboard can slurp down links you post to Twitter, solving a minor epistemological problem of mine
• it can autopost things you favourite on Twitter
• it can distinguish betweeen links you have and haven’t read yet (i.e. has a “toread” category)
• you can sync it with Instapaper – it adds instapaper entries to your “toread” list
• it has a truly breathtaking paid archiving feature that will make a private copy of every single page you add. This is to guard against the inevitable dead links, but it’s like your own private wayback machine. Pretty damn cool.

That’s a pretty impressive array of features, and it’s under active development. I’m not sure if the same can really be said of delicious.

Saw this for the first time on YouTube today:

My copywriting mind went immediately to how police state/patronizing this sounds, and how it could be rewritten to sound less so. “This audio track violates copyright laws, so it has been disabled” seems slightly better, but there’s no way around it seeming like a dick move by YouTube. Because it is. A better mechanism might be to disable copyright-breaking works* only once they breach a certain viewership, say 100,000 views. This video has only 450 views – why bother messing with that?

*At that point, it seems like everyone is better served if an ad-revenue sharing deal is worked out, and the work kept intact.

I find it endlessly fascinating to think about how one medium is going to influence another. Right now, there are so many media spilling into the same pot that it’s hard to imagine how the stew will taste. But in this AV Club year-in-movies retrospective, Tasha Robinson makes an apt observation:

To me, the trend there seems to be less about people filtering the world through their pop-culture experiences—apart from the occasional extreme iconoclast, who in this industry doesn’t?—and more about people filtering the world through camera lenses, seeing every experience as something to be caught on video and shared with a hungry voyeuristic world. I recently watched Martin Scorsese’s 2008 Rolling Stones concert doc Shine A Light, and I laughed at the way Scorsese’s cameras capture people in the process of capturing Mick Jagger’s cavorting on their phones. He’s making his movie—a big, shiny, energetic, polished production—and they’re making their low-fi versions in the middle of it. Or looked at another way, they’re in the front row at a Stones concert… and they’re watching the experience on tiny little screens held up in front of their faces, because capturing it for later is more important than living it.

That attitude has its benefits—for one thing, it gave us Trouble The Water, which rides entirely on the amazing from-the-ground footage two New Orleans residents shot to document their own lives before, during, and after Katrina. I suspect we’re going to see a lot more of that in 2009, as people continue to turn their cameras on themselves and their neighborhoods. Given that so many of our favorite 2008 movies were little lo-fi films about ordinary people rather than the pricey escapist fare, I’m suspecting this might ultimately be a good thing, and I hope it continues.

One of many interesting ideas here is that with so many cameras out there capturing footage, there’s a potential for a new kind of cinema that is both theatrical and collectivist. Imagine a room full of people at an event; you stage something going on in the room, and count on the people there to record it for you. You then sort through the footage from the event and assemble it. Or, you could post all the collective footage for anyone to assemble their own edit. It’s the sort of production that would have been completely inconceivable 15 – 20 years ago.

It’s also the sort of production perpetrated by none other than The Beastie Boys, with their awesomely titled Awesome: I Fuckin’ Shot That in 2006, the year Google bought YouTube, and conceived well before YouTube opened for business.

I don’t know the moral of this story – it’s ongoing, as they say. Perhaps it’s that the Beasties are awesome.

Missed this one – The NYT Magazine’s Screens Issue, from last week, with lots of amazing articles about the convergence of film, TV and computers, and also a David Lynch interview.

This is pretty rad. It’s a service that manages your band’s site, taking care of versioning, streaming, paid and free downloads etc. Interview with the founder on waxy.org, and also this screencast:

Bandcamp Screencast from Ethan Diamond on Vimeo.

Oh, shit. This beta NFB site is too much. 400+ films so far, more being added, free to stream.

Would still like the ability to download, but [this is good]. Hit options and choose “extreme” (no “gnarly” option?) to get maximum resolution. (via 3rdparty)

Here’s Cosmic Zoom, one of my faves:

More...

Here’s an interesting article speculating on the economics of Dr. Horrible, and Joss Whedon himself weighed in to say it is “sensible.” Long and short of it is that the show would need to sell about 100,000 copies on iTunes to see a modest profit, and more like a million to compete with Hollywood paychecks for the creators involved (assuming a budget of $250,000). This is before any DVD revenue is taken into account.

I think we can assume Dr. Horrible will make money for its makers, but is there anything more we can take away from it? Joss Whedon is, after all, a special case within a special case – he has a pro budget and talent pool, and beyond that a rabid extant fan base. But nothing about the success of this show means much for amateur creators, those who couldn’t get Neil Patrick Harris to work for scale, and couldn’t afford to pay him scale anyway. There still doesn’t seem to be a system that can help such talent succeed, other than “get a million viewers on YouTube.” That’s not a system, that’s the problem already solved. A million viewers, whether on the web or on TV, spells success. It’s how to get there that counts. (I know this isn’t Joss’ fault, it’s just you get to thinkin’.)

That’s enough of that particular subject. Soon: Dark Knight!

There’s a bit of press for Whedon’s latest venture. Here’s an article in Variety, tying Dr. Horrible in with other creator-originated web pushes. It mentions that the budget was “low six figures” and financed by Joss’ own cash. There’s also an interview in Wired, but it’s mostly fluff. The show is no longer free, but you can get it in iTunes, where I noticed it sitting atop the list of “top TV shows,” which I think means it may well make its money back. It will see eventual DVD release, but that deal is still being worked out. Me, I just hope they keep making more. There are a lot of villains on the Evil Council of Evil that I’d like to see more of, and will we see Captain Hammer’s Hamjet?

I linked to it earlier in the week but man, thanks to doombot for reminding me to actually watch Dr. Horrible. It’s Joss Whedon, and it’s beyond awesome. Enjoy it soon as it vanishes on sunday.

Perhaps the association superhero=jock, supervillain=nerd was always obvious to everyone, but it only breaks through my thick skull with the help of Captain Hammer’s… er, hammer. Whedon really loads up every superhero cliche with meaning. The freeze ray is what will let the awkward Horrible pause time to think up something witty to say to his crush, for example. And hey, you get lots of jokes, songs and Nathan Filion.

Whedon is such a great writer that even this master plan is a joy to read.

The Star Wars Fan Film contest is in full swing and I would like to direct your attention towards this excellent submission:

More...

Yeah, so this game is going to be fun. I’m a huge fan of web integration, and the export to YouTube thing is slick… slick like every game should have this.

Here’s my lil’ monster, which is like the creature equivalent of when Homer Simpson designed a car. Too many legs, wings, eyes etc. He’s my little special little guy though.

via waxy, somewhat indirectly, the webcomic Pictures for Sad Children, which starts here. The author describes it as, “there is a place between ‘funny’ and ‘sad’. A hidden world. This is where I live.” (He’s also got this livejournal page.)

I’m not the most knowledgeable dude when it comes to webcomics, so perhaps all of y’all have already been reading this. But hell, it’s good.

Wow, note-taking has rocketed ahead a few decades while I was jotting down notes by actually typing like a sucka. I use an assorted hodegpodge of notetaking and organizational tools, because I’ve yet to find one that does everything, but mostly I use Backpack since it makes it easy to organize things by project. (However, I don’t necessarily recommend it since the $5/month plan I currently enjoy is no longer offered.)

Now I just became aware of a couple interesting, high tech note-taking tools. One is evernote. The big twist here is OCR, which I guess has advanced to ‘good enough’ status over the last few years. So with evernote, you can simply hold up a piece of paper to your computer’s iSight, or take a picture with your phone, and the image will be eaten by evernote and scanned for text. Then it will be searchable. I’ve tried it and it did okay with a page from Now Magazine, but I have a feeling it might choke on my handwriting, which is a cross between sanskrit and semaphore.

It has all the usual features, including tagging and emailing notes to yourself. It makes it easy to grab things off web pages. It also has a robust desktop version (both for PC and Mac) that syncs effortlessly with the cloud, something I wish backpack did without recourse to third party apps. Anyway if you want to give ‘er a shot, I have some invite codes I can send out.

The other, potentially more mind-blowing service is Jott. It’s all about voice recognition. So you sign up, register your phone number, and make note of the number you need to call (yes, it works in Canada). When you call and record a message, it converts it into text and emails it to you.

The beauty of the thing is that it will play nice with other services. You could set it up with your secret Evernote email address and turn your random blatherings into a searchable archive. It will deal with wordpress, blogger &c, but sadly not textpattern or I’d totally be dialing in some posts.

Or – SPECIAL AWESOME ALERT, this works beautifully – you can set it up with your Google Calendar account, tell yourself “2pm tomorrow poutine-eating marathon”, and if you’ve got your SMS notifications all set up, google will text your hungry ass tomorrow and remind you. It’s like having a freaking secretary. Now I just need to get it to respond to the voice cue “Diane” and I’ll finally be living my fantasy of being Agent Cooper in Twin Peaks.

Or, The end of the Game Neverending.

By the morning of the second day it seemed like the world would last forever. It had ended before, of course, but now that it had started over we wanted it to stay.

What do you when the world starts over? You explore. You’ve got a map – it shows a bunch of connected hubs, most labeled only with question marks. You move around so that their names are revealed: San Poshio, Soso, Bentown. You poke around in each area, their identities rich despite the paucity of information: a quick description, a little icon. Often, jokes. Sometimes you find items within and collect them, wondering what they do.

An image of the interface circa 2003, from the GNE Museum (click for big):

You remember that you can make things. As you do so, your ‘make’ skill improves and you can make even more things. You can see that all things require ingredients before they can be made, and you click on the ingredient to discover where it might be sold or where it grows.

I have blue paper already, magically. Paper is the currency of this world, and blue paper is very valuable. It tells me it grows underwater. Well, I better find ‘underwater’ then and get my hands on some more. Time to move on.

As you move your energy depletes – it can be replenished by consuming food and drink.

You consumed 5 burgers.

You also have mood and karma. You could pick up some snapdragons, say, and chose ‘contemplate’ from the item menu. This would raise your mood. And items can raise your karma too:

You dropped 1 funk.
energy +10 The funk gives you life! (everyone present)
mood +10 Someone dropped the funk and it disappeared in a puff of smoke. The funk makes you happy! (everyone present)
karma +5 Everybody loves the funk-dropper!

Yes, there are others present. Often you see them just passing through as fast as they can click to the next area. But other times you see them gathering, giving each other items. You can hear everything everyone says in your chat window, and people tend to be helpful. After all, they are happy the world exists.

The world is designed to make people happy. It’s designed to cultivate play. In the words of Stewart Butterfield:

The secret is, even though it’s called Game Neverending, it’s not really a game at all. It’s a social space designed to facilitate and enable play. The game-elements are there to provide both the constraints and the building blocks of interaction – since the thing you’ll notice about the kind of play I’m talking about above is that it is the kind of thing that goes on between people. Ludicorp was started because we imagine all kinds of social computing applications that we’d love to use and participate in, and no one else seems to be building them.

Well, they went on and built Flickr, which indeed embodies the principles Stewart’s talking about. Flickr took off, and the Game Neverending was shelved, back in aught-four, living on only as the file extension for some of Flickr’s pages: .gne. But the principles of social play infuse Flickr, and have made their way into almost every “Web 2.0” site ever since.

I played it back then, and always wished they’d bring it back. Equal parts text adventure, MMO and web surfing session, with a sense of humour right out of a Douglas Adams novel, there’s been little else like it since. And the previous and current incarnation of GNE was nothing compared to some of the developers’ goals for it: player item creation, map expansion, even governments. If only it would come back and flower into what it could be.

But nothing lasts forever.

On my travels I passed many a vacant house – remains of the last time the world existed, their occupants long moved on. People in the chat are saying that you can still buy them and that they’re a good place to dump your items. I stumble upon a real estate agency and check the listings – there are a few I could afford. After I collect a lot more blue paper.

I’m way remote on the map now. Through woods to ‘fire fields’. I find the underwater area and locate the stash of blue paper, one of many that appears as ‘God’ makes one of his periodic, automated announcements.

GOD: I have hidden another sheet of blue paper in a hub. Can you find it?

I’m not sure if I got my house on the first night, or the second day, but get it I did, eventually. By that time I had explored the entire map, made some contacts, made a whole lot of stuff. With the emphasis on making things, and little benefit in actually holding onto it, you wind up leaving little deposits of stuff everywhere for people to stumble upon. 50 donuts, say. Who could turn that down?

Getting the house was satisfying – even if it was only really a little icon and the words ‘living room’, ‘office’ and ‘entertainment room’. It was an idea in a game made of ideas – but it was mine.

And yet word came in the quickly-scrolling chat log that the world would end.

Some were upset, offering to pool money and buy the server to keep the world going. Others saw the beauty in the fleeting experience. Majick was just trying to get enough money to buy his house he had owned the last time around.

GOD: When you walk through a storm…

God was singing Sinatra. The countdown had begun.

Some, including myself, always the lurker, went to the Civic Center (the starting point of the game) and divested themselves of their belongings – you can’t take it with you, after all.

You dropped 1 inconceivably powerful breath mint.

I saw this go by in the chat log, and saved it:

It was indeed lovely. And for at least 3 or 4 of us, a very welcome respite from grief over recent deaths of people close to us (and no I am not kidding). Thank you, truly and deeply. This was a better tonic than almost anything else I could have imagined.

Many decided to meet in a secretive back room area. Avogadro announced he would spend “my last few moments at home with my fourteen cats and all the fish they need until GNE begins again.” Another lit out for the desert.

Then God posted this.

Me? I confess, I was experiencing this at work, and had to leave to engage in revenue-positive activities. When I returned, my browser window displayed the message The GNE is sleeping. With the little animated GIF of the infinity sign humming away.

It was a message of hope, perhaps, that God might deign to some day wake his creation, and thereby restore a singular game experience, a game-not-game, a thing of beauty in abstraction.

If He does, maybe I can get my house back.

UPDATE: There’s a video of the end here, and more stuff at the end of waxy’s post.

Yup, Gabe and Tycho partner with Hothead Games (the Vancouver studio doing the Penny Arcade game) to create Greenhouse Games, a game distribution site. The idea is for the webcomic gods to point their massive following toward quality indie games, not just their own projects, but you can read all about it youself in this Wired interview.

Waxy notes that the Game Neverending – GNE – is back, in possibly experimental or temporary form. GNE was the bizarre web-based MMO developed by Ludicorp before they moved on to Flickr. You can get at it here (you need to be logged in to a flickr/yahoo account for it to work).

I used to play this, back in the day. I recall it was awesome, although walking around in there now I don’t really remember what to do other than roam around collecting things. But give ‘er a shot! Let’s just hope it doesn’t go away when April Fools’ ends.

Check this site out. It lets you create your own comics. So far I’ve only tried the character creator, but it’s extremely easy to use. I had Burpin’ Moses there in a couple minutes. Look out, Eyeless Max and other people saddled with the now-useless ability to draw! And congrats to Ba and pals for building a pretty incredible site and getting nominated for a SXSW Web Award.

UPDATE: OK, so it’s one of those in-beta, need-invite things. If you’re interested in taking a look, send me a message and your email via the contact form.

The Game Developer’s Conference is underway, and lots of newsworthy things are going down, and many more will happen before it’s over. Kurzweil is speaking tomorrow, for instance. Gamasutra has a writeup of Mare Sheppard’s postmortem of N+, also. And a good place to follow along is waxy.org, as Andy Baio is using his new full-time blogger status to attend the conference and write up stuff of interest. His piece on indie games is worth reading, for instance.

Last week, Nadine and I attended the launch party for N+, the Xbox Live version of N, Metanet Software’s kickass ninja platforming flash game (which you can get right here) N+ is coming to the ‘Arcade on wednesday. It’s also in development for the DS and PSP.

The party was at the Gladstone Hotel. There was a little play area for trying out the game. Why not experience it in video form, it’s like you’re really there!

And then read on for the interview with the creators of N and N+, the charming Reigan Burns and Mare Sheppard. Symbolically anyways, it’s robots interviewing ninjas.

More...

Say hello to Doombot, our new sister site. I can honestly say that if you like our cantankerous robot musings, you’ll like theirs as well.

Sounds good, don’t it? Well, you can do it: Offroad Velociraptor Safari. It runs in full 3D in your browser window, which I didn’t even know was possible (but I don’t get out much). You ride around in a bouncy jeep pulling stunts and catching raptors. Go play it, it’s kickass.

It’s by Flashbang Studios, “a deliberately small independent video game developer.” (via Rock Paper Shotgun)

Can’t you see it now? Apple, the purveyors of the Reality Distortion Field, starting their own Alternate Reality Game? Clues are seeded early on, and truth is revealed at a Macworld keynote. It would totally work, wouldn’t it?

Well, people are playing it already, as we do every year in the lead up to the Stevenote (which is tomorrow). But wouldn’t it benefit Apple to actually design that experience, instead of leaving it up to the players? Or maybe they do … (cue creepy music)

I was thinking about which games I have played the most of this year, and number one has to be a tie between Oblivion and my hockey pool.

More...

My GF was a vigourous Facebook refusenik – until last night, when I got a friend request from her. Shocked and appalled, I demanded an explanation. It was forthcoming, and simple; a friend of hers who has moved to Vancouver suggested she sign up to keep up with her life out there, since she “never calls”. Which is true, because it’s expensive, Lucy points out.

This strikes me as another possible reason why Facebook is so popular in Canada.

Canada’s cellphone voice plans are just as suck as their data plans. I was just reviewing the major carriers’ plans; you’re hard pressed to find a 400 minute plan from any of them. AT&T’s plans start at 450 minutes and are no extra charge for long distance, whereas Rogers hits you with 30 cents a minute long distance charge on top of the airtime fees.

So given that, and the following:

a) young Canadians are more likely to have only a cell and no landline,
b) young Canadians, especially those at university or recent graduates, are likely to have friends from all over the country,

you have a perfectly reasonable explanation of why so many more Canadians use Facebook than Americans.

The online organizer app that I tend to use, Backpack, has been updated. It now includes search (hooray!), and the ability to move things around on a page, or to a different page. The look has been refined as well. Unfortunately, the API update has broken a lot of third-party utilities that interface with it.

Here’s a summary of the Halo 3 “ARG” up until the present. This article claims a Microsoft spokesman says the campaign is called “Iris”, and is written by Bungie’s Frank O’Connor – 42 Entertainment, the creators of “The Beast” and “I Love Bees”, isn’t involved. In a week, Iris has had an AI posting on the bungie.net forae, mysterious poetry being emailed out, lots of glyphs in image files, a comic strip, a MySpace page, and real-life demonstrations in various cities staged by The Society of the Ancients. The speculation is that the aforementioned group will show up at Stonehenge for the solstice on the 21st. Fastest moving ARG ever?

The issue of whether third-party developers would be allowed to write apps for the iPhone is a heated one. Steve Jobs threw some wood on the fire by announcing to Mac developers today: sure you can! Make web apps with AJAX!

Frankly, I consider that a better answer than many do, since I’ve been of late pleasantly surprised by Google’s excellent posse of apps. And hey, there are some nifty widgets out there, and those are just li’l web apps too (sorta). And we assume there is some work being done on getting web apps to work offline. Which is one of their huge disadvantages, and if it’s solved in some meaningful way, one would have even less reason to hate Jobs’ latest statement.

But isn’t it a bit odd for a maker of platforms (PC, iPhone, iPod) to argue in favour of web apps? Aren’t web apps the things that make platforms increasingly irrelevant? If you made an awesome web app for the iPhone, people could conceivably use it on their PCs or Windows Mobile phones. Wouldn’t Steve be better off advocating iPhone-only apps?

Yes he would, and he will. This is only a stopgap. But its presentation leaves something to be desired. Presumably the motivation for the AJAX announcement is to give developers something to work with now – having heard them clamouring to develop for the iPhone, he threw them a bone (kinda). But the way he announced it, without stating that a proper SDK is on the way, makes it sound like he lamed out on them.

Here’s an article about it, and here’s the document itself (43-page PDF). It’s a report by the Nordicity Group paid for by the Canadian Television Fund and the Banff TV fest, and it’s meant to set the terms of industry debate at Banff. The issue is the disruption of the traditional TV industry in Canada by new media. That there will be (and already has been) a disruption is not up for debate, but the extent of it, and this report will be somewhat encouraging to scared traditional media bodies. Wise words:

History shows that new media (e.g. television at its introduction) appears disruptive at the outset, threatening to destruct traditional media. Yet what we have seen happen is that they eventually settle into a co-existence with one another as they each evolve to fulfill different roles in our everyday lives. TV did not destroy radio, as radio did not destroy newspapers – although each did replace some of the role of the medium it followed. In the same regard, the Internet will challenge the role of traditional TV distribution, and interactive content will compete to a certain extent with TV content – but there will likely be some form of co-existence.

More...

The musician writes up how he managed to go indie, web-style.

The Singularity Institute, a Kurzweil joint, has a blog now. Worth watching. There’s also an introductory video.

Just finished getting Google Apps for your domain runing on the ol’ AR. Got to say, it’s a pretty compelling bunch of apps. We all know about gmail, and that’s all good – although probably the least important part for me. What is really appealing is hassle-free document sharing and collaboration, and the sheer excellence of Google Calendar. Not only is the web interface great, but it’s super-easy to share calendars with everyone on your domain.

More...

Or, the continued, ultra-fascinating experimentation with tumblr.

More...

An old Kottke link picks up on Ebert picking up the term “hypertext cinema” or “hyperlink movie” to describe what I’ve taken to calling “ensemble drama”. We’re all trying to describe films like Babel, 21 Grams, Crash, Magnolia, You Me and Everyone We Know, Syriana, and most significantly, films like Short Cuts and Nashville by Robert Altman. Neither term really adequately describes the phenomenon – the key point is multiple instersecting storylines, often with characters who don’t know each other. “Intersecting” could be referred to as “cross-cut”, as I don’t think people would consider Pulp Fiction part of the genre since the stories are told as separate arcs.

More...

I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that Merlin Mann’s Merlin Show launched this week and that I am enjoying it.

It’s been a while, maybe a year and a half, since I banged out a TXP site. The new version is swee-eet. The whole site runs on basically one page template and one stylesheet, which is nice. (The horrors of updating an MT site and having to sift through hundreds of little templates…) I’m glad to see the TXP community hasn’t faded away at all – they’re still making bitchin’ plugins of all sorts. I’d love to install tons of them, but the name of the game for AngRob – must never call site that again – is simplicity. My last site had too much shit going down, hence the “spinoff” and “rebranding”. There’s this bizarre bit of blogger psychology where you get turned off by your own design if it gets stale, or maybe you never really liked it but were afraid to tweak it for fear of breaking it and having it display all janky in Internet Explorer. Anyway, I had a bit of that going down, so I decided to make a new site, but a nice, clean, simple one. I’m loving it so far, I must say. Hopefully I will not be the only one.

Rambling! That wasn’t really about Textpattern at all. So back on point: I am building this up from a very basic place, step-by-step, being careful all the while. Not sure yet how to approach archives, whether to use tags or categories, but we’ll get there.

Rockin’ that shit, doin’ it, really doin’ it. The old tweakin’ and massagin’ of HTML and CSS, aaah, nothing like it! Nothing like the smell of burning divs!

So, yeah, new site. Brand new baby robot. Still a lot of things to fix, and the logo will probably take some time, but we’ll be rockin’ soon enough.

So come knockin’.