This took me far too long to figure out, but here's how you create a vocabulary, and then a taxonomy field and instance, all through an .install file (or anywhere else you really care to put it). Took a bunch of debugging before I hit on the right magical combination. This is part of a demo I'm working on for the Drupal 7 and FRBR mental model I published last night.
$libdb_vocabulary_endeavorers = (object) array(
'name' => 'Endeavorers',
'machine_name' => 'libdb_endeavorers',
'description' => t('FRBR Group 2 entities: Persons and Corporate Bodies.'),
'help' => t('Enter a comma-separated list of persons or corporations.'),
);
taxonomy_vocabulary_save($libdb_vocabulary_endeavorers);
$vocabularies = taxonomy_vocabulary_get_names();
$libdb_m_group2_field = array(
'field_name' => 'libdb_m_authors',
'type' => 'taxonomy_term',
'cardinality' => FIELD_CARDINALITY_UNLIMITED,
'settings' => array(
'allowed_values' => array(
array(
'vid' => $vocabularies['libdb_endeavorers']->vid,
'parent' => 0,
),
),
),
);
$libdb_m_group2_instance = array(
'field_name' => 'libdb_m_authors',
'object_type' => 'node',
'label' => 'Authors',
'bundle' => 'libdb_book',
'required' => TRUE,
'description' => t('Enter a comma-separated list of persons or corporations.'),
'widget' => array(
'type' => 'taxonomy_autocomplete',
),
);
field_create_field($libdb_m_group2_field);
field_create_instance($libdb_m_group2_instance);
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I have long been interested in librarian technology and cataloguing, even though I'm far from any sort of expert in the matter. When I started my "real" research into the subject, I jumped on the Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR) bandwagon, as it was a "new" and "great" leap forward in regards to describing and cataloguing the work that makes up a creative effort. Back in 2004, I started coding a Perl implementation of FRBR entitled LibDB, then eventually moved it to a (now unpublished) Drupal module and wrote up a relational database schema for it. The relational schema was the only decent output of both attempts, and it still lives on in the Drupal code repository. But, as things go, the attempt died, though I never stopped thinking about it.
General discontent with much-loved Delicious Library kept the desire to roll-my-own, but the time never arrived, nor do I see it coming anytime soon. After being extolled the wonders of CouchDB in 2009, I figured my first experiment should be with FRBR, and I even started a thread on the mailing list about it. General "eh"-ness with CouchDB, however, had me moving on before anything progressed.
Drupal 7 is "nearing" release and I'm once again thinking about FRBR. 7 now has the ability to add custom fields to its content types, functionality that previously required the contributed module CCK. While CCK, as a framework, had tons of additional third-party modules that mocked up different types of fields, Drupal 7 doesn't, solely because it isn't in the wild yet. I don't consider this bad news, really, because I've always been of the opinion that most of the contributed modules available to Drupal are crap. They scratch itches, certainly, but very few of them are what I'd consider quality productions. So, for me, thinking about Drupal 7 and FRBR is thus constrained to "core" and "my own custom code". Primarily, I'm interested to see just how much of FRBR could be modeled without custom code at all, so I've made some odd decisions to accentuate this. One could even accuse me of "just" making a boring old cataloguing system: regardless, I'm doing it with FRBR's model fully in mind.
The following serves mostly to jot down my notes and experiments.
Group 1 Entities
Like many who sit down to work with FRBR, one of the biggest stumbling blocks is exactly how to define the Work and Expression entities (the WE of WEMI). For my purposes, I'd only focus on Manifestations and Items (the MI of WEMI). You can always tack on WE on top of MI, but you could never implement FRBR without MI. As smallest building blocks go, MI is the place to start.
This leads to the first odd decision I've been leaning toward: Manifestations would be a Drupal content type, but Items would not. To back up even further, there'd be no single content type called Manifestation: instead, I'd implement a content type for Books, another content type for Movies, and so forth. This saves me from complicating the UI with an extra step and extra code: a single Manifestation content type with selectable sub-types would involve complicated form and UI custom code to pull off effectively. Individual content types allow me to define (and share, as necessary) Drupal 7 fields specific to the Book or Movie without custom code based on sub-type selection.
Each of these content types would be a form of Manifestation (an Album manifestation, a Comic Book manifestation, etc.). According to WEMI, the form of these creative endeavors is specified in the Work entity. Since I'm not modeling WE, putting them in Manifestation is good enough - if WE is ever added, the Work would happily inherit the type from M (since a W book could only contain Es, Ms, and Is that were also books, implied or otherwise).
Back to Items. One of the CCK field types that did not make it into Drupal 7 core was node reference: a field to relate the current node to another existing node. Its absence makes some sense from a usability level, as there's never been a clean solution to creating a new node within a reference field itself. Say you create a Book node, and one of the node reference fields is labeled "Author". You dutifully type in "Stephen King", but since you've never defined the Stephen King node previously, it just won't work - you'd be forced to stop what you actually wanted to do and go create "Stephen King" first. There have been a few attempts in CCK-land to solve this problem, but none that are entirely elegant or perfect enough for core.
So, for Items, I can't think of any other way than custom code: a simple relational table keyed to user ID and node ID, with a few fields for location, condition, and notes. There might be an "Add an Item" section on the Manifestation's view page (or even as a second form after the initial node submit), but even this isn't a huge requirement for a first version, since one could assume that if you're adding a Manifestation to your collection, that you also have custodianship over a matching Item. Either way, I don't see the necessary custom code as being anything but rote. I am sure, though willing to be convinced otherwise, that Items should not be nodes: I can't find any compelling use for a node's feature set, and I'd be aghast at 100,000 teenage girls creating 125,000 nodes detailing Twilight Book 1's location on their Favorite Books shelf (with some divining their autographed versions too). Similarly, in a single-user environment, the mental hurdles a non-librarian would have to leap through to justify two nodes for "the single book I bought today" is not cleanly solvable without more custom code than the non-node alternative.
Group 2 Entities
FRBR encourages relationships between entities: if there's a relationship called "Author", then a "Person" is related to a "Book" with relationship type "Author". This allows an unlimited number of relationship types to be created, but also allows relationships to tie any entity to any other entity: this "Work" is related to another "Work" with relationship type "Sequel", this "Corporate Body" is related to this "Expression" with relationship type "Special Effects", and so forth. Drupal 7 has no relationship API built in, so to accomplish the above generic relations, we'd need custom code.
In striving to satisfy the "as much as core as possible" mentality, the Person and Corporate Body of FRBR become another odd decision. For the same reason as Items, Persons and Corporate Bodies aren't nodes either: this time, they're taxonomy terms in a single vocabulary. I have no qualms about this: I am interested in endeavors, not the endeavorers. I have no intention of blurbing each particular entity, or defining their birthdate or address or website, or any such. In Drupal 7, being a taxonomy term doesn't preclude this if someone else wanted to do it (and FRBR does define fields for each of these entities, so it wouldn't be unheard of).
There are two important changes to taxonomies in Drupal 7: one, terms can be modified with fields just like content types (you could add a radio for Person or Corporate Body, a text field for birthdate or website, etc.) and two, a single vocabulary can be applied to the same content type as many times as you deem necessary. This allows us to fake up a hardcoded relationship system.
My mental model asserts a single vocabulary called "Endeavorers" (which sorely needs a better name; "Responsibility" sucks too) which contains terms for both Persons and Corporate Bodies. If distinguishing between the two is a must, we could define and maintain the radio field suggested above. This "Endeavorers" vocabulary is then associated as many times as necessary with a particular content type: once each for "Author", "Illustrator", "Editor", and "Publisher" for Books, once each for "Director", "Producer", "Distributor" for Movies, and so forth. Each field would be an "unlimited" "autocomplete term widget (tagging)"... in other words, you could create as many new entities, or autocomplete existing entities, as needed per field.
This nicely solves the UI problem described above for Items and Stephen King, and has a few additional extras thrown in. We use a single vocabulary for both entities so that a single "Producer" field could contain "J. R. Bookwalter" (a Person) and "Tempe Video" (a Corporate Body). If one were to head to a particular term's URL (ex. taxonomy/term/13), we would see all nodes associated with them, regardless if they were an Author here, an Editor there, or a Gaffer elsewhere. On the other hand, if we ONLY wanted to show nodes where the term was used solely in the Director field, that'd require custom code or, likely, Views. I don't think that sort of filtering would be necessary for the first few versions, nor do I think it's difficult to implement.
Group 3 Entities
Group 3 Entities are handled just like Group 2 entities: a single vocabulary called "Subjects" that would be added to a Manifestation's content type four times: once for "Concept", "Object", "Event", and "Place". This allows a single term to be used in multiple ways: "Shangri-La" might be a concept in this book, but a place in that movie. Browsing to the "Shangri-La" term would show matches for both Book and Movie. I find this particular approach necessary as I just don't trust myself to remember how I categorized the "Shangri-La" in a particular character's drug-induced hallucination from a book I read 12 years ago. Again, filtering down to particular types would come at a later date.
And that completes my current mental map on Drupal 7 and FRBR. Nothing has been implemented, but I'd lean toward a full-fledged module than an installation profile (which could setup all the above, but would suffer from the inability to upgrade existing installs) (see comments). I'm also envisioning another data exchange layer on top of the above, where one would put in an identifier (ISBN, ISSN, UPC, ASIN, etc.) and click a button to prefill the fields. The lack of fieldsets for custom fields in Drupal 7 would cause the above forms to look ungrouped and ugly, but a module could fix that up as well. I might end up actually implementing all the above in a demo site the next time I have a few hours to kill: if anyone is interested in seeing such a demo, don't hesitate to email morbus@disobey.com.
There are a few gaps in what this overall approach can do: it doesn't handle collections or serials nicely (i.e. a book with chapters, or a magazine with articles, written by different people, etc.) and if I were to go down that path, I probably would end up making a second "class" of content type, with a node reference, and there'd be a specific sub-content type per form (Sequence for Comics, Article for Magazines, Chapter/Section for Book, Short Film for movie anthologies, etc.). Also, Persons or Bodies with the same name could be solved the IMDb way ("Stephen King (I)", "Stephen King (II)") or the traditional way (birthdate on taxonomy term, autocomplete tweak to show "Stephen King, 1947-", etc.). And I'm sure I'll find more as I devote more mental slices to it.
For the three people who know what I'm on about: thoughts?
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Notable links enjoyed today:
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"Public Domain Super Heroes is a collaborative website about comic book characters in the Public Domain ... This is intended to be an online encyclopedia of these characters, providing pertinent information to fans who want to learn about their history, as well as creators who may want to use them. Unless otherwise noted, all images and information are believed to be in the Public Domain. The information and images presented are intended to give a brief overview of the characters and provide a visual reference."
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"He has written six books of puzzles, five of which center on the work of a mathematical detective by the name of Jacob Ecco, a biography about great computer scientists (coauthored by freelance journalist Cathy Lazere), and technical books relating to his various areas of research. In his non-academic writings, perhaps his greatest invention is the notion of omniheuristics, a kind of super-heuristics concerned with the ability to solve any and all manner of puzzles, conundrums, enigmas, and dilimmas. Owing their decidedly curious character, he has given particular note to puzzles that start off easy, but have apparently innocent variants that are particularly perplexing; he calls them 'upstarts'."
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"Intertextuality is the shaping of texts' meanings by other texts. It can refer to an author’s borrowing and transformation of a prior text or to a reader’s referencing of one text in reading another. The term “intertextuality” has, itself, been borrowed and transformed many times since it was coined by poststructuralist Julia Kristeva in 1966. As critic William Irwin says, the term “has come to have almost as many meanings as users, from those faithful to Kristeva’s original vision to those who simply use it as a stylish way of talking about allusion and influence”."
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"MSTing is a method of mocking a show in the style of the television series Mystery Science Theater 3000 (MST3K) and, in particular, is a form of fan fiction in which writers mock other works by inserting humorous comments, called "riffs", into the flow of dialogue and events ... MSTing began in the early 1990s, as fans of the show, many of whom were involved in Usenet discussions in groups such as popular MST3K newsgroup rec.arts.tv.mst3k.misc, began adding amusing or critical remarks to others' posts, attributing them to the show's characters."
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"The Urantia Book ... is a spiritual and philosophical book that discusses God, Jesus, science, cosmology, religion, history and destiny ... The Urantia Book is 2,097 pages long, and consists of an introductory statement followed by 196 "papers" divided into four parts ... The exact circumstances of the origin of The Urantia Book are unknown. The book and its publishers do not name a human author, instead it is written as if directly presented by numerous celestial beings appointed to the task of providing an "epochal" spiritual revelation to humankind. For each paper, either a name, or an order of celestial being, or a group of beings is credited as its author."
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"Here, 100ft down and hidden from public view, lies an astonishing secret - one that has drawn comparisons with the fabled city of Atlantis and has been dubbed 'the Eighth Wonder of the World' by the Italian government. For weaving their way underneath the hillside are nine ornate temples, on five levels, whose scale and opulence take the breath away. Constructed like a three-dimensional book, narrating the history of humanity, they are linked by hundreds of metres of richly decorated tunnels and occupy almost 300,000 cubic feet - Big Ben is 15,000 cubic feet."
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"Submerged stone structures lying just below the waters off Yonaguni Jima are actually the ruins of a Japanese Atlantis—an ancient city sunk by an earthquake about 2,000 years ago ... Some experts believe that the structures could be all that's left of Mu, a fabled Pacific civilization rumored to have vanished beneath the waves."
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"When a carpenter ant is infected by a fungus known as Ophiocordyceps unilateralis, the victim remains alive for a short time. The fungus, however, is firmly in the driver's seat. It compels the ant to climb from its nest high in the forest canopy down into small plants and saplings in the understory vegetation. The ant then climbs out onto the underside of a low-hanging leaf where it clamps down with its mandibles just before it dies. There it remains, stuck fast for weeks. After the ant dies, the fungus continues to grow inside the body. After a few days, a stroma—the fungus's fruiting body—sprouts from the back of the ant's head. After a week or two, the stroma starts raining down spores to the forest floor below. Each spore has the potential to infect another unfortunate passerby."
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"One of Aesop's fables may have been based on fact, scientists report.
In the tale, written more than 2,000 years ago, a crow uses stones to raise the water level in a pitcher so it can reach the liquid to quench its thirst. Now a study published in Current Biology reveals that rooks, a relative of crows, do jut the same when presented with a similar situation ... Footage of the experiments shows the rooks first assessing the water level by peering at the tube from above and from the side, before picking up and dropping the stones into the water. The birds were extremely accurate, using the exact number of stones needed to raise the worm to a height where they could reach it." -
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"A hidden metapuzzle threads through the pages [the May] issue of Wired magazine, which is built around the theme of magic and mystery ... Below the surface of the May issue lurk 15 puzzles, all of which combine into a giant metapuzzle ... The metapuzzle was designed to be completely invisible to the casual reader."
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Innsmouth: The Musical. Carol of the Old Ones. Shoggoth, Shoggoth, Shoggoth. If I Were A Deep One. I Saw My Mommy Kissing Yog-Sothoth. Away In A Madhouse. Freddy the Red Brained Mi-Go. I'm Dreaming of a Dead City. Awake Ye Scary Great Old Ones. The Cultist Song. Byakhee, Byakhee. Bonus Feature: Shoggoth on the Roof - A Play Performed with puppets.
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Today, we start something called Textploitation which is, by design, nothing truly exciting. There is no innovation here, no special come’uppance, no inherited feelings of elitism. The site serves the singular purpose of getting us, myself and long-time friend and project-partner John Treacy, to finish a small bit of fiction every Monday. We have no illusions that what we’ll write will be awesome or the gift of greatness to America: it is solely practice. Some releases will be final, others will be serialized week to week. If it turns out that our combined output is of some quality, great; if not, we’ll keep at it, realizing that our goal all along was to do so until it is.
You're more than welcome to comment on any of the stories or pages by using the "Discussion" tabs.
This week’s releases are The Shame (page 1) by John Treacy, wherein a small-town sheriff has the lurid details of his off-duty activities exposed, and Morbus Iff’s Untitled 1 (page 1), wherein a single bubble leads to fleeing sisters and an exasperated mother.
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(For an earlier build-up to this post, see Resources not Services.)
Years ago, I asked where was my Lord of the Rings? Many sympathized with the lament and it's clear they got the message: where was my "epic", my "lasting impression", my "contribution to society"? It's four years later and I've realized the Lord of the Rings was the wrong series to associate the depression with: it's just not good enough.
I've no problem with Middle-earth, and it's still an admirable thing to appreciate and enjoy. What I want to create, however, is something slightly different, something slightly more mysterious. There's been plenty written about Middle-earth, and its epic can be as simple or as complex as you'd like, but it's always optional: the additional books expand archaically on Tolkien's mythology and intentions, but none of it is truly necessary to the core reading.
What I prefer to read, and hopefully write, is something more akin to ergodic literature, something that "requires a 'non-trivial effort' to traverse the text". I consider Infinite Jest a recent example because, although you can read it by "merely moving ... along lines of text and turning pages", there's so much depth and complexity that you'll gain more appreciation via annotation. House of Leaves is another example: atypical page layouts and complexities abound. I've not read any of Thomas Pynchon or James Joyce (gasp!), but I suspect they'd also match my considerations.
Complexity and depth isn't the only thing I find palatable - one downside of the books above is that their "easter eggs" are based on the real world. Still, ergodic alternatives do exist, such as Milorad Pavich's Dictionary of the Khazars; my encyclopedic Ghyll was inspired by this work and was built by dozens of "scholars" over many months. Jorge Luis Borges and most alternate reality games like Perplex City also require "non-trivial" efforts to appreciate them.
Finally, wordplay and and a wry grin are high on my list, and most of the above works contain one, the other, or both. Vladimir Nabokov sprinkled "linguistic playfulness" throughout his work, and Martin Gardner's The Annotated Alice offered an understanding of Wonderland and its embedded secrets that I hadn't anticipated. Creating something that can be read straight through, then spelunked for hidden treasure, then appreciated through research and annotation, is very appealing to me. Something "subtle", as sbp puts it.
The only problem is that I haven't written fiction for decades. I've done two technical books and a dozen articles for O'Reilly, one for Apple, a year-long column for MacTech magazine, non-fiction this, non-fiction that. Ghyll could be considered fiction, but it was written with a scholarly "voice", making it more an exercise in imagination than craft. The last time I really wrote fiction was high school, when New Hampshire English teacher Michael Phelps read one of my Dickensian works to the class and told them they'd see my face on the back of a book someday. Prophetic, and a memory that will stay with me forever. In 2003, I e-mailed Mr. Phelps to tell him of my progress and memories and he replied that, as a teacher, these sorts of updates are vitally important. If you've not reached out to yours, I heartily admonish you to.
Relearning fiction is something I'll begin shortly.
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Any readers play Guild Wars? I'm just about to create a character in Prophecies and looking for a guild.
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"The company flew an employee with a DVD of Up, which is only in theaters, to the Curtins’ Huntington Beach home on June 10 for a private viewing of the movie." Wonderful story, peacefully ending with "Colby died about seven hours after seeing the film." Especially poignant to me, at least, was "Pixar officials declined to comment on the story or name the employees involved.", which screams "This was not a marketing stunt. Leave us alone." Good job, Pixar.
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I might be having a midlife crisis. But, as in all things, especially regarding a pseudo-science concept such as this, the more you examine it, the more you can convince yourself that all this stuff is True and Happening. It's why fortune-tellers and horoscopes and precognition remain popular - the observer effect is well known (and, unknown to me but submitted by sbp: the Forer effect).
If we take Wikipedia at face-value, I don't feel this has anything to do with "the passing of youth and the imminence of old age". I'm 31, but I feel like a young'un. I have to think about what my age is, and I do so not because it's rote but because I have to calculate it every time from the year I was born. When you grow up without birthdays, you just don't pay much attention to age or years. Nor has anything major happened in my life lately, unless you consider the birth of my first child, three years ago, and my second, one year ago - I certainly consider those major events, but positive ones, not like "death of a spouse" or "career setback".
When I look at all the things I like to do (which is an awful, awful lot - I haven't been bored for decades), I don't find myself getting the same amount of satisfaction I used to. I feel "paralyzed", unable to sit down and "do something", but not from laziness nor lack of impetus. This applies both to existing projects or new attempts of existing interests (writing a new program or book, starting a new game, etc.). I don't have any "new" interests that couldn't fall into a subset of an existing desire, nor would I have the time anyways.
The lack of time is a contributor, I think. In a 24 hour day, I sleep 6, work 7, and "babysit" for another 6.5. Let's fill up another 1.5 with maintenance (eating, showering, responding to e-mail and other computer-y things). That leaves me three hours of the day for myself (I will ignore rebuttals of "OMG, YOU HAVE FREE TIME?!!": I'm not comparing myself to you, asshat). In that remaining time, I'm supposed to "relax", "wind down", and "enjoy myself" (my beliefs). For the past week, and on and off for months, I've merely wandered around the house or sat in a chair staring into space. Sometimes I'll meander idly around the web, wasting bandwidth.
There is plenty to do and plenty that I want to do, but it seems that by the time I start to do it, and really get into doing it, time is up, time for bed. I never reach that point of being "in the zone"; my free time feels like an endless series of false starts that may culminate into something worthwhile, but eventually peters off into trying to figure out what I was thinking 24 hours ago.
Maybe I'm "just in a rut" - I've been in those before, but never this long.
Part of my problem may be because I try to make everything a "project", something that I would be proud of "releasing". That perfectionist mentality got me to where I am today but, back then I had a lot more free time. As an example, one of my latest "longest journey" goals is to read every Star Trek book ever written, something approximating over 1,000 entries. A lofty goal, certainly, but I couldn't leave well enough alone: I've convinced myself that I should do "something worthwhile" and contribute summaries and so forth to Memory Beta. Even though I love reading the books, I almost dread finishing one because it means I "have" to improve the wiki, something that would take me a few three-hour nights per book. It's easy enough to say "well, don't do that", but the researcher in me chastises me for "keeping the data all to myself". I'm fighting myself over being a leech or a contributor.
One of the oldest projects I've kept wanting to come back to, time and time again, has been a browser-based game. I've started coding dozens since I first wrote about them in 2000, but they always reach a point where I lose interest: I know I'm a better coder than most people, and I know success is inevitable. Coding nowadays, for me, is like cutting and prepping ingredients for your favorite meal: it's busy work and my mind wanders. I know I can do it, I take no pleasure in it, and it's rarely a challenge. Given enough time, I'll succeed, and keeping it maintained with the latest framework releases will seem like work and a waste of time. I prefer story over mechanics anyways, but I don't even feel like I have enough time to run a decent play-by-post RPG.
Nearly everything I like doing, and I've examined them all, doesn't seem worth actually doing anymore.
I can't even be arsed to write a decent conclusion to this posting.
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"The Story Behind The Looking Glass Laboratories' Alternate Reality Game. The official reasons as to why this ARG was created are: There are several friends and business associates that didn't understand the concept of an "alternate reality game." Some of these friends are prospective writers who did not understand the concept and how it can be used to portray a storyline. We hope we have expressed some of those possibilities. To see what it really is like on the other side of the curtain. You can never understand the amount of work and dedication a "puppetmaster" has to put in to a project until you become one; now having been one, we have more respect for PMs than you can possibly imagine."
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"This is when I decided to make my own list of horror movies that A) people don’t know about, B) should be talked about more often, C) are as good as the known classics, and D) need to be seen, for Heaven’s sake!" Includes: And Soon the Darkness..., The Exorcist III, Bunny Lake is Missing, Hour of the Wolf, Long Weekend, The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane, Who Can Kill A Child?, Just Before Dawn, Magic, and The Innocents.
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Operation: Sleeper Cell postmortem broken up into preparation and design, fundraising, project management, marketing, mission design, game design, live events and website, tech, and then a recap with player comments and statistics.
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I love reading postmortems and summaries of ARG-y things (even for ones I was a judge/consultant on, like this one:) "Operation: Sleeper Cell was made by Law 37 to raise money and awareness for Cancer Research UK as a result of the Let's Change The Game competition. The game ran for ten weeks in late 2008 and we raised £3668 in total. Everybody who worked on the game did so in their spare time as volunteers."
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"We'll just fix that in post!" has always been the rallying cry for filmmakers in the middle of a troubled production. Unfortunately, sometimes things have a nasty habit of actually getting broken in post-production, usually thanks to studio interference. Victims include: I Am Legend, Superman II, Dawn of the Dead, Live Free or Die Hard, and Blade Runner."
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"Dark Room Sex Game is a Wiimote enabled game in which players try to climax with their partners - with no on-screen visuals whatsoever ... Dark Room Sex Game is an erotic multi-player rhythm game without any graphics, played only by audio and haptic cues. The game can be played with Nintendo Wiimote controllers or a keyboard. In Dark Room Sex Game, the player works with his or her partner to find a mutual rhythm, then speeds up gradually until climax. In four-player "orgy" mode, players swap partners randomly and compete to reach orgasm the fastest."
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"Operation Snow White was the Church of Scientology's name for a project during the 1970s to purge unfavorable records about Scientology and its founder L. Ron Hubbard. This project included a series of infiltrations and thefts from 136 government agencies, foreign embassies and consulates, as well as private organizations critical of Scientology, carried out by Church members, in more than 30 countries;[1] the single largest infiltration of the United States government in history[2] with up to 5,000 covert agents."
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"After last year's column I got a flood of new suggestions from frustrated players and developers, so here are nine new Twinkie Denial Conditions for the ninth installment of Bad Game Designer, No Twinkie!: Failure to Explain Victory and Loss Conditions; Time-Constrained Demos; Obvious and Cheap Reskins (also known as Cookie-Cutter Games); Computer Crashed While Saving? Game Over!; Friendly AI Characters That Do More Harm Than Good; Fake Interactivity; Bad Gamepad-to-Mouse/Keyboard Conversions (and vice versa); Setting the Player Up to Fail; Your Only Save is Immediately Before Your Death."
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"The Corpus Clock has been invented and designed by Dr John Taylor for Corpus Christi College Cambridge for the exterior of the college's new library building ... The clock has been designed by the inventor and horologist Dr John Taylor and makes ingenious use of the grasshopper escapement, moving it from the inside of the clock to the outside and refashioning it as a Chronophage, or time-eater, which literally devours time."
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"What in-game objectives ought to merit achievements? How can games best be designed with achievements (and achievers) in mind? What further rewards can be tied to achievements to enhance their effective use in games? How much worth do game achievements truly have? In order to better approach these and other questions, GameCyte consulted Rene Weber, a professor of psychology and telecommunications, and Patrick Shaw, a game designer/developer, who recently collaborated to research and define player types and motivations in modern gaming. Weber and Shaw offered us their considerable expertise in order to examine why game achievements have become such a vital part of our gaming experience."
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