link dump

Link Dumpage for 2011-03-23

Notable links enjoyed today:

  • "The Life of Gargantua and of Pantagruel (in French, La vie de Gargantua et de Pantagruel) is a connected series of five novels written in the 16th century by François Rabelais. It is the story of two giants, a father (Gargantua) and his son (Pantagruel) and their adventures, written in an amusing, extravagant, satirical vein. The text features much crudity, scatological humor, and violence. Lists of explicit or vulgar insults fill several chapters. The censors of the Sorbonne stigmatized it as obscene, and in a social climate of increasing religious oppression, it was dealt with suspicion, and contemporaries avoided mentioning it. According to Rabelais, the philosophy of his giant Pantagruel, "Pantagruelism", is rooted in "a certain gaiety of mind pickled in the scorn of fortuitous things" (French: "une certaine gaîté d'esprit confite dans le mépris des choses fortuites")."
  • Delicious tags: biology science nature death ants
    "This is one of my favorite things about ants -- the ant death spiral. Actually, it's a circular mill, first described in army ants by Schneirla (1944). A circle of army ants, each one following the ant in front, becomes locked into a circular mill. They will continue to circle each other until they all die. How crazy is that? Sometimes they escape, though. Beebe (1921) described a circular mill he witnessed in Guyana. It measured 1200 feet in circumference and had a 2.5 hour circuit time per ant. The mill persisted for two days, "with ever increasing numbers of dead bodies littering the route as exhaustion took its toll, but eventually a few workers straggled from the trail thus breaking the cycle, and the raid marched off into the forest."
  • Delicious tags: wikipedia games
    "These are games where the rules are intentionally concealed from new players, either because their discovery is part of the game itself, or because the game is a hoax and the rules do not exist. In fiction, the counterpart of the first category are games that supposedly do have a rule set, but that rule set is not disclosed." Includes discovery games, hoax or joke games, and games in works of fiction.
  • Delicious tags: zombies culture science
    "Let's pretend for a moment that zombies are real (as if half of you weren't already daydreaming about that very thing). Have you noticed how most zombie movies take place only after the apocalypse is in full-swing? By the time we join our survivors, the military and government are already wiped out, and none of the streets are safe. There's a reason the movie starts there, and not earlier. It's because the early part, where we go from one zombie to millions, doesn't make any sense. If you let the creeping buzzkill of logic into the zombie party, you realize the zombies would all be re-dead long before you even got a chance to fire up that chainsaw motorcycle you've been working on. Why?"
  • Delicious tags: nature wikipedia india rats
    Mautam (Mizo, ’bamboo death’; also spelt mautaam) is a cyclic ecological phenomenon that occurs every 48 years in the northeastern Indian states of Mizoram and Manipur, which are thirty percent covered by wild bamboo forests, as well as Chin State in Burma, particularly Hakha, Thantlang, Falam, Paletwa and Matupi Townships, creating a widespread famine in those areas … This event is followed invariably by a plague of Black Rats in what is called a rat flood. This occurs as the rats multiply in response to the temporary windfall of seeds and leave the forests to forage on stored grain when the bamboo seeds are exhausted, which in turn causes devastating famine."

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Link Dumpage for 2011-03-22

Notable links enjoyed today:

  • Delicious tags: television games culture
    "In thirty-eight years, The Price is Right never had a contestant guess the exact value of prizes in the Showcase showdown. Until Terry Kniess outsmarted everyone — and changed everything … He looked into the audience for a moment, leaned into his microphone, and said his bid as though he were reading it from a slip of paper: $23,743. … "Wow," Drew Carey said. "That's a very exact bid. We'll be right back, folks," Carey said. "Don't go away." And then the show just stopped."
  • Delicious tags: args viral marketing games
    "The goal for marketing types in the Internet age is a "viral" ad campaign. You pull off some publicity stunt, there's tons of coverage on the internet, you wind up with millions of eyeballs for virtually no cost. But viral campaigns are all about pushing the envelope. You have to shock people to get their attention, and this is where the potential for disaster lies. Awful, hilarious disaster."
  • Delicious tags: games history culture language
    "I periodically post about “games and names,” or etymologies and explanations of names and words that appear in video games. Over time, I’ve come across various bits of information that I didn’t feel deserved their own post but that might be interesting to readers. I began collecting these bits in what was at one point a short list of odds and ends but which now exists as a bigger-than-planned list of name etymologies, translation oddities, and my own geek theories — with footnotes, no less." Includes the Legend of Zelda, Mario, Donkey Kong, Wario, Sonic the Hedgehog, Street Fighter and other Capcon titles, Final Fantasy, Metroid, Kid Icarus, Castlevania, Earthbound, Chrono Trigger, Secret of Mana, Mega Man, and more.
  • Delicious tags: wikipedia art roman greek history
    The Venus Kallipygos, also known as the Callipygean Venus, all literally meaning "Venus (or Aphrodite) of the beautiful buttocks",[1] is an Ancient Roman marble statue, thought to be a copy of an older Greek original. In an example of anasyrma, it depicts a partially draped woman, raising her light peplos to uncover her hips and buttocks, and looking back and down over her shoulder, perhaps to evaluate them."
  • Delicious tags: games code design
    "Humans have a tendency to anthropomorphize AI opponents. We think the computer is going through a thought process just like a human would do in a similar situation. When we see the ball end up in an advantageous position, we think the computer must have intended that to happen. The effect is magnified here by the computer's ability to pot a ball from any position, so for the computer, all positions are equally advantageous. Hence, it can pot ball after ball, without having to worry about positional play. Because sinking a ball on every single shot would be impossible for a human, the player assumes that the computer is using positional play."
  • Delicious tags: movies mindfuck
    "Mindfuckers aren’t just Dadaism by another name—there has to be some rationale for the mayhem, even if it’s far-fetched (orbiting hallucination-inducing lasers!) or lame (it was all a dream!). And they are not those movies where the audience (and the characters) think they know what’s happening, only to discover in the final moments some key twist that turns everything on its head. (Bruce Willis was balding the whole time?!) ... In Mindfuck Movies you know that Something Is Going On. It’s just not clear what." Covers Spellbound, Rashômon, La Jetée, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Solyaris, Videodrome, The Quiet Earth, Jacob’s Ladder, The Game, Abre los ojos, Cube, Dark City, Memento, Mulholland Dr., Donnie Darko, and Primer. 
  • "Some of the characters we know and love were recycled from other TV shows and commercials Jim Henson worked on, while others were invented by using whatever materials were around." Covers Cookie Monster, Elmo, Telly Monster, Count von Count, Kermit, Swedish Chef, Missy Piggy, Rowlf the Dog, Oscar the Grouch, Gonzo, Statler and Waldorf, Beaker, Fozzier Bear, Bert and Ernie, Grover, Sweetums, Rizzo the Rat, Pepe the King Prawn, and Herry Monster.
  • Delicious tags: wikipedia reference tricks cons
    "Confidence tricks and scams are difficult to classify, because they change often and often contain elements of more than one type. Throughout this list, the perpetrator of the confidence trick is called the “con artist” or simply “artist”, and the intended victim is the “mark”."
  • Delicious tags: puzzles games adventure design
    "In this article, I will be taking a closer look at the various types of adventure game puzzles, how they relate to the gameplay, and even how some of these basic forms relate to other game genres." Creates a classification of self-contained puzzles (interaction, mini-game, and riddle puzzles) and key puzzles (inventory, pattern, and implicit information puzzles).

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Link Dumpage for 2010-10-13

Notable links enjoyed today:

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Link Dumpage for 2010-06-18

Notable links enjoyed today:

  • "Many readers have heard of Frank Stockton’s famous story, The Lady or the Tiger. But very few have heard of the sequel which [is reprinted] in full here, The Discourager of Hesitancy (A continuation of “The Lady, or the Tiger?”)."
  • Delicious tags: television lost
    "To say it’s about Everything — which its adherents swear it is — is a bit grandiose. So let’s just say it’s about destiny. And metaphysics. And quantum physics. And leadership, torture, time travel, synchronicity, Skinner boxes, geodesic domes, polar bears, doomsday equations, comic books, the Casimir effect, and the no-less-potent Cass Elliot effect. It was weird. Even weirder: It was a hit … [W]e’re stopping time here and making that fidgety, spatiotemporally promiscuous island sit still long enough for us to plumb and pay tribute to its mysteries. Once more into the hatch!"
  • Delicious tags: games collecting ccgs
    "For collectible card games (CCGs), game designers often limit the availability of cards that have a particularly powerful gameplay effect. The conventional wisdom is that the more powerful a card is, the more rare it should be. The long-term implications of such an approach can have negative consequences on a game’s suitability for casual play. Digital Addiction (a company that produced online, collectible card games in the 1990s) developed a different game design philosophy for balancing collectible card games. The approach called for the most obviously and generally useful cards to be the most common and to equate rarity to specialization rather than raw power."
  • "In the Illuminatus Trilogy by Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea I first encountered the rudiments of the 23 enigma. As the history of the origin of the 23 enigma has it, Robert Anton Wilson first heard of this puzzling bit of Forteana from William Burroughs … The 23 enigma did not, however start with Burroughs' Captain Clark in the 1960's. Neither did it start with what is probably the earliest example from Burroughs' collection of cases involving the 23 enigma and notorious gangster Dutch Schultz during the 1930's. Inspired by Burroughs, Wilson began to collect data on the 23 enigma after 1965, and it is said that he believed that Burroughs' was the first person to notice the 23 enigma. But that notion of the 23 enigma can be found decades earlier as the following three examples demonstrate."
  • Delicious tags: wikipedia alphabet hidden books
    "The Ultimate Alphabet is a best-selling book by Mike Wilks. It is a collection of 26 paintings, each depicting a collection of objects starting with a particular letter of the alphabet … According to Wilks the book contained depictions of 7,777 words in total ranging from just 30 for the letter X to 1,229 for the letter S, taking a total of 18,000 hours to complete … As he had predicted, between the two editions Wilks had discovered a number of words he had omitted from his original list, bringing the total up to 7,825 (and that of the most prolific letter, S, to 1,234); and this did not include several more words discovered by readers that were too late to include in the lists."
  • Delicious tags: faces fortean wikipedia
    "People often see hidden faces in things. Depending on the circumstances, this is referred to as pareidolia, the perception or recognition of a specific pattern or form in something essentially different. It is thus also a kind of optical illusion. When an artist notices that two different things have a similar appearance, and draws or paints a picture making this similarity evident he makes images with double meanings. Many of these images are hidden faces or hidden skulls."

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Link Dumpage for 2010-06-16

Notable links enjoyed today:

  • Delicious tags: games
    "So here's the big question: Are some games intentionally designed to keep you compulsively playing, even when you're not enjoying it? #5: Putting You in a Skinner Box; #4: Creating Virtual Food Pellets For You To Eat; #3: Making You Press the Lever; #2: Keeping You Pressing It… Forever; #1: Getting You To Call the Skinner Box Home."
  • Delicious tags: art marina abramovic moma
    "Speculation about how performance artist Marina Abramovic pees has been growing steadily over the weekend. Permanently seated on the second floor of the MoMA, her performance “The Artist is Present” invites one sitter at a time to stare at her. She never leaves her chair."
  • "When a white horse is not a horse, also known as the White Horse Dialogue, is a famous paradox in Chinese philosophy. Gongsun Long wrote this circa 300 BCE dialectic analysis of the question Can it be that a white horse is not a horse? … This dialogue continues with deliberations over colored and colorless horses and whether "white" and "horse" can be separated from "white horse”."
  • Delicious tags: metropolis fritz lang film movies
    “For fans and scholars of the silent-film era, the search for a copy of the original version of Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis” has become a sort of holy grail. One of the most celebrated movies in cinema history, “Metropolis” had not been viewed at its full length — roughly two and a half hours — since shortly after its premiere in Berlin in 1927, when it was withdrawn from circulation and about an hour of its footage was amputated and presumed destroyed. But on Friday Film Forum in Manhattan will begin showing what is being billed as “The Complete Metropolis,” with a DVD scheduled to follow later this year, after screenings in theaters around the country."
  • Delicious tags: ebert games art
    "As someone who adamantly prefers to call themselves a "game critic" rather than a "game reviewer," I've been asked by several parties to make some counter-comment to film critic Roger Ebert's recent post. Presumably they were all hoping for some expletive-laden takedown of all Ebert's arguments broken up by comparisons between the man and various historical dictators and farm animals. But the thing is, I like Ebert. I think he's an intelligent guy and well worth listening to, especially when he's got a particularly terrible film in his sights. In my more egotistical moments, I might one day aspire to being his videogaming equivalent."
  • "I met Andrea Phillips at this year’s SXSW, where she delivered a smart, wide-ranging talk about the representation of women in ARGs. Andrea is a veteran ARG writer, designer, and player, and is the current chair of the IGDA ARG Special Interest Group. In this interview, Andrea discusses her creative process and the formal and technical limitations (and possibilities) of ARGs and other playful forms of transmedia storytelling."
  • "To make your transmedia experience accessible, you need to connect with the audience on their terms, where they already are, with tools that they’re already using, and in ways that they already understand … Now don’t think that this is some rigid thing. It’s completely flexible and can be (should be!) customized to your specific transmedia experience. It may seem that the easiest solution is to throw the experience out onto a popular social networking site or two. You could be right, that might be the best strategy. But don’t lock yourself into that thinking. There are a lot of other options out there and they really depend on your audience."

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Link Dumpage for 2010-06-15

Notable links enjoyed today:

  • "We hacked the Portal 2 BBS and tracked Meltzer's kidnapped daughter to Rapture without touching a video game console. Alternate-reality games (ARG) have become more sophisticated in the last few years, and now it seems every major release comes with an extra mystery to solve. What makes these games so popular? Who plays them, and why do developers sink so much time and effort into a free product?"
  • Delicious tags: books criticism reading
    "One man's Shakespeare is another man's trash fiction. Consider this pithy commentary on the Great Bard's work: "With the single exception of Homer, there is no eminent writer, not even Sir Walter Scott, whom I can despise so entirely as I despise Shakespeare….” But, of course, there must be SOME writers we can all agree on as truly great, right? Like Jane Austen. Or not: "Every time I read 'Pride and Prejudice,' I want to dig her up and hit her over the skull with her own shin-bone.”"
  • Delicious tags: books serials writing
    "There are people arguing that the ebook will never achieve mainstream adoption. I think we can safely assume, for reasons logistical, economic and environmental, that this isn't the case … Once our books are consumed in significant proportion by people reading on the screen, people are going to want to interact with their books the way they do other content. And that pressure is going to fundamentally change what books are, and how they're written, sold, and read … Welcome, one and all, to the rebirth of short and serialized fiction. Short fiction has been dead for a long time. And by "dead" I mean there's been very little market for it, which means there's been very little money for writing it. That's going to be changing.”
  • Delicious tags: writing pulp fiction
    "This is a formula, a master plot, for any 6000 word pulp story. It has worked on adventure, detective, western and war-air. It tells exactly where to put everything. It shows definitely just what must happen in each successive thousand words. No yarn of mine written to the formula has yet failed to sell. The business of building stories seems not much different from the business of building anything else."
  • Delicious tags: biology science bacteria
    "In the 1990s, a European biotech company prepared to commercially release a genetically engineered soil bacterium for use by farmers. They were operating under two very reasonable assumptions: 1. Nobody likes plant waste [and] 2. Everybody likes booze. Whereas the common man might address these issues by simply not doing any plowing and opting to get plowed instead, scientists at the biotech company thought of a much more elegant solution: Engineer a bacterium that aggressively decomposes dead plant material--specifically wheat--into alcohol. And in 1990, they did exactly that. The bacterium was called Klebsiella planticola, and it nearly murdered everybody; you just don't know it yet."

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Link Dumpage for 2010-06-05

Notable links enjoyed today:

  • "The Dyatlov Pass incident refers to an event that resulted in the deaths of nine ski hikers in the northern Ural mountains on the night of February 2, 1959 ... The lack of eyewitnesses and subsequent investigations into the hikers' deaths have inspired much speculation. Investigators at the time determined that the hikers tore open their tent from within, departing barefoot in heavy snow. Though the corpses showed no signs of struggle, two victims had fractured skulls, two had broken ribs, and one was missing her tongue. According to sources, four of the victims' clothing contained high levels of radiation."
  • "This service allows you convert a Flash Video / FLV file (YouTube's videos, etc.) to MPEG4 (AVI / MOV / MP4 / MP3 / 3GP) file online. It is using a compressed domain transcoder technology. It converts FLV to MPEG4 faster and less lossy than a typical transcoder." Wonder how well this works.
  • "The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which "people reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices but their incompetence robs them of the metacognitive ability to realize it." The unskilled therefore suffer from illusory superiority, rating their own ability as above average, much higher than it actually is, while the highly skilled underrate their abilities, suffering from illusory inferiority. This leads to the perverse situation in which less competent people rate their own ability higher than more competent people. It also explains why actual competence may weaken self-confidence: because competent individuals falsely assume that others have an equivalent understanding."
  • "Besides, there’s something about an unfinished series that people like ... When you have a finished series, it’s like a whole book. It’s longer, but it’s the same emotional experience, it’s complete, over. An unfinished series on the other hand is much more likely to provoke conversation, because you’re wondering what will happen, and whether the clues you have spotted are clues or red herrings. People complained that The Gathering Storm wasn’t the one final volume to complete the Wheel of Time, but they’re clearly loving talking about it. And I’ve noticed a lot less conversation about Harry Potter recently, now that everyone knows as much as there is to know. The final volume of a series closes everything down. With luck, it closes it down in a satisfying way. But even the best end will convey a strong sense of everything being over. An ongoing series remains perpetually open."
  • Delicious tags: ebooks reading books
    "The rules for iPad content are still ambiguous. None of us has had enough time with the device to confidently define them. I have, however, spent six years thinking about materials, form, physicality and content and — to the best of my humble abilities — producing printed books. So, for now, here's my take on the print side of things moving forward: Ask yourself, "Is your work disposable?" For me, in asking myself this, I only see one obvious ruleset: Formless Content goes digital. Definite Content gets divided between the iPad and printing."

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Link Dumpage for 2010-06-04

Notable links enjoyed today:

  • "Carnegie Mellon University Professor, Jesse Schell, dives into a world of game development which will emerge from the popular "Facebook Games" era." Incredible video, and yeah, honestly, this is the sort of future I do want.
  • "The world is full of secret and exclusive places that we either don’t know about, or simply couldn’t visit if we wanted to. This list takes a look at ten of the most significant places around the world that are closed to the general public or are virtually impossible for the general public to visit." Includes Mezhgorye, the Vatican Secret Archives, Club 33, Moscow Metro-2, the White Gentlemen's Club, Area 51, Room 39, the Ise Grand Shrine, Mount Weather Emergency Operations Center, and RAF Menwith Hill.
  • "Ol' Rip (died January 19, 1929) was a horned lizard ... whose supposed 31-year hibernation as an entombed animal is believed by some and doubted by others ... In 1897, a horned lizard was placed in a cornerstone of the Eastland County Courthouse in Eastland, Texas along with other time capsule memorabilia. When the courthouse was torn down 31 years later, the cornerstone was opened on February 18, 1928, a live horned lizard was produced, allegedly from within the time capsule."
  • "What is it about the bizarre and mysterious that piques our curiosity? It entertains our sense of wonder and excites our imagination, for sure. Luckily for us, history is marked with strange, logic-defying occurrences to amuse us. Here is a list comprised of 10 more unexplainable and interesting phenomenon and incidents that we crave so much." Includes Ice Woman, Iron Pillar of Delhi, Carroll A. Deering, The Hutchison Effect, Faces of Belmez, Disappearing Lake of Patagonia, Chile, Raining Blobs, Animals within Stone, and Donnie Decker.
  • "Know Your Meme: Documenting Internet phenomena: viral videos, image macros, catchphrases, web celebs and more." The RSS is ancient on this one, so manual catchup. Still a decent reference. I've been wanting to make one of these for a long time (sadly, the "Ate My Balls" meme is poorly documented).

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Link Dumpage for 2010-06-02

Notable links enjoyed today:

  • Delicious tags: games puzzles magazines
    "P&A Magazine is a bi-monthly "puzzle hunt" magazine sold on-line, featuring a puzzle extravaganza (a series of interconnected puzzles leading to a single solution). Each issue contains logic, word, and trivia puzzles intended to challenge even the most hard-core solver."
  • "Walker shuns the sort of bibliomania that covets first editions for their own sake—many of the volumes that decorate the library's walls are leather-bound Franklin Press reprints. What gets him excited are things that changed the way people think, like Robert Hooke's Micrographia. Published in 1665, it was the first book to contain illustrations made possible by the microscope. He's also drawn to objects that embody a revelatory (or just plain weird) train of thought. "I get offered things that collectors don't," he says. "Nobody else would want a book on dwarfs, with pages beautifully hand-painted in silver and gold, but for me that makes perfect sense."
  • Delicious tags: puzzles games logic
    "PuzzlePicnic originated from the wish to create an online community for those who like logic puzzles. Besides providing the opportunity to solve some nice puzzles from our collection and relax, we also want to become a platform for people who like to design their own puzzles and get them published online."
  • Delicious tags: games math puzzles
    Incredibly detailed resource for math puzzles. No RSS.

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Link Dumpage for 2010-05-29

Notable links enjoyed today:

  • Delicious tags: writing fiction
    "Fictionaut is a vibrant literary community that is opening exciting new possibilities for short fiction and poetry. Part self-selecting magazine, part community network, Fictionaut is a way for readers to discover new voices and for writers to share their work, gain recognition, and connect with their audience and each other."
  • Delicious tags: books club fiction reading
    Various message board based book clubs: The Next Best Book Club, SciFi and Fantasy Book Club, The Rory Gilmore Book Club (o_O), etc. Non-topical clubs are heavily feminine (like most I've seen), there's doesn't appear to be a huge amount of leeway between nomination and the start of reading, and it's hit or miss on whether there's driven discussion or come as you will.
  • Classic Works of Literature, Philosophy, Science, History and Exploration and Travel. All books available under a Creative Commons License. "These web-books are intended to be new editions — Web editions — rather than facsimiles of previous editions. The key objectives are accessibility and readability. The implication of this is that we have generally made no attempt to retain pagination or other textual references which may have been in the source edition."
  • "MST3K fans love to quote Joel Hodgson: "The right people will get it." And they always do; there's no disputing that. But occasionally, the wrong people want in on the joke. Not to say that you're the wrong person, of course — just that you're not the right person yet ... If you've ever seen the show, there's bound to have been some joke that you laughed at but left your friends or family scratching their heads. No one gets all the riffs (at least, no one that needs this site). So why not pool our collective knowledge of obscure and not-so-obscure knowledge, organize, categorize, and give everyone the benefit of our surplus of free time?"

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