I’ve not done one of these in a while and it looks like Postalicious hasn’t picked up all of the links I’ve saved since the last one. Sorry about that. The curious can always just go look at the saved links directly on delicious.com. :)
Del.icio.us links for January 20th through January 22nd:
- MOVING NORTH – MANCHESTER PUNK ROCK: AUDIO: Above Them – Step Back Release – Above Them have teamed up with Punktastic to stream another new song from their upcoming album “are we a danger to ourselves” – Yes, it irks me a little that there’s no question mark either. Anyway, the song is called “Step Back Release” starting with just Oli’s vocal and guitar then kicking in (epicly) into the pounding buvvem’s rhythm we’re all used to. It’s another great song from an album that is very special.
Tags: band music - The Ontological Geek: Guest Article: Skyrim is Gonzo Pornography – After 70 hours or so of play, I finished the main quest line of Skyrim. By this point I had completed the Thieves’ Guild quest line and a smattering of other quests from all over the map. I had discovered dozens of dungeons, slain many dragons, and finished more petty side-quests than I care to admit. When I decided to stop wandering the map and focus on finishing the central plot of the game, I was able to complete my remaining tasks in a couple hours, kept slow by my insistence on playing as a Bosmer archer instead of using any of the many methods of combat that render encounters trivially easy to complete. As the dragon-god Alduin evaporated in a shiny flash of elaborate death animations, I didn’t feel like a hero. I wasn’t even sure I had actually finished the main questline, there was so little fanfare. What I did feel like was that I had just finished a cheap porno, and that I should probably start playing something else before someone noticed me.
Tags: skyrim game design gonzo pornography immersion - Odd Partners: Videogames and Environmentalism –
On Dec. 27, 2011, game developer Just Add Water released an HD remake of the under-appreciated Xbox game Oddworld: Stranger’s Wrath. Like the previous three games in the Oddworld franchise, Stranger’s Wrath is at its heart an environmental game, a quirky first person shooter with an important message about the control of natural resources and the threat of unregulated corporate practices to the natural world. If the Atari E.T. fiasco is a memorial to the gaming industry’s environmental shortcomings, the Oddworld games are a perfect counterpoint, a reminder that video games and environmentalism can coexist, however oddly, and strengthen each other.
Tags: oddworld videogames environmentalism - MOVING NORTH – MANCHESTER PUNK ROCK: AUDIO: Watch Commander – Cheating Death (NEW SONG!) – Those lovely guys from Watch Commander have been working hard over the last few months on their debut album that should be out in the next few months. They’ve uploaded the song ‘Cheating Death’ to their soundcloud account and obviously, it’s real good.
Tags: band music - Solar storm of 1859 – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia – The solar storm of 1859, also known as the Solar Superstorm,[1] or the Carrington Event,[2] which occurred during solar cycle 10, was the most powerful solar storm in recorded history, and the largest flare, observed by Richard Christopher Carrington, became known as the Carrington Super Flare.
Tags: history astrophysics solarstorms - World building 404: The unknown unknowns – Charlie’s Diary- In earlier think-pieces I discussed a very normative, predictable, conservative (in the sense of unadventurous) version of the likely shape of the next century.Of course, it’s not going to be like that.
Tags: futurism worldbuilding society uncertainty prediction - Plot is Gameplay’s Bitch: Blank Slates & Scripted Decision Making- In light of my recent thoughts on developing a new approach to dialogue systems (or, more accurately, thanks to a recommendation from the designer I’m working with on a nursing simulation side project) I was approached recently to produce a short interactive dialogue demo for a middleware firm based on some of those ideas.Their core system, though, is a traditional dialogue tree, and it got me to thinking – if we’re limited to the usual tools and can’t factor in any procedural elements then what practical guidelines can we follow to avoid the usual problems around motivation, depth of simulation and reward?
Tags: gamedesign narrative dialogue dialogue systems - 6 Scientific Discoveries That Laugh in the Face of Physics | Cracked.com- “As we’ve pointed out before, there are some startlingly simple questions that science can’t answer. And then there are the special occasions where the universe up and does a freaking magic trick that seems to be designed by an unjust, all-powerful entity dedicated to making scientists slowly pull off their glasses while saying, “What in the hell?” For instance …”Fun list, even if #1 has, I think, already been disproven.
Tags: science super science physics astrophysics space - BBC News – Exoplanets are around most stars, study suggests- Every star twinkling in the night sky plays host to an average of 1.6 planets, a new study suggests.That implies there are some 10 billion Earth-sized planets in our galaxy.
Using a technique called gravitational microlensing, an international team found a handful of exoplanets that imply the existence of billions more.
Tags: space planets exoplanets space exploration - It’s a girl: The three deadliest words in the world | | Independent Editor’s choice Blogs- It’s a girl, a film being released this year, documents the practice of killing unwanted baby girls in South Asia. The trailer’s most chilling scene is one with an Indian woman who, unable to contain her laughter, confesses to having killed eight infant daughters.The statistics are sickening. The UN reports approximately 200 million girls in the world today are ‘missing’. India and China are said to eliminate more female infants than the number of girls born in the US each year. Lianyungang in China has the worst infant gender ratio on record with 163 boys born for every 100 girls. Taiwan, South Korea and Pakistan are also countries in which unwanted female babies are aborted, killed or abandoned.
Tags: femicide infanticide gender children infants south asia