Scientific Results

An excellent quote from a paper I'm reading:

"A final thought before moving on. Science has one methodology, art and design have another. Are we surprised that art and design are remarkable for their creativity and innovation? While we pride our rigorous stance, we also bemoan the lack of design and innovation. Could there be a correlation between methodology and results?"

Greenberg, S. and Buxton, B. 2008. Usability evaluation considered harmful (some of the time). In Proceeding of the Twenty-Sixth Annual SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Florence, Italy, April 05 - 10, 2008). CHI '08.

Psychosomnium

Wow. I just played another excellent example of platformer turned into a compelling mind-fuck indie game. Playable here.

UPDATE: I didn't really emphasize enough how important it is that you play this game, like right now. It questioned my meaning of existence, and its ending left me shocked for a long time afterwards. Please, please play it. And then comment here.

A special wish

After a few months of limping along with a degrading phone, I finally replaced my loyal LG 6070 with a ass-kicking Blackberry Pearl. I mean, just look at that wicked flash website! Anyway, the main point of interface with the Blackberry Pearl is the beautiful, backlit trackball (my friends have affectionately called it the Blackberry Clit - it just demands to be touched). I love it - it makes moving through menus so fast.

However, I got an idea the other day when stumbling on the fact that I can use Bluetooth to connect my Pearl random laptops nearby. Could someone PLEASE write some code so that I can connect by Bluetooth to a laptop, then take my Pearl and turn it UPSIDE DOWN so that it effectively becomes a wireless mouse? Left-clicking would be equivalent to pushing the Pearl down so the trackball "clicks" in, and right-clicking could be automatically assigned to one of the three buttons adorning the side of the pearl. Or, if you're a Human-Computer Interaction snob then you have a Mac and don't need right-clicking.

Please, someone make my day!

I just discovered a new term!

It's CSCW - Computer Supported Cooperative Work.

Sweet.

Encroaching Automata (but, you know, in a good way)

Holy wow, Google Reader is now making recommendations.

Wow

Animal Crossing

A few weeks spent underwater

It's been a while since I've updated this blog. I'm sort of beginning to wonder what the purpose of it. The last few posts have been all over the map. Am I using this to disseminate things I find cool? Am I using this for commentary or musings? I'd like to use if for all of the above, but it may be time to consider a serious design change.

Every once in a while, I make a consciously drastic change in my daily life. This may be anything from forcing myself to sing in the shower in the morning, or moving my furniture around to a very different configurations. I find this forces me actively adapt to new situations, so I never actually settle into unproductive habits. I'm beginning to think I need to re-think this blog in the same manner. Another problem is that most of my casual updating about my life (with pictures!) now happens over the almighty facebook.

These last two months have been busy. Oh man oh man oh man. I'm so anxious to finish up this undergrad degree it hurts. I've also been on a school hunt. After an especially good find while I was in Vancouver, I've decided to broaden my horizons and look around a little. I'll likely apply to many places, but several factors may influence my final choice. I've also been doing Improv, producing a show and finishing up my degree. This has left me pretty lacking in new interpersonal relationships, although I have to say that the people I'm living with are amazing (sorry, there's no actual link there).

I've managed to play Halo 3, Half-Life 2: Episode 2 and Portal during the wee hours of the night after I've been mentally capable of doing schoolwork. My reading has been lacking lately, although I've managed to organize the giant list of rss feeds I read into Google Reader. I currently read 62, some of which are more news-oriented, some are less serious, and some are rants or laments on the nature of game design. I've taken to watching video of the latest Johnathan Blow speeches while doing laundry or relatively boring homework, too.

Somewhere in here I have a list of art projects to finish. Some involve flash, some involve the internet, some involve text. As usual, thanks for reading and I promise to bring some more coherence to this space in the near future.

Finally, womanly slapping as a gameplay element

LINK to Rose Camellia

The plot of the game follows Rose, a low-born widow of the eldest son of a noble family who was only married yesterday. She must defend her stake to the family mansion by slapping every female in her way. Fantastic! The gameplay is entirely controlled by mouse-tracing, so you literally are dragging your mouse across the other character's face to attack, and then across your own back to evade. Here's a few screenshots:

O-SNAP! forces me to learn

I just started applying for OSAP for the fourth year in a row. The last few years, its just been a series of clicks through all the documentation and then on to the "give me money phase" (some paraphrasing here) but it looks like this year, for each portion of the legalese, there is a short multiple-choice quiz on what the legalese actually says. Initially, I find this incredibly annoying, but its nice that I'm actually being forced to read the fine print on what I'm signing up for.

If only they'd do this with EULAs....

Daft Hands

Holy Crap!

UPDATE: Oh shit! A parody! Again, hilarious



UPDATE 2: Oh shit! More! I'll never understand the relationship with some people and their pets.

I want 10

When I saw Jason (my high-ranked Telus salesman/karaoke friend) in Toronto this past weekend, he had taken a screenshot of an iPhone display and made it the background of his regular phone. I dropped to my knees involuntarily, fooled temporarily and praising him as a god.

In related news,

Games and Education

The link below is to "Statetris", a game where you play tetris with the States of America. After playing it for about 3 minutes, I think I've learned more about the geography of the states than in my previous 22 years of life. Awesome!

http://www.mapmsg.com/games/statetris/usa/

Self-Referential Multiple Choice

I'm currently writing a multiple choice placement test for engineering calculus students. I wrote a draft, and sent it in to the professor I'm working for, where he found an error in this question.

Which statement is correct about the f(x) and its inverse, g(x)?

1. g(x) is the reciprocal of f(x)
2. An output so that g(x) = - f(x)
3. g(f(x)) = x
4. g(x) undoes the action of f(x)
5. 3 and 4
6. I don’t know

Have you spotted the problem?

In the question, #3 is right, #4 is right and so is #5. Or is it? The choice #5 doesn't say that it itself is right. #5 needs to state this fact, given that it isn't talking about statements about calculus, it is talking about statements which may or may not be true.

I'm reading too much Godel Escher Bach.

Peppering of Humour

Perry Bible Fellowship has been going slowly for the past few months (although I did still check it obsessively while I was in Southeast Asia), so I'm happy to resort to xkcd for my visual endorphin needs.

Sitch Ring

Since this is almost the third post in this vein, I'm tempting to add a tag on my blog for "news about sitch-like devices". If you haven't heard about the Sitch, it was a device I invented for the purpose of Deviants, a play I wrote and acted in this past spring. The central idea is that it connects one's mind to all other minds (think like a mental internet) and allows for free flow of information, and the ensuing consequences.

Well here's a video where someone has created a Sitch-like device using wikipedia and Second Life:

All Quiet on the Home Front

I know I've been pretty quiet since I got back from the amazing trip. I've been job searching, which is, for me at least, one of the most stressful activities in the world. Anyway, I may be two inches away from securing something but I can't be really happy until that happens.

Well, I noticed this story recently, combining many things I'm a fan of: Second Life, Richard Dawkins and questions of "reality".

Also, happy birthday to mom.

Psssstthhh!

I know I'm supposed to be in Southeast Asia right now, but The Escapist has a great four-part article by Warren Spector (Deus Ex, Thief, Wing Commander, etc.) on Storytelling in games.

link.

Hooray!

Eidos to open games studio in Montreal

This makes my (very early) day.

Brain damage turns man into human chameleon

What a fascinating article.

This leads to alot of interesting discussions of acting, role-playing and identity crises.

Discovery: Grammatical Group

While over a discussion with my linguist/awesome/web programmer friend Eric Akaoka, I discovered the most interesting thing.

He was going about correcting people on the proper use of the plural form of words, which is completely normal for him.
e.g.

Octopus -> Octopi
Uterus -> Uteri
Clitoris -> Clitorises

Clitoris turned out to be a bit confusing, since most people expected the plural to be Clitori, but Eric corrected us that it was, in fact, Clitorises. For it to be the way we expected, the word would have had to be "Clitorus" with the -us ending.

Suddenly it hit me.

I turned to Eric, and asked
"So, what's the plural of 'us' then?"

There was a few seconds of silence, and then we realized that we had discovered something beautiful:

The plural of I is US, and the plural of US is I. Mathematically speaking, {I, us} is a group under the "plural" operation.

So,

plural(I) = Us
plural(Us) = I

also, the product plural*plural is the identity operator.
i.e. plural(plural(I)) = (plural*plural)(I) = I

fantastic!