- Boston Review — Claude S. Fischer: The Loneliness Scare
‘People using the Internet, most studies show, increase the volume of their meaningful social contacts. E-communications do not generally replace in-person contact.’
- Is Facebook Making Us Lonely? – Magazine – The Atlantic
‘In the face of this social disintegration, we have essentially hired an army of replacement confidants, an entire class of professional carers.’
- The Most Dangerous Gamer – Magazine – The Atlantic
‘The game industry’s harshest critic is also its most cerebral developer, a maverick bent on changing the way we think about games and storytelling.’
Links for April 29, 2012
Links for April 24, 2012
- Radio Time Machine
“Hello, I’m a musical time machine. Go back in time to hear how popular music has changed from 1940 to today, as told by the Billboard Top 100.”
Links for April 23, 2012
- Johann Sebastian Joust | Die Gute Fabrik
- This 3-D, Multiplayer Board Game Mashes Up Foosball And Pong | Co.Design: business + innovation + design
‘Each player holds their own Android phone while facing an octagon. This octagon has a terrain all its own–polygonal peaks and valleys–and then it’s projection-mapped with a digital skin. Using touchscreens, each player slingshots their ball across the screen to knock out pieces on the board.’
Links for April 19, 2012
- Gamasutra – Features – Jerked Around by the Magic Circle – Clearing the Air Ten Years Later
‘For me this idea — that games are a context from which meaning can emerge — is so simple as to be almost banal. Hardly a cause for debate! And note that this general understanding of the magic circle does not imply the impossibly brittle, heavy-handed caricature that is so often criticized.’
- The Jig Is Up: Time to Get Past Facebook and Invent a New Future – Alexis Madrigal – Technology – The Atlantic
‘Thousands of startups are doing almost exactly the same thing, minor variations on a theme. Tech journalists report endlessly on the same handful of well-established companies…. What I see is people filling ever-smaller niches in this “ecosystem” or that “ecosystem.”’
- Dick Clark, TV Host and Icon of New Year’s Eve, Is Dead at 82 – NYTimes.com
‘The perpetually youthful-looking television host whose long-running daytime song-and-dance fest, “American Bandstand,” did as much as anyone or anything to advance the influence of teenagers and rock ’n’ roll on American culture, died on Wednesday in Santa Monica, Calif. He was 82.’
Bill Plympton couch gag for The Simpsons.
Bill Plympton couch gag for The Simpsons.
Links for April 16, 2012
- PONGS
36 variations on a theme.
- The New Aesthetic Needs to Get Weirder – Ian Bogost – Technology – The Atlantic
‘The New Aesthetic could use a dose of good, old-fashioned twentieth century immodesty. Not naïve fascism or impulsive radicalism, but bigger eyes, larger hopes, weirder goals. Sterling shares this impression: “a heap of eye-catching curiosities don’t constitute a compelling worldview.”‘
Links for April 15, 2012
- Drawn – Twitter Text Art Car Commercial
‘A Twitter profile from Smart Argentina (@smartArg) features all the frames to a text art animation, a car commercial… the idea being that you press / hold the ‘j’ button on your keyboard to automatically jump to the next tweet in succession.’
- Humans TXT: We Are People, Not Machines.
‘An initiative for knowing the people behind a website. It’s a TXT file that contains information about the different people who have contributed to building the website.’
- Initializr – Start an HTML5 Boilerplate project in 15 seconds!
- HTML5 Boilerplate
- Emilio Gomariz – today and tomorrow
Animations made from OS X UI transitions.
- Why Food Isn’t the Point – Kill Screen
‘The artist is still performing a real, physical service in preparing a meal, but the food itself is not the endpoint. His game is to underline the social aspect and the fundamental transaction of cooking: the actual dinner is secondary to his preparation of the meal for you, and the staged context that you enjoy it in—in this case the unlikely background of an art museum.’
- Gamasutra – Features – Defender’s Quest: By the Numbers
‘The upshot is that on Kong, the score depends more on the first impressions of a large audience, trends downwards over time, and is more vulnerable to one star hate-reviews. On Newgrounds a devoted fanbase of site regulars can gradually raise the score and easily offset drive-by down-ratings. Shortly after launching, our score on both sites was around 4.11. It’s plateaued on Kong, but it’s up to an unbelievable 4.40 on Newgrounds!’
Links for April 14, 2012
- Drug-free migraine treatment and more with TheraSpecs Glasses
‘Some light can irritate nerves in the eyes and brain. That nerve irritation contributes to headaches, eyestrain, painful light sensitivity (photophobia), and can trigger migraine attacks. TheraSpecs block the unwanted light to provide immediate and lasting relief.’
Links for April 13, 2012
- Computer Science for Non-Majors Takes Many Forms – NYTimes.com
‘Jeannette M. Wing, head of the computer science department at Carnegie Mellon University, wrote a manifesto arguing that basic literacy should be redefined to include understanding of computer processes…. There is little agreement within the field, however, about what exactly are the core elements of computational thinking. Nor is there agreement about how much programming students must do, if any, in order to understand it.’