Links and write-ups about beautiful things from around the web!
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Katie Couric Goes All Regulators on Some FMV
Katie Couric goes all regulators on some FMV villains in this circa 1990 clip about arcade laserdisc sensation (well, maybe not so much) Mad Dog McCree. It’s kind of sad to see early 90’s tv – the production values on the crummy video game look far more polished than the Today Show’s.
(Via GameSetWatch)
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Another World Ported to HTML5 Canvas and JavaScript
Another World ported to HTML5’s <canvas> and JavaScript.
One of the best games of all time, now running experimentally in your browser, demonstrating that the future could be very bright for non-proprietary interactive content on the web. It’s only the first part of the 2nd level (or whatever you want to call the cage-swinging, alien-buddy-meeting scene) and it’s glitchy, but still looks beautiful and smoothly animated (maybe a bit too smooth, due to the <canvas> polygons being all anti-aliased and filtered out of the box). If you’ve never played the original game, an amazing high-res WinXP-compatible remake came out a couple of years back in honor of the 15th anniversary of its original release.
(Via GameSetWatch)
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dpBestflow: Digital Photography Best Practices
The American Society of Media Photographers has a new resource up for people working with digital images: dpBestflow rounds up the best practices and workflows for digital photography, in neat, easy-to-digest pieces, with tips on subjects ranging from camera file formats to desktop hardware to room lighting. If you look at their handy Quick Reference overview, be sure to note that each bullet point links to a more in-depth piece if you’re interesting in drilling down for more info…
(Via John Nack)
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But Gladwell Frequently Holds Forth About
But Gladwell frequently holds forth about statistics and psychology, and his lack of technical grounding in these subjects can be jarring. He provides misleading definitions of “homology,” “saggital plane” and “power law” and quotes an expert speaking about an “igon value” (that’s eigenvalue, a basic concept in linear algebra). In the spirit of Gladwell, who likes to give portentous names to his aperçus, I will call this the Igon Value Problem: when a writer’s education on a topic consists in interviewing an expert, he is apt to offer generalizations that are banal, obtuse or flat wrong. From Steve Pinker’s NY Times book review of Malcolm Gladwell’s “What the Dog Saw”. Further discussion of the Igon Value Effect over at Language Log.
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From Endless Loop a Brief History of Chiptunes
From Endless loop: A brief history of chiptunes:
Pressure Cooker was an ambitious exception among its contemporaries. In 1980, most home computer music remained limited to single-voice melodies and lacked dynamic range. Robert “Bob” Yannes, a self-described “electronic music hobbyist,” saw the sound hardware in first-generation microcomputers as “primitive” and suggested that they had been “designed by people who knew nothing about music” (Yannes 1996). In 1981, he began to design a new audio chip for MOS Technology called the SID (Sound Interface Device). In contrast to the kludgy Atari TIA, Yannes intended the SID to be as useful in professional synthesizers as it would be in microcomputers. Later that year, Commodore decided to include MOS Technology’s new SID alongside a dedicated graphics chip in its next microcomputer, the Commodore 64. Unlike the Atari architecture, in which a single piece of hardware controlled both audio and video output, the Commodore machine afforded programmers greater flexibility in their implementation of graphics and sound […]
When I saw this headline linked by Waxy I took it to be an overview of the recent (late 90’s to now) chiptune music craze, but it’s actually a nice little overview of the nearly 30 years old history of writing music on game hardware. Even includes sections on cracktros, the demoscene, and the early advent of trackers, along with some good videos of the relevant technology.
(Photo of the SID chip via Chris Hand)
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NASA’s Be a Martian
NASA has launched (pardon the sorta pun) a new website for kids called Be a Martian, with various games that allow them to rack up points and earn badges as they learn about the red planet. The interesting twist? The games are actually crowdsourced work, real data sorting through the aligning of map images taken by Mars Odyssey explorer with elevation images from the Mars Global Surveyor project. Kids play a game, NASA gets useful data that’s otherwise hard to get computationally. The Register has a good writeup of the project.
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Timeline of Analog Video Synthesizers
From the ANIMAC to the FairLight Computer Video Instrument, a nice roundup of mostly analog video-mangling technology from the 1960’s to the 1980’s. Lots of pictures and back stories, too.
(Via Coudal Partners’ Fresh Signals)
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LEGO Hole Punch!
LEGO holepunch + hip Japanese retailer MUJI = sublime new construction paper fun.
(Via Make and a million other design/crafty blogs)
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Vanja Mrgan’s Game Character Updates
Illustrator Vanja Mrgan is updating various game and cartoon characters (and some non-imaginary folks, too) with thick, full beards. I particularly like this version of Nintendo’s Mr. Game and Watch.
(Via GameSetWatch)
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The Last Days of Gourmet Magazine
From Last Days of Gourmet, a photo set depicting the offices of the now-defunct magazine. There are plenty of better photos in the group, lots of scenes of office supplies in the trash and empty workspaces, but I liked this one the best: evidently someone went all Hawkeye Pierce.
(Via Coudal Partners)
