Links and write-ups about beautiful things from around the web!
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Classic Nintendo Games are (NP-)Hard
Science!
We prove NP-hardness results for five of Nintendo’s largest video game franchises: Mario, Donkey Kong, Legend of Zelda, Metroid, and Pokemon. Our results apply to Super Mario Bros. 1, 3, Lost Levels, and Super Mario World; Donkey Kong Country 1-3; all Legend of Zelda games except Zelda II: The Adventure of Link; all Metroid games; and all Pokemon role-playing games. For Mario and Donkey Kong, we show NP-completeness. In addition, we observe that several games in the Zelda series are PSPACE-complete.
Translation: video games might provide interesting fodder for complexity theory, and possibly provide a model for novel ways of looking at difficult decision problems. In any case, I just like seeing Metroid mentioned on the arXiv.
(Via New Scientist)
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Fake Unicode Consortium
I’m getting far too many chuckles out of this page for the Fake Unicode Consortium, which pairs up obscure Unicode glyphs with better names. Depicted here:
Unicode character U+2231: ‘NOW FLIP SNAKE TO COOK OTHER SIDE’
http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/2231/index.htm(Via O’Reilly Radar)
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Moebius on Drawing Comics
Comics give to the artist a very interesting field of exploration and research. Everything is possible. You can be very small or very big or very modest or very ambitious. You can stay in a regular style like everybody, or you can escape and be completely unusual and incredible. You can give more to the world, more to the drawing. Everything. Jean Giraud (aka Moebius) on why he turned to drawing comics as a young man, from the documentary The Masters of Comic Book Art (was on YouTube but got yanked, VHS might be the only option at present?), as quoted in his NYTimes obit.
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Boston News on the Morris Worm
[Video no longer available]
A fun Boston nightly news clip from 1988 on the outbreak of the Morris worm, one of the first Internet-spreading infections that caught mainstream attention. There’s much to love about this clip: the “part-time virus hunter”, the scenes of MIT’s computer labs, the bizarre (but maybe slyly satirical?) footage of the infamous Atari 2600 ET game inserted, um, I guess to, uh, illustrate something computer-y?
(Via Dangerous Minds)
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The Secret Font of Monkey Island
A fan-made port of the pixel font built into the adventure game classics The Secret of Monkey Island and Monkey Island 2: LeChuck’s Revenge. As a bonus, a separate version is available that is properly kerned and hinted. (double bonus: opening the .ttf file in Font Book reveals that the demonstration string for the font reads “You fight like a dairy farmer!”)
A post combining Lucasfilm Games and typography? Immediate reblog!
1990s, dos, font, fonts, games, lucasarts, lucasfilm, monkey island, nostalgia, type, typography, video games -
Digital Camera on a Drill
A little video spin art for your Saturday night enjoyment.
(Via Quipsologies)
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RIP Steve Kordek, pinball pioneer
Steve Kordek, the guy who revolutionized the world of pinball by introducing a machine with the now-familiar electromechanical flippers at the bottom of the playfield (imagine: a player can somewhat control the game!), passed away this week at the age of 100. His 6-decade career started off with remarkable serendipity. From the NY Times obit:
On a visit to his hometown in 1937, he was walking down a street without an umbrella when a torrential rain forced him to step into the lobby of a building he was passing. It was the Genco company. A receptionist asked if he was looking for a job.
“I had never seen a pin game before in my life,” Mr. Kordek told The Chicago Tribune in 2009. For 45 cents an hour, he was soon doing soldering on the company’s production line. …
Mr. Kordek never got tired of the clang, clack and buzz of pinball. “I had more fun in this business than anyone could believe,” he told The Tribune.
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Sesame Seed Braile Burgers
To advertise their new accessibility-friendly menus, the South African arm of the Wimpy fast food chain delivers burgers to blind users with a special twist: the sesame seeds on the bun spell out a message in braille! While it might be viewed as a marketing gimmick, it’s nice to see a fast food place making efforts to be inclusive, and the recipients in the video certainly seem amused. (a narrated version of the video is also available for the visually impaired)
PS: what’s up with both the Popeye’s and Wimpy fast food chains completely ignoring their namesake cartoon characters in their branding?
PPS: evidently the Wimpy UK mascot, a weird little guy in a Beefeater outfit, got his own platforming game back in the early 1980s! Thanks, Wikipedia rabbit hole.
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This May Be the Most Important Proposition
This may be the most important proposition revealed by history: “At the time, no one knew what was coming.” From the first page of Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84 (translated by Jay Rubin). His earlier books that I’ve read have been wonderful dream factories, but I’ve seen this one scoring some negative reviews. I don’t know what’s coming over the next 925 pages, but I have hope that it’ll be good.
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What Sumerians Can Teach Us About Data
Gathering data is not a neutral act, it will alter the power balance, usually in favor of the people collecting the information.
From What the Sumerians can teach us about data, a blog post noting that the predecessor of writing was the depiction of data, a concept that helped establish the hierarchical systems of power in the early city-states. (I like his comparison between the data-protecting curses inscribed on the cuneiform tablets and the FBI WARNING notices on VHS!)