Ilomilo!

Polish + Cute + Platform/Puzzler. Coming to XBLA. Looks awesome. This and Monday Night Combat are all I'm really excited for... esp since hearing that Joe Danger isn't coming to the platform :-(

Vintage Book Win!

Score!, originally uploaded by Kim Pallister.

I got this awesome book via ebay. "Inside the Personal Computer" is a somewhat dated but still useful and highly intuitive pop-up book on how computers work. Great for the kids

Thanks to Margaret Robinson for the pointer. Someone else has captured pics of the inside here:

http://jonathanryan.org/2009/04/28/pop-up-guide-to-the-personal-computer/

Sigh. Games as Art (again)

So Roger Ebert has gone curmudgeon on games again, this time using Kelly Santiago's TED talk as fodder. She posts a good rebuttal here. Kotaku's Brian Ashcraft also chimes in with a good response.

If you were following, you might have missed this really good response from the esteemed Scott McCloud. The whole thing is worth reading but here's an excerpt:

If you’re asking if videogames are art, I think you’re asking the wrong question. I don’t think art is an either/or proposition. Any medium can accommodate it, and there can be at least a little art in nearly everything we do.

Once in a while, someone makes a work in their chosen medium so driven by aesthetic concerns and so removed from any other consideration that we trot out the A-word, but even then it’s a matter of degrees, and for most creative endeavors you can find a full spectrum from the sublime to the mundane.

Book Review: The Invention of Air

Wow, was this a lucky surprise. I picked it up off the shelf at the library, randomly browsing their history section when another book I was looking for was out. Here' s a link to the book on Amazon:

The Invention of Air: A Story Of Science, Faith, Revolution, And The Birth Of America

The book is the story of Joseph Priestley, who though he is not nearly as well known as the founding fathers of the US, was friend to many of them, published over 150 works, and did no less than discover oxygen and the concept of biosystems.

It's a fascinating bit of history, and holds some interesting lessons for today. For example, after providing for his family for several years under patronage of a wealthy individual, that patronage was revoked. He then had the idea of crowd-sourcing that patronage, distributing among a collection of patrons to diversify risk. I couldn't help but think of many of the game projects being done on Kickstrarter.

Anyhow, fun bit of reading and illuminating from the standpoint of history, politics, and science

Book Review: The Audacity of Hope

OK, maybe I'm the late to the party, but we had a long car trip and brought it along as an audio book.

Obama reads it himself, which is nice. he's such a great speaker. I agree with most of his ideas and would have voted for him if I could have (still don't have citizenship).

One thing that did strike me though was how... formulaic, his prose is.

"When it comes to issue A, some people feel adjective A, adjective B, or even adjective C. Then again others feel adjective D, or E, or F." - Rinse, lather repeat.

I still think he's great, but he's more of a politician than most would have us beleive

Steve Jobs shows his REAL thoughts on iPhone development

I'm long overdue to write up a post on the iPhone, appstore and closed-vs-open platforms. This isn' t it.

In the meantime though, Dave wrote up some thoughts on the announcements from Apple recently, and *brilliantly* caught something Jobs said that most folks seem to have missed:

Jobs, in speaking of the addition to an advertising revenue model to the platform, said

“This is us helping our developers make money so they can survive and keep the prices of their apps reasonable,”

To which Dave asks:

Btw, was anyone else struck by Jobs’ use of the word “survive?” I think that’s the closest he’ll ever come to admitting that life for developers is rough in the world o’Apple.

Bravo! What a catch. Quelle choix de verbe! "Survive" indeed!

Pixels

Fun game-themed vid for those that haven't seen it plastered everywhere already: