Hey Hollywood, what's that behind you?

It's amateur content... and it's coming on fast!



Simply awesome!

Hacker Wiizardry

Apologies for the title. I am as prone to Wii-puns as the rest of the blogosphere.

A number of people pointed me to Johnny Chung Lee's youtube vids. Lee has done some interesting hacks with the Wiimote, and posted vids of them along with explanations. They include:

Interactive Whiteboard:



Minority Report-style finger-tracking:



VR headtracking:



These are all very cool, yes. But the real lesson to take away here is that this is what happens when you base your products on open standards (Wiimote uses bluetooth to communicate). This in turn is predicated on not selling your HW at a loss, which means you have to be damn sure people aren't using it for something other than its intended purpose, but that's the subject of another post...

One does wonder whether the folks at Nintendo are benefiting from these vids in some way. If I were them I'd be replicating the experience and doing some game jams around them to see if they have legs.

Metaplace elevator pitch video

There's been a video posted of Raph doing this short version of the metaplace pitch. If you haven't heard about it yet, well, you will.

Polygon Family: Episode 2

Because YouTube is the bestest thing EVAR!

Long lost from the Siggraph Electronic Theater a few years back.

And now, a word from our sponsors...

I'm selling out. I'm putting up ads.

Not that I really think I can sell out for an significant amount of coin, but I want to play around a bit with the consumer-side of adsense and some of it's competitors, so I'm trying a couple things for a few months and I'll see how they pan out. I'll share results (if any) here at that time.

The first thing is putting an ad block on my blog. I'm using text ad links and as you can see (at right, under 'sponsors') they have yet to populate the feed. We'll see whether anything comes of it. Proceeds from these ads, if any, will go to my yearly contribution to the EFF. Ads won't be a big part of the blog and the blog will continue to deliver the miniscule value that it does by entertaining readers via my pedantic banter about games, kids, and my cat, etc. It'll also serve as the yardstick for the other thing I'm doing.

The second thing I'm trying is a little more interesting, IMHO. Inspired by this Seth Godin post, I created another blog, with a very narrow focus. It'll get one post a day, and that's it. You can find it at www.gamebizvideo.com. Proceeds from the ads on this site (again, should there be any), will be used to market the blog itself. I want to see whether niche content + shoestring bootstrapping can work. Again, I'll share results here.

That is all, we now return you to regularly scheduled programming.

One for the ladies?

Silverjet airlines in the UK is attempting to differentiate themselves by having at least one ladies-only restroom per plane. Nice differentiator.

This ad talking about it, while catchy, I think misses the mark of it's target audience.

At least I think so. I think I'll go watch it a few more times to decide...

Philosophical Mii

Funii...

If stoner doodles were animated

As Steve puts it:

If you’ve ever played Line Rider, you are completely owned by this video. Just give up now.




This is complete Line Rider pownage. It occurred to me watching it though that it was like a moving version of the doodles that stoners in high school (yours truly included) would draw on their notebooks (back when notebook meant paper, not a $2000 computer).

Web 2.0 - The Machine is Us/ing Us

Everyone on the web will link to this, because it's the most concise explanation of Web 2.0 seen to date, and is entertaining and inspiring to boot.

Saints Row Bugs: The Musical

OMG. Truly, the Internet never ceases to amaze.

Saints Row is a fun GTA-3 clone. I've sunk a lot of time into it. It's also buggy. I have seen the bugs. They have, well, bugged me. However, never did it occur to me to make a musical out of it:




Hi res version here.