Robert Yang (who I’ve mentioned here before) made such a good let’s play of the first room and corridor of Half-Life.

A “let’s play” is traditionally a narrated video of one or more people playing through a video game. Usually they are just to document the video game so that it can be experienced or understood without playing it, but some of the best ones are made by people who know the game inside out and are able to add some amount of context or commentary to the play-through, drawing the viewer’s attention to specific details and not getting side-tracked by any difficulty in progression. There are many great let’s plays on the Let’s Play Archive.

Robert Yang’s video is not really about the game as it is played, but about the design of the game from the perspective of a level designer. It was made for a let’s play event.

I don’t think he has plans to do more but I would listen to that guy talk about level design any time. A couple of the comments under his post of the video are worth reading too.

I was trying to make a bunch of elements change position as an audio file played, using a snippet something like:

$(audiohtml).bind("timeupdate", onAudioUpdate);
$(audiohtml).bind("play", onAudioUpdate);
$(audiohtml).bind("pause", onAudioUpdate);

function onAudioUpdate() {
  // Move the elements here
}

But the trouble was that the audio element’s timeupdate event only fires once every 200ms or so on my browser (this is set by the HTML5 audio specification and isn’t modifiable as far as I know).

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So the GCHQ and the NSA are apparently teaming up to do a whole lot of extremely legal warrantless mass surveillance.

I am not against spying or surveillance per se. Anyone who lives in the UK and says “if you’ve nothing to hide you’ve nothing to fear” doesn’t understand the purpose of judicial oversight and probably doesn’t speak arabic. I believe in judicial oversight. An amoral-nerd-handler is not a judge. And political bias, false-positives and chilling self-censorship are the only outcomes of the GCHQ program I can see on the horizon.

So, if you’re emailing me, please feel free to encrypt your message with my PGP public key.

I’m currently running GPGtools, which is a very user-friendly free implementation of PGP and interfaces nicely with Mac OS and Mail.app for Mac OS in particular.

Today I read two letters written by companies which impressed me.

The first is by Kickstarter. Some asshole was trying to raise money to produce a “seduction guidebook” which advocated sexual assault of women, and though many people asked Kickstarter to cancel the project before the funding period completed, they didn’t. Then today they wrote a (seemingly) sincere letter of apology to their users, and by way of compensation have donated $25,000 to RAINN, an anti-sexual assault organisation.

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In Mac OS 10.8 Mountain Lion, Apple removed the Email link to this page option in Safari, replacing it with Share > Email this page, which places the entire contents of the page into the email, images and all.

Sometimes this isn’t what you want, though. Sometimes just a link is best.

I’ve written a short AppleScript to perform the old “just a link” function, and will explain how to make it run from within Safari using a customisable key command.

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Oh this? Just a film of landing on Mars.

PS. If you haven’t seen NASA’s “Seven Minutes of Terror” video, it’s worth checking out. Those folks are crazy.

In the past few years there have been released a handful of indie games which share a kind of common form and aesthetic, one that strikes a chord with me. This design space is represented in my mind by Kairo, and the upcoming Fract and NaissanceE, though it contains many more.

The quality these games have in common is use a first-person perspective and an experience based around architecture and soundscapes, working in concert to elicit some aesthetic or emotional response.

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Clint Hocking’s talks are always interesting, but this is a particularly fascinating one from the GDC 2011.

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I’m a local organiser for the Workshop on Algebra, Coalgebra and Topology (part of the Wessex Theory Seminar) which will be held at the University of Bath on March 1st 2013. More details on that page to which I just linked. Email me if you’d like to attend (registration is free). Proceedings will be published in ENTCS if enough people submit.