To my friends who have sleeve tattoos, gauged ears or drawn-on moustaches, please don’t take this seriously <3

Sources: here and here.

This makes me pretty happy. Mike Ando has created a real, working Myst linking book.

Well, actually it’s a Myst-playing PC inside a hollowed-out book identical to the original Myst book, but it’s still gorgeous.

I am a lifelong fan of Cyan Worlds’ Myst games, especially the first two. They occupy a special, formative part of my mind.

Something else which I am excited about, but which I have yet to fully investigate is Mystcraft, a Minecraft mod which allows players to create linking books and write descriptive books and use them to travel between worlds. That seems to rank among the best ideas.

This has been plaguing me for a while since I updated to Mac OS 10.8. Dragging layers in the layers palette of Photoshop CS4 would cause an immediate crash to desktop. Finally found a solution in this thread which worked.

Solution: turn off the OS power-saving graphics switching.

It’s the checkbox at the top of the Energy Saving preference pane:

You’ll need to ensure that it’s unchecked and probably restart after that.

Now I can drag layers all day long.

Since Braid, 2D indie puzzle platformers have had somewhat of a resurgence (to put it mildly). Typically with such a release, we expect the game to have some unique, mind-bending mechanic, sport either retro pixels or hand-drawn art, and to be “atmospheric”. Closure fits snugly into this paradigm. Going in, I was worried I’d be trudging through it, rapidly losing interest as the novelty wore off as has happened before with indie puzzlers. But this didn’t happen; Closure grabbed me and, through its excellently designed levels and well-crafted difficulty curve, lead me through to completion in just a few play sessions.

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What with the way the world is at the moment, I’ve been thinking a lot about social justice. I find myself confronted with sexism, homophobia, and even racism, with increasing frequency both offline and online. Possibly it’s just because I’m becoming more conscious of these things as I become more educated about the world, myself and the power dynamics therein. But even empirically it seems like the dark forces are massing.

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I’ve recently been pursuing the possibility of voting in the upcoming US presidential election, since I am a US citizen. The trickiness is that I have never lived in the US but am a citizen by virtue of my parent who was born there.

The UOCAVA protects absentee voting rights of some citizens overseas, including those who have never lived there.

Here’s where I’ve been looking; perhaps it will help you if you’re also considering voting absentee.

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This is kinda old, I think, but it’s pretty great. A rant by Bret Victor on the Future of Interaction Design.

From the rant:

... There’s a reason that our fingertips have some of the densest areas of nerve endings on the body. This is how we experience the world close-up. This is how our tools talk to us. The sense of touch is essential to everything that humans have called “work” for millions of years.

Now, take out your favorite Magical And Revolutionary Technology Device. Use it for a bit.

What did you feel? Did it feel glassy? Did it have no connection whatsoever with the task you were performing? ...

Go read the rest!

Time for another podcast recommendation!

This time it’s for Robert M. Price’s show The Human Bible. It’s a show where theologian Dr. Robert M. Price discusses topics in biblical criticism and answers listener questions using his vast knowledge of biblical and Christian history. Best of all, he comes from a secular perspective, understanding the text as a human creation, not one inspired by a god. And yet as a former Baptist pastor he has insight into the biblical literalist mindset.

In my formative years I was a great fan of Reginald Finley Sr.'s The Infidel Guy Show. Robert Price’s “Bible Geek” episodes of that show were some of my favourites — his great voice, his quiet sense of humour, his breadth of knowledge. His new show here is much the same, though unfortunately without Reginald Finley’s irreverent co-hosting.

I’ve only got an amateur interest in biblical criticism, so I’ve got no way to assess whether this guy knows what he’s talking about or is respected in his field, but he sure sounds like an expert.

I want to describe an interesting experience I had recently. Something which completely changed my experience of a piece of art and something which is almost unique to the medium of video games.

The other day I was pointed towards Souvenir, a work-in-progress from MFA students Robert Yang, Mohini Dutta, and Ben Norskov. In the creators’ words:

Souvenir is a first-person video game about growing up and leaving home. The disorientation of becoming an adult is reflected in the surreal M.C. Escher-inspired world with multiple gravities.

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