talk from GDC 2012 on iPhone/iPad game controls re Super Crate Box etc.

tools for rendering Stamen's toner style maps

“For the last few days I have been wondering what it might have been like to play Tourney on my family’s old Amiga 500. This is how I have come to remember that fictitious experience.”

“Compare this to Animal Crossing, which, while framed with a structure of repetition—performing chores to pay off a mortgage—emphasizes the intrinsic rewards of doing so. As a player, you check in regularly, and finish your tasks within 10 or 15 minutes; it is possible to exhaust the possibilities of a play session in half an hour. And yet returning the next day will yield new fish, new plants, new conversation from villagers pleased to see you.”

“Create a physical space that encourages social activity.”

“Link to others as you'd have them link to you. Easy.”

“Oh, FFS. I can’t believe we still argue about this: Older goes on the left. Newer goes on the right. It’s a timeline. Minard got it right.”

mostly just “let's show everything on a timeline, and make the posts with lots of comments bigger”

“Down way at the bottom is this little tiny box with a tiny font with no extra tools that says leave your comment here. That already sends the message that the publication doesn’t value commenters as much as they value their own stuff.”

“Ugh. Don't block thoughtful comments on your blog by instantly putting them into ‘moderation’. It assumes all behavior is criminal first. We definitely need better tools for managing blog comments, but email would have never taken off if every email was assumed to be spam first.”

“IKEA clearly tips the Bauhaus balance in favor of business. IKEA’s success, however, might prove that consumers care less about the Bauhaus emphasis on lasting value and a humane society than they do about buying cheap stuff right now. ... For IKEA, form does not follow function. It follows price. IKEA claims it battles elitism, but it really battles cost. ‘Our biggest idea is the smallest price,’ reads an IKEA catalog. Compare this (rather unfairly, I realize) with a statement by Walter Gropius: ‘We aimed at realizing standards of excellence, not creating transient novelties.’”

“The crazy thing is that I’d bet that right now, today, we have the right technology smarts and certainly the right design smarts to solve [the media center] problem. But the missing leg of the stool, a rational, user-focused business model, is still sorely missing.”

“When you perform ‘bigger’ actions, Fever uses a modal dialog box to ask for confirmation, something I've always called The Ghetto Shield *because it's so lame.* ... This is another desktop UI convention that has no place on the web. Even Apple left this in the dustbin of history when it replaced system-blocking dialogs with per-window sheets with the introduction of OSX.”

“Like those off-color panels in a Scooby Doo cartoon from the 70's, gamers can see an approaching scripted event instantly, and it becomes a matter of anticipation instead of surprise.”

in case i try to lose this link again

high level Werewolf is definitely a thing to behold, even only at SG Foo

as a WF customer, the new design is really nice

Those new UK coins are hilariously beautiful

“Uh-oh. If solution #1 had worked, people would not have needed to invent solution #2. If solution #2 had worked, people would not have needed to invent solution #3. Since there are five solutions, there is a good chance that none of them work.”

“Instills a child-like sense of befuddlement.”

"So what makes good copy good? Perhaps we can find out by considering what’s made the best of the best… the best."

"[I]t's a perfect evocation of, as the subtitle says, how engineers see the world of everyday life: as an assortment of things -- objects, assemblages, and machines -- maintained in relation to one another by unseen forces, both manmade and natural."

this + gopher bridge plz

omg big true

hahahaha

"Load interface!" means turn on referrers

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