|
Chocolate chip cookies Wednesday, July 9, 2008 ...
This article borders on a master's thesis on cookies, but one takeaway secret was "let your dough rest for 36 hours." I assume you have to leave home for that period, or you'd eat it raw.
Where the Hell is Matt Wednesday, July 2, 2008 ...
The 2008 edition of "Where the Hell is Matt", where a Connecticut man travels the world to perform the same goofy dance in exotic and familiar places. It's beautiful and inspiring and cheering. Perhaps it's my rubbish memory, but this edition is my favourite so far.
Freezer Bag Cooking Friday, June 27, 2008 ...
We'll be car camping for year to come still, but I've started getting interested in tips for travelling more simply. This recipe site found through AskMefi's camping hacks thread.
Answering a Climate Skeptic Wednesday, June 18, 2008 ...
A collection of responses to common arguments about climate change and global warming. Filed here before I forget.
Random encounters Wednesday, June 11, 2008 ...
The new fourth edition rules of Dungeons and Dragons are designed to make it easy to mix and match sets of monsters that will challenge but not overwhelm your party. So easy, that Asmor has created a web page to randomly create these challenges. Now the tough part is figuring out what the stirge, magma hunter and hyena were doing together in the first place...
Yeondoo Jung Thursday, May 29, 2008 ...
Children's drawings brought to life. Your mom will forward you this soon as an HTML mail, but I don't care.
PC Gaming in 2008 Tuesday, May 13, 2008 ...
I've been catching up on my computer game reading for months now and even so, over half of these Reasons to be a PC Gamer in 2008 were new to me. A free Heroes of Might and Magic browser-based multiplayer game? Or to abbreviate: HOMMBBMMORPG? Most of these games are upcoming, so really this is a 2009 list.
The Plot-Driven Door Monday, May 12, 2008 ...
A well-earned rant about impassable doors in computer RPGs, complete with a Neverwinter Nights 2 screenshot covered in post-its outlining how pen and paper heroes would have handled the challenge.
Moo Tang Clan - improving Azeroth Friday, May 2, 2008 ...
Garumoo is a World of Warcraft player, but he or she has a designer's eye. Almost all the entries on the blog focus on a shortcoming of WoW, chased by possible fixes or new directions. Garumoo's game wishes seems very close to my own, which means they are GENIUS. The site's only a few months old, so I exhausted the archives quickly. Looking forward to more.
Kill Ten Rats Thursday, April 24, 2008 ...
Oh, what a fine name for this blog about multiplayer fantasy games.
Spirit of the Century Friday, April 4, 2008 ...
A fun-sounding roleplaying game set in the pulp 1930s. Two gameplay features stood out. First, when you have the Academics skill, you can change the world of the game by "knowing" facts. The example is the review has a player encountering an angry native tribe and declaring that they are the Yondallak tribe, famous for respecting shows of courage. As in an improv show, the game master picks up the invention and weaves it into play.
The other gameplay feature I liked are character traits like "Learned combat in the ice monastery of Lahamra" or "I knew him at Oxford." When this trait could be handy, you can spend a "fate point" to get some dice bonuses. The game master gives you fate points by doing the reverse -- applying dice penalities in situations where your trait could be a drawback. In both cases, you come up with a little story about why the trait matters.
Smoot Tuesday, April 1, 2008 ...
I was using Google Maps to measure the distance between my cottage and my friend Joe's new house and noticed that one unit offered by Google is the "smoot." Wikipedia delivers with the MIT-based history of the smoot. I love that the young man the measure is named after went on to be the head of the ANSI and ISO standards organizations.
Photopia Tuesday, March 25, 2008 ...
A beautiful, sad, unfair piece of fiction, delivered as a text adventure game. The author's notes convinced me that interactive fiction has an advantage over other types of fiction here, because you inhabit the characters, you adopt them, and their perspectives become yours. (My goodness, Photopia is ten years old!)
Wikihistory: Good news, I've killed Hitler! Wednesday, March 19, 2008 ...
Ah, reposting BoingBoing links. Finally, we're back to what makes Mooselessness irreplaceable.
Google Nanaimo Thursday, March 13, 2008 ...
The capital of Google Earth is Nanaimo? "Their citizens have more information about their city than the people of San Francisco." "Eventually, Nanaimo plans to equip its grass-cutting machines with GPS devices, so residents can use Google to find out when last it was groomed by the city's gardening staff." But will they network the racing bathtubs?
DealExtreme Thursday, March 13, 2008 ...
Confession: I'm a sucker for those globalization spinoffs: cheap toxic Pacific Rim gadgets made by condemned child criminals. This web site collects them all in one spot. USB vacuum? $4. Ten pack of keychain flashlights? $5. They ship worldwide for free.
Accio tunes Friday, February 29, 2008 ...
May I just say that art is irresistible when it grows out of love? Here are over 100 bands whose music is based on the Harry Potter novels. Found through Penny Arcade, who recommend the Ministry of Magic, especially their duet with the Parselmouths, Snape versus Snape. Let me know if you find a favourite.
Salary range Thursday, February 21, 2008 ...
Tips on how to avoid giving a salary range in an interview. They're pretty aggressive. I think the unwritten last step is "pretend to see a monkey behind the interviewer and then snap his neck." Note to employers googling me: I'll totally do it. But imagine having my proven neck-snapping skills on your team!
Kate Beaton's history project Friday, February 8, 2008 ...
This site made me feel like sites from when the web was new, and you could discover beautiful things no one else had seen. Visit her comics library, especially her conversations with a younger self.
Can a lightsaber cut through Superman? Wednesday, February 6, 2008 ...
Another entry for my list of Unexpected Products of the ARPANET.
Dice Wars Sunday, January 20, 2008 ...
I've been trying to rebuild my video gaming vocabulary, reading designer blogs to see what they're talking about, looking at teaser videos, interviews and playing some casual games like Peggle that most of the world has already retired. Dice Wars is a clever little Risk-like game where you tromp around the map with armies of dice, earning more dice by controlling a large amount of contiguous territory. The trick of the game is not so much when to attack, but where. Recognizing my vulnerable and expendable battlefields was the point where I finally turned my string of losses into a win. Dice Wars feels like a board game, but it would be impractical to play in the real world, because of the hassle of gathering, totalling and restacking dice hundreds of times. Thank goodness for robots.
Maptool Saturday, January 5, 2008 ...
It's unlikely my friends and I will ever find enough time in our pockets to play role playing games online. All the same, I was impressed by this free mapping tool. Easy tokens, paths, distance measurements, light, fog of war, all on top of custom maps.
Thirst Saturday, December 22, 2007 ...
My three-year-old daughter says "I don't need water. I can eat monsters and drink their feelings."
Dwarf Fortress - a game from a parallel universe Monday, December 3, 2007 ...
Costik's essay and all the other praise and devotion for Dwarf Fortress led me to try it.
I want to love it. I can bear the ASCII art, and the day-long learning curve, but the insane interface drove me out of the game. Try to buy goods. What I'd like is a long list of goods with quantity fields and a single Done button. Instead, you have to navigate a wee scrolling window to each individual product, select the item, increment your quantity with arrow keys, and repeat for the dozens of things you might want to buy. It's something you'd find in a digital camera with a joystick/button for controls. This recreation of old-school interfaces doesn't seem like a programmer's labour saving technique -- it's fetishism. Anyway, the stories from people with more courage than me are remarkable. I look forward to revisiting the game in a year or two.
Wingsuit mountain swoop Thursday, November 8, 2007 ...
Added to my list of "things to do once human backups are perfected." Youtube.
Little Savages Wednesday, October 31, 2007 ...
I once wrote a screenplay about wild fairies (it was my master's thesis, actually), so I desperately want to teleport to London to see this display at the Museum of Natural History. As far as I can tell, the movie mentioned is not online.
Erik Wolpaw Wednesday, October 31, 2007 ...
Writer Erik Wolpaw went from Old Man Murray to Psychonauts to Portal. If those names mean anything to you, you know this will be the best interview since Moses met a fiery bush, and way funnier. Also revealed (to me) in this interview is that Tim Schafer (Psychonauts, Grim Fangango) is making a game called Brütal Legend about the legendary Age of Metal. And yes, it stars Jack Black. Schafer cautions: "Please be patient. It's going to take us a little while to gather up every single piece of awesome there is in the world and put it in this game."
CBC podcasts Sunday, October 14, 2007 ...
Sweet zombie Jacques Cartier! CBC has a podcast page where you can download Vinyl Cafe stories, Quirks and Quarks, As it Happens, and so much more. They even posted the last episode of Morningside with Peter Gzowski. If you load the RSS links into Google Reader, you can see a list of the archives back to summer 2007. (Hm, actually I can't seem to get the oldest ones to work. If you can, please let me know.)
A job offer, vaguely menacing Wednesday, October 10, 2007 ...
I keep promising to stop reading Charlie Stross, because his fiction is like spooning up a can of frozen BoingBoing, so concentrated and intense your teeth hurt. But he's hooked me again with just the prologue of his latest novel, Halting State. It's a recruitment letter that reads like it was written by Douglas Coupland's spambot descendents.
Summary of A Pattern Language Wednesday, October 10, 2007 ...
Forty years after the publication of the design book A Pattern Language, I still had to add my name to a waiting list to get a copy from the library. The official web sites related to the book are dreadful, but butter's web summary of the book is clean, simple and captures the tone of the book.
When I was a frosh, I had a quotation on my wall about how utopian ideas rely on moving both the white pieces and the black, and I do get that feeling from A Pattern Language. (How do you encourage a life cycle for towns? Perhaps the full text will tell me.) But the game designer in me has to admire a project that entails recommending designs for everything from a world government down to the window seats.
Obviously broken Monday, September 24, 2007 ...
I have a soft spot for geek controversies where the shared terminology and knowledge is so dense that it borders on private language. In this article, a Wizards of the Coast employee explains how a card that some players call "obviously broken" slipped through their playtesting. It became the first banned card in 2500 new ones. Despite being a Magic fan once upon a time, I had to be walked through the problem.
The Book of my Enemy Has Been Remaindered Saturday, September 1, 2007 ...
A poem by Clive James. Like an Onion article, almost the entire joke is there in the title, but the final stanza has the author confront the possibility of his own book's remaindering.
Content-Aware Image Sizing Thursday, August 23, 2007 ...
Software that automatically changes images to make them fit new frames -- adding or removing unimportant areas like blue sky, while protecting key features. You can also mark key features, like unpersons, for erasure. We're approaching the point where I can no longer distinguish technology from magic.
Breaking News in Wizardry Thursday, August 23, 2007 ...
FLASH: Fireballs no longer to do 1d6 per level damage! Flee!
Previews of fourth edition D&D are rolling out. Lots of streamlining and applying the lessons of computer game design to pen and paper. (For example, more attention is paid to the math underlying the encounters. See that fireball link above.) Every class will have per-encounter abilities in addition to per-day ones, which is one of those brilliant and obvious in hindsight inventions. Along with the new edition, Wizards of the Coast is launching a new subscription-based business model for special content and tools like character generators and online tabletops. Lots more at EN World, but I can't find any permalinks there.
11 Movies Saved by Historical Inaccuracy Tuesday, August 14, 2007 ...
"You will be happy to learn that the Chinese cannot fly." Article found through the also delightful and scholarly "The 10 Most Awesome Movies Hollywood Ever Killed."
PocketCiv Wednesday, August 8, 2007 ...
I've started playing Scott Slomiany's PocketCiv, a free solo civilization game that's played with pen, paper and a small deck of cards. In the middle of a game just now, I glanced at the clock and realized that I'd played through my whole lunchbreak and was now 13 minutes late for work. And also quite hungry. Just like full-size Civ!
The game has lots of clever angles, but my favourite part is the way that your moving tribespeople are used as the building blocks for almost everything (cities, advances, expeditions, mines, diplomatic ventures), but they're also the seedstock for future tribespeople. You need to concentrate them to accomplish anything, but keep them spread out to grow more. Plus, the poor devils keep getting swallowed by lava, sand and sea.
Horses per mile Thursday, July 26, 2007 ...
Somehow, without meaning to, I developed an interest in both transportation and economics, so I couldn't resist Marginal Revolution post about how much it once cost to travel 60 crow-miles by stagecoach (a month's wages for a labourer) and why.
Drag the circles, have some fun Friday, June 29, 2007 ...
A Flash toy with levers and attractors and no goal that you don't invent yourself. Mine was climbing orbits. I need more circles though. Please send.
Productivity erotica Friday, June 22, 2007 ...
Simple tips for staying productive. Andreessen (yes) calls them productivity porn, but they're too vanilla for that. I'm proud to say I discovered Structured Procrastination independently at UBC. It's amazing what I could accomplish while avoiding writing. (Admittedly, I could have accomplished more without Diablo and free cable.)
No One Belongs Here More Than You Thursday, June 14, 2007 ...
Miranda July promotes her short story collection with a whiteboard slideshow drawn on her kitchen appliances. (A sample story would've been nice, Miranda.) Found through the A.V. Club's wonderful Tolerability Index which is a tasty way for me to learn how entirely out of the world of pop and unpopped culture I am.
Gimli Glider Friday, May 25, 2007 ...
"Gimli Glider is a nickname given to an aircraft involved in an infamous incident in aviation history. On 23 July 1983, Air Canada Flight 143 ran out of fuel at 12 km altitude...."
Hammerdin Time Wednesday, May 23, 2007 ...
And while I'm devolving into a YouTube blog, here are some World of Warcraft characters doing their dance animations alongside the original famous source. Enter M.C. Hammer, accompanied by an orc.
I want to publish zines and rage against machines... Wednesday, May 23, 2007 ...
Did all you people forget to send this to me or something? A masterful lip synch video that gets better and better. Includes probably famous pop song that I am too square to know. Also, nice buttonless video player from Vimeo! Monkey Disaster' is joking in his comment by the way -- these people aren't really a sitcom, they're new media folks (or whatever new media people are called now: Peopl?). This video's main home is the #6 Google hit for the word "lip synch" so if you haven't seen it, there are only a few people frozen in ice you have left to beat.
The man who has kept us at peace Thursday, May 17, 2007 ...
I find this 1956 campaign message for Eisenhower fascinating, not for what it says about current politics, but because it shows how much the media craft has changed. There are the stilted testimonials obviously, but even the acting and the narration, which is much more dramatic even apocalyptic than I would have guessed. (Can this spot really be an ad given that it's 4 minutes long? Where would it have been seen?)
Heh, bonus Ike cartoon and jingle
Use palettes from paintings Tuesday, May 8, 2007 ...
Another morsel for the bottomless pit of Photoshop gimmickry that I mean to try... someday. Use Photoshop to swap the colour palette of a famous painting into your own photos.
Coloring page Wednesday, May 2, 2007 ...
Anna wanted to play with the mouse, so I hunted for a kid's drawing page. What I found was this click-to-colour page, which was popular, although Anna prefers clicking the scroll wheel.
None May Pass Friday, April 27, 2007 ...
A thread on BoardGameGeek asks you to pick a game that represents your job.
Bye, Dragon Thursday, April 19, 2007 ...
Dragon magazine and its nestling Dungeon will cease publication this September. Dragon will have reached issue 359. I used to buy back issues of Dragon for $4 in a store next to my music lessons. The earliest issue I owned was Dragon 47, and I stopped reading in the low 100s. Strange to think how few of those articles I ever pulled into my campaigns, but I poured over the fringe creatures and mad NPC classes, imagining the adventures that could be had. The early issues had fiction, comics and board games in them. I still think of the Jorune ads from time to time. There's a box of these magazines in my crawlspace. Roll a d6 to see what happens when you open it.
Better way to link images Tuesday, April 10, 2007 ...
The ImgRed service caches an image from somebody else's web page for you, so you can display it without hotlinking or saving/hosting it yourself. [Update: oops, dead. Apparently one site can't host all the web's images.]
FileHippo Saturday, April 7, 2007 ...
FileHippo's update tool examines your system and lets you know if any of your software needs to be updated.
The Inbox Of Nardo Pace, The Empire's Worst Engineer Monday, April 2, 2007 ...
One day, our civilization will fill an entire artificial moon with Star Wars commentary, sketches and humour. This moon will orbit around another moon filled with figurines and toys.
Twittervision Monday, April 2, 2007 ...
Twitter lets people publish very short notes about their current activity. Twittervision superimposes some of these notes on a map of the world, one at a time. These random peeps from across the globe remind me of a 1970s short film somehow. Maybe I will buy them all Cokes.
GeekDad Tuesday, March 27, 2007 ...
Wired's GeekDad, a blog about cool science-y things to do with your kids. Bonus: check out the lower stop motion video. Why aren't my floors transparent!
Previously on Mooselessness Friday, March 23, 2007 ...
A taste of politics and lots of nifty software tools. Or visit the full archives here.
|
