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"More primal and immediate than any of the previously mentioned examples, it was couch cushion architecture that established the basic building blocks of our design logic. Unrepresented and ignored for too long in the architectural industry, today’s post pays respect to the wonders of couch cushion architecture. We’ve rounded up a (mostly) admirable collection of projects, taken from a randomly conducted search on the internet. Join us as we take a critical analysis of the architecture, methods and design philosophies of living room furniture re-appropriation." Charming, and generous, too.
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"Final Fantasy Tactics: The War of the Lions is heading to iPhone and iPod Touch on 15th September." Uh-oh. I might end up giving it another crack. (It's clearly a great game, but very hard and even more unforgiving).
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Passion Pit cover Smashing Pumpkins' "Tonight, Tonight".
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"Suicidator City Generator (SCG) is a Python script for Blender… With it, you can automatically create entire, three-dimensional modern cities in a matter of seconds by adjusting various parameters, such as city size and complexity, rather than creating each building, each street, and each texture manually." Lovely; the preview video should give you a good idea of its capabilities.
Vice Style launch
24 June 2010
James got a late invite to the Vice Style party (under our old office, and over the road from his house), and took his camera. I liked this.
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"Still, if you're going to watch a pair of zombies go at each other for eleventy-billion hours, far into the night, it might as well be these zombies. They were incredible, astonishing, indefatigable. They fell over frequently but they never stayed down. My hat goes off to these zombies. Possibly my head goes off to them too." Xan Brooks' live coverage of Isner-Mahut. Some great writing in there.
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"Even the likes of Modern Warfare 2 and Bad Company hide their bloodlust behind a figleaf of fictional "what if" scenarios. Medal of Honor turns a real tragedy into a social shooting gallery, and is going to have to tread carefully to avoid belittling the reality it borrows for our amusement." The problems of making videogames about current conflict, especially when the tactless multiplayer audience get their hands on your content. Not sure I'm particularly cool about this in any way. Oh well.
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Collecting casual and informal collective-nouns by scraping twitter. The "What Is This" page is very well done, explaining just what the scraper "sees" in a clear fashion. Fun.
PB’s Backyard
23 June 2010
The next obvious thing to do with SLRs that shoot hi-def video: strap one on a helicopter. And then this happens. Lovely.
(via Matt Haughey).
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"In AR Monster, you use your iPhone's GPS system and camera to discover and battle more than 600 monsters hidden in the real world. By playing the game in different locations and pointing the handset in different directions, you'll be able to find new kinds of monsters." As is increasingly becoming my reaction to all things AR: "so what?"
What’s a media inventor?
22 June 2010
Robin Sloan drops some smart science:
Also: what’s a media inventor, anyway? Here’s my (totally made-up) definition: It’s somebody primarily interested in content who also experiments with new technology, new processes, and new formats. Allen Lane was a media inventor. Early bloggers were media inventors. Right now, the indie video game scene is full of media inventors.
Fundamentally, I think, a media inventor is someone who isn’t satisfied with the suite of formats that have been handed down to him by his culture (and economy). Novel, novella, short story; album, EP, single; RPG, RTS, FPS — a media inventor doesn’t like those choices. It turns out a media inventor feels compelled to make the content and the container.
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"Start Holding Shift" is when you understand what's going on. You will hate this game.
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I really like this, and need to spend more time with it when I'm not at work: platform-puzzler in which you can "fold" the environment up to shortcut parts of the level. Nice aesthetic, too.