Categories
Blather Science Fiction and Fantasy

Hell hath no Fury

Nir‘s book, One Hell of A Writer has a launch party today. I hope lots of people show up, because I just wrote a review of the book for the Meimad, and I’d feel safer seeing him in a good mood and surrounded by a big crowd.

Categories
Comics

re-V-iew

The V for Vendetta movie is out. Not too surprisingly, Jonathan Ross hated it: If it had been called V for Vasectomy I could scarcely have found it a less enjoyable experience. However, William Gibson loved it: More thumbs up than a Chernobyl pianist. Superb. Splendid. Heartening. Go see.

Categories
Software and Programming

grazing on blogrolls

Grazr is a cute javascript widget that can view OPML files; OPML are these outline files used for storing blogrolls, or RSS reading lists in general. And I see there’s a list of Israel blogs posted byxslf, who also links to some others. I’ll mention David Abutbul‘s, because he commented here.
Anyway, behind the cut is xslf’s blogroll in the grazr widget, looking better in my blog then on their page because this page is UTF-8, so you can see the titles in Hebrew.
Unfortunately, once you expand the tree and get to the actual content of the feeds in the reading list, things get messed up.

Categories
Roleplaying Software and Programming

Spore

Ran and Greif already linked to this, but I have to add my own recomendation: if you think computer games are cool (which I do, in the abstract, I don’t actually play them myself sort of way), you should watch Will Wright’s demo of Spore, a game in development that has been described as from bacteria to galactic god.
There are a lot of cool things to say about this, but I think the main thrust is the shift from player as consumer of canned media (the CD-ROM view of reality) to player as creator and storyteller. Also, and I think this is sort-of cool, the game uses networking in an interesting way: instead of players beating on each other’s characters, anything they design gets uploaded to a server and used by the game to generate challenges for other players (or offer them cool toys).
Long ago, when I was scriptwriting for Neora’s CD-ROM/Internet game, I thought of something vaguely like this: to design a game for a slow network, you should have something smart to send over it, like a corewar bot the player can design or something. But that idea is like a bacteria to this galactic god game.

Categories
Oddities Resources

Akiyoshi’s illusion pages

Akiyoshi’s illusion pages are a great collection of optical illusions – this is apparently the source to the spiraling snakes illusion I linked to sometime ago. All sorts of images that seem to move, rotate, shift and distort.