Tuesday, November 3, 2009
Another games-related post? What gives?!?!!?
The guy who does the weekly bargain-bucket posts on RPS is listing a brief (very brief) summary with a link to get the game, and how it's released (i.e. freeware, shareware, commercial release, demo) for every game with a release in this year's IGF, if you have any interest in trolling through the thing and looking for something that catches your fancy. Awful lot of games.
Dragon Age is out...
... so I must link you to a review. This one's by John Walker, of both RPS and the podcast I can't remember the name that I made you listen to an episode of which is awesome and can be found at botherer.org - you really should listen to every episode. They're always entertaining and regularly insightful. Plus the guy from South Africa shares that personality flaw I have, in that he's just generally disagreeable in order to amuse himself and/or be different, sometimes, I think, so listening to him is like listening to a smarter, wealthier, better-traveled me.
Wednesday, October 28, 2009
Because I watch football...
... I've been seeing ads for 'Fancast' which is being presented as doing basically what Hulu does. I finally got around to checking it out, and while I haven't done a comparison to see, I think it's basically Comcast's free on-demand content for everyone, over the internet for free, instead of over the cable box. Plus a bunch of extra shit that's just free. I also haven't compared its content to Hulu, but I'm guessing there's some overlap. Anyways, thought you might want to check it out.
For the record: I find it really ugly. You know how domain-campers put up a page that's just to earn them clicks, when you go to a page that used to be something and then was purchased by domain-campers? That's what it reminds me. When I first loaded it, I thought I'd typed the name wrong and gotten some asshole trying to make money off of typos. But no, it just looks like that.
Well, this was just interesting.
I was talking to the DJ who comes on after me at WRIR about learning programming, and one of the things that came up is how frustrating I find the beginnings of programming books because I really want to begin with a grammar, basically. I want to know the structure of the language; they never want to tell me that. They just give me some shit that prints 'Hello, World' on the screen and they explain that they will later let me know why what I just compiled had that effect. It's possible that part of this is just the books I happen to have encountered, but in my experience with BASIC, Pascal, C, C++, and Visual Basic books, they never explain why the code takes the FORM it does.
I'm an English major. I am into knowing about the structure, not just the particulars. Just like I have no interest in those language-learning tapes that just have you repeat a bunch of phrases that will be useful, I don't have any interest in the rote memorization of random code. I want to know - the thing that kicked it all off - why some lines in C++ code have to end in semicolons and some don't.
This has been an incredibly long tangent introducing an article (it's short) describing someone's attempt to write a program that translates C code into standard English, because they feel code is speech and should be protected under the constitution. I just found it interesting to think about, probably because of the conversation about learning programming I had last night.
Wednesday, October 14, 2009
Musics! (no video (much text))
I didn't actually listen to any of these but I had a lot of fun reading the text. I didn't read all of it. I figured you might find it interesting. It's a list of 50 "records that matter" for the years 1900-1919. With tons of expository prose about each one. I have to assume the sound quality blows, but the amount of random trivia/information was large and the guy writes reasonably well for a blog.
"If you don't get caught, then steal it all..."
World of Goo is currently available for as much as you want to pay for it. I love it when people experiment with the honor-system. I think you mentioned wanting to play it once, and by all accounts it is worth playing.
A TV-show!
Cold-war espionage drama television starring Bill Cosby? FTW!
I watched the pilot and it wasn't bad, despite featuring an annoying 'Short Round' kid. I assume it gets better, since Cosby got three Emmys for it, according to the writeup on Hulu. Played less for laughs, but occasionally funny. Cosby pretending be drunk in 1960-something sounds kinda like Cosby sober now.
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