Parallax is an interdimensional platforming and puzzle-solving game. The goal in each level is to reach the exit by travelling between two overlapping dimensions through rifts. Parallax challenges the player to think beyond the spatial boundaries of traditional platformers.
Pure black and white is a difficult style. These guys seem to have nailed it.
(via Ars)
I generally despise product placement, but a survival tool company and a zombie apocalypse show seem like a natural fit. Witness Gerber’s Apocalypse range, perfect for defending against The Walking Dead.
It was also very cool to hear more about the new Hackspace Cardiff (@HackspaceCDF) from Mark Heseltine, who talked at Dorkbot about the new digs and some of the possibilities the new community could have.
While I’m no hardware geek myself, I think it’s fantastic that such a place exists in Cardiff.
I don’t know if it’s the same in other Dorkbots, but Cardiff’s skews heavily towards projects where technology meets art. These can often leave me a bit cold, feeling that I understand how the artist has done something, but not really why.
I did rather enjoy this documentary about Paul Granjon’s Oriel Factory robot exhibit however.
Perhaps it helps me that the messages about recycling and using clean energy seem clear and important in this exhibition. Plus, it looks like a lot of fun!
I watched Terra Nova last night, and I noticed plenty of similarities with the BBC show Outcasts that was on earlier this year:
It is the distant future, and Earth has become inhospitable, forcing humanity to send a small number of humans to a distant world/our distant past in a last-ditch attempt to preserve our species.
Jim/Cass is a man with a complicated past who wasn’t even supposed to be a part of the colony, but he earns the trust of the stern and experienced base commander and is given a position of responsibility as a part of the security team.
He quickly learns that although this world is beautiful, it is also deadly and holds many secrets. Some of the colonists have already split from the main group and formed a dangerous faction with an unknown agenda.
There are more similarities and differences between Outcasts and Terra Nova, but I doubt either show was influenced by the other directly, instead drawing their inspiration from the same old tropes. Both shows have an angsty teenage character who feels abandoned by their parent, for example. The Terra Nova producers don’t seem to have any shame either, hiring the canonical Colonel Badass.
Terra Nova isn’t exactly terrible, just it’s a very expensive re-tread of the usual.
Got frustrated with AWS, so I made a new mob! :D http://imgur.com/ADYrx?full
It will be craftable, is friendly, and throws snowballs at enemies. Also melts in hot biomes.
Also, they spread snow by walking around. Nice.
One of the best things about Minecraft is how publicly the game is being developed.
This gallery contains 9 photos.
Some wonderfully detailed photographs of Discovery on Spaceflight Now. The space shuttle Discovery on Wednesday morning made her first public appearance outside the hangar since being retired, emerging without any main engines, nose thrusters or aft rocket pods. Seeing the stripped … Continue reading
Yesterday was the first Cardiff International Comic Expo, the first comic convention I’ve ever attended. I had a great time, saw some cool stuff and spent a little more than I expected!
Here’s a quick rundown of the highlights for me… Continue reading
Alice and Bob from the album Algorhythms by MC Plus+ (via Reddit).
If you’re not familiar, Alice, Bob and Eve are example characters used to illustrate encryption scenarios in Bruce Schneier’s Applied Cryptography
There are a whole host of characters. This would make a pretty good dramatis personae for a screenplay…
This is amazing. Found via Roger Ebert, but it’s so epic I’m even going to link to the source – a car insurance website. Be warned, it’s a looong image.
Links abound in this post, but dig in if you’re a Star Trek fan as there’s lots of insights and revelations into the production of one of the most unfairly dismissed Star Trek films. I actually rate Insurrection as one of my favourite Next Gen movies, but there’s no doubt it felt like a heavily compromised entry. An unpublished book by the late Michael Piller, Fade In: The Writing of Star Trek: Insurrection, tells the story.
“They’re not out to make a quick buck, they’re looking to protect the integrity of the franchise and its mythology.” 1998’s Star Trek Insurrection went through a number of different plots before becoming the film we ultimately saw. Starting out as Star Trek: Stardust, the first take on the idea involved Captain Picard going all Heart of Darkness on a former friend from his Starfleet Academy days in a bid to find the Fountain of Youth. That treatment evolved into a remarkably Avatarish story called simply Star Trek IX in which Picard must go upriver to kill a malfunctioning Data as part of a Federation/Romulan alliance to displace strange alien natives from a planet teeming with a valuable and rare ore (spoiler: Picard actually kills Data in this treatment, and Tom Hanks was supposed to have a major role somewhere).
(via “He might have read the document when he was tired, at the end of a long day of being tied to a whale.” – metafilter.com & via Boing Boing)
The PDF of the book was originally released by Trek Core. They included this note:
When we received this submission, we were told that Michael Piller considered this book his last great gift to the fans and to aspiring writers everywhere. Unfortunately, Paramount somehow got it suppressed from being published. Michael Piller passed away in 2005, so getting this book published will never be possible (not to mention Insurrection is quite old now, so a book about it wouldn’t be financially feasible for a publisher). It’s clear Michael Piller wanted this book read, so we felt that making it available to the fans made sense. It’s an amazingly detailed look at the process of writing the movie including internal memos, letters, pitches, story drafts, etc. Enjoy this unique glimpse into writing Star Trek Insurrection! And lastly, if anyone can provide the draft of Star Trek Insurrection that is missing from this document, please email us.
I’ve been having a bit more fun with the Google Ngram Viewer (previously). A reminder that these graphs show how much these phrases have appeared in published works over time. They are case-sensitive and I’ve used the English corpus.
The Americanisation of English
This February 26th at the Mercure Hotel there’s going to be a big Cardiff Comic Expo (follow them on Twitter). Tickets are currently £5 each, but they imply that the price may go up in the new year.
There are some very interesting guests, but no megastars (yet). I’ll be interested mostly to see the exhibitors myself, and hopefully discover some interesting indies.
I had no idea this was happening, so I figured others may appreciate the heads up!
A few days ago Google launched the Google Books Ngram Viewer, a labs project that lets you compare the frequency of word use in published works, and compare these terms over time. For example, the following is a variety of common first names appearing in the English database over the last two hundred years.
Common English first names
You can see that around 1960, the name David suddenly started to gain in popularity. You can narrow the English corpus to American English, British English and English fiction, and also search works in other languages.
Confirmed: The Air Force Totally Hides Aliens From Us
You don’t know how many Freedom of Information Act requests we’ve filed in the hope of finding the Alien Technology Exploitation Division, the intrepid souls who’ll soon announce a sources-sought contract to develop the Hyperspace Blaster. Alas, they don’t exist.
A former officer at Air Force Space Command tells Paglen that he and his friends had the patches made at their own expense after getting endlessly ribbed for working in a secure vault “where they kept the alien bodies.” They wore them on their flight suits for months before a one-star general asked where he could get one of his own.
Oh, and the barely-decipherable legend on the bottom? It’s Klingon for “Don’t Ask.” Paglen got it in the mail from its creator after mentioning that he knew about its existence on the Colbert Report.
Image: Courtesy Trevor Paglen
(via Secret Insignias From the ‘Black Ops’ World – wired.com)
This one’s clearly a joke, but the bigger joke is the reminder that there are certainly thousands of people working on things so secretive that no one will ever tell us that these things even happen, and they’re certainly not going to ask for our permission to continue doing these things. Vote for who you like, but some stuff is too important for democracy.
This gallery contains 6 photos.
Cowabunga! I can’t get enough of these Russian Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles books. These obviously unlicensed stories have the Turtles squaring off against all sorts of monsters, demons, aliens, and unlikely foes. But my favourites are the frequent run-ins with … Continue reading
SF television shows get the best cliffhangers. These are taken from a list on io9 – The best SF/fantasy cliffhangers ever shown on television – with some of my own thoughts. Geeky stuff, but I love it.
Today was my final day at BBC Wales after handing in my notice last month. Though I still have absolutely no regrets, I have actually been enjoying more creative freedom over the last few weeks. If the previous two years had been similar, I may not have left…
Anyway, I thought I’d show and tell some of the things I’ve made. You can find all these in the SJA Fun and Games section.
I love this stuff. I could possibly justify buying them as props for stock photography work …right?
“We consider ourselves intermediaries between the community and the lumbering Danish company. For a long time the building experience has been the focus of creativity; but an increasing number of people are realizing their inner child through the role-play of the minifigs included in those sets. The mission of BrickForge is to fill in the gaps left open by LEGO and other brick-building companies.” – Armothe
“A lot of thought (and work!) goes into the creation of these tiny accessories. We do our best to consider ‘how would these look if LEGO made them’ and then we attempt to raise the bar even further.” – Redbean
(via About BrickForge)
halfblog.net 