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Gamers manifesto

Gamers manifesto

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This guy has really captured some of the funny, but all too common problems with games.

My personal favorite is #14 about crates.  It was a running joke while I worked at Intel in the graphics and 3D technologies lab.  There was a hidden developer acronym for the phenomenon: TTC (Time To Crate).  It could be used in sentences like ‘What a lame game – the TTC was zero!”  TTC is the measure of time between the first moment of the title screen until you saw a crate on the screen.  Try it – many times the answer is zero.  Why?  Because the very first scene starts you in a room full of crates!

The TTC metric often is used as THE metric of rating the creativeness of the artist that made the game.

Tasty squares! mmmm….

Tasty squares! mmmm….

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Ugh, this is the most addictive little game. Cool music too.

The camera seems to have sustained $180 worth of damage; but no detailed part-list or cause as of yet.  Pro Photo in Portland is having their Canon discount days this weekend.  I checked out their 10-22EFS lens and it was really great.  If you want wide-angle on the digital SLR world, this is your baby.  I was even considering selling my excellent 17-40L to buy it.

Now if I could only get the 20 page paper, and a 10 page research paper done this weekend…

No Exit

No Exit

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I went and saw Jean-Paul Sartre’s existential philosophical play ‘No Exit’ at Imago Theatre.  It was really, really great.

It is a play about 3 people who are in hell; and hell consists of a room on a tilting floor.  A 17′ stage floor is suspended at one central point.  When one actor moves, the whole set tips and the other players must counteract that move to keep the floor balanced.  It’s so very cleaver a play because there is great dialog, but there is just as much communication going on through the fact actors moving around raise each other up, balance each other, or sink depending on how they are in relation to each other on the floor.  It’s only open until this weekend, but I would highly recommend it.

20Q

20Q

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Wow, what an excellent bit of coding!  One of the guys on the hilltop got one of these little gadgets as a present and it’s been traveling around the hilltop and amazing people.  It’s a new take on the 20 questions game.  This game comes as a web version, but also has a handheld version and is almost uncanny in its ability to correctly pick things even when the questions it asks seem so unlikely.

Try it and be surprised.  I was thinking about how one might code up such a tool, and had some great ideas of how to automatically generate such a device…  Makes me think of the old glory days of coding. Do I smell a personal