Nachimir

Their kickstarter total has been falling for the past day, and they seem to have stopped replying to comments. This made me laugh:

The Harry Knowles pissing himself story is an excellent crescendo to that post synth

I am more excited about this thread than I ever was the Half Life 3 one.

I have a feeling that contrary to their claim, it would in fact be quite bothered by massive waves. Also, legislation.

Jesus, everywhere I've lived in the UK has been £7 - £12 (US $12 - $20). It's usually the indie theatres that are cheaper, everywhere else is not only expensive, but has lots of advertising and dickheads playing with their phones in the front rows.

With the exception of small indie cinemas, that's kind of how it feels in the UK too.

Oh, thanks I'd missed the other releases link in the sidebar, and their name just links to the Akira project track.

I nearly submitted for that site, but had been on an all white, all male panel one day before I saw it. (This comment was meta reward fishing, and pointing that out is meta-meta reward fishing). In seriousness, when I try to act on any kind of social problem, I also try to think about whether or not the way I'm acting is inherently drawing attention to me. Usually, the best thing I can do seems to be any course of action that removes attention from me, and also doesn't draw attention to the issue (i.e. not "Greetings HU-MAN FE-MALE, would you like to speak at our conference? It is non-diverse and needs more HU-MAN FE-MALES like you. Yeah talk about anything you want it doesn't really matter"). Diversity in a non-diverse industry can be a hard problem to work on without being unflattering to minorities* or appearing to want a Nice White Guy certificate. *cough: within the context of that industry, I mean, not necessarily in general.

This is fantastic, though I couldn't find it for sale anywhere. I found an album on bandcamp though.

Sometimes when mountain bikes and cameras mix, friends joke "look at that bike face" as someone rides down something technical. I found out today that apparently Bicycle Face was an actual bullshit thing used to try and scare women: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicycle_face (It seems one of the original advocates had more of a anti-bicycle agenda than a gendered-agenda though: http://garethrees.org/2012/01/10/shadwell/ )

Roland Barthes, eat your fucking heart out

I enjoyed our little chat. Here's a picture of Joseph Fink's legs:

That's all good to know, thanks. Despite wildly varying discipline when it comes to workouts, my body seems to hover around skinny with a little fat around the middle and lot of muscle in the legs. At times I've become leaner and/or stronger, but never managed to pin that to a specific behaviour or routine that definitely works.

Different heart rate zones are good for different types of exercise. I don't recall offhand how to calculate them, and they vary a bit for everyone, but say over adulthood the theoretical max heart rate for healthy adult man is 180 - 200, then going right up to the top of that range when exercising won't be effort you can maintain for very long at all. It also burns energy fast, so only sugars are really useful for it, and your muscles will run out of them faster than they can be replaced. Doing this will build strength but you're unlikely to lose weight (stressful aerobic exercise is a good combination with lifting weights if you want to gain, particularly if you hammer your quads). Lower zones (130 - 160 BPM IIRC) are good for fat burning because they're less stressful and your body can convert fat at a suitable rate. A few hours on a bike or at a slow jog with this heart rate is good for losing weight. It takes a lot of discipline to keep your heart this low for long periods, particularly when on climbs. The more you exercise, the lower your resting heart rate will be. At my healthiest I got mine into a BPM of the low to mid-60s, and athletes sometimes have <50 BPM resting heart rates.

I really like Transitory.

I've seen a bunch of negative reactions to Looper recently and don't really get them. I liked it an awful lot.

This guy got to 500 days and is still going strong.

Everything Merus said. It sounds like there's no way you can carry on working on it, you have a reason that's out of your or his control, and if he's an asshole about that, he's an asshole.

There is an actual egg in the middle though. It's fairly intricately made, they must've started the time lapse shooting, ingredients on as it cooked, then created the banding afterward.

I'm surprised at how little people seem to have talked about Mad Men this last season. I've really enjoyed Likewise Tywin in GoT:

Kind of my face:

Really sorry to hear that Gormongous.

I don't know. Without really big jobs like the one off thing I had last year, I don't get enough work to pay for myself year round. I've done a lot of indie related stuff for the past seven years or so, made some really good friends, and helped a lot of developers, but for some of them I'm clearly just a stepping stone. I meet quite a few now who treat game development as a lottery ticket to be Notch, and are about as realistic over their chances as people who think they'll win a regular lottery. Where my current event is targeted is at the fringes, where interesting collaborations and weird stuff happen, but the meetups I've been to all over the UK give me the impression that people are more interested in pitching their game and "Five surefire ways to sell your iOS thing!" than, y'know, game design, the future, culture and interesting crossovers. Nowhere in the UK seems to have the culture or critical mass to so much as start something like Arcane Kids. I meet the odd developer here and there, but most meetups seem to be students mixed with middle aged guys talking about the big studio job they were recently laid off from, or the next one they're hoping to get, and meanwhile let's spend a year or two making the helicopter game for iOS, but really shiny. I desperately want something like A MAZE to exist in the UK, and have been trying for the past three years, but events with UK developers all feel like they circle the same drain. I get a lot of people asking if they can playtest their game at the event, basically asking me for free expo space and everyone else for free labour, but pitching it as if they're offering everyone an amazing bit of programming. Just today someone asked me if he could speak there about scummy persuasion techniques, and as if that wasn't bad enough, I looked at his portfolio and it was all "Here's some artwork I ripped off for a client". Programming is actually the easiest part of this event, but the audience feels less ambitious yet more hungry every year. Some really amazing, interesting developers I didn't know well at the time said after the first one that it was the only game developer event that properly felt like home… but it shrinks every year, and that's super depressing. Mood: cynical.