Nachimir

It's done with this chrome experiment.

None of people's usage of the OR points to it being as ubiquitous as phones. People tend to use it for short sessions, and even the most dedicated VR developers and journalists I know can only handle it for an hour or two at a time. For every other argument in your post, I see opposite trends: Communities getting better and faster at appropriating the slurs thrown at them, friend groups who consider it rude to be on a phone while in a group, etc. I think very similar arguments to yours could have been and sometimes were made against novels, telegrams, rock'n'roll, comics, the walkman, videogames, and the internet. They were all wrong and none of these things that could make us more insular or change the way we socialise ended socialisation. It's very simplistic to take pathological behaviour and draw a line of causation to whatever's new, but the fact is we've been suffering from psychopathology for aeons and new technology just expresses it in new ways. We'll be okay; we're sometimes fucked up and evil, but we're not that psychologically fragile as a species. Yep. Facebook are gambling 2Bn of their 156Bn market cap on something that might be big. Given my experiences with first person video on it so far, it's enormously relevant for other forms of entertainment, and I can see a major application would be live events fed through camera arrays. What's currently lacking is the recording and transmission hardware; the closest things are google streetview cameras and RC FPV hardware. The former is horrifically expensive, and the latter is relatively cheap but all analogue at the moment (and the goggles are shit compared to the Rift). Given how they've not fucked up Instagram or Whatsapp yet, I'm not worried about the OR being screwed like that. It's more a worry FB will shitcan it the way Cisco did with Flip, then sit on some patents.

Why?

I'm not really convinced by that. None of FB's acquisitions have, in hindsight, reeked of trying to stay relevant. Acquisitions do seem to remain relatively independent of Facebook; they don't suddenly start pushing those acquired users into FB. These two points are cribbed from a mailing list run by someone smarter than me: - Facebook are most likely trying to connect everything through Facebook the holding company, not Facebook the web application. - Facebook have an output in the form of Oculus, it's now likely they'll make some acquisitions related to 3D games, scanning and 360 degree video too. As John Carmack and Palmer Luckey have both said, the acquisition gets them past some horrible production scaling problems too. I still don't trust Facebook and it's still made me a bit sad, but the anger I'm seeing on Twitter is ridiculous.

I'm really glad this was put on youtube.

Palmer Luckey* is saying a bunch of reassuring stuff on Reddit right now. *Possibly a PR team? I would guess: curved screen, better optics.

Actually, having a DK1 and lending it out to various people for about a month each, and trying it on non-games people, the non-gamey experiential stuff is just as exciting for me. The Rift is really fucking good at that due to a bigger FOV than any other goggles that are around, and even in it's current quite basic form, people feel a real sense of immersion from it. I just don't trust Facebook to not fuck it up, is all. I wasn't surprised at the price. They seem to value users over tech.

I'm probably less cynical than below, but this news has made me sad today. I dread the integration of "social features" with the Oculus SDK/Unity/Unreal/etc. I was ready to pre-order DK2 yesterday, now I'm reconsidering.

That's my new OK Cupid pic sorted then:

Sorry I flaked; it was the night after working on Wild Rumpus and we were all comatose as a result.

Sorry, not for now. I might get some tomorrow though.

I can probably make Dear Mom for 9 on Thursday. I think this is heading for a crash. Compared to previous years, I had twice the number of submissions for a recent show, but the quality of them was markedly lower than usual. I think some of that is due to loads of students who don't get that a few years with a well established company can improve their development skills immeasurably and instead jump feet first into independent development. Some of it, I'm sure though, is due to people who are more suited to studio environments than going it alone. I've probably said it here before, but the best solo developers I know tend to spend around 70% of their time doing contract work, often unrelated to games, to allow them to work on their own stuff.

This is the RGBriefcase: It's a code breaking/music/simon says type puzzle that works off an Arduino and waveshield with a bunch of arcade buttons. I'm currently exhibiting it as part of ALT.CTRL.GDC in the North hall of Moscone, and it's full of candy: If you solve it, it tells you the combination to the case. No one else who worked on it* gets the reference, but it says "hooray for you" between levels. * Team: Me (physical build, minimal code), George Buckenham (code and puzzle design), Jon Brodsky (code and puzzle design), Joon (first software prototype).

That's lovely subbes. Congrats. Getting rid of a long commute is an excellent difference to make

That operating system was a real thing in the first place. I'm glad someone has made a working replica of a real thing though.

I can't add much to Bjorn's post other than I went through something similar too. Lack of qualifications made me feel stupid and depressed for years, during which I also did low-paid, shitty jobs. Pursuing my interests in any spare time I had eventually made me realise that I'm quite smart, and has turned out well, leading to a heap of interesting people and jobs. The only times I've felt what you describe in relation to studying, are those when I felt like I had to do something I really fundamentally didn't want to. It may be that making a decision resolves these feelings, or they may a be symptom of something deeper. If the latter, you should definitely think about where you can get some help.

I think the three of us agree and this might be an amusing three way misunderstanding

Interesting write up. I don't really get this: It seemed heinous from the get go to me. I watched the entire film with mounting horror; and the abstraction of Belforts victims was obviously a way of expressing how he exists this way, not a way of glorifying his work or dismissing their plight. This also reminds me: I went to see it with a friend who works for a fairly large company. She told me that their marketing department doesn't refer to people as people, it refers to them as DMUs: "Decision Making Unit"

An excellent death

Bizarrely, they were at Maker Faire UK last year. I just missed out on getting a shot of a kid staring at the crotch: https://vine.co/v/bxvnHmZBOTi

I'm not so unsure. I think it clearly says he is a terrible human being and no matter how much wealth and power accrue, it's a bad thing to walk down his route. That's probably informed by my slight fascination with cults also spreading into a slight fascination with sales-based organisations, because they're super fucking culty too. I perceive it as a story told relating to a very specific framework of cultural and business related things in my head. The entire libertarian/sales rhetoric of "you can succeed too!" is fed by stories exactly like Belforts, just stated in a very selective and different light and with a pitch at the end.

It's interesting that they waited until pretty much the last shot to I wouldn't call it a rosy portrayal of Belfort; Its singular focus on portraying a profligate business does a fairly good job showing him as a terrible human being. Not as resonant this side of the Atlantic, but I bet his Edit: oops, spoilers.

What boggled me is that

A former landlady of mine was given this a short while back: Visiting last week, I was asking her about it in the kitchen while her boyfriend was there. She talked about the things she did from the 80's on, and that she got an invite to an event the Lord Mayor of Nottingham held, not expecting anything like this. Max asked: "Did you have to go up on stage to get it from him?" She replied: "The current Lord Mayor's a woman"

I'm down for this. Busy with Rumpus/Venus Patrol thing on the Wednesday, but on any other night will probably head to the Irish Bank and go wherever with the developer katamari that starts there goes.