Nachimir

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull was shown a few days ago. From a friend:

Yes, TP and Yufster speak truth. Pen and paper are excellent tools for playing around with ideas. Not only do they help you avoid getting distracted by tech, they also take you well away from the distractions of the internet. When it comes to design, you can get properly absorbed in a notebook

As well as for Super Friendship Club, this year I've heard a lot of love for Stencyl, including, from a programmer, "It's like GameMaker but it doesn't suck". Also, play a fuckton of other tiny indie games. Collectively, @retroremakes, @realnoyb, and @terrycavanagh are an excellent starting point for that on Twitter, because they tweet a lot about other people's interesting games as well as their own. I would advise for and against this. Pen and paper for mucking around with ideas at first: YES. Once they have a vision, people get lost in tech, and spend a month fiddling to make something just so. Doodling can help to keep you focused on the actual idea, as well as asking bigger questions about it. The latter bit though: Numerous mod teams fail in exactly this way. If you're going the route of making something big and needing a team, try out a bunch of stuff then pick something you enjoy to develop your skills in. Have a thing that you definitely do, other than have ideas. Ideally "game designer" is a job, but there are a lot of small teams that just cannot support one full time if they don't also do something else, like code, or design levels. That goes for non-commercial projects too. The capacity of one person to design can far outstrip the capacity of a small team to produce, which leads to all kinds of uncomfortable situations mainly ending in resentment or tears. There are also too many posts that read "HAY GUYS I have kool idea for a kool gam I just need artists, coders, level designers, modelers, animators, a musician, and a sound effects guy so let me know thx".

New Batman trailer too: 9R6zD8VcQTQ It gives me goosebumps to see a childhood landmark as Wayne Manor.

Happy birthdays you two

The Wired article has a conclusion significantly less sensationalist and biased compared to most parts of the infographic above. How about you stop trying to move the focus off the thing you originally posted? Your pointing out I'm opinionated and that it shows in my post, is not proof that the infographic is valid. You've also failed to answer the criticism that some of the sources quoted in it are shockingly poor ones, reputed for awful journalism and just making shit up. IMO, that image is part of a larger current of the same old shit that has been levelled at pretty much every new form of media for the past few centuries. It's bollocks propagated by people with an axe to grind. As I already stated, that doesn't make social media unworthy of study or discussion. What peddlers of this kind of infographic are doing though, is not: Making the topic less sensational. Identifying real problems. Starting useful discussion. We might as well be asking Are books making people dangerously introverted?, or Is Rock and Roll corrupting the young's ability to listen? as paying attention to that image above. Science isn't presented with goofy concerned and/or zonked out faces next to it. Fuck's sake. Here's another thing that should set alarm bells ringing: It links the absolute to the subjective. For shame. I do have my own concerns about things we do online and the effects they have on us and our attention spans, but that doesn't make me anti-social media. That infographic is distilled bullshit from an untrustworthy source though. It doesn't stand up to scrutiny, but is probably just enough to feed a nice case of confirmation bias.

Go back through the Idle Forums editing every post you've ever made to include references, or specify they're not required, and I'll take that. For now though: Poppycock, T.P.

tl;dr I'm with Armchair. It's sensational pap, for the most part. Commercially sponsored, and all the references are to blogs and magazine articles. Science reporting in particular is full of shit, bad interpretations and sensationalism. The section "Social Media/Internet Addiction Is Real" stuck out to me as a particularly bad one. Shaky connections. That's not to say it isn't worthy of study, but "social media" is as much a hotch potch of things as "hypnosis", and even without the problems that presents, I don't think we have much in the way of decent conclusions yet. In contrast, there are definitely a lot of sources with an axe to grind or papers to sell.

You know how there's that… thing, that happens on these forums about this time every year? A link that just kind of turns up? Well, Cyriak just topped it. Warning: Do not watch. I4ep3OIIKcM

Hope it went well, Miffy.

+1 for King of Tokyo, Ankh Morpork, and Citadels. All Brilliant. Really want to play Betrayal at House on the Hill, I keep hearing it's great. I also picked up Lifeboat recently. Not only is the art lovely, but the game turns a desperately grim and horrific scenario into comedy. I've not seen one group of players fail to laugh at it yet Basically, you have a secret love and a secret despised enemy on the lifeboat, and you get a bonus, respectively, for each surviving or dying before you get to land. For either or both of those, you might get dealt yourself, in which case you're a narcissist, a psychopath, or a narcissistic psychopath. You can also score by surviving yourself, and acquiring loot. Each character has a special ability, like being able to pickpocket, swim well, or a bonus for specific loot. If you're a psychopath, you get a bonus for dying, but because someone else on the boat secretly loves you, it can actually be really hard to cause your own death. Sometimes characters go overboard, and one of the items is a bucket of chum you can throw in to attract sharks. Another item is a painting, captioned "It's called modernism, you boob!" In the case of one player becoming very powerful, it's almost always in the interests of others to gang up and depose them. Alliances and monopolies never seem to last long. It's a very elegant game; in all aspects players usually have influence but rarely control

Favourite finds today: True American Dog: http://www.trueamericandog.com/2010/12/boy-scout-leader-ties-forbidden-knot.html (That kid has the best face) Skate Bush: http://skatebush.tumblr.com/

IE9? Still working on it, but I had to get done what I could in the time I had. Edit: A lot of people are being really supportive, and my inbox is flooded. Thanks Ben, Nevsky and TP

One of the things I did until January this year was organise a conference for indie developers. A bunch of them have been asking if I'd do another since I went freelance, and the answer is yes! I've been thinking about it for months, settled on some ideas I'm happy with, and found a good artist too: http://www.bit-of-alright.com It's in London on the 3rd of February next year, and the early bird tickets are going about a million times faster than I expected them to.

I like being able to help a little with this. The time it takes is fractional, but it appears you might be asking questions I normally wouldn't consider myself, or at least reframing those issues.

That's kind of brilliant. I'd also recommend this very slowed down version of the Jurassic Park theme.

I could loop this and dance for a very long time: PNdfExQPaUQ

I'd second the recommendation for premium economy. I flew London to San Francisco twice, once standard and once premium economy. The latter, on Virgin Airlines, was ludicrously comfortable compared to standard seats, and Air NZ looks even better.

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Whoever he is, I like that man. Today I found this:

… and looks like he's been spliced together from maggots.

Soft robots inspired by nature could become our flexible friends Friends!

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I guess this is mostly in the translation, but still: