found_drama

• How to Master the Writing Process
  at Writing Forward
• 10 Geeky Movies to Raise Your Kids On
  via Geekdad from Wired.com
• Mangobot: The Yellow Peril, Fu Manchu, and the Ethnic Future
  at io9 (via B^2) :: "Asian cultural markers are often used as shorthand for the future," says Claire Light, an Asian-American science fiction writer. Light sees a link between this trend in entertainment and the sudden success of the Japanese economy in the 70s and 80s: "At the time, most Americans just thought of Asians as the technological power of the future," she says.
• Web comic strip creator finds female niche in ‘Questionable Content’
  at The Boston Globe :: it's cool to read stories like this, about folks that take-it-and-run with their passions and have it work out to be a success — inspiring and cool
• Photrade :: Contests :: ApertureNatureWorkshops
  via Apple Hot News feed

I still don’t understand this whole hybercube/tesseract thing but I sure am fascinated by it.  And let’s face it, that animation is wickedly mesmerizing.

It’s some kind of All Wrangler Congress or Extended Family Reunion.  Everyone is there, plus some “new recruits” or “applicants” or whatever you might want to call new friends.  We’re all in some kind beach house.  You can hear the ocean in the far background.  I’ve woken up and stumbled into the kitchen to find that most everyone else is already awake and has crowded in there.  There is a lot of discussion, a lot of chatter.  Some folks are reading a short story that I’ve written and published.  Others are reading the newspaper.  Spirits are high.  John has a miniature hip flask that he shares with me; it contains a rather sweet whiskey.  Sarah (who is making the biggest batch of scrambled eggs anyone has ever seen) comes over, takes the flask, and pours a little of it out onto the sleeve of my bathrobe.  She does the same to John.  She rubs the whiskey in and explains that if we’re going to be published, our bathrobes need to smell like whiskey.

A little while ago, during the drive home from Maine, I was struck by some odd reminiscence for a few classic (nee “old”) science fiction games I used to play on the computer.  By classic, I don’t necessarily mean that they were best sellers^[1] or even particularly good games^[2].  No, by “classic”, I mean only that these were games that I played ”back in the day”^[3] – sometimes ad nauseum — with a great deal of enjoyment.

As the drive continued and the reminiscing went on, I made up my mind to do a series here on F_D — a kind of “top 4″ of these classic sci-fi time-wasters.  I’m going to take a look at four “old favorites”, make a few remarks on what made them great (or at least fun), and then discuss a little about their replayability and how they might be different if they’d been made in the past year or so.

I’ll start with Outpost.

Read the rest of this entry »

1. Though a few of them were, and some were even award-winners. [↩]
2. Though that’s a subjective argument we won’t even begin to broach here. [↩]
3. Though “back in the day” ranges here from “the days of DOS and 5¼ diskettes” to “among the first CD-ROM games I played”. [↩]

• Don’t Think, Just Write
  at Writing Forward
• Ten Futures
• Canon releases 50D, Swiss Army Knife 18-200mm lens
  Ryan Brenizer's Amazon Blog :: I'm curious about this 18-200mm lens…
• Jump Because
• 10 Principles of the CSS Masters

Downloaded and installed Firefox 3 this morning^[1]; here are some first impressions from throughout my first day of use:

1. Content rendering seems improved.  Not sure if it actually is improved or not.  Just feels that way^[2].  Noted that it seems to use the default OS X buttons for otherwise unstyled form buttons now.  I should look into this content rendering thing, see if there really were changes.
2. Tab bar is more “Safari-like”; tab now merges with the browser chrome instead of with the window of content.  But the closing ⊗s are still on “the wrong side”.
3. Tab drag/drop indicator is easier to see.
4. Firebug was incompatible with the upgrade.  (No surprise.)  But the Add-on/Extension Manager couldn’t find the compatible, updated version?  I had to go looking for it.  (Maybe this is more of an issue with Firebug?)
5. TOOLBAR:
   1. I actually like the big back button^[3].
   2. Why not merge the Stop/Reload buttons like the Apple team did in Safari?  They’re mutually exclusive actions anyway…
   3. I like what they’ve done with the address bar.  Especially with the favicon.
   4. Also, I like how they have the little star for the bookmark.  Kind of reminds me of how “favourite” pages are marked in Confluence.
   5. Default theme makes it hard to see the separators on the Bookmarks Toolbar.
6. Some fields don’t seem to want to let me type in them.  This one is hard to replicate but I think it has something to do with when I try to give focus to the field before the page finishes loading.
7. When did the RSS “radio” badge get turned from orange to blue!?!?
8. There seem to be a lot of pages that wind up with horizontal scrollers that didn’t have them before.
9. When it comes to showing the address bar all the time, Firefox 3 means business.
10. Speaking of the address bar: I like how it drops down like that with the memory of the favicon and title and URL.  Gimme some context!
11. I like that the bookmarks are now displayed/managed in a sidebar.  Where they belong.  Responses to clicks seem a little strange sometimes.  (Try right-clicking on a bookmarklet?)
12. And at the end of the day: it was nice that it didn’t crash when I quit the browser.  For a change.

Up next: Ubiquity?

1. At long last? [↩]
2. Then again…  Some elements appear to render totally differently.  Maybe block-level elements?  Something is off in a few places… [↩]
3. Is this blasphemy?  Everyone else seems to hate it. [↩]

Take Philip K. Dick
mix well with ice cream and nuts
top with saccharine.

• iPhone events
  via QuirksBlog (via DF) :: need to finish reading — but the short version appears to be that there is a paradigm shift taking place here b/c the "old fashioned" predictable contiguous behavior of the mouse cursor is totally violated by the iPhone's discontiguous touch-based interface (so much for "onMouseOut")
• The Impotence of Proofreading By Taylor Mali
  at YouTube (via ML) :: probably the funniest damn thing I've seen in a while
• Playing for Keeps: Mur Lafferty’s podcast superhero novel comes to print!
  via B^2; also saw on 365 Tomorrows :: looks and sounds like a fun read (roughly in the same vein as Soon I Will Be Invincible by Austin Grossman?)
• Dial A Human!
  via LifeHacker :: everyone loves these lists because everyone loves getting results
• School Bus Stunt
  at YouTube (via Dan J.) :: "Yep…. That's my new ride."
• End User: Review: Sigma 70mm f/2.8 EX DG Macro

• Seven Problems with a Someday/Maybe List — and Ways to Correct Them
  via LifeHacker :: interesting approach to the "Someday" list — not that there's anything inherently wrong with procrastinating on some pie-in-the-sky project… If you're a GTD fanatic I could see how a long, un-actionable "Someday" list might bog you down but I tend to think of it as a place for these ideas to marinate into brilliance or else fester into something to be pruned.
• Science News / Seeing In Four Dimensions
  via Slashdot :: in my on-going quest to understand this "4D" thing…
• Scientists Solve Mystery of Star Formation Near Black Holes
  via Slashdot :: having just finished Kress' "Shiva in Shadow", doubly interested…
• Neal Stephenson’s new novel, Anathem: sneak peek at glossary
  at B^2 :: Anathem round-up!
• Could There Be Life On Titan?
  via Slashdot :: having just finished Caitlin R. Kiernan's "Riding the White Bull" last night… !!!!!!!!!
• Visualization Strategies: Text & Documents
  neat stuff (useful, too?)
• Get Started with CSS 3
  via Webmonkey
• CSS 3 selectors explained
  via 456 Berea Street

• Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: Make your 404 pages more useful
• Clifford Stoll on … everything
  via mefogus
• 7 Principles Of Clean And Optimized CSS Code
  via Smashing Magazine
• The Scotch Egg: Sphere of Goodness…or Heart-Attack-on-a-Plate?
  via Al Dente :: serve cold? gross! however, served hot (possibly with a little maple syrup) and this might very well be right up my alley
• Wine in a Box Protects the Environment and Saves You Money
  Op-Ed @ NYTimes.com (via DF) :: to bottom-line it: putting wine in a box decreased the manufacturing footprint and makes more sense for both transport and storage of the wine for wines meant to be consumed w/in a year (Yellow Tail, I'm looking in your direction)