Seven Lions

A headfoot I noticed:

I think he has too many eyes, don't you?

Playpen allows you to draw some extremely pixelated Harkonnens, but it does have Dwarf Fortress.  Don’t try to rescue the beard mite, though, it’s a lost cause.

Saw this over at Know Your Meme:

It’s absolutely incredible.  The timing necessary to pull this off, and the mastery of the gameplay elements…  I can’t believe it’s been around for three years and I’ve never heard of it.

There’s a great post on the entire Adobe-Apple debacle over at /dev/why!?! that not only explains the technical issues at play with Apple’s closing off of the iWhatever to outside SDKs but also points out that this “makes it a license violation to include a language interpreter inside a game.”  (Interestingly, enough, this apparently already violates the current SDK)

I don’t know contract law (thank God) but wouldn’t you think that inconsistent enforcement of a legal contract would somehow damage its value?

Very frankly, I am opposed to people being programmed by others.

Mr. Rogers

There’s a great interview with Tarn Adams up on Negative Gamer.  Tarn and his brother are creating Dwarf Fortress, as inexplicable as it is marvelous.  How marvelous and inexplicable and crazy?  Well, if Baudrillard was writing Simulacra and Simulation today, he’d use Dwarf Fortress as his example, not Crash.  Dwarf Fortress makes Crash look like Parcheesi.

The more I code, the more I think coding is for tools.  For tools, by tools, to keep all the power in the hands of the needy pedants that have the time and delusion to keep track of the absolute normative disaster that are programming languages.  For instance, let’s just say you want to have a little border resize to your image in your wee Flex app, that should be easy, right?  Just get the size of the image and change the border to be a bit bigger.  Oh wait…

1. width is the width of the Image loader control and not the loaded image’s. If this property is not set, it will be adjusted automatically based on the loaded image’s width. The auto adjustment will not occur in the Image control’s complete event. This value will be updated in the last updateComplete event (the one after the complete event).
2. contentWidth is the width of the loaded image when scaled. The loaded image has not been scaled yet in the Image control’s complete event so you won’t get the correct value, you will get the original width instead of the scaled value. You have to wait for the Image control’s updateComplete event after the complete event finishes to get the correct value.
3. content.width is the width of the loaded image without regard to scaling. This will be immediately available during the Image control’s complete event. Note that content is actually the loaded image.

Right?  And Actionscript is one of the easy languages (reason number two why it’s now cool to hate Flash, along with “Steve told me to.”).

Some days, when you’re working with spatial analytical software, looking for a way to shoehorn techniques used to study bighorn sheep into studying the historic gravities of power, you forget that you’re dealing with some of the most beautiful imagery to have graced the retina.  There’s something about radar topography and electron microscopy that reveal shapes and patterns both foreign and familiar.  Here’s Canada and the northern United States, round about the Rockies.

North America - 250m Resolution - Albers Equal Area Contiguous

Guess What 14-legged Monster Just Got a Taste for Humans - Be Afraid

Apparently, the ocean is sick of being abused and it’s sending up armored hellbeasts to devour us.

See Isopocalypse 2010 for more.  In all seriousness, the guy there is the closest thing you can get to an Isopod expert, and gives a great expose on how breathless reporting of strange creatures can go from divorced-from-reality to full-blown-crazy-talk in no time flat.

It’s also aware to me she might (I don’t know because it’s a personal issue) be a femenist. Nothing really wrong with that. But sooner or later even femenist have to face judgement.

The Internet, where you can see Bangkok and Smallville without leaving the comfort of your own seat.