Breaking with tradition

For the like-minded aficionados of the non-traditional: A Redis implementation of Twitter, designed for learning about non-relational datastores and Clojure’s creator Rich Hickey on state (bonus track: Jonas Boner on the same). Derek Sivers on the fatal determinism of declaring a goal or as I like to say, “the reason you find so many weblogs with one post promising to post a lot”. Michael Heilemann on the lack of good fiction in contemporary games.

That's the second biggest monkey head I've ever seen

A thousand times yes! The Secret of Monkey Island, revisited. My eleven-year old self is jumping with glee. Awkwardly.

See also, ScummC and The Secret of Monkey Island, The Play.

I am going to call Ghostbusters

At the risk of rambling too much about games: DO WANT.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dD7nw_L4W5M&hl=en&fs=1]

The Ghostbusters video game for the Sega Master System was pretty much the first video game I played.

Beautifully static

Game trailers are frequently a montage of confusing montage. This trailer stands in stark contrast to the standard:

[youtube=[www.youtube.com/watch](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IjU0NZMcUxI&hl=en&fs=1])

Best use of a Romantic piano sonata in a game trailer? Probably.

Turns out its sort of a take-off on the Halo 3 Believe ad. Also pretty well done.

Gaming and design

Khoi Vinh’s thoughts on games and their relation to what I aspire to do on the web:

...I’m savvy enough at least to recognize that very interesting things are happening in that world. As a point of reference for interaction design — for design of every kind — I’m convinced that games represent an important new paradigm...

Game On. Khoi and I are thinking along the same lines here. There’s lots to learn from games, besides the ease at which one can spend time in them.