May 2013
1 post
On hiatus
I’m taking a break from blogging for May. Marit’s here, and we want to spend as much time together as we can, so apart from possible sporadic entries, I’ll pick this up again in June. I’ve blogged something daily for the last six months, something I only hoped to sustain for November, so I think that’s a pretty good Phase One.
Thanks for reading.
April 2013
30 posts
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Dabbling in mnemotechny
Yesterday, in ten minutes, I did something for the first time that I would have previously judged to be very difficult to accomplish in an hour: memorising the sequence of reds and blacks in a shuffled deck of playing cards and recalling them with 100% accuracy.
I was prompted to do this by an audiobook I’m reading, Moonwalking with Einstein by Joshua Foer, a journalist drawn into the world...
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I Finally Played: Cargo Commander
There’s a real gem in the current Indie Royale bundle (available for another four-and-a-bit days). And it shows that the real value of these indie bundles is not always in their savings, but in their discovery.
I’d never heard of Cargo Commander. I’d never seen it in the Steam store, and missed the post where RPS gave it its only mention. If not for the bundle I would be unaware...
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Thursday Themed Thrivia: From the Mind of Stan Lee
This quiz comes to you from the Marvel universe, which every couple of years I fall into in a big way. 700 free issues from Comixology has a way of doing that to a guy.
Below is a list of the real names of ten characters created by Stan Lee. What are their superhero/villain alter egos?
Peter Parker
Dr. Bruce Banner
Ben Grimm
Scott Summers
Matt Murdock
Clint Barton
Max Eisenhardt
Wanda...
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Saucy beef dofu/tofu
A word of caution. If a recipe calls for fresh tofu, but you don’t have any, don’t make the recipe. And if you happen to have a jar of preserved fermented tofu in the cupboard, leave it there.
Do not think you can get away with the substitution. And definitely do not ruin an expensive piece of fillet steak by rendering it almost inedible this way.
This was one of the worst things...
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I Finally Played: Minecraft + Feed The Beast
A few months ago I felt like I’d played out Minecraft—if you can play an infinite, actively developed game to exhaustion. This week past, I’ve probably played it more than in any other.
I’ve been figuring out (or failing to figure out) uranium, rubber, bees, backpacks, engines, quicksand, wisps, cogs, blue sparkly trees, and linking books.
I have Feed the Beast to thank for...
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Thursday Themed Thrivia: Either Ore
It’s a gorgeous day here in Derbyshire. Spring has finally arrived, the sun is warm, and the birds on the canal are building their nests. But who has time for outdoor frivolousness when there’s a quiz to do? Priorities must prevail.
I’m going to give you a list of ten ore minerals. For each, give me the element for which they are an important ore.
Hematite
Galena
Bauxite
...
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Yesterday I asked, given a photo of a particular phase of the moon, how many weeks would pass before the next full moon?
You probably know that a lunar month is about 28 days, or four weeks. And perhaps you know that the lunar terminator (the line separating the light and dark halves of the moon) sweeps from right to left in the Northern Hemisphere. And so when we see a right hand half moon, it...
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Today: a simple question.
You look up at night, and see this moon:
How many weeks (to the nearest round number) will pass before the next full moon?
I’ll post the answer tomorrow.
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I Finally Played: Thirty Flights of Loving
The worst reaction you can have to an artwork is not to hate it, to consider it a complete waste of time, to wish it had never been created. Nor is the worst reaction you can have to an artwork to love it unconditionally, even… blind to its flaws, adoring it without subtlety of opinion or judgment.
No, the most dreaded reaction you can have to an artwork is to fail to understand it; to know...
Completists →
There’s something inspirational about people who undertake projects to work through a defined list of something. I think I find them compelling because projects like these are often a little bit arbitrary and crazy, but the endpoint is well-defined. When a project’s goal is to complete everything on the list, there’s no ambiguity about finishing. It appeals to both my senses of...
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Thursday Themed Thrivia:
Tonight’s Geekeasy night, where we meet in a pub in Derby, listen to an engaging speaker, drink ale and eat samosas! So to celebrate, before I go, here’s a quiz with no connection to that.
Eleven questions (I’m feeling rebellious), each in the form of one or more words. The answer, in each case, is the name of the writer who coined these words.
newspeak, doublethink, Big...
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The Right Person
At work, our three-man IT department is facing our toughest challenge to date: finding a replacement for one of us who is leaving.
We’re looking to find a replacement quickly, so the departer can help train the newcomer; if that doesn’t happen, the resultant disruption will certainly lead to a postponement of meaningful work.
There are a number of points against us:
We’re...
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I Finally Played: Bioshock Infinite
What can I write about a game that we shouldn’t spoil each other on after I’ve completed it? Bearing in mind that half the stuff widely circulated in previews were things I’d consider spoily. This is going to be tricky.
See, the game’s still new, so I don’t want to talk about the ending or how it made me feel. I won’t talk about the plot either in details or...
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Super Adventure Box and chiptunes
Guild Wars 2’s April event is a full-blown in-game Zelda-like 8-bit adventure game. It’s full of references and crafted with great nostalgia for its source materials.
It even has its own chiptune soundtrack and, unusually, it’s both genuinely appropriate in style and written with the technical restrictions of music on old games systems. (Like many pastiches of retro pixel art...
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Thursday Themed Thrivia: Where They Have Gone...
Thursday already, huh? Though we just shifted to British Summer Time, so according to my lagging brain it’s currently… slightly later on Thursday.
Here’s a geeky one for you. Each of these famous people all made a guest appearance in a Star Trek TV series (forget the movies). Just figure out which series each one appeared in: the original series (TOS), The Next Generation (TNG), Deep...
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A Walk from Matlock—30th March 2013
On Saturday I caught the train up to Matlock to go for a walk. I haven’t walked seriously since Marit’s last visit in September, so I was clamouring to get out of the house. It’s spring now, and the forecast was for sun, so I expected a day which, though not warm, would be pleasant.
What I neglected to think about was the huge amount of snow which had fallen in the Peak...
March 2013
31 posts
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I Finally Played: Stonekeep
Last week I’ve spent most of my time playing Bioshock Infinite (what else?). But before that came out I put a few hours into Interplay’s state of the art dungeon crawler of 1995, Stonekeep.
A game with a notoriously turbulent production cycle, Stonekeep mutated from a nine-month, $50,000 project into a five year project with a budget one hundred times higher. Here’s a...
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RPS Comment Free
In response to recent conversations about the worth of the comments on PC gaming site Rock Paper Shotgun, I threw together a quick user script to hide the comments section, comment counts and the sidebar of recently posted comments.
It’s hosted on userscripts.org. It works in Firefox with the Greasemonkey extension. In Chrome it’s a little different, since that browser won’t by...
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Thursday Themed Thrivia: Punctua Obscura
This week on Thursday Themed Thrivia, there’s a big prize to be won! The winner will be credited with three extra days of living (time will automatically be added to end of lifespan).
Here are ten punctuation marks of different levels of obscurity. For each, just provide the name of the mark.
The answers, they are below…
[[MORE]]
Ellipsis
Tilde
Caret (circumflex also allowed)
...
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On Bioshock Infinite and avoiding spoilers
After the first couple of hours, I am torn between wanting to write and talk and tweet about everything I’ve seen in this game, and an appreciation bordering on awe for the quality of execution of its visual and narrative reveals.
What I feel strongly is that everyone who’s going to play this game should go into it with as little information as possible. It’s a very well crafted...
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Pork with Chinese leaf
From Chinese Food in Minutes by Ching-He Huang. (Recipe seems to be exclusive to the book, it’s not on the Channel 5 website. Sorry!)
A straightforward dish, this, with just one ingredient new to me: the famous Chinese leaf (or Napa cabbage). Which, unsurprisingly, turns out to be a tasty vegetable: lots of crunch in the stalks and a light white cabbage flavour in the leaves, and a good...
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I Finally Played: Space Engine
It’s hard to argue that Space Engine even counts as a game. But it would make an incredible foundation for countless games, and lately I’ve been spending more time in this than in games. So it’s this week’s ‘game’. What a joy it is to make the rules.
Space Engine is a simulation of the entire universe. Using real astronomical data where known, and procedural...
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Game Development Diary: Simulating Pressure Take 2
Last time I wrote about my first attempt at simulating pressure propagation on a 2D map. Doing it that way, I ran into some shortcomings, so I’m taking another swing at it.
Upfront I have to thank Andy Durdin (Twitter) who, generously and without solicitation, essentially created the solution you see here; the biggest change to his fully formed solution is that I’ve used SFML’s...
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Mixed seafood (non-)crispy noodles
Still trying to get more adventurous with the fish, so a dish with three kinds of seafood was a good bet. (Recipe here.)
I held off deep-frying the noodles, since I didn’t have an oil thermometer, and served this on boiled noodles (and white rice the next day). So I suppose I haven’t properly cooked this dish, but I’ll try deep fried noodles some other time as a rice...
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Thursday Themed Thrivia: Famous Person, Floral...
It’s the first (full) day of Spring and my feet are frozen solid. Let’s do this in a hurry so I can go and burn off the cold, dead tissue that used to be a set of toes.
Here are descriptions of ten famous people who share names with flowers or plants. Just work out who they are.
2010 Brit award winner for Best British Female Solo Artist
TV presenter who’s been called the Queen...
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Spicy Sichuan aubergine
From Chinese Food in Minutes. Recipe here.
My first (partial) failure from this book, but it was my fault. The recipe specifies a temperature for the groundnut oil (I used sunflower, maybe another mistake) used to deep fry the aubergine, but I didn’t have a thermometer (or any bread) so I guessed… and the oil was still way too cool for frying.
The aubergine slices sucked that oil...
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I Finally Played: Little Inferno
(I’m sick of typing “Project Play Some Of Those Bloody Games in 2013”, so it’s now renamed to “I Finally Played”. Because my writing definitely needs more occurrences of the word “I”.)
Is it possible for a game to be a savage attack on gamers and the gaming industry without its creator intending it to be?
That’s what I’ve been wondering...
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Game Development Diary: Simulating Pressure
Last time I wrote a bit about 2D map representation in the game I’ll be working on for the rest of eternity. This time I’ll discuss implementation of the core mechanic of the game—simulating gas pressure in a space station—and I’ll try to do so without going into the physics of fluid dynamics, because I don’t know a damn thing about the physics of fluid dynamics.
The...
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Gong Bao (Kung Pao) chicken with peanuts
First recipe from Every Grain of Rice by the wonderfully named Fuchsia Dunlop. ‘Katie at the Kitchen Door’ blogged the recipe here with publisher permission.
I used 250g of chicken when the recipe called for 300-350; this didn’t appear to be detrimental to the dish at all.
It’s great to be in a position where I’ve got all the standard Chinese specialist...
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Thursday Themed Thrivia: Rock AKAs
Sooner or later every setter does this quiz. I’ve tried to dig up some of the less well known ones but I dunno… this one’s a bit tricky for anyone but music trivia nerds. Good luck.
Here are ten real names of rock stars… just figure out their stage names.
John Joseph Lydon
John Michael Osbourne
James Newell Osterberg Jr.
Brian Hugh Warner
Michael Peter Balzary
Saul Hudson
...
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