You will never have enough pylons.
Never.
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PAX begins, as many large gatherings do, with queues. But walking in, it’s easy to see that this isn’t the usual motley assortment one might see while waiting for an ordinary concert to begin. People here share similarities – they wear clothing adorned with the logos of games, snippets of Penny Arcade, or markings of allegiances Horde or Alliance. Some display no plumage at all, while others clothe themselves with costumes elaborate and fun. People standing in line range all sorts of ages and ethnicities, but despite all the difference for appearances, the difference in origins, everybody in the queue stands together. Everybody knows, that on some level, all the people around them share the same loves – loves for gaming, for sitting with friends going through a dungeon, for fragging a noob with a sweet headshot, for taking down a raid with guildies in record time. Everybody stands together, because they have all stood together before, in queues to enter a busy realm, in lobbies waiting for a new game, in chat rooms shooting the breeze with other bored questers. This is a culture usually traveled by electrons, bridged by silicon and copper, brought together in real space. It’s a sweet note, to be able to see and smell and feel for one’s self that their culture is a real thing, built and inhabited by people who exist.
Not dead, just resting – and busy. Here are some photos I’ve taken with my new camera, the DMC-LX3 from Panasonic. By a long shot the best camera I have ever owned.
For all the attention given to music in the world, most people only recognize a small, ‘famous’ portion of musical instruments. There are many obscure, wonderful instruments that produce unique timbres but which couldn’t be identified even by people who have probably heard them in a piece of music. This post will be examining two relatively unknown, but heard and slightly related instruments: the theremin and ondes Martenot, their obscurity reinforced by the fact spell check recognizes neither of them in its judgements.
The theremin is most likely the more recognized of these two instruments, as it has a rather iconic shape and unforgettable method that is used to play it. The theremin is controlled by two antennae, one controlling volume and the other, pitch. It is one of the simplest arrangements conceivable, and yet so very difficult to master.
In reading the patch notes to World of Warcraft, it is easy to see a certain critical intelligence behind the notes, belying a certain amount of critical undertones in the notes. I have attempted to extract these undertones from the notes and put their meanings out where it’s easy for the average player to see.
# The quest log is now double-paned for more easily viewing quest information. The list of all quests a player has will show in one pane, while the quest details of any highlighted quest will display in the next.
Do your poor, strained eyes tire from the tiny morsels of story we still attempt to fruitlessly inject into your grind fest? Fear not, all the irrelevant information pertaining to what your quest is actually about will be helpfully segregated off to one side of the quest log, leaving you, the treasured player, to be free to easily scan the objectives and determine how many of what you have to whack with unprecedented ease.
After the last sessions of analyzing the lengths of Azeroth, I still had no concrete values as to how big Azeroth really was in terms of its area. Proceeding from where I last left off on measuring the length of Azeroth, I took the pixel-length measurements and ran with them. From last time, I had determined that one pixel on the scale of the map I had been using at the time was .034706 kilometers to one side of a pixel. So, the area of one pixel should therefore be 0.0012045 kilometers². The next step was to remove the pixels from the map that weren’t navigable land or water, so basically just the oceans. This proved a bit trickier than it first appears, since the minimap has lots of different colored water and gradients to take out. Once that was done, the following outline emerged.
Or: Data Mining for Everybody
Stumbling through the internet today and trying some new things, I began to realize the power of Google Trends and what it’s capable of showing. The unique situation of Google as a search monopoly has given it the position to monitor what the majority of people are looking for on the internet at any given time. The Hot Trends page shows recent events with an almost stunning similarity to news feeds and blogs, although searches aren’t intended to reflect what’s the news. This might seem like old news, with things like NPR proclaiming the power of Google in detecting flu pandemics and the like, but it didn’t fully hit me from things like that that these tools aren’t just available to researchers, the Google Trends page allows anyone to compare the prevalence of a search. Setting out on my own scientific endeavor, I looked for what G. Trends would have to say about Cake vs. Pie.
(cake = red, pie = blue)
Recently I was lucky enough to discover the application Terragen while navigating through Wikipedia. Its render quality is absolutely fantastic for an application that is both free and several years old, and while mucking through it I thought that it might be fun to import a few heightmaps from games and render them into near-photo quality images. This was easier said than done, however, and after exporting heightmaps from Fallout 3 in a myriad of formats (RAW 8/16 bit, Targa, Gif, Png) I finally got an accessory application for Terragen to properly import the bitmap version of Fallout 3′s heightmap. Originally, the map was much too flat in Terragen, but after scaling it up and changing the colors to be a little bit muddier, the following result was yielded:
From Terragen
Recently I took the task upon myself to make an image in dedication to Liberty Prime, chief among the most awesome of robotic companions. After editing different parts from my Fallout 3 screenshots (it’s hard taking something from Fallout 3 out of a background, because you have to guide the magnetic lasso between brown-grays and other gray-browns), I assembled together the following image attempting to depict Liberty Prime in all his zealously patriotic glory.
I can hear him in my head, "DEMOCRACY IS NON-NEGOTIABLE"
The only thing left, naturally, was to make an appropriate satirical caption poking fun at both how ridiculously over the top his pro-American slogans are, while mentioning how his pseudo-cold era mentality still applied during to the last administration. Unfortunately, after conferring with the co-writer of the blog, the conversation took an unfortunate turn and this came out of it:
Sometimes the creative process makes great things . . . other times it fails
This, unfortunately, is in the latter category. I’m afraid it falls upon you, the valiant readers, to apply a more suitable caption. Suggestions are welcome!
