Diaspora, the open source alternative to Facebook is three weeks away from release.
I’ll give it a shot.
Not that I’m violently opposed to Facebook or its disputed privacy/ownership policies.
Nope, I just want to try out an alternative implementation.
Then again, the blog entry only promises that the code will be available on September 15th, a full-fledged competitor to Facebook won’t be ready.
Following the move to Espoo last year, Haagan Hakkapeliitat as the team name is now officially retired.
Long live Nöykkiö ‘niners. At least in fantasy football.
The drafts for the two leagues are in two days, both live. No homework done on anybody beyond the initial ten prospects.
Yay! Exit Through the Gift Shop is available on dvd/bluray on the sixth of September.
Paul Allen sues everybody. Except companies from Washington state.
PHYLO is a trading card game whose subject is biodiversity.
The image quality of the crowd-sourced game is uneven to say the least, but it is an interesting idea nonetheless.
A tiny new frog species discovered in Borneo.
Microhyla nepenthicola breeds inside the pitchers of carnivorous plants, and is not a new discovery. The specimens picked up earlier were thought to be juveniles of some other amphibian.
Cut the stay in chilling Helsinki very short.
An abbreviated 6Pack show at Sir Eino.
Random walking.
Sushi at Masabi.
Mellow.
Cut loose when the number of kids milling around exceeded comfort level.
Nothing less than awe-inspiring custom-built action figure of Rod Serling, the man behind Twilight Zone.
New subject matter.
Elegant design.
No symbols related to global conspiracies.
And most importantly, the bills can actually be told apart by color.
The summer-long photo thursday challenge was all about climate action.
My climate action was in no way related to cutting down CO2 emissions or the like. I took only two flights this summer, haven’t driven a single trip with a car and am in no way going to give up eating meat.
My action was buying the cloud-spotter’s guide and trying to pay more attention what’s there up in the sky.
Here’s one of the results, a gloriously hedgehog-shaped cloud captured a couple of weeks ago.
Photo Thursday #166/173: Climate action.
Wired provides a recap of the recently played Conspiracy for Good ARG created by Tim Kring.
Let’s just hope there’s no SCO around to ruin it for everybody.
The Parser is a new journal “für Interactive Fiction”.
18 pages worth of improvements on German.
From anarchism to yemenism. It’s all there.
CAPITALISM: You have two cows. You sell one and buy a bull.
…
SURREALISM: You have two giraffes. The government requires you to take harmonica lessons.
Fragile – that’s what coral reefs are.
Two 4 Tuesday 25.8.2010: Unbreakable / Fragile.
As impressive hacks are counted: the MAMEization of an electronic voting machine gets top billing this week.
I bought PopCap’s Plants vs. Zombies for the ipod Touch to serve as in-flight entertainment on the trip to Japan in April. While the game was definitely a good timewaster, it took me almost half a year to finish.
Plants vs. Zombies is a tower defense game where the player uses toys at his disposal (different plants and plant paraphernalia) to stave off invading enemies (zombies).
The game starts off simple, with peashooters against slowly shambling zombies. But the evolving enemies (packing anything from steel buckets to zamboni machines) demand higher grade weaponry. And that is indeed provided – beating each level in the adventure mode puts a new plant at the player’s disposal.
Visually the game falls into the candy-colored-cuteness camp. Even the undead are given a pleasant coating on top of their festering skin. Tom Savini-style visuals would hardly have led to the massive sales the game has enjoyed.
Indeed, the game has been a great success for the kings of casual gaming. It’s been ported to quite a few platforms, with a version on the XBLA surfacing in September. No sequel has been announced yet, but it’s just a matter of time before a new horde of the living dead walks onto the consoles and computers.
Plants vs. Zombies features achievements on all platforms. Achievements that demand quite a bit of extra playtime after the adventure mode is completed, as only a few will get picked up during the course of the story.
A selection of minigames (including zombie-bowling) round out an entertaining package well worth the couple of dollars it costs.
Hayao Miyazaki’s My Neighbor Totoro is a film I return to, over and over again.
The tale of a sundered family takes a left turn towards Sense of Wonder-City at the first opportunity and remains there for the rest of the movie. The plot is not an overly sweet story, but contains plenty of drama. And the drama is of the proper kind – there are no bad guys, no ADHD-styled chases and absolutely no explosions, just situations that demand painful choices of the protagonists.
Fortunately, the drama is adequately balanced with fantasy – weird creatures and uncommon domestic transformations are slotted into the somber story without visible seams.
Still haven’t seen the movie with anything than the original voices. The Disney-engineered dub is allegedly quite passable, and hopefully it erases one of the very few of my pet peeves about the film: there’s just too much shrill laughter in the beginning.
The Totoro merchandise is ubiquitous in Japan. The empire may not yet rival that of Hello Kitty, but the paunchy trolls are definitely closing in on Sanrio’s pale kitten. The cultural impact merits its own section in wikipedia, and is quite informative – the appearances range from an asteroid to a cameo role in Toy Story 3.
Like many of Miyazaki’s films, Totoro occurs in an idealized version of Japan. Here the milieu is rural, and dated somewhere around early sixties.
Totoro works effectively on all levels. It is an engaging movie for adults as well, without regressing to the injokes and pop-culture intertextuality so prevalent in the likes of Shrek and Pixar movies.
Watch Totoro. Or watch it again. It’ll rub meaningful amounts of cynicism off everyone who spends the ninety minutes enthralled.
A triple cul-de-sac, and one way out – not hard to figure out the traffic patterns of this intersection.
Weekday Photo / Urban #13: Intersection.
To mend its ailing economy Philadelphia requires bloggers to purchase a 300$ license.
