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Check out this quiz and this video. I can’t say much more without revealing the secret, but these both demonstrate how oblivious the human mind (yes, even yours) can be.
Even better than the rotating snakes, and Mr. Angry and Mrs. Calm - check out The Big Spanish Castle.
Not only is “Y water” a healthy, organic drink for kids, the bottles become building toys when empty.
Brilliant. Absolutely brilliant.
A while ago I posted about Cecropia, a game company which had pioneered a totally unique video game called “The Act“.
Using a simple knob, the player smoothly adjusts the silent protagonist’s personality, causing the characters around him to react accordingly. All the action takes place in ultra-smooth Disney-quality animation, with absolutely no UI elements - creating the first true interactive cartoon.
Unfortunately, Cecropia has had a real problem with “The Act” - namely, how to market it. It’s far too short to make into a console game, and the knob (which most users don’t have) is pretty much critical to the experience, which would require a special hardware investment for most people. The animation quality is far too high to package into some kind of Flash game. It really would make a perfect arcade game. Unfortunately, the market for this kind of arcade game died out in the early 90’s.
So, anyway, they’re taking their technology in a new direction, facing up to the realities of today’s gaming market, and trying their hand at interactive Flash “advergaming”. They’ve put up a demo on Cecropia.com. I won’t tell you how it works (figuring it out is part of the fun). If you’re at all involved in interactive marketing, get in touch with these guys. What they’re doing is truly groundbreaking, and they deserve a lot of attention (and money). And, who knows, maybe someday The Act will see the light of day, in some form or another.
OK, my mind is officially blown. Enjoy:
A while ago, I bought one of the coolest books ever - the Omni Future Almanac. The Omni Future Almanac was written in 1982, and its purpose is to describe what life will be like, well, now.
An entire blog could be devoted to the contents of this book. Sometimes it’s spot on, sometimes it’s way off, but the most interesting parts are the ones where life could easily have turned out they way they describe if a butterfly flapped its wings in just a slightly different way.
I’ve kept this book on a table in my office that I always walk by, and I’m constantly picking it up and perusing a random page. Today, it was about the effects of inflation. So, without further ado, here are the prices we’re looking at in 2010, three years from now (p. 158).
Oh, but wait:
Well, the good news is that a factory worker will be making $197,000 a year to help pay for all this stuff (p. 159).
As someone who often thinks up brilliant* ideas while driving, I’ve been looking for a safe way to make note of them in the car. I’ve got me this iPhone here, but it has no Voice Memo feature. Nor is it possible to leave myself a voicemail with it. (At least not without some crazy setup). What’s a guy to do?
Well, I just discovered ReQall.com, and it is way cool. Just sign up, call a special phone number and leave a message whenever the urge strikes you. They will then take that message and transcribe it to text - using actual human beings - (you can request a no-human version if you’re paranoid, though you risk set so doubling the killer delete select all).
You can then peruse your memos online later via the regular web or via a special iPhone interface.
I’m not sure how these guys make money, but there are plenty of hooks in the system for them to throw ads into. Haven’t hit them yet, though, and I’d be willing to put up with an occasional commercial message for this service - as long as they don’t affect the memo recording process.
* ideas may not be brilliant
The Pipettes. Yes. Listen to them.
I’m pretty sure I just saw Pradeep from VH1’s The Pickup Artist in a local eatery. A couple years ago I ran into “Brian W.” from Average Joe at CompUSA. In neither case did I approach the subject, but it got me thinking…
What’s the proper approach when saying hello to a reality *ahem* star? I mean, with “real” actors, even if you know they’re jerks in real life, you can ignore that fact and just say that you “loved you in [whatever]”. But with a reality TV dude, it’s just, like, “Hi, saw you in The Pickup Artist. Um. You were a jerk.”
Not that I’m saying Pradeep is a jerk. But he refused to apologize after accidentally slapping another guy in the face really hard. What’s up with that?
Perry Bible Fellowship is, by far, the most clever comic strip online, and now it can be obtained it in book form - woohoo!
The Perry Bible Fellowship: The Trial of Colonel Sweeto and Other Stories (Perry Bible Fellowship)
![[sunrise]](/images/sunrise.jpg)
I randomly stumbled upon Sunrise Earth the other morning and actually started Tivo-ing it, not so much to save for later, but just to have it automatically turn on every day… Sunrise Earth is a show consisting of nothing but 60 minutes sunrises from gorgeous places around the world. Tranquil, peaceful, beautiful.
I’ve only watched brief snippets of it, but I had it on this morning while the baby was wandering around the living room getting into his usual trouble, and it dawned on me that since the show was on basic cable, it must contain commercials. I thought about how unfortunate this was - to break up such a pure, unadulterated experience of natural beauty for crass commercialism. But now I was intrigued… I had to hang out to see what would happen. Did The Discovery Channel have some trick up their sleeve to handle this gracefully, via some sort of more subdued ad unit? Then, as if to confirm my worst fears, it struck…
HEAD ON! APPLY DIRECTLY TO THE FOREHEAD!
HEAD ON! APPLY DIRECTLY TO THE FOREHEAD!
HEAD ON! APPLY DIRECTLY TO THE FOREHEAD!
I’m glad I left advertising.
For the parents of young’uns out there, there is now a Sesame Street podcast in the iTunes Store.
Just when you think you’ve seen everything, another mind-blowing demo. This could play a huge role in the Mobile Web.
I’m so glad that “casual gaming” - well - exists. For the longest time people regarded simple, visceral gameplay as outdated and obsolete. I think it was an extremely happy accident that technological limitations in the golden days of the arcade actually forced developers to stumble upon a lot of critical elements of fun gameplay.
What’s great is that in the past couple of years, casual gaming companies like PopCap are really analyzing which aspects of classic-style arcade gaming are best left behind as nostalgia, and which ones really form the primordial essence of videogaming fun.
In this GamaSutra article, PopCap’s general manager Dave Rohrl breaks down the casual gaming experience into critical timespans - discussing about how the players’ impressions at ten seconds, sixty seconds, and twenty minutes, etc., factor into the overall acceptance of the game.
What’s interesting is that the old wisdom about “what will make another quarter into this game machine?” almost perfectly translate into today’s widsom about “what will make someone spend another 15 minutes of their day playing this casual game?”.
Dance Dance Immolation. Wow, talk about hardcore gaming.
That’s right, it officially starts July 3rd, but I was lucky enough to see it at Hasbro’s charity premiere on Thursday.
First things first, as a kid I LOVED Transformers. They were pretty much the only toy I cared about. And as for any other toys I had - if they weren’t something that turned into something else, I wasn’t interested. I even collected all the Go-Bot Rock Lords - robots that turned into, yes, rocks.
But, I digress. The point is, I’ve been a huge Transformers fan for over two decades now. So, I had some fears about the movie. Clearly it wasn’t going to be like the old cartoon, or the original animated movie. And the teaser shots made it clear that the robots didn’t quite look like the originals. - they were far more alien-looking. Could Spielberg and Bay really capture the essence of Transformers that made them so exciting as a kid - yet appeal to a wider audience 20 years removed from the initial phenomenon? In other words, could the movie be awesome?
In a word: yes.
I was just lucky enough to get a hands-on demo of “The Act”, a totally new type of video game created by a local game development company named Cecropia. There’s a trailer of the game online, but it doesn’t give you a sense of what it’s actually like to play–which, right now, you unfortunately can’t do anywhere, because they’re still working out a business/distribution model.
Anyway, the game is an interactive cartoon, animated by former Disney animators. Of course, my initial thought was that it would be a next generation Dragon’s Lair of some sort. Well, that’s basically what it is, but it’s not at all what I expected.
The action in the game is controlled by a single knob instead of a joystick. But you’re not controlling the movements of the protagonist, you’re controlling his personality. Each scene requires you to interact (silently, there’s no dialogue) with other characters via facial expressions and gestures.
For example, in the first scene, you’re trying to pick up a woman at a bar. The way you do this is by carefully “ramping up” and “easing back” (via the knob) on your level of shyness/aggression–in reaction to her facial expressions and body language. In another scene, you’re trying to pass yourself off as a doctor, finding yourself in a cluster of other doctors. You’re trying to blend in as they alternate between laughter and seriousness. Again, you control this spectrum of emotion via the knob. Laugh when they’re serious, or neglect to laugh when they laugh, and the jig is up.
Unlike with Dragon’s Lair, the animation is totally smooth, and infinitely varied, with no obvious “breaks” in the animation. It truly feels like a real cartoon. Watching the game, you’d never know someone was actually “playing” the character.
The game was play tested as a coin-op machine in several locations around Boston, but it remains to be seen what its final incarnation will be. Regardless, if you ever get a chance to play it–or any possible future products using Cecropia’s technology–you must. It like nothing you’ve ever experienced before. If they can work out a distribution model, Cecropia is sitting on a goldmine.
There’s some kind of legitimate scientific research going on here, but whatever the purpose, some folks have created the world’s cutest little dancing yellow squishy Peep-like robot thing. Check out the video of it dancing to Spoon.
37signals, advocates of simplified software and software development have released their how-to book, Getting Real, for free, in HTML format.
Scott Adams (of Dilbert fame) runs a blog which is far more interesting and thought-provoking than you might expect. Unbeknownst to me (and presumably many other people) Scott lost his ability to speak - permanently - about 18 months ago. Actually, he didn’t lose it entirely - in a bizarre quirk of his disease (Spasmodic Dysphonia), he retained his ability to speak to large crowds, or with no one else around, but not socially, in small groups. Read his fascinating account of his life with the disease, and how he recently made a major breakthrough in fighting it. I’m always amazed at how mysterious and adaptable the human brain is, when subjected to bizarre circumstances: