T w e n t y S i d e d
Your demands for more comics about the demo for a two-year old game have at last been answered.
I aim to please.
Time Capsule
Civilization is about to undergo some calamity. You can see it coming, but you can’t avert it. (Perhaps it’s unavoidable.) Sometime before the end of this century, civilization is going to be blasted back to the stone age, but projections suggest that things will calm down again in 100-200 years. During that time it’s expected that humans will lose nearly everything, technology-wise. We’ll be back to spears and animal skins.
A clever scientist has come up with a very sturdy time capsule. She’s confident that it will:
- Survive the apocalypse.
- Remain hidden, safe, and airtight until things blow over.
- Be found by any surviving humans once the planet returns to normal.
- Those that find it will be reasonably interested in using whatever they find inside to better their understanding and aren’t going to ignore it or waste it. (They won’t burn textbooks to keep warm, even if they can’t understand them.)
Let’s assume we’ll retain the abstract “technologies”, like phonetic alphabet. If we have to nail things down, assume that the people who find the capsule will be reasonably intelligent adults with a second-grade education and almost no understanding of what the world was like, pre-disaster. (I’m not going to specify what the disaster is, or people will begin gaming the system and suggesting ways to avert or survive the disaster instead of tackling the proposed question.) Note that while you can be sure a group of literate humans will find this, you can’t be sure they will be able to read and understand your textbook on quantum physics.
You’ve been given the job of filling the time capsule. Assuming the goal of jump-starting technology, what do you put in?
EDIT: Oh. I forgot to give a volume limit, just to keep some smartass from stuffing the entire library of congress inside of a power plant inside of an aircraft carrier and putting it in the “capsule”. The capsule is one cubic meter.
Death to Good Graphics!
I just want to point out that another installment of my weekly column went live at The Escapist last Friday. I didn’t link it at the time because the site was inaccessible to me. They were in the midst of some hardware upheaval, the emergent result of an upgrade of some sort. I thought I’d let that business calm down before I tried to send you in that direction. The column is about the self-destructive pursuit of graphics, and what I think developers should be doing instead. In order to make up for the lateness of the link, I am linking it an unprecedented eight times in this paragraph, so that you’ll be able to find it easily.
Also, I want to congratulate The Escapist on the new site design. Some people have groused about the layout in the past, but I think this new thing they have going is, in youngster parlance, “totally sweet”. If this were the 80’s I would pop my collar, put on some awesome shades, and declare the site to be “rad”. I may even go so far as to say it was bitchin’, and I’m sure you know me well enough to realize I don’t make such unqualified appraisals of excellence lightly. But there it is: Bitchin’!
I love the new Stolen Pixels index with the little comic thumbnails. There is something compelling about seeing those little windows into the comic that makes me want to click on them and see what they say. Then I remember: I’m probably already familiar with said contents.
Anyway, Death to Good Graphics!, and so on.
Stolen Pixels #91: Print is Dead
Stolen Pixels is taking a break from Left 4 Dumb. In the meantime, please enjoy this look at some back issues of Gamepunx.
Please hold
If you’re one of the dozens and dozens of people who has contacted me recently, then I beg your indulgence a bit longer. The procedural city project captured a lot of attention. It wound up on Rock, Paper, Shotgun, Kotaku, Flowing Data, BoingBoing, a cross-section of various blogs, and even Digg. (Although true to form, Digg managed to scorn the original link to my site and then embrace one to a different site, days later. (Someone sent me an email explaining the malfunctions and social gaming going on behind the scenes at Digg, but that rant will have to wait for another post.) Still, this follows Digg’s usual pattern of picking up on news that is both late and wrong, and then acting as a spawning pool for a “discussion” that would be too stupid for YouTube.)
This surge of attention brought in a flood of project invites, feature requests, programming suggestions, bug reports, criticisms, business proposals, code snippets, collaboration proposals, and fan mail. As an example: I have requests from three different indie bands who want to use footage of the city builder in their music video / stage performance.
Keeping up with my day job, the Pixel City stuff, my column at the Escapist, my webcomic, and this website proved to be too much. Managing a large slate of projects is a lot like juggling: If you drop one, you’re probably going to drop them all. I dropped everything for a bit this weekend and went for 48 hours straight not producing anything for anyone. And it was awesome.
I’m going to idle along for a couple more days, meeting my business obligations (day job, Escapist) and let everything else slide for a bit longer. Better this than burnout.
Anyway, if you’re waiting for me to get back to you, I apologize for the delay. It’s in the queue.
Multiple Sidosis
In 2000, the following movie was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant”. Multiple Sidosis is the work of Sid Laverents, an amateur filmmaker. It was made in 1970.
Link (YouTube) |
Sid was around 60 when he made that film. (He died earlier this month, a bit short of his hundred and first birthday.) It’s amazing what he was able to accomplish with such primitive tools. Imagine what he could have done with a modern Mac. He also wrote an autobiography: The first 90 Years are the Hardest. (Out of print, sadly.) I can only hope to stay on top of the tech curve half as well as Sid was able to.
Houston Ship Channel Time Lapse
This video is very simple, but I found it to be oddly captivating. The time lapse of a big ship like this gives a better sense of how it moves, in a way you just can’t see when watching it creep along in real time.
Link (YouTube) |
I love the 0:27 mark, when the tug opens up and pulls away. It looks like the enterprise going into warp at this speed.
The sidebar says that this was done by taking a photograph once every six seconds. Assuming the video was then made by simply mapping one photograph to one frame of video (which is by no means certain) and assuming the video was made at 30fps (was also isn’t certain) then 1 second of video would represent 3 minutes of activity. That’s a compression factor of 180:1, which means that the three minutes of visible activity would represent… nine hours?
That sounds wrong to me, but I honestly have no idea. Either way, it’s fun.
(Via.)
From The Archives:
This Scene Breaks a Character
Small changes to the animations can have a huge impact on how the audience interprets a scene.
Batman v. Superman Wasn't All Bad
It's not a good movie, but it was made with good intentions and if you look closely you can find a few interesting ideas.
Seven Springs
The true story of three strange days in 1989, when the last months of my adolescence ran out and the first few sparks of adulthood appeared.
Marvel's Civil War
Team Cap or Team Iron Man? More importantly, what basis would you use for making that decision?
Object-Disoriented Programming
C++ is a wonderful language for making horrible code.
A Lack of Vision and Leadership
People fault EA for being greedy, but their real sin is just how terrible they are at it.
Are Lootboxes Gambling?
Obviously they are. Right? Actually, is this another one of those sneaky hard-to-define things?
The Best of 2013
My picks for what was important, awesome, or worth talking about in 2013.
TitleWhat’s Inside Skinner’s Box?
What is a skinner box, how does it interact with neurotransmitters, and what does it have to do with shooting people in the face for rare loot?
Dear Hollywood: Do a Mash Reboot
Since we're rebooting everything, MASH will probably come up eventually. Here are some casting suggestions.