nsfmc

i forget how quickly you can hammer out these kinds of posters....

Fri, 10 May 2013 16:06:41 -0400

i forget how quickly you can hammer out these kinds of posters. the small text seems a bit wrong and poorly proportioned, but still fun nonetheless.

also, the discovery lab still has sessions open, it’s a maths / robotics summer day camp which is actually very cool! It’s not just a poster! middle schoolers take note! scholarships available!

mint mojitos

Sun, 05 May 2013 19:49:10 -0400

if you don’t drink sweet coffee drinks, you can skip this post

philz coffee in the san francisco region has a fantastic gateway-beverage, the mint mojito, whose trade secret is its on-the-spot assembly using Berkeley Farms ‘Manufacturing Cream’ which has four grams of fat per tablespoon. beyond that, there’s a reasonable amount of speculation on the internet as to how you can recreate the heady flavor at home, but everyone seems to agree that the manufacturing cream is the real lynchpin without which you are out of luck.

it’s a tasty drink, though, and i began trying to approximate it at home and the end result ended up being, to my mind at least, superior to philz’s offering (i’ll explain why after the recipe). The ratios here and proportions result in something like the default “sweet and creamy” offering and make two small mojitos or one very large one.

tools needed

muddler, long spoon or ‘fancy stick’
cocktail shaker

ingredients

1 cup (12fl oz) hot coffee
1/3 cup (4fl oz) heavy cream
2tbsp granulated sugar
1/3 bunch mint (or more, you should not be shy about using mint here)
Ice

steps

remove mint leaves from stems and put in shaker, add sugar
mash/muddle mint and sugar together until nearly all sugar is mixed with the mint. Like a julep, you can add a bit of water to help out the process. Do not be gentle, you want to extract as much essence as possible from the mint using the sugar as an abradant.
add hot coffee to the muddled mint and give a stir, dissolving whatever granulated sugar remains
add cream
add ice (how much ice depends on the size of your shaker, i typically add enough so that there’s slightly more ice than coffee in the shaker)
aggressively shake until cold, until the cream has whipped a bit.

so without sounding too hyperbolic, i think that most detailed explorations of this beverage really understate that you should basically be treating the drink like a cocktail you would serve to a houseguest or a paying customer at a bar.

in particular, you should be approaching the mint muddling with gusto (at the end of the muddling, the mint should appear like it was thrown in a blender) and you should be shaking the beverage as if you were trying to make butter with a jar, some cream and a marble. if you do this, then you can fake the mouthfeel of the manufacturing cream by basically folding a coffee drink into a small volume of whipped cream.

when you do this, you end up with the trademark foamy head of cream you get from philz, and you also get to dial in the consistency each time you make the drink. depending on the traffic and barista, the true philz mojito varies a bit in mintyness, sweetness and even creaminess. the baristas always offer to remediate, but why bother?

sure, i mean, this concotion may also vary wildly, but it’s probably not going to vary that wildly and more likely than not, you will know what you do or don’t like about what’s going on. it’s exactly like going to a bar. even though drinks are standardized enough in theory, every bar and every bartender puts their own twist on a drink which is exactly what happens with baristas that make great and not-so-great coffee drinks.

the other thing is that even though the recipe is pretty straightforward, getting it to come together is actually somewhat time and energy intensive. this serves as a good rate-limiter, preventing you (or at least me) from going on mojito benders, so win-win, right?

"As a programmer, my core strengths have always been knowing how to apologize to users, and composing..."

Fri, 19 Apr 2013 08:00:04 -0400

“As a programmer, my core strengths have always been knowing how to apologize to users, and composing funny tweets.”

- The Matasano Crypto Challenges - Pinboard Blog

"TL;DR I caught the bat! It’s really important to get the bat"

Thu, 18 Apr 2013 20:59:13 -0400

“TL;DR I caught the bat!
It’s really important to get the bat”

- What are some useful secrets from your job that will benefit customers?

"If you die in San Francisco, unless you are judged notable by our know-nothing newspaper (it is..."

Wed, 17 Apr 2013 20:04:35 -0400

“If you die in San Francisco, unless you are judged notable by our know-nothing newspaper (it is unlikely you will be judged notable unless your obituary has already appeared in the Washington Post or the New York Times), your death will be noted in a paid obituary submitted to the Chronicle by your mourners. More likely, there will be no public notice taken at all. As much as any vacancy in the Chronicle I can point to, the dearth of obituaries measures its decline.”

- Final Edition by Richard Rodriguez | Harper’s Magazine, Nov 2009

IDEA/ONICS CG-1000 EAS

Wed, 17 Apr 2013 12:55:01 -0400

IDEA/ONICS
CG-1000
EAS

Tom Bissell reviews L. A. Noire, the latest hit game from Rockstar Games - Grantland

Wed, 17 Apr 2013 02:04:24 -0400

Tom Bissell reviews L. A. Noire, the latest hit game from Rockstar Games - Grantland:

I recently had the chance to finally play this game through and found myself agreeing with nearly every point in this article (which is also a hilarious read).

the most fascinating observation (which perhaps is obvious, but still sits with me after having read the essay twice (and, by the way, will be the subject of the rest of this distressingly long post)), was this:

the following question was never far from my mind: How big of a problem is it that players can effectively screw up video-game stories? It is a question that is never far from my mind when I am playing any game whose fiction works in tandem with my decisions to create something thematically unified and dramatically satisfying. So, how big of a problem is it? One answer to this question is: There is no answer to this question. Another answer is: Strong interactive fiction will compel players to behave in ways roughly analogous to how the interactive fiction’s author intends them to behave. Another answer is: The whole purpose of interactive fiction is to encourage this type of crisis. Another answer is: This is precisely why the video-game medium is incompatible with authored forms of storytelling. In the past few years, I have thought about this question a lot — maybe more than any other question, in fact. None of the above answers satisfies me.

and this is actually a fascinating question when you think about guided experiences, just as a ‘u/x thing’ rather than a ‘video game thing’ because sometimes these off-the-rails deviations aren’t the user trying to mess with you, they’re just offshoots of natural curiosity. you even see this as you (or a loved one) use a new service you don’t totally understand, you click once, twice, you get somewhere, do something neat and all of a sudden: “now… how do i get back” or “where am i?” and probably more importantly “can i restart what i was doing before i got curious?”

similarly, i start to wonder in what contexts you provide these saftey handles for users. in a game like LA Noire, you pretty much do missions as they’re handed to you with slight interludes. If you’re ever lost, there’s actually an ‘objectives’ menu that you can always return to. If you forget that, you can (hilariously) press X to ask your partner what you should be doing now. If you freak out, the pause menu has Restart as the fifth option or somesuch.

lemme rewind here: the question tom bissell posed was this:

How big of a problem is it that players can effectively screw up video-game stories?

which, decomposed implies the following:

there’s a narrative
the player is part of that narrative…
but somewhat free to diverge slightly from the story…
and capable of doing something logically inconsistent…
but the story demands that the player’s character return to some baseline situation
so how do you handle that without
- forcing restarts or
- ending the story?

and i agree with tom bissell that it’s a hard problem in general unless there’s no actual end-goal in mind (or if the player/user’s objective is tangential to the choices they are able to make as players). So i guess what i’m saying is that the final objective has to be clear and part of the gameplay in order for the player to have the ability to mess everything up. For example: in the game ms. pac-man, there’s the completely obvious goal to eat as many dots as possible while escaping the ghosts. The worst your player-ability can do here is prevent Act Three from happening by never getting there. You either die, or you receive a pac-child from the stork.

Since the goal (and the thing that gets you points) in pac-man is tied up in collecting dots and fruit and cannibalizing ghosts, it’s not obvious that failing to do this would do anything other than end the game. Which is to say, there’s no version of ms. pac-man in which you can spurn mr. pac-man’s advances in order to expect a different gameplay outcome when you reach act three. In contrast, a game like 2007’s Bioshock successfully exploited the red pill/blue pill mechanic vis-à-vis harvesting little sisters because the choice between harvesting and saving them was ultimately part of the gameplay. Do or not do, there is no deviation from the end-goal.

There’s also the nature of micro vs macro effects limiting a user’s effects. Think of it like this: in a fantasy stock portfolio game, you actually have lots of opportunities to ‘mess with the system’ but the effect of a single trader (you) with a $100,000 portfolio is, in the scheme of things, not quite enough to visibly affect the nature of the entire stock market. I don’t think anybody playing these games cares that the game doesn’t offer them the realism of being able to pull some george soros-esque black wednesday manoeuvre but they do care that the exchanges which govern their individual transactions behave rationally (or as rationally as exchanges operate).

So getting back to the point about relating to UI/UX in general, i think what i’m noticing is that there’s this issue with many guided experiences which is:

what am i supposed to be doing (i.e. what’s my main goal)
- this is not necessarily obvious: let’s pick tetris, is your goal to get a high score, to ‘beat’ the game, or to have fun?
is it possible to bypass or deviate from my stated/implicit goal?
- can you play tetris sustainably without actually trying to ‘advance’ the game?
importantly, is there any reward, either extrinsic or intrinsic for deviating from the goal?
- in a system where every action is rewarded in some way is there less motivation to ‘stay on target’?
is it a problem if the user’s goal changes or deviates from the explicit goal?
- if so, is it easy to reset or ‘realign’ the goal?
- if not, are there any ‘bad’ goals?

and coming back full circle to the original question: it strikes me that the issue of user-agency conflicting with the goals of a narrative is rooted in whether or not there are ambiguous end-goals or not. If there are numerous ways to provide progress for a player, it feels like all those sorts of progress motivators should be aligned towards a common goal. and that is incredibly hard because i think it’s easy to imagine (he says handwaving) crafting a dramatically/conceptually/educationally/&c. diverse experience that includes at least two rewarding, but fundamentally orthogonal game mechanics.

you can see this in ms. pac-man: eventually, devouring ghosts no longer yields the massive point bounty that eating rare fruit provides. but it is incredibly gratifying to eat the ghosts until you observe the risks outstripping the benefits. the behavior remains the same: eat something, get points, but the observed reward for some kinds of actions inevitably shifts so that your strategy for optimizing high-score eventually changes and you use the ‘energizer’ purely defensively.

i don’t really know what i’m trying to say here, but there’s some nut of an observation going on, if anything, it’s a realization that creating satisfying guided experiences is tough when lots of options are available to the player.

some other observations, mostly about la noire:

the storytelling in the game is about on par with syndicated crime procedurals. I constantly told everyone who would hear me out: “it’s like playing a version of ‘Murder, She Wrote’, but in video game format.” It’s actually a little bit better because it plays with multi-mission story arcs, so there’s that, but
the biggest flaw in the interrogations is the choice between ‘lie’ and ‘doubt’ because it’s not clear what metric you’re using to assess the statements, and it takes you out of the experience by making you think about what you think the system expects you to answer. This is actually sort of good because it shows that mission writers didn’t feel shoehorned into writing dialog that neatly fit into any category, but it also seemed somewhat arbitrary when you picked one over the other unless you wildly accused everyone of lying and then took it back.
instead of making beer bottles and matchbooks insignificant, it would have been nice if you could have entered them into evidence anyway and then pruned your list of evidence. The game already introduces irrelevant evidence all over the place, so it would just be a matter of training you to ignore things that actually don’t matter in your evidence book, rather than while investigating the objects.
what’s up with the love interest subplot? it sort of comes out of nowhere and never really materializes in any good way.
also, really enjoyed the extra mad men cameos in the game. nice touch.
but man, jessica fletcher as the star of a game. i would seriously pay for that right quick.

v0: 26 down and a few astral planes to go.

Sun, 14 Apr 2013 23:51:48 -0400

v0: 26 down and a few astral planes to go.

"Jack Ziegler, who has published more than fourteen hundred cartoons in The New Yorker, once remarked..."

Fri, 05 Apr 2013 19:23:07 -0400

“Jack Ziegler, who has published more than fourteen hundred cartoons in The New Yorker, once remarked to me that he finally started getting the hang of it after about the three thousandth one.”

- Roger Ebert Wins the Cartoon Caption Contest

oh letter S, how you elude me

Wed, 03 Apr 2013 11:36:58 -0400

oh letter S, how you elude me

"Pledge $10,000 or more You will get a speaking role in the movie. Here’s the scene — Veronica is..."

Wed, 13 Mar 2013 23:20:51 -0400

“

Pledge $10,000 or more

You will get a speaking role in the movie. Here’s the scene — Veronica is eating with the man in her life. Things have gotten tense between them. You are the waiter/waitress. You approach the table, and you say, “Your check, sir.” We guarantee you will be on camera as you say the line. Unless you go all hammy and ruin the scene and we have to cut you out, but that would be a sad day for all of us. Just say the line. Don’t over-think it. You’re a waiter. Your motivation is to turn over the table.

”

- The Veronica Mars Movie Project

"At the last moment, Lincoln regrets volunteering for Booth’s party trick."

Mon, 11 Feb 2013 12:01:58 -0500

“At the last moment, Lincoln regrets volunteering for Booth’s party trick.”

- Synopses of movies I haven’t seen, based solely on their posters: Killing Lincoln

"We support the printed word in all its forms: newspapers, magazines, and of course books. We think..."

Thu, 07 Feb 2013 01:19:55 -0500

“

We support the printed word in all its forms: newspapers, magazines, and of course books. We think reading on computers or phones or whatever is fine, but it cannot replace the experience of reading words printed on paper.

We pledge to continue reading the printed word in the digital era and beyond.

Copy the code below the button to add it to your page.

”

- Read the Printed Word

All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others

"What they didn’t know was Sean Raftis, who was “It,” had flown in from Seattle and..."

Mon, 04 Feb 2013 14:51:00 -0500

“

What they didn’t know was Sean Raftis, who was “It,” had flown in from Seattle and was folded in the trunk of the Honda Accord. When the trunk was opened he leapt out and tagged Mr. Tombari, whose wife was so startled she fell backward off the curb and tore a ligament in her knee.

“I still feel bad about it,” says Father Raftis, who is now a priest in Montana. “But I got Joe.”

”

- It Takes Planning, Caution to Avoid Being ‘It’

Caturday

Thu, 31 Jan 2013 12:06:08 -0500

Caturday

still don’t know what’s going on here, but the T...

Mon, 28 Jan 2013 16:54:49 -0500

still don’t know what’s going on here, but the T isn’t nearly wide enough for this and the A is feeling a bit too high-waisted.

harley quinn

Tue, 15 Jan 2013 19:56:06 -0500

harley quinn

cyrushighsmith: from sketchbook

Tue, 15 Jan 2013 19:43:16 -0500

cyrushighsmith:

from sketchbook

The Phaedrus

Thu, 10 Jan 2013 11:21:00 -0500

Socrates: Enough appears to have been said by us of a true and false art of speaking.

Phaedrus: Certainly.

Socrates: But there is something yet to be said of propriety and impropriety of writing.

Phaedrus: Yes.

...

Socrates: At the Egyptian city of Naucratis, there was a famous old god, whose name was Theuth; the bird which is called the Ibis is sacred to him, and he was the inventor of many arts, such as arithmetic and calculation and geometry and astronomy and draughts and dice, but his great discovery was the use of letters. Now in those days the god Thamus was the king of the whole country of Egypt; and he dwelt in that great city of Upper Egypt which the Hellenes call Egyptian Thebes, and the god himself is called by them Ammon. To him came Theuth and showed his inventions, desiring that the other Egyptians might be allowed to have the benefit of them; he enumerated them, and Thamus enquired about their several uses, and praised some of them and censured others, as he approved or disapproved of them. It would take a long time to repeat all that Thamus said to Theuth in praise or blame of the various arts. But when they came to letters, This, said Theuth, will make the Egyptians wiser and give them better memories; it is a specific both for the memory and for the wit. Thamus replied-- O most ingenious Theuth, the parent or inventor of an art is not always the best judge of the utility or inutility of his own inventions to the users of them. And in this instance, you who are the father of letters, from a paternal love of your own children have been led to attribute to them a quality which they cannot have; for this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners' souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality.

Phaedrus: Yes, Socrates, you can easily invent tales of Egypt, or of any other country.

Socrates: There was a tradition in the temple of Dodona that oaks first gave prophetic utterances. The men of old, unlike in their simplicity to young philosophy, deemed that if they heard the truth even from "oak or rock," it was enough for them; whereas you seem to consider not whether a thing is or is not true, but who the speaker is and from what country the tale comes.

Phaedrus: I acknowledge the justice of your rebuke; and I think that the Theban is right in his view about letters.

Socrates: He would be a very simple person, and quite a stranger to the oracles of Thamus or Ammon, who should leave in writing or receive in writing any art under the idea that the written word would be intelligible or certain; or who deemed that writing was at all better than knowledge and recollection of the same matters?

Sucrets Tin on Flickr.

Mon, 07 Jan 2013 00:00:04 -0500

Sucrets Tin on Flickr.