Elijah Meeks's Blog, page 3

Apple thinks COBOL is evil, "GOTO 10″ Bullshit

There's a great post on the entire Adobe-Apple debacle over at /dev/why!?! that not only explains the technical issues at play with Apple's closing off of the iWhatever to outside SDKs but also points out that this "makes it a license violation to include a language interpreter inside a game."  (Interestingly, enough, this apparently already violates the current SDK)

I don't know contract law (thank God) but wouldn't you think that inconsistent enforcement of a legal contract would somehow...

There's a reason why he won the Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny

Very frankly, I am opposed to people being programmed by others.

Mr. Rogers

Kill It With Magma

There's a great interview with Tarn Adams up on Negative Gamer.  Tarn and his brother are creating Dwarf Fortress, as inexplicable as it is marvelous.  How marvelous and inexplicable and crazy?  Well, if Baudrillard was writing Simulacra and Simulation today, he'd use Dwarf Fortress as his example, not Crash.  Dwarf Fortress makes Crash look like Parcheesi.

This is why we can't have nice things

The more I code, the more I think coding is for tools.  For tools, by tools, to keep all the power in the hands of the needy pedants that have the time and delusion to keep track of the absolute normative disaster that are programming languages.  For instance, let's just say you want to have a little border resize to your image in your wee Flex app, that should be easy, right?  Just get the size of the image and change the border to be a bit bigger.  Oh wait…

width is the width of the Image...

The Transcendent Beauty of Radar Topography

Some days, when you're working with spatial analytical software, looking for a way to shoehorn techniques used to study bighorn sheep into studying the historic gravities of power, you forget that you're dealing with some of the most beautiful imagery to have graced the retina.  There's something about radar topography and electron microscopy that reveal shapes and patterns both foreign and familiar.  Here's Canada and the northern United States, round about the Rockies.

North America - 250m...

And Sometimes the Internet Scares the Hell Out of You

Guess What 14-legged Monster Just Got a Taste for Humans - Be Afraid

Apparently, the ocean is sick of being abused and it's sending up armored hellbeasts to devour us.

See Isopocalypse 2010 for more.  In all seriousness, the guy there is the closest thing you can get to an Isopod expert, and gives a great expose on how breathless reporting of strange creatures can go from divorced-from-reality to full-blown-crazy-talk in no time flat.

Sometimes you find the funniest things on the Internet

It's also aware to me she might (I don't know because it's a personal issue) be a femenist. Nothing really wrong with that. But sooner or later even femenist have to face judgement.

The Internet, where you can see Bangkok and Smallville without leaving the comfort of your own seat.

Tomorrow, AD

For all of us who find it completely not suspicious at all that everyone at Boing Boing loves Hot Tub Time Machine (starring action spectacular superstar John Cusack, not coincidentally soon to be a guest blogger at Boing Boing, which I wouldn't have known except they mention it in every post, along with how impressed they are by the cinematic quality of John Cusack Presents Hot Tub Time Machine starring John Cusack) and are intrigued by the idea of "time travel" I direct you to a blog, from ...

Next Week, AD

For all of us who find it completely not suspicious at all that everyone at Boing Boing loves Hot Tub Time Machine (starring action spectacular superstar John Cusack, not coincidentally soon to be a guest blogger at Boing Boing, which I wouldn't have known except they mention it in every post, along with how impressed they are by the cinematic quality of John Cusack Presents Hot Tub Time Machine starring John Cusack) and are intrigued by the idea of "time travel" I direct you to a blog, from ...

Articulate synesthetic audiovision

Boing Boing has an excellent essay by the Superbrothers about the strength and promise of gaming as a form of communication. They even take on the alphabet.

Remember when Miyamoto made that videogame about those plumbers? The real revolution with that videogame was in the style of communication. It was a tremendous leap forward in how articulate synesthetic audiovisual could be. Coins looked like they sounded and they sounded the way they behaved in the context of the mechanics. Each element...