Elijah Meeks's Blog, page 4

Visualizing Spatial History

We're all spoiled by cartoon maps of the allies storming Normandy or the melting ice caps, and so a visualization of spatial change in medieval China, while accurate (at least according to the Songshi, Taiping huanyu ji & Yuanfeng jiuyu zhi), doesn't seem nearly as dramatic as thick-lined cartoon arrows rushing across the French countryside.

You can make your own slowly shifting maps of Song Dynasty political geography by downloading the Digital Gazetteer of the Song Dynasty. Or maybe you...

Simplicity is Force

It wouldn't be hyperbole to call this one of the most amazingly sung and choreographed pieces ever created.

Chunari Sambhal Gori

Unfortunately, the folks who posted it disabled embedding, and it seems to be the only full-length version on YT.  The male voice is Mohammed Rafi.

Steve Jobs Says Duracell is Lazy, Energizer's 'Keeps going, and going and going' mantra is "Bullshit"

You remember Space Quest, don't you?

Or, at least, that's what I expect to hear soon enough, now that Apple is in the battery business.

Abstract Virtual Game Art

DefaultProperties is not a loop. It is a game modification presenting a perpetual state of expectancy. In its original format (10 were produced on custom computers) we are watching them and they are watching us. Nobody is going anywhere.

Or, if you'd prefer…

DefaultProperties

Learning Incorrect Schema

Just finished watching Will Wright's presentation for the Games for Learning Institute.  It's cleansing, I think, to move from some of the raw intuition that open source types present as social commentary and listen to someone like Will Wright, who's actually considering the difference between "the social landscape and the material landscape" and has been doing so for years.  The talk itself focused on the concept of games and stories as schema, fostering understanding of our world through...

Esoterica

It's hard to tell if there's such a fragmentation of visual culture that the post-ironic, repurposing crowd exists at a convex location from the materialist/idealistic crowd or if they're right next to each other but, because of how we project them, they get split in half and floated away on an imaginary ocean.  You know, like Greenland when you run a Lambert Asian Conformal Conic.

To muddy the water a bit, I offer this piece of

What's going on here?  Is it an...

OSRIC, the Usurper

Against all intuition and spurred by willful nostalgia, I went out and bought the 4th (5th?  18th?) Edition Player's Handbook and Dungeon Master's Guide.  I remember the halcyon days of yore, when I would spend hours of nerdy bliss reading about spheres of annihilation or various bits of Vecna–and even occasionally playing the games with others (which, in my experience, invariably proved that CRPGs didn't turn gaming into a manic-obsessive tactical combat and resource gathering exercises, it ...

Updated Apple Downloads for Flash Player

I took the liberty of updating Apple.com's woefully out-of-date description of its Adobe Flash Player for Mac.

Now includes information for iPad and iPhone owners!!!

Apple Hates Homestar, Seriously

I've stumbled upon an imbroglio:  Apple hates Flash.

I had no idea until Stanford got me an iPhone and said "Develop scholarly digital media for mobile devices!" and I said, "Yeah, sure–John Milton's Paradise Lost: Mobile Edition!"

And then I found out that the iPhone doesn't support Flash, and that Steve Jobs thinks Flash is awful because it makes Safari crash and that the only way to get your Flash app working on an iPhone or iPad is to use some packager from Adobe that isn't even out yet.

Way...

A Clockwork Canary

There's such an insidious breakdown in the quality of a story after you write it down. It's not even the writing, it's that people read it and they just accept. Like they're listening to old-time mystics, like these things happen because they were meant to happen, no matter how terrible the fight or touching the makeup. In reality, they're so much more emotional. You lose that in writing because you can't express to the reader the uncertainty. To them, we make up because it says, on...