firehose

Game designer Ron Gilbert pondered the definition of the label "indie developer" in a post on his website today, posing numerous questions about the term apparently in an effort to point out how meaningless the phrase has become.

Gilbert came to fame at Lucasfilm Games (later LucasArts) in the late 1980s and early 1990s with his work on a string of beloved adventure games, including Maniac Mansion and The Secret of Monkey Island, and the engine that powered them, SCUMM. He has spent most of the years since as an independent developer, working at studios such as Hothead Games and Double Fine Productions.

"What irritates me is this almost 'snobbery' that seems to exist in some dev circles about what an 'indie' is," Gilbert began. He noted that "indie" is short for "independent," and that the term refers to being independent from publishers. Gilbert went on to posit a bunch of different situations in which developers may characterize themselves or be characterized as "indie" — with many of the scenarios seemingly contradicting each other.

The term "indie," Gilbert noted, can refer to the source of a game's funding (self-funding, publisher, venture capital, Kickstarter), the game idea itself, the developers themselves, the level of success a game attains or even the use of marketing and public relations personnel.

"Someone once told me I was not 'indie' because I have an established name, despite the fact that the games I'm currently working on have taken no money from investors or publishers and are made by three people," said Gilbert. He added that while he came up with the idea for The Cave, the adventure game from 2013 that he worked on at Double Fine, Sega funded and published the title — so does that mean it wasn't an indie game?

"I don't know the answers to any of these questions (and maybe there aren't any), but it irritates me that some devs (or fans) look down on devs because they are not 'indie' or not 'indie enough,'" Gilbert continued.

"Or is being 'indie' just another marketing term? Maybe that's all it means anymore. It's just part of the PR plan."

Longtime Apple employee Greg Christie, who told the origin story of the iPhone in Apple's US court case against Samsung just last week and heads up its Human Interface team, is leaving the company. The news, which was reported earlier by 9to5Mac, has now been confirmed by The Financial Times. According to 9to5Mac, the departure stems from a "falling out" with Apple design chief Jony Ive, though in statement, Apple says the move was part of a planned retirement.

"Greg has been planning to retire later this year after nearly 20 years at Apple," the company said in a statement. "He has made vital contributions to Apple products across the board, and built a world-class Human Interface team which has worked closely with Jony for many years."

Christie became an unusually public face of Apple

Christie became an unusually public face of Apple over the past month leading up to the trial between Apple and Samsung. Christie did interviews with both The Wall Street Journal and NPR discussing the creation of the iPhone, rare access doled out by the company, which usually only trots out members of its executive team around product launches. Samsung took offense to the move in pre-trial proceedings, calling it a planned move and part of Apple's pretrial strategy.

In testimony last week, Christie described the very beginnings of the iPhone and iPad programs at Apple, including being plucked by Apple's former iOS chief Scott Forstall, and having to work at the very highest levels of secrecy with a tight-knit team. The project "was the focus of an awful lot of people for a very long time," Christie recalled. Forstall had offered a similar narrative during his time on the stand in the 2012 trial, comparing the iPhone's creation to the story of Fight Club. Forstall was fired by Apple CEO Tim Cook just three months after that testimony as part of a management shuffle that also saw the removal of retail chief John Browett.

“There’s a green… potato-looking… thing that lives with the X-Men. He is… Doop.” —All-New Doop #1

Doop has no place in superhero comics. With a bizarre inhuman appearance and no specific origin or power set, he’s a mystery that has never been solved and likely never will be, a collection of questions in a genre that isn’t known for being particularly enigmatic. Superhero titles can certainly be puzzling for new readers who aren’t familiar with years of continuity—and that’s not even considering the confusion caused by reboots—but the stories themselves tend to be straightforward, rarely venturing into the abstract territory Doop represents.

There’s no place for him, but he’s a significant character because his creators made a place for him. In the pages of X-Force (later X-Statix), writer Peter Milligan and artist Mike Allred ignored tradition and continuity, giving birth to ...

Tea room proprietor and Sufi poetry aficionado Billy Corgan is releasing a new, expensive, experimental solo project. AEGEA, due out within the next two weeks, is described by Corgan as “a soundtrack to some lost foreign film.” Corgan says the record “has qualities that are both meditative and alien, but not alienating,” unlike Corgan himself.

Only 250 copies of the record will be produced. Each of those will be hand-numbered and annotated by Corgan, and they’ll run you about $60—plus shipping, if you live anywhere not adjacent to Corgan’s tea shop.

As previously reported, there are also two Smashing Pumpkins records in the works for release in 2015. It’s expected that those will be slightly less “experimental.”

During last year's electoral campaign, current Seattle mayor Ed Murray received donations from Comcast, casting a faint shadow of doubt on the city's plans for a public-private gigabit internet partnership. But Murray said he would continue to support the project, and today, he's promised to improve Seattle's internet by any means necessary. "Seattle would never leave the construction of roads up to a private monopoly, nor should we allow the City's internet access to be constructed and managed by a private monopoly," wrote Murray in a statement. "It is incredibly clear to me and residents throughout the City of Seattle, that the City's current high speed internet options are not dependable enough, are cost prohibitive for many, and have few (if any) competitive options."

Murray's statement comes the day after Comcast, which provides much of Seattle's internet service, petitioned the FCC to approve its takeover of Time Warner Cable. Comcast has insisted that because the two operate in different markets, a merger wouldn't reduce competition in the industry, but it would make Comcast at least three times as big as the next-largest wired broadband competitor, making his promise all the more timely. Seattle's previous mayor, Mike McGinn, had previously agreed to a partnership with Gigabit Squared, but Murray announced in January that the deal had fallen through. Now, he's put forward other potential ideas, which include relaxing installation rules and more efficiently using existing infrastructure.

Murray hopes to build out a fiber network to every building in the city, leasing unused or "dark" fiber to companies at low costs while maintaining control over the network, and ISPs could potentially use existing utility poles for free or at a low cost. These leases, however, would "need to come paired with significant improvements in services." He is also considering changing the "director's rule" that requires a very high level of approval in a neighborhood before ISPs could expand service. If all other efforts fail, Murray says he will explore a municipally owned broadband network, a plan that McGinn also floated before ultimately deciding on the Gigabit Squared partnership.

dudewithabow:

"So, er, for the non South Asians in the audience who perhaps didn’t understand why there was applause, the British built a really extensive railway system throughout India before they left, and it wasn’t so much for transportation for the Indian people, it was because it’s really hard to plunder on foot."

Hari Kondabolu’s joke about the British colonisation of India [x]

Automattic, the company behind publishing platform Wordpress.com, has acquired the curation service Longreads for an undisclosed price, the companies announced today. Longreads serves up one magazine-length recommended story per day through its website, Twitter feed, email newsletter subscription, or iPad app. Started in 2009 by Mark Armstrong, the bootstrapped company has four employees and survives off of its meager subscription fees and occasional sponsorship deals.

The Longreads staff will join Wordpress's editorial team, which scours Wordpress-published sites for material to highlight. Armstrong promises it will continue as usual, however, with no change in story selection. "We will continue running this service the same way we always have," he says in a blog post.

Deb also asked me to put together some drone to play at DEBCON, and I figured this would be a good opportunity to do a chronology of sorts of the genre starting with its introduction to the Western contemporary music world in the ’60s up to the current crop of bad dudes. So here’s the background on this mix. I tried to go for more drone than ambient, and I generally opted for longer songs. I tried to go with “classics” but since you can’t really have a new classic, the later years are more of my favorite well known(ish) stuff. I tried to keep the spacing more or less equal between the decades and was pleased with a nice round number of 20 songs. I included the year of composition or recording when possible but otherwise the year is the release date of the record. I did some equalizing of the tracks but since it’s almost 7 hours (1GB) of drone, I didn’t have time to listen to the whole thing again afterwards, so please let me know if there’s any crazy shit going on volume-wise (side note: Radigue’s piece is on the low side, but it’s maxed out with no clipping so just dig deep and zone in).

Thanks and enjoy.
 

Download Intro To Drone for DEBCON 1

1. Tony Conrad – Early Minimalism: June 1965 (Part 1) (from Early Minimalism Volume One, 1965)
2. Terry Riley – Untitled Organ (from Reed Streams, 1966)
3. Eliane Radigue – Onward 9,5 (from Vice Versa, Etc…, 1970)
4. La Monte Young & Marian Zazeela – 13 | 73 5:35 – 6:14:03 PM NYC (from Dream House 78′ 17″, 1973)
5. Brian Eno – Discreet Music (from Discreet Music, 1975)
6. Yoshi Wada – Bagpipe (from Lament For The Rise And Fall Of The Elephantine Crocodile, 1981)
7. Pauline Oliveros – Horse Sings From Cloud (from Accordion & Voice, 1982)
8. Phill Niblock – Ten Auras (from A Young Person’s Guide To Phill Niblock, 1994)
9. Windy & Carl – Antarctica (from Antarctica (Bliss Out Vol. 2), 1997)
10. Stars Of The Lid – Austin Texas Mental Hospital: Part 2 (from The Tired Sounds Of Stars Of The Lid, 2001)
11. Charlemagne Palestine – 2 (from Music For Big Ears, 2000)
12. William Basinski – Disintegration Loop 4 (from Disintegration Loops III, 2003)
13. Tim Hecker – Incurably Optimistic (from Mirages, 2004)
14. Mountains – Hundred Acre (from Sewn, 2006)
15. Fennesz – Happy Audio (from Endless Summer, 2001)
16. Sun Circle – Untitled 1 (from Sun Circle, 2007)
17. Deceh – Untitled 1 (from Deceh, 2009)
18. Kyle Bobby Dunn – Movement For The Completely Fucked (from Ways Of Meaning, 2011)
19. Nicholas Szczepanik – Untitled 2 (from The Truth Of Transience, 2012)
20. Eluvium – Memory Print Boutique (from Catalin, 2014)