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Director Shane Carruth—the man behind cult favorite indie films Primer and Upstream Color—names Portal and Grand Theft Auto IV as influences on his work in a profile on Vulture. As video game players become creators in other mediums, this kind of thing becomes less surprising. But it’s still cool to see.

Take your pick from these two Ni no Kuni deals!

You can buy the heavily discounted Ni No Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch for PlayStation 3, now just $39.99.

Or you can import Ni no Kuni: Shikkoku no Madōshi for the original DS, which is also $39.99 right now — it plays just fine on U.S. systems, and comes with the magic book. Plus, there’s a fan translation project for it that hasn’t died yet.

[Update: Dang, apparently shipping costs from Play-Asia are nuts, like over $20 :o/ ]

There’s the option to buy both, too, but then you’re not saving much money today…

IMAGE VIA Unfocused Mind

I'm slowly making the move from LaunchBar to Alfred 2. I've found a number of creative and highly useful workflows to smooth my transition.

I love this Wolfram Alpha workflow. It requires a Wolfram AppID to get live results, but it's worth the effort.

Sean Korzdorfer has a number of really nice workflows. I particularly like his OneLook workflow. This provides three options: a quick definition:

A reverse lookup:

Or an advanced OneLook query with wildcards:

Pedro Lobo created a set of interesting Mail actions. Unfortunately this is a bit buggy and slow for me with my dozens of mailbox folders. Still, it's a nice demonstration.

Recents and Favorites by Carlos-Sz on the Alfred forum is really nice.

Alfred Dev Doctor is a great resource for searching many, many language and framework docs. There's built in autosuggest, which is the main reason to use it. It supports Python, JS, jquery, php, html, css, node, rails, haskell, erlang, c, ruby, flask, .net, java. Ok, you get the idea. It can even search Github

Matt Gemmell created a workflow for quickly creating new text files with reconfigured slugs, which is similar to an earlier example from David Ferguson

Speaking of David Ferguson, he has a lot of really great example workflows. His migrate tool should come standard with Alfred 2. It migrates all of your custom searches and snippets from Alfred 1. There's also his wonderful little Lipsum workflow that can insert specific amounts and kinds of Lorem Ipsum. Type lipsum 25 to get 25 words of lorem ipsum.

David has so many workflows that are great, I can't just list a few and do him justice. Check them all out.

PHPFunk has several, very geeky, workflows like the Instant Cosby workflow.

Finally, Alfred Workflows is a large list of Alfred Workflows. They are not all as sophisticated as some of the others in this list, but it's still a nice starting place.

While Thou Shalt Not Steal is one of the best known ten commandments, there is no directive ordering Thou Shalt Not Copy. This glaring loophole in God’s law, which runs contrary to established entertainment industry doctrine, apparently allows...

“Two pumps and then down.”

While filming the Conan show in Atlanta, Georgia, host Conan O’Brien took the time to learn proper Southern etiquette with Cindy Haygood of etiquette school Perfectly Polished.

Conan learns the finer points of Dixie etiquette and manners. First lesson: no mashed potato scooping at the table.

submitted via Laughing Squid Tips

snog box

An anonymous reader writes "In one year today exactly, Microsoft will shut down support for Windows XP. The deadline will prove a challenge for many of Australia's largest users of IT, all struggling to migrate to new Microsoft environments." Net Applications' chart of current OS market share figured shows XP only slightly behind Windows 7, even now.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Welcome to Stiq Figures, where the sales data is after the break and the posts don't matter. Every week, we take a look at, uh, something - meanwhile, the previous week's Japanese hardware sales figures are posted after the jump, and a discussion of said figures takes place in our comments. It may not be conventional, but it's a time-honored Joystiq tradition.

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With the recent closure of LucasArts by Disney, we're taking some time this week to watch this news report from 1990. The report by KPIX-TV in San Francisco features designers Brian Moriarty, Ron Gilbert and Hal Barwod, each listed as "Computer Games Creators" in the video's lower-thirds. The game designers talk about games such as Monkey Island and LOOM.

Continue reading Stiq Figures, March 25 - 31: LucasArts edition

Stiq Figures, March 25 - 31: LucasArts edition originally appeared on Joystiq on Sun, 07 Apr 2013 23:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Li Han


Li Han

drawingarchitecture:

Li Han

paris


cambridge


windermere

Illustrations by Ed Fairburn

Die Spielmechanik von SimCity scheint so dermaßen doof zu sein, dass es möglich ist, dort eine vollbesetzte Stadt ohne Obdachlosigkeit, ohne Verbrechen und ohne Steuern zu bauen. Aber eben auch ohne Sanitäre Einrichtungen, ohne Wasser und ohne Strom und ohne Steuern mutieren die Einwohner in SuperSIMs und werden niemals krank. Eine virtuelle Stadt ohne Geld voller Zombies, die den ganzen Tag gegen die Wand starren und nichts tun, da es nichts gibt, außer Hochhäusern.

- Why are your sims not… Horribly upset about, well, everything?
- Because this game is fucking broken.
- But how? Whenever I do this people still get ill, fires still break out, people still start crimes?
- Most of those things are triggers after they go to work or do something. Since there is no something to occur they just sit around like zombies without any brains to eat.

I present to you, Megabumtopia One, 1,801,800 population city! [Image Album!]

Vorher auf Nerdcore:
Interview mit dem buddhistischen Diktator von Sim City
10-Year-long Civilisation II-Game creates Hell on virtual World
Francis is pissed at SimCity
Sim City Disaster-Mayor

From here

petermorwood:

Todd Lockwood’s amazing animations of dragons in flight. The red dragon is conventional  - if any dragon can be considered conventional - but the gold dragon with that extraordinary wing and helix-ripple, not at all…

After reviewing movies for more than forty years, Roger Ebert died last week at the age of 70. The Chicago Sun Times has published Ebert's final review, for Terrence Malick's To The Wonder. A haunting, disjointed tale of love and faith, To The Wonder pleased Ebert, who gave the film three and a half stars.

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"'Well,' I asked myself, 'why not?' Why must a film explain everything? Why must every motivation be spelled out? Aren't many films fundamentally the same film, with only the specifics changed? Aren't many of them telling the same story? Seeking perfection, we see what our dreams and hopes might look like. We realize they come as a gift through no power of our own, and if we lose them, isn't that almost worse than never having had them in the first place?"

• Via Daring Fireball
• Source Chicago Sun Times
• Related Items roger ebert movie film review chicago sun times terrence malick to the wonder

By Emily Gera on Apr 08, 2013 at 7:56a

International Game Developers Association head Kate Edwards has emphasized that independent game developers require the same levels of freedom of expression as are given to film-makers and authors.

Speaking to GamesIndustry.biz, Edwards discussed the issues relating to cultural offensiveness in games. Without localization and with less restrictive submission rules for digital platforms, video games are more likely to cause cultural offense, she explained.

She adds, however, that independent developers should not have their voices restricted on this basis, stating that games are simply another art-form similar to films and novels.

"Games are an art-form, pure and simple," Edwards explained. "As an art-form they should be free to express whatever they want to express. Here in the U.S. we've had the Supreme Court decision which protects games as free-speech, rightly so. So they shouldn't have any limits put on them, like books don't or movies don't.

"Where the limit comes from is the goals. If your goal is to distribute worldwide, you're probably going to want to think about the cultural impact. If your goal is to make a political statement then you need to do what you feel is right."

Edwards added that there is a fracture between what developers do and the marketplace of users who may not necessarily have the same understanding of creative freedom.

"The main thing that I do when I consult with developers, even now in the IGDA role, is to encourage them to be proactive and think about what they want to get out of it. I think developers should feel free to make what they want to make, to create what they want to create. But they can't expect consumers in all markets to have that same understanding of creative freedom.

"As long as they understand that, and that to me is one of the things we can do as the IGDA, then they can go ahead. It's like telling a painter ‘don't paint that picture because it might offend someone.' Most painters would laugh at that — it should be the same for game developers. Games are still progressing from the perception in society that they're a toy, which can have defects and need to regulated, to that of an art-form."

An anonymous reader writes to note the latest large-scale document release from WikiLeaks: "The cables are all from the time period of 1973 to 1976. Without droning about too many numbers that can be found in the press release, about 200,000 of the cables relate directly to former U.S. Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger. These cables include significant revelations about US involvements with fascist dictatorships, particularly in Latin America, under Franco's Spain (including about the Spanish royal family) and in Greece under the regime of the Colonels. The documents also contain hourly diplomatic reporting on the 1973 war between Israel, Egypt and Syria (the 'Yom Kippur war'). While several of these documents have been used by U.S. academic researchers in the past, the Kissinger Cables provides unparalled access to journalists and the general public. 'The illegal we do immediately; the unconstitutional takes a little longer.' — Henry A. Kissinger, US Secretary of State, March 10, 1975."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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The most recent Reddit disclosure may have upped the ante on unconventional confessionals—by using a cuddly picture of a bear to fess up to a grisly murder.

Рационально используй металл! / Better use of metal!

A Chinese newspaper reports that one worker who was observed by a colleague taking sleeping pills was fired by Foxconn for allegedly “disrupting order”.

A drug kingpin who controlled a multimillion-dollar cocaine empire in Queens that was so lucrative his lifestyle became the stuff of rap lyrics and street legend, is now in the midst of a senior moment.

With a population of over 7 million people packed into an area of 426 square miles, Hong Kong is one of the most densely populated places in the world. As with other places where development cannot expand horizontally, apartment buildings tend to get taller and taller in order to provide living space for all the inhabitants.

German photographer Michael Wolf decided to capture this population density through a series of photographs studying the architecture of these high rises. The project is titled “Architecture of Density.”

The photographs offer a closeup view, turning the buildings into mesmerizing patterns of edges, windows, balconies, and air conditioning systems. In most of the photographs, the buildings completely fill up the frame, and the repetition is disorienting.

The photographs have been published as a hardcover book. Here’s what the description says:

Stunning and sobering, the photographs of high-rise apartment buildings in Hong Kong by German photographer Michael Wolf reveal his personal fascination with life in mega-cities. Having lived there for several years, Wolf began to document Hong Kongs extreme development and complex urban dynamics, and how these factors play into the relationships between public and private space, anonymity and individuality, in one of the most densely populated cities on the planet. His close-up view takes the repetitive facades and colourful palettes out of their architectural context, instead offering urban patterns.

You can find more photographs from this series (and larger versions of these) over on Wolf’s website.

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Thanks for sending in the tip, Nienke!

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Image credits: Photographs by Michael Wolf and used with permission

From Drinks

Grounds for your garden. [Photograph: Tristan Ferne]

Don't throw out those used coffee grounds: Your plants need 'em.

Composting is a low-maintenance way to minimize personal kitchen waste, create cheap, nutrient-rich fertilizer, and contribute to the health and productivity of a personal or community garden. Compost is a great gift for plants: It naturally helps replenish the nutrients drawn out of the soil by their roots. Good thing, then, that the same stuff we use to perk ourselves up in the morning can do the same for soil.

Used coffee grounds are rich in nitrogen, which is one of the three main nutrient components—along with potassium and phosphorus—in any successful fertilizer. (For you soil geeks, here's why: Nitrogen allows plants to convert sunlight into energy; phosphorus helps that energy get transmitted throughout the plant through its root system and cells; potassium helps the plant retain moisture, which aids photosynthesis.) When managing the "ingredients" in a compost pile, it's important to have proper balance: Nitrogen-rich material (greens) needs to be appropriately tempered by carbon-rich material (browns).

Coffee grounds are considered "green" matter, or nitrogen-supplying to the compost system. They help create and maintain heat inside the pile by giving bacteria a hospitable growth environment; they also can help manage the pile's overall moisture content. When paired with "browns" like leaves, twigs, even coffee filters, coffee is the perfect catalyst for healthy decomposition, which can speed up the composting process and give you better fertilizer faster. Worms love the stuff: They'll munch your day-old coffee happily, turning it into black gold by digesting it and producing nutrient-rich castings. (Just don't spread the grounds themselves straight on your trees and tulips: They can cause more harm than good if they haven't been fully composted yet.)

Jittery and wriggly. [Photograph: rosepetal236 on Flickr]

If you don't brew coffee at home but do have plants to tend to, you can probably source some grounds through a local café: Many shops offer bags of used-but-compost-clean grounds and paper filters for customers and other garden nuts. It reduces their waste, while helping your tomato plants thrive. (Feel free to tip your baristas in produce come harvest time; money isn't the only kind of green we appreciate.)

Side note: Those "compostable" paper cups that you see more and more at coffee shops are also appropriate "browns," but they're only eco-friendly if you actually compost them. Throwing them away means they will likely end up in a landfill, and the anaerobic environment at the dump stalls decomposition, so even corn cups take eons to break down.

Once your compost is completely broken down into a dense, healthy humus, you can use it to fortify sad-looking tree pits in your neighborhood, plant a window-box herb garden, or donate to a local community or school garden.

Who says you should cut back on caffeine? You're actually doing the world a favor! So keep brewing, and start composting.

About the author: Erin Meister trains baristas and inspires coffee-driven people for Counter Culture Coffee. She's a confident barista, an audacious eater, and a smiling runner, but she remains a Nervous Cook.

jones_supa writes "The gutting of LucasArts was a tragic loss for the video game industry, but for many of us, it was more than that. By most accounts the last truly great LucasArts game was released almost 15 years ago, and yet, many in the industry still hold these titles as the benchmark. But why is that? Why is it that we still consider these games among our pinnacle achievements as an industry? Why do developers still namedrop Monkey Island in pitch meetings when discussing their proposed game's story? Why do we all continue to mentally associate the word "LucasArts" as the splash screen we see before a graphical adventure game, even though the company hadn't released one in over a decade? Gamasutra has collected a good majority of the answers. Following these responses, as a special treat, Lucasfilm Games veteran David Fox attempts to answer that question with his own insider perspective."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

After a botched debut, Marvel’s #1 promotion—which offers 700 free first issues from the comics publisher’s archives—is coming back this week. Registration ends tomorrow so hop to it, true believers.

judgecorp writes "For three days, customers at British ISP Sky have been receiving a flood of old and deleted messages. The problem started when the company switched its email provider from Google to Yahoo. As it began to move accounts from one provider to another, it became obvious that the new provider could not tell which emails in the old system had been sent or deleted. Some users had up to 8000 old messages. The incident has been going for three days, as users are migrated. Sky is apparently unable to fix the problem — its best advice been to suggest users delete the old messages."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

CBS News

America's Best Airlines Forbes Virgin America is the highest-quality major airline in the United States, according to the 2013 Airline Quality Rating report, an annual study of airline performance. The privately owned airline –founded by billionaire entrepreneur Richard Branson– has only ... Behind rising air travel complaints: mergers and ever-shrinking seatsChristian Science Monitor (blog) New Study Shows Fliers More Fed Up Than Ever BeforeCNBC.com all 55 news articles »