In my polygon map generator from 2010 I built the mountains based on the coastline, then made rivers flow down from the mountaintops. I’ve been exploring a different approach. Last week, I grew rivers up from the coastlines. My goal this week was to build mountains that matched the generated rivers.
I rescued “Mom and Me” for the Atari ST! (though I guess I’m about a month late for Mother’s Day) You may recall that two years ago I blogged about two old Atari ST programs I remembered from my youth – “Mom and Me” and “Murray and Me” by the cartoonist Yaakov Kirschen. The programs […]
Usa is a 20-year-old clothing shop staff we bumped into in Harajuku. She caught our eye with her aqua ombre hair and her oversized resale street fashion.
Usa’s outfit features resale clothing such as a Ralph Lauren oversized button up shirt over a blue dress and long black skirt, a pair of Dr. Martens boots, and a resale sling bag. Her accessories include ear studs, a lip ring, labret piercings and midi rings.
Usa loves to browse and buy at resale shops and her favorite bands include The Dresscodes and Thee Michelle Gun Elephant. Follow her fashion snaps on Instagram!
About a year and a half ago (has it really been that long!?), Game Boy Works (née World) reached into the depths of Japan-exclusive software and came up with a true deep cut: A deeply Japanese dungeon-crawler RPG called Ayakashi no Shiro.
It seemed an enormously promising game considering its platform and vintage, but the extremely dense non-English text (which even rendered English loanwords like “potion” in more traditional Japanese script) kept me from making a whole lot of progress into the quest. If only someone would create a fan translation of this, I sighed, I could give it a more thorough examination.
Imagine my surprise when someone took me up on that. A fan translator by the name of summvs found themselves as intrigued by Ayakashi no Shiro as I was and decided to do something about it. The result is that, as of today, you can now play an English-language adaptation of Ayakashi no Shiro on your very own Game Boy (assuming you have a hack-friendly flashcart, of course). It’s been given the new title of Doman’s Revenge, and aside from a mysterious late-game overflow bug mentioned in the readme file, it appears to be a comprehensive localization of the game.
Needless to say, I definitely intend to revisit it for Game Boy Works. But that’ll take a while. In the meantime, you can check out the game for yourself by downloading the language patch in this forum thread.
And, of course, I’m unspeakably happy to see Game Boy Works help spread awareness and spur action for forgotten games. This is the kind of thing the entire project exists for, and I hope this isn’t a one-time incident. Huge thanks to summvs for taking up the baton and bringing an intriguing little slice of video game history to a wider audience.
Take a look back at this exploration of some of the fascinating deviations and beautiful experiments that fighting game devs took to try and change up the fighting game formula. ...
Zelig is a Paris-based fashion model currently working in Tokyo who we have seen around Harajuku several times lately. His height and amazing hairstyle make him easily stand out of the crowd.
Zelig is wearing a vintage Kiss t-shirt with a vintage plaid skirt by legendary designer Jean Paul Gaultier and black creepers. His bag is Mobus and his accessories came from vintage shops and 100 Yen shops.
Zelig’s favorite places to shop are vintage shops including Kinji Harajuku. His favorite music includes 1990s Hip Hop, Rock, J-Pop, and K-Pop. Follow him on Instagram and Twitter and also check out his YouTube Channel for videos about modeling life in Tokyo.
Imagine that you've been away from Earth for ten years. Now imagine trying to catch up on—god, even just the past two years would be enough—using only Twitter. It would be like trying to figure out what happened in a TV show via the tweetstorm aftermath, but for a decade of politics, relationships, drama, and slowly decaying friendships.
Such is the life of Jay in Killing Time at Lightspeed, who is on a 29-year journey to a distant planet, able to entertain himself only with the game's version of social media, Friendpage. But for Jay, the flight only takes half an hour, meaning that each time he refreshes the page—months, if not years—have gone by. You'll respond to a message about a burgeoning relationship only to find it dissolved by the time you check your messages again, congratulate someone on a job only to find out they hated it a year later.
Killing Time at Lightspeed, which launched last summer but has only just made its way out of my backlog (we all have them, right?), makes me feel incredibly introspective about my own use of social media. The incessant refreshing, the waiting for things to happen, the way you forget about life events as soon as they reach the bottom of your timeline, to be replaced by the latest awful politics fuck-up. Joy replaced by anger, replaced by laughter, replaced by fear, sadness, happiness, and so on. The ephemerality of life is mirrored in miniature, 140-character thoughts thrown out and lost in the ether.
There's no more intense feeling of FOMO than that in Killing Time at Lightspeed. This is what social media is about now, the feeling that we should be changing our status to "Engaged," the worry that we should be at a protest, the anxiety that things are happening without you and the world moves on, still, while you sit at home pressing F5.
But in Killing Time, the world moves on in the blink of an eye. The time it takes to make a cup of coffee, to drink that cup of coffee, and to "Like" the fact that your friends are slowly forgetting you.
Rikarin is a 20-year-old student and apparel sales staff who we often feature in our street snaps because of her colorful street fashion along with her colorful hairstyles.
Today, pink-haired Rikarin’s ensemble features a resale printed pajama top and resale striped long skirt with a tasseled hem. Fuzzy platform shoes from Jeffrey Campbell, a drawstring backpack from 6%DOKIDOKI, a rope belt, and kawaii accessories from 6%DokiDoki complete her look.
The ACLU of Massachusetts and the MBTA today announced a settlement of a lawsuit over the beating, pepper spraying and arrest of Mary Celeste Holmes at the Dudley Square T stop after she publicly complained about the way officers were treating another woman there in 2014.
Among the steps agreed to by both sides: Transit Police officers will receive four hours of aggression-management training, their supervisors will enhance their systems for monitoring and acting on possibly aggressive activity and the T will make it easier for people to file complaints about officers.
Holmes also got an unspecified monetary payment.
In a joint statement, the two sides write:
"Our client is satisfied with this outcome and hopes that the improvements to MBTA monitoring and training will help ensure that others won't experience what she experienced," said Jessie Rossman, staff attorney at the ACLU of
Massachusetts.
"Prior to the resolution of this matter, our department took significant steps to improve monitoring and training and we will continue to ensure that all of our officers engage the public in a professional manner," said Transit Police Chief Kenneth Green.
Holmes sued the T in 2015 over a March 26, 2014 incident at the T stop in which she objected to the way T cops were manhandling an elderly woman. Two two cops responded by hitting her with a baton, spraying her with pepper spray and smacking her phone out of her hands as she was talking to a Transit Police dispatcher. She had her hands placed behind her back and was handcuffed.
One of the two cops, the one who wielded the baton and who had a history of complaints, was fired because of her role in attacking Holmes.
WBZ reports on the new convenience-store battle on East Broadway between the chain and a former franchisee who objected to being forced to sell hot food nobody was buying.
A cultural focus, quality of life fixes, and new job actions: we talk to director Naoki Yoshida about the upcoming Final Fantasy XIV expansion, Stormblood.
Director Neill Blomkamp (District 9, Elysium, Chappie) has a new venture, Oats Studios, that's aiming to release short experimental films on platforms like Steam -- perhaps with downloadable 3D assets. ...
I'm a programmer, working mostly on backend and distributed systems, and mostly in the Go programming language. I've worked for Bloomberg, SoundCloud, and Weaveworks in a variety of backend roles; I'm currently working for Fastly, on the data infrastructure team. I'm also reasonably prolific in the world of open-source. My current projects include Go kit, a toolkit for microservices; and OK Log, a distributed and coördination-free log management system.
What hardware do you use?
I mostly use a 3-year-old MacBook Air 13". I use it about equally in cafés and restaurants around Berlin, and connected to a monitor at home or in a coworking space. It strikes the right balance of low weight, usable screen size, great battery life, and sufficient horsepower. I also have a corporate-issued MacBook Pro 13" that's permanently attached to my monitor at home: a sort of pseudo-desktop, with its own trackpad and keyboard. To be honest, I can't tell the difference.
I've got an iPhone 6, which I think is a bit too large and fragile; at the next opportunity, I'd like to switch to an SE. At home in my rather spartan flat in Mitte, I've got a Time Capsule and Airport Express driving my wi-fi network; I appreciate how low-maintenance and high-performance they both have been. That's basically the extent of my technology. I've spent enough time configuring and troubleshooting to deeply appreciate not needing to do it anymore.
And what software?
I use a pretty bone-stock Mac OS. For the vast majority of my day-to-day work, I use iTerm, Visual Studio Code, and Chrome. I also use Homebrew and Homebrew Cask to manage my applications; Dropbox to manage some of my files; f.lux to let me sleep at night; SizeUp to move my windows around; and Spotify and SoundCloud to listen to music. Finally, I owe DigitalOcean and Terraform a debt of gratitude: they're my one-two punch when I need more compute power for testing, benchmarking, or demos.
What would be your dream setup?
I suppose I think of "my setup" very broadly. Not only the specific tools I'm using to do my work, but also the context in which I do it: the state of my mind, my emotions, the city in which I live, and the people surrounding me. I'm very happy with where I am, now. With technology that never really feels burdensome to use; with friends and colleagues who complement me and challenge me to be a better person; and in a city that is at once accessible and transcendental, humane and larger-than-life, full of cafés where I can spend half a day hacking without guilt, full of people who are inspiring, earnest, and engaged in the shared social contract of humanity.
So I don't have a dream setup, really. I just want to keep interrogating, adjusting, and re-assessing all of these things, in a constant introspective conversation.
With that said, I'd love to have a laptop that was a little lighter and thinner than my Air, with a better, higher-resolution screen. Am I just describing the new MacBook? Maybe. Shame about the single USB-C port, though.
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While Nintendo's stock prices typically see some level of ebb and flow as major products are detailed, the recent announcement helped the company's stock value hit its highest point since 2008. ...
In Harajuku, our eye was caught by Sarah, a 17-year-old student who was sporting plaid fashion with her black ensemble. Let’s take a closer look at her outfit.
Sarah’s ensemble consists of a fishnet top from Forever21 under a black Drinkscancode top, plaid pants from Faith, a black tote bag from M.P.Q., and Demonia platforms. Her accessories include aviator style eyeglasses, a chain belt, and multiple rings.
Sarah’s favorite brand is M.Y.O.B. and she listens to Big Bang and G-Dragon. She is active on Twitter and Instagram.
How tempting for Republicans to treat House candidate Greg Gianforte’s assault on Guardian reporter Ben Jacobs as an isolated incident. This idea collapses under scrutiny. First, Gianforte’s own history of making putatively irreverent comments about wishing violence on members of the press. Second, the leader of his party, a lifelong man of wealth used to threatening insinuations and preemptory commands, detests the idea of scrutiny, press or otherwise. He can’t stand it. Consider:
1. During the campaign in November 2015, Trump mocked a New York Times reporter with a congenital joint condition.
2. At a Texas rally in February 2016, Trump promised supporters, “I’m going to open up our libel laws so when [journalists] write purposely negative and horrible and false articles, we can sue them and win lots of money.”
3. A day after Trump’s inauguration, press secretary Sean Spicer blasts media for getting reports about DC crowd size wrong.
4. Excluding major news organizations like CNN, the Los Angeles Times, and the New York Times from press briefings.
5. In anticipation of a February speech at CPAC, Trump or an amanuensis tweeted that “the FAKE news media” is “not my enemy, it is the enemy of the American People!”
6. Daniel Ralph Heyman of the Public News Service was arrested and charged with “willful disruption of government processes” last week after shouting questions on the Hill at Secretary of Health and Human Services Tom Price.
With the ZX Spectrum Next Kickstarter campaign coming to an end after making £723,390 and hitting all stretch goals, it’s a good time to look at some of the Speccy’s more memorable titles. Over 24,000 games came out for the system, so there’s certainly a fair bit of memorable material — but more than that, there’s some games with premises and gameplay concepts you just don’t seem to get anywhere else. When you consider that a lot of Speccy games in the early ’80s were usually made in their entirety by just one (usually quite young) guy in their bedroom, the amount of weirdness there is on the Spectrum isn’t that surprising…what’s great though is when that weirdness is combined with an actual good game — something like Trashman from 1984, made by Malcolm Evans for New Generation Software.
Trashman is an extended look into the world of garbage disposal — something that, as it turns out, is very freaking dangerous indeed. You play as the titular trashman of the title, and you have to collect bins from each house and empty them into the dustcart as it slowly moves down the road — naturally you’ve got to put the bins back too, don’t go thinking that part would be left out. You’ve also got to do this pretty fast — waste no movement, and for heaven’s sake keep off of the grass! If you’re on the grass, that means that you’re stepping all over Betty Swollocks’ geraniums (you clumsy oaf) and you’ll lose your time and your bonus. Just because you’re going fast however, doesn’t mean that you should avoid any requests that people make of you as that would be rude — if a kid wants to show you his new computer game then indulge them, as that will increase your time and bonus. Do this for every house on the street and you can consider the job to be a thoroughly good ‘un.
A typical street in the world of Trashman. Every one of these cars spells death for our hero. But then, every cleansed bin spells rejuvenation.
Sounds basic enough, but Trashman is on a dangerous mission. He’s going to have to cross the road quite a few times in order to complete this task, and this is a busy street packed full of cars that like to drive really fast. Most trashmen don’t even last one day on the job — they’re assigned to Montague Road on their first day, they unsuspectingly walk in front of an automobile driven by a raving maniac, and the next thing you know they’re the ones being put in the trash compactor — for in this dangerous vision of the world, too many trashmen die for them to be given a proper burial. Cars aren’t the only menace out there — sometimes a dog will speed out of a house with its eyes, mouth and teeth trained on the trashman’s scrotal sack. Even the pavement isn’t safe, with clueless bikers speeding down it and taking out unsuspecting targets — and while dogs and bikes will only leave you with a limp, that’ll make you an easy target for those damn cars because no matter what injuries you might have, the work’s still got to be done…seriously, I think it might be in these guys’ best interest to form a union.
Trashman is a strange little game that, as a lot of classics do, spins gold out of menial labour — And yet it’s too slow and even a little grounded in reality (somewhat anyway) to be considered an arcade game. It’s more like a dad explaining to their wide-eyed kid what they did today on the road, complete with exaggerated details and good old fashioned British humour – of which Trashman has quite a bit when you’re asked to go into people’s houses and the like, or if you go and visit the caff and pub for a much needed Full English/booze break. It’s often requested on my streams – partly because it’s weird and people like it a lot, but I think that in the main it’s requested because it’s quaint and charming. 24,000+ Spectrum games can be a big number for folks to get their head around, but this is undoubtedly 1 that you ought to play if you wish to understand the evergreen appeal of the machine.
Take a look back at this exploration of some of the fascinating deviations and beautiful experiments that fighting game devs took to try and change up the fighting game formula. ...
Director Neill Blomkamp (District 9, Elysium, Chappie) has a new venture, Oats Studios, that's aiming to release short experimental films on platforms like Steam -- perhaps with downloadable 3D assets. ...
Spoiler: It's triangles all the way down. ...
While Nintendo's stock prices typically see some level of ebb and flow as major products are detailed, the recent announcement helped the company's stock value hit its highest point since 2008. ...
A typical street in the world of Trashman. Every one of these cars spells death for our hero. But then, every cleansed bin spells rejuvenation.
With the ZX Spectrum Next Kickstarter campaign coming to an end after making £723,390 and hitting all stretch goals, it’s a good time to look at some of the Speccy’s more memorable titles. Over 24,000 games came out for the system, so there’s certainly a fair bit of memorable material — but more than that, there’s some games with premises and gameplay concepts you just don’t seem to get anywhere else. When you consider that a lot of Speccy games in the early ’80s were usually made in their entirety by just one (usually quite young) guy in their bedroom, the amount of weirdness there is on the Spectrum isn’t that surprising…what’s great though is when that weirdness is combined with an actual good game — something like Trashman from 1984, made by Malcolm Evans for New Generation Software.
A typical street in the world of Trashman. Every one of these cars spells death for our hero. But then, every cleansed bin spells rejuvenation.