Taylor Swift

Nicky Case's interactive experiments with thinking in systems  

Some time ago I received a vintage Nintendo catalogue as a gift from a fellow collector. This catalogue shows the range of playing cards that Nintendo had for sale in Japan in the early 1980s. It was produced for sales staff and toy store buyers.

It was printed on heavy paper not unlike that of playing cards and was clearly intended to highlight Nintendo's ability to produce print work of the highest quality.


The six-page catalogue dates from July 22 1983 (printed on the catalogue using the Japanese calendar: 昭和58年7月22日). To put this date into perspective in Nintendo's history: this was one week after the release of the Family Computer. Although Nintendo was very busy conquering the world of electronic entertainment, at the same time it also still carried a substantial range of playing cards (in fact, it still does so today).


The first four pages are used to showcase Western style 'trump' (トランプ) playing cards in many different geometrical designs. The designs are presented in pairs with slight colour variations, intended for games that require two card stocks to play.

Various levels of quality are offered which differ in card material, size and thickness. Prices range from ¥1,200 for the most expensive to ¥500 for the simplest set.


Most of these cards are made from plastic. This is also reflected by their product codes: all cards with codes that include 'NAP' are plastic. 'NAP' is short for 'Nintendo All Plastic'.

In 1953 Nintendo started producing playing cards that were made entirely out of plastic. It was the first company in Japan to do so. Although printing on plastic complicated the manufacturing process - as the ink smears more easily and takes longer to dry - it produced much more durable cards that retain their shape and colour better.

Not all offered cards in this catalogue are plastic though; some of the cheaper sets are made from paper, as indicated with the kanji for paper (紙).


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astounding remix of The Wizard of Oz recut in alphabetical order; related: ARST ARSW  

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a depressing annual reminder that current copyright law terms suck  

I looked. I swear that I looked for any other game that might fit the bill for our Editors’ Choice winner this year, but nothing came close to the love we have for Card Crawl. It’s quite possibly the perfect iPhone game, straddling a line between tactical decisions, long-term strategy, and casual gameplay that made it only slightly less addictive than these Percocets I’ve been downing since yesterday afternoon.

There’s not much more that I can say about Card Crawl that hasn’t been covered in its review or numerous award posts. Luckily, I don’t have to. I managed to get a hold of Arnold Rauers, one half of the Tinytouchtales team, and we chatted about Card Crawl and what happens now that they’re rich and famous.

Pocket Tactics: At what point during Card Crawl’s development did you realize you had something special? Did you realize that you had something special?

Arnold Rauers: Card Crawl had a pretty turbulent prototype phase. I started with a completely different concept.

The first iteration was more luck based and had horribly complicated rules. After about a month, I completely stopped development and threw away the whole project. The second attempt was closer to my inspiration, Scoundrel, an unreleased game by Kurt Bieg and Zach Gage. This time i took the base of Scoundrel, which is the idea of valuing good and bad cards against each other. I added the hand slots idea early on and had a running prototype in about two days.

The backpack slot came later, but i knew that i had a really good game when i came up with the shop mechanic. In Card Crawl you can sell item cards to the little Shopbox next to the dealer. This the main way (without the ability cards) to gain more gold. The cool thing about selling cards is that it automatically makes the game harder since you might need the sold items later in the game. This is the one brilliant thing that i really enjoy and think is what Card Crawl makes a good game. Obviously the Ability-Cards are a big thing two. But the Shopbox did it for me.

PT: Which Special Ability is your favorite, and one that you will add to just about every game?

AR: I do like cards that can swing the game in both directions bad and good. From the first set i like Morph, but from the 1st expansion my favorite is Bounty, because you can do some crazy good scores with it. From the 2nd expansion Chaos is pretty cool, but can end a game pretty quick. The one that has the most utility is probably Devour since it can turn any Monster into another random Ability-Card which can be super powerful.

PT: Can you give us any hints or insight into where Tinytouchtales goes from here? What’s your next project, and what will happen with Card Crawl in the future?

AR: I’ve talked about that on my blog already. After my first somewhat successful game (the 9th in total) it’s always a tough decision what to do next. For me it comes down to finding the balance between “more of the same” and “creating something new”. This way you can cater to your existing fans–there are, luckily, quite a lot–and also try to create something fresh that maybe new players could be interested in. This is why I decided to stay within the solitaire style card game genre. I think it’s a super interesting design space that has a lot of restrictions which are always good for creativity in terms of gameplay. I can say that i already have found Card Crawl’s spiritual successor and am actively working on it. It’s very likely that we will announce it in January when the flood of games around Christmas has gone away. Mexer and Oliver have also confirmed that they are in for a second round, so awesome art and sound are guaranteed as well. Let’s hope that I can design a game that can at least live up to a fraction of Card Crawl’s success.

For Card Crawl I will see what the future brings. I just recently posted about a possible balancing patch, which would include a few ability card design changes and a highscore reset. Also we are thinking about the Streak-Mode and if we should add something that makes Streaks more difficult over time. The good thing is it’s always a lot of fun to open up Card Crawl again and work on it, even after so many hours of tinkering.

PT: We’ve found it fun each time we open up Card Crawl, too. Thanks for chatting and congratulations!

• Card Crawl for iOS Universal
• Card Crawl for Android
• Card Crawl for Kindle

To see all of the games recognized in the Pocket Tactics Best of 2015 Awards, visit the 2015 Awards Index page.

"I strongly feel that MMOs are a special thing. Trying to save an MMO's history is like trying to save a festival," says internet historian Jason Scott. ...

Yesterday, in a different forum, our valued commenter Bijan Parsia complained about Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States. Basically, his complaint, if I may summarize, is that it is awfully simplistic. I agree, as I have stated before. The basic problem with Zinn is that while it was a very useful book in 1980, it is badly dated today. All those stories about the rich exploiting the poor, women, and people of color and all those stories about how people rose up to fight their exploitation have been explored in great depth by historians. The appeal of Zinn today is the idea that history teachers and professors don’t teach that stuff–but of course most of them, at least at the college level, very much do teach a bottom up history today. What often happens though is that the student is not ready to hear that history when they taking a 100-level intro U.S. history course at the age of 18. So Zinn still feels fresh to some readers. But to others, who do know some of this material, A People’s History reveals little but its own limitations. That’s not really a criticism–it’s a 35 year old book. Most 35 year old history books have limitations to today’s reader.

But there isn’t a ready text to replace Zinn either. Perhaps the closest is James Loewen’s Lies My Teacher Told Me, which covers some of the same ground from a similar perspective. It has great value, but also is not a one-volume overview of U.S. history from a leftist perspective that takes into account the vast historiography of the past 50 years.

I told Bijan I’d provide some reading recommendations. Here are a few books I think any reader of this site would find useful and interesting. These are well-written and often argumentative books that provide a lot more complexity than Zinn offers and also are well-written. As I’ve said a few times, we are in a renaissance of good historical writing from scholars appealing to popular audiences and providing a lot more complex looks at tough questions than authors like Ron Chernow and David McCullough. People love those guys and that’s fine, nothing wrong with that. But they are also both basically celebrity biographers of historical figures that aren’t really forcing audiences to confront the dark side of American history in the way that Zinn does. On the other hand, we are lacking in good overarching synthesis. I suppose one might look at Eric Foner’s two-volume textbook as a possible synthesis, but it’s a college-level textbook and that style simply doesn’t lend itself to the same sort of writing and audience, as good as it may be. It’s also priced like a textbook.

Anyway, here are some books I think are really accessible to modern readers that provide pieces of what Zinn purports to do.

1) Richard White, Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America. I’ve reviewed it here. Some don’t like it because it is so openly political, but that’s hardly a problem for me or for most of you. An angry history of the Gilded Age written from the perspective of the New Gilded Age.

2) Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877. We actually really need a new synthesis of Reconstruction and historians to challenge Foner’s dominance over this field, but this remains a wonderful book that retains great value today. See also Foner’s The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery.

3) Joseph McCartin, Collision Course: Ronald Reagan, the Air Traffic Controllers, and the Strike that Changed America. Simply a great book on a key issue in modern history.

4) Jefferson Cowie, Stayin’ Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class. I’m not sure that a short list like this should have a companion book to the McCartin, but the 1970s is blowing up in the recent historiography and this is a wonderful work of history.

5) Tiya Miles, The House on Diamond Hill: A Cherokee Plantation Story. You might not think a book about a house in Georgia would be that amazing, but this is a fantastic microhistory that introduces readers to whole words of Cherokee history, domestic violence, trading networks, changing racial standards, white supremacy, and displacement. A must read.

6) James Green, The Devil Is Here In These Hills: West Virginia’s Coal Miners and Their Battle for Freedom. Green’s new book centers the story of West Virginia coal miners right smack in the middle of the American freedom struggle, challenging historians for leaving them out. I reviewed this professionally so I can’t really go into it too much here, but if you read one 2015 history book, read this one.

7) James Turner, The Promise of Wilderness: American Environmental Politics since 1964. Title pretty much sums it up.

8) John Demos, The Unredeemed Captive: A Family Story from Early America. A classic It’s also fascinating and heartbreaking story about cultural clashes in the 18th century.

9) John Dower, War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War. How the Japanese saw the Americans and how the Americans saw the Japanese.

10) Lisa McGirr, Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right. Easy to read and very insightful if you want to know how the modern craziness started.

11) Eric Rauchway, Murdering McKinley: The Making of Theodore Roosevelt’s America. A very reader friendly book using McKinley’s assassination as an entry point into a rapidly changing and very contentious America.

12) Kathy Peiss, Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York. An older book but still one of the great social histories. Peiss makes it very easy to root for the immigrant kids of New York to make a new youth culture that will eventually transform the U.S.

13) Timothy Tyson, Radio Free Dixie: Robert F. Wiliams and the Roots of Black Power. This will really change your view of the civil rights movement.

14) Sara Dubow, Ourselves Unborn: The History of the Fetus in Modern America. A must-read for anyone concerned with reproductive freedom.

15) Jack Metzgar, Striking Steel. Half a history of the steel industry centered on the 1959 strike and half a personal memoir of growing up in a steel family, this is outstanding.

I’m not really satisfied with this list because a lot of the books are still monographs. It also reflects my own reading, which is defined largely by my scholarly interests, so there is a lack of books on the American Revolution, about which I basically don’t care, and slavery, which I should read more of but I don’t have time. I could have included some of the new critically acclaimed studies on slavery that I have not read but I figured that would be misleading. But barring spending even more time on this post than I already have, I can live with it. However, I am sure that many of you have recommendations on excellent histories as well.

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Platform: Flash — TomaTea gets festive in this cozy escape game that goes all out on decorations and puzzles. Christmassy style is everywhere, but if you want to escape and ring in the New Year, you'll need to crack some codes and find some presents! Tagged as: browser, christmas, escape, flash, free, game, playthis, pointandclick, puzzle, rating-g, tomatea

UPDATE Red5, a studio founded by ex-Blizzard staff best known for developing MMO shooter Firefall, failed to pay its staff on Christmas day. ...

a) the pic above is misleading — Motörhead were a quartet at this point (Lemmy, Wurzel, Eddie Campbell and Pete Gill) on this tour, and in the curious parking lot performance shown below.
b) supports were Exciter and Mercyful Fate. The latter dared appear in the tri-state area despite this being the height of Kickass Monthly editor Bob Muldowney’s fatwa against King Diamond.
c) perhaps due to the modest size of the venue, Motörhead’s “Bomber” lighting rig was not utilized ; instead, several members of the band’s crew ran around w/ airplane arms during the song in question.
d) there was an unfortunate incident at the Capitol Theatre’s box office when a well-known entertainer’s name could not be found on the guest list. I’ll refrain from the details because I’m pretty sure Jon Mikal Thor could still beat me up (or die trying).

In this GDC 2014 presentation, Square Enix's Naoki Yoshida analyzes the causes of Final Fantasy XIV's initial failures, and discloses some of the behind-the-scenes decisions surrounding the importance of a relaunch. ...

A simple, flexible, and programmatic way to create randomly-generated dungeons for a roguelike, described with helpful images and code examples. ...

Sebastian Masuda’s work is familiar to any serious fan of Japanese fashion and pop culture. He first came to the world’s attention in the late 1990s as the director of the Harajuku “Kawaii Anarchy” fashion brand 6%DOKIDOKI. Several years ago, his work as Kyary Pamyu Pamyu’s art director brought his signature colorful style to a much wider audience, both in Japan and abroad. In 2014, Masuda took step away from fashion and art directing with his New York fine art debut exhibition “Colorful Rebellion – Seventh Nightmare”.

When Masuda’s “Colorful Rebellion – Seventh Nightmare” exhibition opened in New York City, over 1,000 people showed up on the first day. Since then, he has been working on several other art projects (including his “Time After Time Capsule” series), but he was also working on bringing the New York show to Tokyo to share with his fans in Japan. Earlier this month, Masuda announced a private art exhibition titled “True Colors” would be opening in Tokyo.

The interest in the Tokyo “True Colors” exhibition has been so high, the artist just announced that the show will open to the public for two days only – December 26th and 27th.

“True Colors” features Sebastian Masuda’s original artwork from the “Colorful Rebellion – Seventh Nightmare” New York show, other works from the “Colorful Rebellion” series, work from “Time After Time Capsule” series, print works, and other stand alone works (both new and old). “True Colors” is the largest showing of Masuda’s fine art to date, offering viewers an understanding of the underlying concepts in his entire body of work.

Masuda’s “True Colors” exhibition will be open to the public from 14:00 – 18:00 on December 26th and 27th only. The location of the exhibition is T-Art Gallery in the Shinagawa area of Tokyo. If you are interested in Sebastian Masuda’s work – or Japanese contemporary art – we highly recommend that you check out the show. Here are all of the details:

Sebastian Masuda “True Colors” Art Exhibition

• When: December 26-27, 2015 from 14:00-18:00
• Where: T-Art Gallery, Shinagawa, Tokyo
• Admission: Free Admission
• Nearest Train Station: Tennozu Isle Station
• Gallery Map: Tokyo Art Beat Map
• Artist Website: Sebastian Masuda

The “True Colors” show is produced with the support of Japanese art storage company Terrada.

Click on any “True Colors” photo to enlarge it.

The Belgium Underground app maps four decades of independent music from punk to noise

"Belgium, or perhaps Brussels, is kind of a no-man's land", says one of the interviewees on a promotional video for a new app about Belgian underground music. Given the country’s interconnected scenes, from new beat and new wave to underground rock and noise, and the linguistic divisions of the country, perhaps that's why a new project has taken the unlikely move of making a smartphone app to try and to map the country’s music of the last four decades.

The amount of data contained in the app – details of bands, venues, record shops, as well as images, interviews and links to music – is extraordinary, and browsing it is a little like accidentally falling into the back end database of Discogs. When you open it up, you're faced with a multicoloured cloud of dots representing artists, labels and bands. Over here, there's a purple block representing microlabels; look a little closer and you find lines linking the 1970s avant prog of Univers Zero with the underground scene of today. You can listen to music from many, perhaps most of the hundreds of dots on the screen, and spend hours lost in tiny niches of Belgian independent music.

A geographic option offers an even more scrambled take on Belgian music. Hitting the map button throws up maps of Brussels, of its surroundings, and of Belgium itself, with nodes on the maps representing venues, record shops and other important places (though finding out which is which is a charmingly confusing experience). There are articles in various languages buried in several of the entries, alongside the odd video interview and information on the locations (it's not always clear if the information is new or old).

Browing the Belgium Underground app feels like a lucky dip – articles pop up in different languages, instructions are minimal, and you run into some dead ends. But if you take the casual surfing approach it throws up some intriguing connections. Dipping into the prog scene of the 1970s, you find the name of Marc Moulin coming up frequently. Follow the various links, and you end up at Vincent Kenis, producer of both Tuxedomoon and Konono No 1.

The app is a project of Belgian organisation PointCulture, is available on both iOS and Android, and claims to have entries for "3000 cornerstones of the Belgian artistic scene: musicians, labels, producers, graphic designers", from the punk era up to the present day. It's available on the iTunes store, and more information can be found online.

"A 2 button space trading miniature. Buy, sell, dodge pirates, fling asteroids and get berated by your gran." - Author's description

Download here (Windows, Mac)

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There's nothing wrong with contemporary games. Well, there might be something wrong with some of them, but I don't have time to get into it. Regardless, what's right and wrong with 90s games has a lot more appeal to me. ...

In 1975, Charlie Rich presented the Country Music Awards Performer of the Year Award. After very slowly reading the nominees, he opened the envelope, saw it was John Denver, pulled out his cigarette lighter, and burned the card. This is truly epic public drunkenness.

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2015 turned me 30. Here are 15 records that stuck with me from a year of blogging. For more selections past and present, follow me on twitter @sun_rad.

Presented in alphabetical order:

AL-90 – CODE-915913

Elysia Crampton – American Drift

James Ferarro – Skid Row

Rafael Antom Irisarri – A Fragile Geography

Jlin – Dark Energy

Lotic – Agitations

Low Jack – Sewing Machine

Oneohtrix Point Never – Garden of Delete

Prurient – Frozen Niagra Falls

Silk Saw – Imaginary Landscapes

Sound Shaman – Black Feathers

Spires That In The Sunset Rise – Beasts in the Garden

TLATOLON – Natural Devices

Vehement Caress – Frailty

Zs – Xe

SUN RAD is an artist living in Jamaica Plain.
He does many internet things:
blogs here: http://sunrad.info?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss
drones here: http://slavetothedrone.com?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss
releases tapes here: http://propertytapes.com?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss
bands here: http://moltcorps.bandcamp.com?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss
tweets here: http://twitter.com/sun_rad?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss
instagrams here: http://instagram.com/propertytapes?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss
Favorite thing SUN RAD released this year:
RSVP TAPE

Post-millennium nostalgia

[Video][Website]
[7.43]

Katherine St Asaph: A dangerous, seductive sentence: “I know what I like.” It is dangerous because it lures you away from the zeitgeist, where human conversations and connections are made (not to mention, for me, a living), and from new genres and sounds and ideas, into a musical walled garden impenetrable to anyone but you. It is seductive for the same reasons, and I know what I like. I wouldn’t have expected to be Autour de Lucie; the two albums I’d heard were the sort of limpid mid-’90s alt-rock and late-’90s trip-hop that leads curmudgeons to dismiss entire genres as creativity landfills. I wouldn’t have even heard this had I not stumbled upon French radio halfway through this year. But it is what I like, and everything I like: wistful Sundfør dramatics, lead bass, swooning and brooding set to guitars, smoke and reverb and everything that makes the world seem that much more cinematic. It innovates nothing — even the rises and falls are timed to the particular formulaic seconds of EDM — and doesn’t need to.
[9]

Jonathan Bogart: I have feelings about that guitar sound, which reminds me uncomfortably of the ways in which I spent the early 2000s (not not electroclash would be how the kids would put it, I think), but who cares about feelings when you’ve got that bassline.
[7]

Edward Okulicz: Had this come out between 1998 and 2002 and been sung by some impossibly British woman like Sarah Nixey (the verse even reminds me a bit of Black Box Recorder’s “Sex Life”) I would have basically frothed at the mouth, bought several copies of the CD and put the song on every mix tape I made. The feeling of speed from the drums kicking in over the messy riff is mostly a head-rush than a hip-rush, but how it surges without aggression or forsaking its cool is impressive. Just like that I need to hear if this lot have a second song as good as this.
[9]

Alfred Soto: The guitar squall is impressive, calling to mind Sky Ferreira’s “You’re Not the One,” and the other rhythmic tricks aren’t bad either.
[7]

Megan Harrington: Smooth, effortless, bubbling with carbonation — “Ta Lumière Particulière” disguises all the make-up and photoshop and angles that go into capturing one’s special light. I should feel envious but I’m just a little sad. 
[6]

Brad Shoup: It has one of my favorite nighttime casts: partying while hidden from an orange-black sky. The guitars stretch and lacerate; the bass sounds like a giant grunting. They’re wide-eyed and still luxuriating. Leulliot sings of border crossings and traffickers; I imagine passing under the right door will bring that sense of escape.
[7]

Madeleine Lee: I’m so stuck on that scratchy, sun-faded guitar that I didn’t notice until a few listens later how sleek and fully shaded the electronic environment is underneath it. It’s just the right texture to keep it from sounding too manicured.
[7]

brilliant free jazz guitar harmonizing found footage on YouTube [via] 

shockingly simple open-source framework for making WebVR with HTML  

running analytics on Neko Atsume, the notoriously opaque kitty collecting game