Links for Friday May 25th 2012

  • Griot
    The next time I meet a pagan wanging on about bards and druids and their sacred oral traditions, I'm going to slap them in their boringly white middle class face. The phenomena is far from unique, and what they're spouting about "Celtic Tradition" in Britain it's mostly made up bullshit anyway.
  • UI design in the Avengers
    Detail shots of what are clearly some very cleverly thought out bits of UI design for fictional ultra-tech. This sort of thing is fascinating, both from an ideas point of view, and as an illustration of the level of thought and attention to detail that goes into even fleeting details in the background of a movie.
  • London Underground Tube Diary – Going Underground’s Blog
    A chance to take a steam train on the tube! (OK, not actually, you know, underground, but that's OK, because it'll be pretty!) Yes, I will obviously have to go. I would also like to make it clear that I thought steam trains were cool *before* the goth scene discovered the colour brown.

Links for Thursday May 24th 2012

  • Kosmograd: Olympics Brand Exclusion Zone
    If I know anyone who lives in these zones (and I suspect I do) I *strongly* encourage you to buy competitor products, and leave them prominently in your windows. And, indeed, to pass this idea on. It would be *lovely* if the streets in these areas were plastered with the logos of competing brands – not as paid for advertising, but just as spontaneous citizen reclamation of the space that belongs to them, not to advertisers and marketers.

Links for Wednesday May 23rd 2012

  • Why I Write "Strong Female Characters"
    ALPHA, the new novel by Greg Rucka is out in the UK tomorrow. I am more excited for this that I am for Mieville's latest, out the same day. I mention this, because you ought to be buying it. I also commend this article to your attention, where Greg talks about his process – I learned a few tricks I didn't know while reading it.
  • 25 Handy Words That Simply Don’t Exist In English | So Bad So Good
    I knew a few of these, but some of the others that I didn't know are lovely, and very revealing about human nature.

Links for Monday May 21st 2012

  • The Toolbox: a directory of useful single-page sites and apps
    Really useful set of stuff. Wonder how fast I could roll my own wordpress layout with these tools.
  • electric imp
    Easy to install wifi for well, everything. If this takes off, things (no, literally, things, physical-object-things are going to get interesting. The only thing I object to is the same thing I do with all cloud services – that the devices talk to the company's servers, rather than a system in the home, thereby making the company a single point-of-failure for its own technology. You would not buy a wristwatch that stopped working if Casio went bust, why sould any other technology be different.

Links for Friday May 18th 2012

  • Easter island heads have bodies!?? | Thinkbox
    From the department of "I did not know that". There's a story in there somewhere. Possibly underground.
  • Blogging is not a thing, it’s an attitude
    A simple and clear insight into why "corporate blogging" is an oxymoron. In order to blog, one must be free to express one's *true* thoughts, on any subject that one is moved to. Otherwise, you're just writing on a website. Which is not a bad thing – there is not value judgement necessarily implied here, although yes, I do have a preference, and you can guess what it is – but it's not blogging.

Links for Monday May 14th 2012

Road Test

Attention conservation notice: total wittering follows.

I am such a muppet. I bought a shiny new keyboard for my iPad, and then bought not one, but two back-cover cases for it. The first wouldn’t allow me to unclip the keyboard. The second wouldn’t allow me to clip it in. And then I realised that I’ve actually owned the perfect slipcover case for my iPad+keyboard all along, something I bought for my original iPad with room enough for the new device plus keyboard inside. I am, in the parlance, a numpty.

In other personal technology news, after having had it installed but unused on my iPad since the day it launched, I finally got around to configuring Flipboard for the iPad. It is an extraordinarily gratifying way to catch up on the world, and I am only ashamed that it’s taken me literally years to get around to it. If you own an iPad, and aren’t using it, you’re missing out.

Busy (and nerdy) weekend coming up. Dinner+drinks with friends tonight, Gamecamp tomorrow. Another one where I haven’t got a talk ready. I vaguely wonder about busking it, but honestly, my ideas are sort of half baked – they’d suit a conversation, but I’m not sure about a talk. Particularly since the sort of LARP I run is different in scope and scale to many others, and it’s really theories of LARP that I want to talk about.

Sunday I’ve to a LARP to run. It should be awesome. I am actually really excited about the next few sessions of this particular game – I feel like it’s really hitting it’s stride, and is providing exactly the sort of game I hoped it would (this is not blowing my own trumpet, BTW – that it is successful is largely down to the players, who have stepped up to what was have been quite a challenge with absolutely superb style). I actually expect the challenge with this game to be knowing when to stop – previous LARPs I’ve run have been concieved with pre-determined lengths, and this one is no exception, but honestly, the way I feel about it right now, I could keep running to forever.

As you’ve probably guessed, the major reason for this post is just to test this new keyboard out, and I’ve got to say that while it’s not as good as a full-size one, it is in fact, pretty bastard good. Most of the reviews I’ve see moaned about the size of the backspace key, but that’s not what’s bugging me. It’s the tiny tiny size of the apostrophe key (and the other punctuation marks). But it’ll do for out and about quite nicely.