-
IRL Deviations from Snow Crash and The Diamond Age
ADDED POST-US-ELECTION UPDATE AT BOTTOM I first read Neal Stephenson’s duology of future cyber/* punk novels Snow Crash and The Diamond Age a decade ago. As my personal aspirations increasingly resemble some of the elements in the novel, I’ve given them a re-read. I especially want to look how the future in the novels resembles…
-
Game Mechanic Compression Ratio
After attending a conference on roguelikes over the weekend, I was talking with friend Randy Lubin about how players move from learning rules to playing a game. We discovered/invented this really cool concept: Game Mechanics Compression Ratio: the ratio between the initial instructions for a game once understood cognitively, and the complexity that they create…
-
What I’ve been up to
It’s been a while! Lots of excitement is upcoming and I’m happy to finally share. At the end of April 2016, after a year and a half, I left Occipital and returned to Toronto to focus on personal projects. I had contemplated this move for a while, and the timing just happened to work out.…
-
Bungie’s Destiny and Iain M. Banks’ The Culture
After a year hiatus, I played through much of Destiny recently. The production design is high-quality good. The writing is maybe good. The presentation is terrible. I’m a fan of the subtle out-of-order storytelling in the Dark Souls series. It seems Destiny tried to do the same, except ignored the subtlety, so every piece of…
-
Concussive Time-Skip
On December 21st, I was in the back of a car that was in an accident on a way to work. It was the first time I was in a vehicle that had its airbags deploy. I felt a sense of gratification and immortality and having survive something that totaled 3 cars. All I had…
-
Books Read 2015, 2014, 2013
Books listed with date of completion. This was a year with a massive change in reading style. I only read 10 books in 2014, not including texts skimmed for the sake of picking up something for my PhD. All my spare time was saddled with PhD obligations, and spare time outside that I really did…
-
Game: SimZilla
Players: 2-3 pilots At least 1 Zilla. Though the Zilla should get tired quickly, so having a lineup of 3-4 Zillas works well. Setup: This game works best in an atrium – it requires a raised platform 3+ meters above the play space for the pilots to stand on. The play space (for The Zilla)…
-
What’s the best way to transfer money US -> Canada?
All my income is in the States, and all my student debt is in Canada, so I’ll be regularly be transferring pretty hefty sums of money to Canada for probably the next decade. The support for this is pretty terrible. While money transfer within countries seems very easy, as soon as you cross a border,…
-
Observations from Spending a Day Mute
I had dental surgery midday Wednesday. It’s totally minor; I now have a small plaster cast in my mouth and it was recommended I don’t talk until Friday to speed up healing. So I haven’t talked all Wednesday night (where I went to a birthday party for a bit) and all day today at work.…
-
Tejo
Tejo is a sport played in Colombia. It’s like curling, except you throw the weights like 60 feet instead of sliding them on the ground. The target is like a sandbox, except it’s filled with clay, and tilted on its side. Inside it, are explosives; little pink triangular envelopes filled with paper. These make very…