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Learning from Feedback
As the head chef of a new 5-Star restaurant, you are anxiously preparing for the opening in three months. Your menu is mostly set, and you’ve talked about your ideas with your food industry friends and they’re excited. You want to try out some of your dishes on people who aren’t in the industry, so…
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Players are Jerks to NPCs in Real Life, Too
A non-player character (NPC) is anyone you encounter in a game who is not a player themselves. They are controlled by the game, whether a human game/dungeon master or a computer simulation. Player characters (PCs), the in-game characters controlled by the players, are notoriously abusive to NPCs. Since the universe exists and moves forward for…
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Explaining Hipsterism
I was at my cottage this weekend hanging out with a few younger male relatives and their friends. At one point, one of them jokingly said that I, with my beard and square-framed black glasses and plaid shirt, “kind of looked like a hipster”. They didn’t know that I lived right next to Queen Street…
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First Dungeonmastering Experience
After wanting to do it for many years, and meticulously re-reading DM of the Rings, I DMed a tabletop RPG session for the first time last week, in a setting of my own invention. I had all kinds of concerns going into it (Will it be fun? Is the custom setting over-ambitious? Do I know…
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Digital Immortality Now!
My friend[1] just sent me this article from the Montreal Gazette, announcing a program called “Live On”, developed by an ad ageny that lets users to tweet after their death. The service doesn’t claim to merely let you schedule tweets to appear a certain time after you die, but will attempt to replicate your writing…
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Moons of Sallys
Click the image to play Moons of Sallys, inspired by Stanislaw Lem’s The Cyberiad. (More of a toy than a game really – you can just fly rockets around). I’ve nearly finished reading Stanislaw Lems’ The Cyberiad for a second time. I’m an old-school sci-fi aficionado, and it’s possibly one of my favourite books in…
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Books Read in 2012
In the theme of life-logging games from yesterday’s post, here’s all the books I read in 2012, and some I recall reading in 2011. The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien – Dec 22, 2012 Hack / Slash Volume 1: First Cut – Dec 18, 2012 Flex Mentallo – Grant Morrison – Dec 18, 2012 Shake Hands…
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Games of Life
I got my first smartphone, a Nexus S, back in early 2010 when I was living in Cambridge, UK. Impressed by the novelty of the beers there, I started snapping photos of taps and bottles: When I uploaded these to Picasa, I discovered, gloriously, that my phone had been saving location data, and Picasa automatically…
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Manually Clustering 275 Images For Qualitative Analysis
Grounded Theory is a technique for developing a theory about some empirical data you collected. This is in opposition to having some hypotheses in advance, which you will either verify or not. However, if you’re collecting data in an entirely new field, you might not know what hypotheses are important, and the hypotheses you have…