Tim Schafer’s writing routine
The latest Double Fine Adventure update1 was pretty fantastic, documenting the beginning of the process of creating an adventure game.
Schafer gets up in the morning and freewrites longhand in a spiral lined notebook as a way of getting over the blank page and getting out all the crummy ideas. It’s pretty great seeing all of his old notebooks—if you click the third picture, you can see a list of names Schafer was brainstorming for Grim Fandango.
For Kickstarter backers only, though they have a “slacker backer” option that will let you watch these videos. ↩
"Live your Life. Live your Life. Live your Life."
— Maurice Sendak has died. We’re changing the entire show today to remember him. This quote is from his most recent Fresh Air appearance last year. (via nprfreshair)
(via enfilades)
The first computer at my house when I was a toddler was a Wang (presumably the 8088-based PC clone?) on loan from my dad’s job at AT&T, later replaced by the equally sexy Olivetti M24. All I remember about the Wang was that it had a letter guessing game called Wangman, and some kind of text-based dungeon / Adventure clone. And years later memories of it provided a good chuckle during an episode of the Simpsons (“Thank goodness he’s drawing attention away from my shirt!”). Unpopular computers FTW.
(Via John Nack)
As an art person I’ve enjoyed a good amount of time around lithography and other drawing media, and now I’m engaged to a children’s book illustrator who largely works in watercolor, so I’ve spent a fair amount of time at art supply shops buying paper. One thing has bugged me for years about our fine rag paper purchases, though: what’s up with the “BFK” in “Rives Arches BFK”? I’ve asked professors, professional printers, other artists, and even the Internet, with no great leads, but I finally coaxed the answer out of Google today. From The Albumen & Salted Paper Book: The history and practice of photographic printing, 1840-1895:
It is no wonder that only two paper mills in the world managed to consistently produce a paper of the necessary quality, and these two mills were able to maintain their monopoly from the 1860’s until approximately World War I. They were the above-mentioned Blanchet Frères et Klébler Co. in Rives, France (hence their product was known as the “Rives” paper) and Steinbach and Company, located in Malmedy, Belgium (at that time part of Germany). Steinbach paper was known outside Germany as “Saxe” paper.
The product that established their paper monopoly (duopoly?) — the exploding new field of photography! More to the point, 3D stereography, the Victorian postcard origin of a Tumblr meme:
In the late 1850’s and especially after 1860, two new factors in photographic technology and practice generated a great demand for albumen paper. The first of these was the stereograph; its ability to transport the viewer to distant scenes with the illusion of three-dimensional reality depended largely on the smooth surface and fine detail of albumen paper. Stereo views were extremely popular, and created a corresponding demand for albumen paper. Nearly all stereo views before 1890 were made on albumen paper.
This 3D thing will catch on one of these days…
"Be a scribe! Your body will be sleek, your hand will be soft … your servants answer speedily; beer is poured copiously; all who see you rejoice in good cheer."
— Ptahhotep, ancient Egyptian sage, quoted in Jonathan Gottschall, “Jargon to Jabberwocky: 3 Books on Writing Well,” NPR Books (via jndevereux)
(via jndevereux)
Special to the What It Is class:
As you think about making images for your book, think of this spider and let your mind wander.
(via jndevereux)
"Autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful. A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying, since any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats."
— George Orwell, Benefit of Clergy: Some Notes on Salvador Dali
Unbelievable! Akira Kurosawa visits the set of KINDERGARTEN COP:
I ignore the Internet for a day, and I miss great announcements like this new Criterion edition of Kindergarten Cop! Jeez.
Though it’s distinguished by pulse-pounding suspense, a Crayola-bright palette by cinematographer Michael Chapman (Taxi Driver), and trenchant observations about education in the Bush I era, the film’s emotional center is Schwarzenegger’s gruff yet good-tempered interaction with a class full of precocious scamps, including a tumor-forewarning death-obsessive and a genitalia expert. By leavening a children’s film with enough violence to please even the most cold-hearted bastard, director Ivan Reitman shows that he refuses to color inside the lines.
(the “Related Films” sidebar is pretty great, too)
Been having fun playing with Google Map’s Quest feature, creating some lo-fi Austin scenes. I’m sorry to say that this is likely a Google April Fools’ joke, as I kind of like poking around places as though they were background scenes from a forgotten third-tier Sierra adventure. I’ve posted a handful of Austin 8Bit pics on Flickr — what other locations would be good choices?
Science!
We prove NP-hardness results for five of Nintendo’s largest video game franchises: Mario, Donkey Kong, Legend of Zelda, Metroid, and Pokemon. Our results apply to Super Mario Bros. 1, 3, Lost Levels, and Super Mario World; Donkey Kong Country 1-3; all Legend of Zelda games except Zelda II: The Adventure of Link; all Metroid games; and all Pokemon role-playing games. For Mario and Donkey Kong, we show NP-completeness. In addition, we observe that several games in the Zelda series are PSPACE-complete.
Translation: video games might provide interesting fodder for complexity theory, and possibly provide a model for novel ways of looking at difficult decision problems. In any case, I just like seeing Metroid mentioned on the arXiv.
(Via New Scientist)
I’m getting far too many chuckles out of this page for the Fake Unicode Consortium, which pairs up obscure Unicode glyphs with better names. Depicted here:
Unicode character U+2231: ‘NOW FLIP SNAKE TO COOK OTHER SIDE’
http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/2231/index.htm
(Via O’Reilly Radar)
"Comics give to the artist a very interesting field of exploration and research. Everything is possible. You can be very small or very big or very modest or very ambitious. You can stay in a regular style like everybody, or you can escape and be completely unusual and incredible. You can give more to the world, more to the drawing. Everything."
— Jean Giraud (aka Moebius) on why he turned to drawing comics as a young man, from the documentary The Masters of Comic Book Art (was on YouTube but got yanked, VHS might be the only option at present?), as quoted in his NYTimes obit.
A fun Boston nightly news clip from 1988 on the outbreak of the Morris worm, one of the first Internet-spreading infections that caught mainstream attention. There’s much to love about this clip: the “part-time virus hunter”, the scenes of MIT’s computer labs, the bizarre (but maybe slyly satirical?) footage of the infamous Atari 2600 ET game inserted, um, I guess to, uh, illustrate something computer-y?
(Via Dangerous Minds)
A fan-made port of the pixel font built into the adventure game classics The Secret of Monkey Island and Monkey Island 2: LeChuck’s Revenge. As a bonus, a separate version is available that is properly kerned and hinted. (double bonus: opening the .ttf file in Font Book reveals that the demonstration string for the font reads “You fight like a dairy farmer!”)
A post combining Lucasfilm Games and typography? Immediate reblog!
