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Hi Professor-

Just read and enjoyed "How Pac-Man Eats". I'm not much of an academic but I've engaged with a couple game-making communities (for a while I had a job at Pearson with Gerard LaFond, Ian Bogost's co-founder of Persuasive Games (just to try and name drop) and I hosted Anna Anthropy when she visited Boston (we were connected on the message boards for The Gamer's Quarter, a New Games Journalism effort) and got to playtest some of her games.
had some thoughts I'll try to keep quick:

* Sort of amused that a book called "How Pac-Man Eats" barely mentions the word "mouth", which I think does a lot of the heavy lifting in "skinning" the pellet collisions in Pac-Man

* Anthropy's book "Rise of the Videogame Zinesters" inspired a little poem of a game The Pr3vent Trilogy - kirk.is/2012/04/19/ - her talking about what a game is "about" led me to basically put 3 skinnings in one game, ala "Kaboom! is a Many Splendored Thing", with the small joke that all 3 are played at once. (Also from a mechanics/logics/collisions stand point, creating obstacles for an animate NPC and thwarting their desires might be somewhat novel.)

* You mentioned Knights of the Old Republic - I found its combat was a really weird and unsatisfying blend of a realistic, smooth look overlaid on a turn-based, probability dice roll system. So like on the first in-spaceship fight, I kept moving for cover, but really the movement was just resetting the "timer" before I had a chance to fire again.

* "By engaging the limitations of the television technology with which Computer Space was implemented, we can understand why its physics logic lacked gravity." Looking at footage, I think everyone spots the lack of physical grace it has - but I'm not sure if that's the limits of television technology. It is easy to get "good enough" gravity effects with simple arithmetic - in fact one of my proudest accomplishments is JoustPong/FlapPing, which is "Pong with a Flap Button" (years later Flappy Bird would have great success with this kind of one button control) I added some complexities (breakout-like walls and an interfering middle character) to increase its saleability, but the basic Pong of it - including rudimentary but satisfying AI - has been fun to port to different systems because its system - gravity included - is easy to implement. (the sine cosine stuff gets a bit more tough)

* In 2012 I made Action Figure Fighter - which predates "How Do You Do it?" by 2 years, but is kind of the "boy-play-coded" version of the same idea - it recapitulates the common mechanic of indicating toys are fighting by bashing them against each other...

* That game was made as a spinoff project of "Glorious Trainwrecks", that invented the "2 hour game jam" as an attempt to get around perfectionism by making the best worst game you could in that time frame - I'm not involved now but it still seems to be going. Interesting to think of where small games might be happening - more activity in some commercial ventures like Roblox, I imagine...

* WarioWare "Get It Together"'s gimmick is that it goes back to consistent avatars in game - each of Wario's buddies has a somewhat different move and attack, and then the joy is seeing that character's verbs against all the new minigame nouns (along with the usual trademark weirdness) - and some characters are much better suited at a particular challenge than others. For me it lacked some of the "this next game could be anything!" charm of earlier versions, but it was interesting to see how the basic WarioWare quick play idea could still work with a more traditional view of the avatar in the game.

* "Tax Avoiders" - you might be interested in this 1982 article from the Christian satire magazine "The Wittenburg Door" that I transcribed - they set up all these parodies of existing games (complete with Title art and a few screenshots) making up new stories while often keeping the basic mechanics the same as the famous Arcade games they parody

* Interesting to see what if Gemini could become more LLM/ChatGPT like (if it wasn't already) and what might result...

* Finally, I'm wondering if you know of Barbara Tversky's "Mind in Motion". To borrow Tim Harford's summary:
The psychologist Barbara Tversky, author of Mind in Motion, argues that our minds are built on a foundation of cognition about place, space and movement. That creeps into our language with phrases such as "built on a foundation" and "creeps into". Our brains started by helping us process our surroundings and the threats and opportunities they presented. Abstract thinking is an adaptation of those basic spatial capacities.
This idea that motion is so fundamental to cognition kept recurring to me in the early chapters about collision and systematic representation


Ok, thanks for your time! Please let me know if any of these topics captured your interest.
-Kirk

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To invading germs, you are a jungle full of hungry tigers. To your gut bacteria, you are a warm orchard of perpetual bounty. To your eyelash mites, you are a walking fortress and a mountaintop pasture. How many generations have you hosted? What do they name the wilderness of you?

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the melancholy of lonely twitter

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Elon explained, pretty well. He just wants attention, possibly as a hope to money and/or loyalty in general, and alt-right bootlickers are happy to give it him.

Just saw someone describe crypto as 'Mary Kay for young men' and now I'm dying.

One of the most amazing optical illusions ever. Those circles don't move.

1. I've always loved the Edie Brickell song "Nothing", and how it plays with the concept of nothing as it's own thing and nothing as the lack of anything:

   Are you mad at me? Let it show
   Don't tell me nothing I don't wanna know
   There's nothing I hate more than nothing
   Nothing keeps me up at night
   I toss and turn over nothing
   Nothing could cause a great big fight
   Hey what's the matter?
   Don't tell me nothing.
   

2. Lately I've been noticing the word "nothingburger". It's a pretty damning put down - tapping into the visceral need for sustenance but then pulling a bait and switch, leaving folks metaphorically chewing on air.
   
3. Growing up with certain kinds of religiosity can cultivate a sense of personal nothingness that can be hard to shake. Ideally, yes, we are precious because of that spark of divinity God graced us each with, but you know, one's own finite nature divided by the infinite nature of God... that's about as close to zero, or nothing, as you can get. And I think that has had a negative synergy with my fixed mindset - it's hard to think of growth and development of nothing, there's no there there!
4. Moving to cosmology - so why is there something rather than nothing? ( "And if there were nothing? You'd still be complaining!") My favorite theory scientists have is that nothingness is surprisingly unstable - at the quantum level particles are popping in and out of the nothingness all the time, and it might be they key to understanding the origin of the universe. Nature abhors a vacuum, but a vacuum kind of abhors itself, it turns out.

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Dunno if it's weird to have a chip on my shoulder about being part of Generation X...

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Doesn't feel like the most rigorous study - but this is why I tuba dance. Lately I've been working on a personal timelines project, experimenting with visualizing the course of my life so far: where I've lived, jobs I've had, people I've been with romantically, etc.

Time for humans is such an odd beast - it marches inexorably forward, yet loops back on itself in the form of days of weeks and seasons in years. In experimenting with visual representations of it, I thought back to my old hooptime illustration, showing the idiosyncratic way I place a week in physical space (like when making simple day-of-week calculations)

Back then I mentioned and illustrated my even stronger sense of the course of a year - again counter-clockwise, with January at the top, and looping back:

Of course a simple loop doesn't display a forward progression of time, so for grins today I stretched out the loop into something that also expresses the movement into the future:

(It's not entirely dissimilar from repeat until death, my attempt to animate Christa Terry's ingrained visualization of an upward spiral of years.)

You can see the full p5 version here.

I'm still very interested in the topic of how different people visualize time, and speculation on what influenced that (clockfaces, calendar pages, whatever) If anyone has an idiosyncratic time-space mapping I'd be delighted to try and make an illustration of it.

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It's judgement that defeats us.

I have been thinking a lot on judgement lately; wondering if it's just a form of unnecessary attachment, this incredibly goofy need to develop a gut feel "am I for this or against this" on every topic that crosses our path. Interesting thoughts about when family's just had one "the computer" All my life, all the way back to the early 8 bits (Atari 800XL and Commodore 64) I cut my teeth on, my computing resources were just mine, an only child with non-techie parents. But there was a time, before the rise of the smartphone and cheap powerful laptops, when my main connection to the world of computing (online and off) had its own permanent deskspace - I came to It, it didn't wander around the house with me. Sometimes I see those lovely Apple iMacs and think about that time, when my computer was its own little shrine of sorts - crossing the boundary in space demarcated boundaries in time as well.

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A Predictive Keyboard is trained on Harry Potter books and writes a new book in the series: Harry Potter and the Portrait of What Looked Like a Large Pile of Ash!

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Back to vertical monitor land!

(though not my first trip to this rodeo 2011/10/20)

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Just testin' out the camera on Melissa's best lil buddy...
Bob Deskin linked to this last week and it's been on my mind ever since

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(Today's advent entry is one of my top three for this year)

advent day 12
advent day 12

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"Please do not cling to meanings in this case."

Or as Slate puts it, Putin Has Now Offiically Declared War on Meaning...

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Three things I learned playing at Johnny D's:
1. The "musician's entrance" there is knocking on the door of their kitchen, and if you need to you can stow gear in the corner there.
2. For this kind of event, music stands and charts are ok. And "charts" is the cool word for "sheet music".
3. If you need to mic a sousaphone, just drop a mic down the bell, fishing-line style.

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That is the greatest fallacy, the wisdom of old men. They do not grow wise. They grow careful.

advent day 12

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So the second and sixth dragons
decided to help
and to demonstrate the correct way
of making things.
But everything somehow came out men and women.
And the world was in real trouble.

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A man said no person is educated who knows only one language, for he cannot distinguish between his thought and the English version.

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Love is not refuted because it comes to an end.

advent day 12

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Today is National Soundcheck Day, "1 2 1 2 1 2". Sad that I won't see another day of this format, and that it had been a darkhorse candidate for a day to get hitched with Amber...

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I just sponsored the IndiGogo project GravityLight, http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/282006/x/430319 -- in part because it's awesome, and in part because i want one.

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http://kirkdev.blogspot.com/ -- on my UI devblog, some fun with the minimalist program "10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1));:GOTO 10"

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Sometimes terrible people produce things we like. Sometimes things we like are terrible. You can enjoy things without agreeing with them.

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Seeing all the billboards at Park Street being holiday ads for "Dietz & Watson Premium Deli Meats & Cheeses" feels oddly depression-era.

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How old would you be if you didn't know how old you were?

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December Blender of Love

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http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/12/12/out-of-our-brains/ - Amber linked a great piece on gizmos as extensions of our minds. That articles talk on "body thinking" makes me think that a "neuron accurate" computer brain model wouldn't work if it were sans body...

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loveblender is here!

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Like whose alley ISN'T it up?

Small problem with the planned office move:

Apparently my space had already been doubly assigned, me and Lot's Wife.

(This besides the skepticism felt for the new half-cubicles anyway...)

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"Yoda doesn't sound like Miss Piggy" "He doesn't NOT sound like Miss Piggy" -me and FoSO on all of Frank Oz's voices sounding alike

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JZ just shows me VMware Fusion's Unity mode, where a Windows window leaves the main emulation window and joins the other OSX ones- uncanny!

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JZ suggested bowling... weird doing 10 pin after a decade of the regions candlepin- what other sport has balls with fingerholes??? SRSLY

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Also JZ tends to get better through 3 games, I tend to get worse. Not sure what that implies.

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Ah, unfathomable mystery of the greenline. Cold rainy morning? Lets just send 1 car instead of 2. You kind of hope there's reason, but what?

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I should mention, the Bowladrome by Alewife is pretty great. Cheap drinks, automated scoring, Celtics on TV next to each scoring screen...

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A bit annoying that the standard for non-laptop keyboard still has a numberpad on the side. Too few PC companies seem to like "compact". Lovely day today, wet and cool, like early spring.

I've had a feeling as if it is getting brighter earlier, but according to that java toy I made, that's an illusion. Maybe I'm responding to the angle of the light at a certain time or something.

Nice to know that solstice is almost here.

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Craft of the Moment


The bottom row is new, the top one is from the other day. Can someone tell me their relationship?

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Game of the Moment
Cute gambeboy-looking physics-y game for Windows, Spout. Your little block ship has a thruster of pixels you can turn in any direction, so you not only have to use it to fly upwards, you have to use it to burn the blockage in your path, but without sending yourself back to the floor.

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Quote of the Moment

Seek simplicity, and distrust it.

Five and a half years ago (yikes, I must be a slow thinker) I mentioned this idea how felt forced to claim satisfaction with every bit of history that happened up 'til the moment I was conceived, the thought being that if any "flap of the butterfly's wing" had been different, I might not have been. But there's an interesting assumption, at least for someone who isn't sure about a separable soul: how different could I be from what I am now, and still be "me"?

Is there some golden thread that connects me to a certain subset of "alternate universe Kirks", but not others? It would seem so... I wouldn't expect an identity crisis if, say, yesterday I had a extra large iced coffee rather than a large. I would find a lot in common with that alternate Kirk... maybe he had slept a tad more poorly but everything else was the same, and so there's no question that he's still me.

But if, say, a different spermatozoa had won that race back in 1973, and carried a different genetic payload? Maybe even an X chromosome? (call her Kirkella... actually my folks didn't have a great girl's name in store, so...) That "alternate Kirk" would have a different enough experience that I don't think they'd be, they would likely have been molded into an entirely different person.

So, barring the idea of a soul in common, there's somewhere between "Kirk of the XL coffee" and "Kirkella" where there's a transition. Or, maybe it's shades of grey, and "me-ness" is only a spectrum. I guess that is the answer to this, actually: according to guys like Daniel Dennett, the notion that there's a distinct Me might actually be a sneaky bit of Cartesian dualism, that there's some bit or pattern of brain stuff that's "the real me" and the rest of my head is just there for support.

Oh well. I'm here, and the time is now, and that's important.

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Link of the Moment

As Hillary Rodham Clinton starts preparing to run for the Democratic presidential nomination, Republicans start pointing out that the full name of her top competitor is Barack Hussein Obama. The Zeitgeist has a feeling that even if his name were Barack Hussein Hitler Stalin Milosevic Satan Osama Obama, Republicans would still prefer to face Hillary in the general election.

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Photo of the Moment

--Could New Hampshire's lamented Old Man of the Mountains have reappeared in China? (via cellar.org Image of the Day)

Lyrics of the Moment
For music in the car, I tend to get kind of stuck on whatever CDs happen to be floating around. Lately I've been listening a lot to a lot of Gwen Stefani's "Love. Angel. Music. Baby." disc. (I got it because of all the cool marching band percussion and horns in "Hollaback Girl"...incidentally videos for that and a few other songs are available off of her website.) Anyway, one of the other songs I've really been digging is "Bubble Pop Electric" (a kind of counterpoint to Meatloaf's infamous "Paradise By The Dashboard Light") where Gwen sings to her sutor that "tonight I'm gonna give you all my love / in the back seat."

But there are two parts that I really relate to...one is from the voiceovers (unders?) that play through the song, dramatizing the tale of the boyfriend picking up Gwen from her house. It's the way he says "Hi Mr. Stefani!", and you can almost hear the goofy grin on his face...cracks me up every time, I remember saying the exact same thing to Marnie's folks (substituting their last name of course, though it also starts with S and has 3 syllables, which maybe is why the song strikes such a familar chord for me.) In fact, Marnie's mom nicknamed me "Eddie", because I reminded her of that punk kid in "Leave It To Beaver" who was always so bright and cheerful with the parents.

The other thing I dig is where the boyfriend asks "so baby where you wanna go, huh", and the background chorus answers, sounding an almost ethereal "drive-in movie..." which repeates but gets (almost imperceptably) changed into "drive in, move me" and finally morphs to "Drive into me..."...yowza! That's Dave Matthews Band-esque in its starkness when you start to think about it.

So, those are the lyrics that have been bouncing around in my head lately. Thought I'd share with you all.

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Cartoon of the Moment

--"Ghost of Christmas Present"...a cartoon I made for the Guest Ramble of the latest issue of Love Blender Digest.

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Dueling Viewpoints of the Moment
Boingboing linked to a NY Times piece about the difference in Americans and Brits' smiles...later followed up with a different spin on the same research by a UK paper. The Americans say that the Brits' smiles are more forced and aware of the social hierarchy, the Brits say the Americans' are more shallow and easier to fake.

So, apologies for the delayed and minimalistic update today. Many thanks to Jim, Sam, and Andy, as we all helped out with the Salvation Army coat drive, downtown...afterwards, I heard estimates were that we helped move and sort 20,000 coats...that might be a high estimate, but still, we're talking many, many, many heavy coats.

Tonight I'll dream of winter wear.

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Design Commentary of the Moment

--No matter how you feel about the guy, Bush had a much better desgined poster than Kerry did...Before & After magazine has a detailed study on how they stack up. Bush's kind of reminds me of this bit from a Douglas Adams book, where a character talks about how another character "Howard Bell" (an obvious knock off of Steven King) had the perfect shlock author name, because you could print it at the top of the cover, above the title, with the first name over the last name, and the last name in REALLY big letters.

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Quote of the Moment

Be still when you have nothing to say; when genuine passion moves you, say what you've got to say, and say it hot.

Image and Link of the Moment

--excerpt from this parody of the London Tube Map. You can compare it to the original, though it took a lot of liberties (though there is indeed an "Elephant and Castle" area in London.) The original was definately a pioneering work in information design, showing that sometimes maps need to show connections as clearly as possible, regardless of geography.

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Paraphrase of the Moment

there's no moral to the story, it's just a bunch of stuff that happens.

Thanks for the comments yesterday, from AuSkeptic and "Been there". I really don't there's an unspoken agenda on Mo's part, but I doubt it, we really do talk quite a lot.

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Meme of the Moment
Would that hot dog taste better if it was an octodog, a hot dog in the shape of an octopus?

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Virual Toy of the Moment
I don't know how hard it is to install/download for non-techies, but Smooth Teddy is an interesting little toy that makes 3D objects out of your 2D shape sketches. You may need to have Java2 installed on your system. It's a really cool idea, though the interface needs work...the game Magic Pengel seems to have a similar concept, though I think the territory for seriously cool kiddie-CAD apps combined with a game is just barely starting to be explored...

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Neurosis of the Moment
Despite its disturbing headline, CNN's Report: Earth's magnetic field fading was actually kind of reassuring in terms of the timeline of it all. (For those coming late to the party, the whole loss-of-the-magnetic-field things is one of my more recent TEOTWAWKI (the end of the world as we know it) neurotic scenarios.) Link of the Moment
Morbidly romantic, Mix Tape for Dead Girl. A bit enigmatic as well. Though when I stop to think about it, it's probably cooler to read about than actually hear, being mostly conceptual in nature, so maybe it's good it's not going to be listened too to much.

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Political Quote of the Moment

Until then, we've got an Ichabod Crane economic policy--headless, and galloping wildly on a horse named Tax Cut.

I think that was before GWB picked his candidates, but the article called it ahead of time, none of the guys are very impressive or confidence inspiring.

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Poll Results of the Moment
A really big poll shows much of the world becoming disenchanted with the USA, surprise surprise.

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Quote of the Moment

If Jesus Christ played baseball he would be the best ever; but if Babe Ruth was the Messiah the Catholics would have beer and hot dogs at communion.

...people use it as a retort to hypotheticals along the lines of 'but if X was still in the game, things would be totally different'. Still, I think I like it more for its sound than its sense. Google just announced that they've expanded their Usenet Archive to go all the way back to 1981! They made a big Announcement with lots of 'Firsts': First mention of Microsoft, the Commodore 64, first post from AOL, first serious spam, etc etc.

So I've been going a little nuts going over my old posts. Here's the first one of mine I could find. (Actually, the searching mechanism seems a little buggy, you can see it by fiddling with the dates, so it's probably not my first first post.)

Ok. Time to prove my true navel-gazing geekdom. Here's a handy chart of all the accounts I used to post, and related info:

account	dates	#	#/day
kisrael@pearl.tufts.edu	28 Apr 1993 - 14 May 1993	9	.56
kisrael@jade.tufts.edu	14 Sep 1993 - 05 Jun 1994	102	.39
kisrael@emerald.tufts.edu	15 Jun 1994 - 27 Feb 1995	139	.54
kisrael@diamond.tufts.edu	23 Mar 1995 - 25 May 1997	486	.62
kisrael@allegro.cs.tufts.edu*	26 May 1997 - 28 Sep 1997	265	2.12
kisrael@allegro.cs.tufts.edu	28 Sep 1997 - 29 Jul 1999	1950	2.9
kisrael@andante.cs.tufts.edu	03 Aug 1999 - 12 Jul 2000	873	2.5
kisrael@andante.eecs.tufts.edu	15 Jul 2000 - 01 Sep 2001	962	2.33
kirkspam@alienbill.com	01 Sep 2001 - 11 Dec 2001	483	4.8

*for some reason this group of posts only shows up when you search for posts before Sep 28 1997

I'm a little alarmed that the average posts per day has doubled lately. It may be a spike, since it's a smaller than average sample, and I posted a lot right after September 11th...

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Funny of the Moment

> Actually, I have heard rumors that Howard Stern
> and H Ross Perot are one and the same. (Have we
> ever seen them in the same room, huh? huh?)

No, that's not true: in fact I have them both in my room right now:
        say Hello, Ross:

        Hello! I'd l

That's enough Ross, thank you. Howard?

        This is fucking ridicu

Thank you, Howard.

Kirk "and the truth shall make you free" Israel

Every once in a while I'm worried that I used to be funnier.