Sep 1st

• Reverse-engineering H1N1: http://bit.ly/9iFeR
• I like how FishBot has a confirmation on the opt out request. "Are you *sure* you want me to stop smashing your face with a hammer?"
• Waxen Kurt Cobain stars in Bizarro-world League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: http://bit.ly/156Z1m
• Leafing through April 1997 Nintendo Power I grabbed from a box marked "free." Hey, here's a 6-page Super Metroid speed run guide!

Sep 2nd

• Trying to do sound design; need to fix this headphone buzz. Maybe I could mix to complement the buzz and finalize by micing the headphones.
• 455 products tagged "WTF" on Amazon: http://bit.ly/unpfn -- Inflatable toast! Tempting, but I'll wait for the jar of spreadable Nanobees.
• Groove quantize is really playing hell with my sextuplets.

Sep 3rd

• Viacom losing money on Rock Band due to the expense of peripherals: http://bit.ly/sKrIe So why do they keep selling new hardware versions?
• @pnewnan Can't just be any stripe, though. You have to calibrate the width and color saturation, or the albedo will screw with your airflow.
• http://bit.ly/12B78p -- Yoshi's Island is an amazingly happy game. How did the SNES hardware render this much happiness at full framerate?

Sep 4th

• http://bit.ly/2vsfBT -- A week of information on Ron Gilbert's "DeathSpank." There's a nice LucasArts developer reunion video in there.
• http://bit.ly/2TltEJ -- No natural force of evolution could've produced this. The whole time, he has to be thinking "I shouldn't be!"

Sep 5th

• Woman in front of me shifted her head and my reptile brain interpreted it as a falling object. Almost tried to reach out and grab her.
• http://bit.ly/8r5aE -- Oh, they're sliding a new piece of the Bay Bridge this weekend. No wonder BART was so crowded on Friday.

Sep 6th

• Rereading Alan W. Pollack's "Notes On" series in anticipation of The Beatles: Rock Band. My music theory is much more robust than last time.
• Hah, "This Boy" shares a chord progression with "Yoshi's Island Athletic Theme."
• Oh, not quite. I vi ii V vs. I V/ii ii V. For reference: http://bit.ly/QWQGa and http://bit.ly/x94a
• http://bit.ly/7TfRU -- I think the solution here is clearly to use a globe.
• http://bit.ly/10uPzc -- Oh man, if you look at the sheet music for this, he's actually improvising heavily even on sight-read.

Sep 7th

• "Would not all this attention to salt be inexplicable, unless [...]" MARK KURLANSKY PLEASE LERN 2 RITE.
• I wonder whether Mr. Rickenbocker knew that his name was so similar to an existing guitar brand when he named the company after himself.
• The Beatles: Rock Band nicked the unpause countdown from Guitar Hero. High-fives to Neversoft for a nick going in that direction!

Sep 8th

• Multitasking towels: http://bit.ly/yYIpG
• PSA: Swine Flu attended PAX. http://bit.ly/4ZCNE

Sep 9th

• You know how each individual Squirtle is also named Squirtle and can only say "squirtle"? http://bit.ly/kTXaW
• For anyone who didn't believe me about the brick-shaped 'fros: http://bit.ly/mqnOp
• Narcolepsy knows no borders: http://bit.ly/iP4zX

Sep 10th

• @thealawson It's this delicately-balanced set of values I fear losing most via the inevitable cognition-enhancing drugs and/or surgery.
• Braid is $5 on Steam. This is one of those game that even lapsed gamers should still play. (Never-gamers will have a hard time with it.)
• @thealawson I wouldn't call it your innards specifically. The balance is part of the human experience. Have you read A Deepness in the Sky?
• Hups! My name shows up as "Jim Jrawford" on the backers list in the "Kind of Bloop" liner notes.
• @thealawson I got your metaphor. Re ADITS, it's a big book and I don't know if you'd be into all of it, but life balance is a strong theme.
• 55 years after his death, Alan Turing gets an apology: http://bit.ly/2LXk
• $260 for The Beatles Remastered? $300 for the mono boxed set? I bet the mono set wasn't even remastered. I bet it was only mastered once!
• Also, here's something they don't want you to know: the redbook audio format doesn't support mono, so that mono boxed set? Actually stereo.

Sep 11th

• @thealawson I know what you mean. In my case, being productive and relaxing are both very interior, and being social is a third leg of sorts
• @thealawson Also, if I spill past even one tweet I feel I like I'm abusing the medium. But I don't usually go elsewhere until I hit three.
• @fistfulofsand Didn't you get my link to "The 2009-2014 World Outlook for Frozen Meat Lasagna"?
• @thealawson Man, Twitter sucks at discussion. Looking back at our conversation, I feel like I could only hint at the edges of what I meant.
• How do you advertise low-budget 1980s sci-fi and horror movies to residents of Ghana? http://bit.ly/WKRDY
• Placebos are getting more effective, and pharmaceutical companies are struggling to keep up: http://bit.ly/11VvZm
• "The durndest thing you'll ever learn is just to love and then return and love some more and get a little lovin' right back."

Sep 12th

• What's your morning ritual? Mine: roll out of bed, check email, make coffee, check RSS feeds, check work email.
• Craig Timpany has been doing some fascinating game design prototypes based around spheres and gravity: http://bit.ly/tRNaK
• Goombas.org post: "The Psychological Ramifications of Sampling a Friend." http://bit.ly/syS4D
• In case you needed convincing to take advantage of the $5 Braid deal this weekend: http://bit.ly/18bndO -- "Forever is Composed of Nows."
• Drawings of everybody in New York: http://bit.ly/yqr7k

Sep 13th

• Beatles outtakes/bootlegs always come in FLAC. Because you so need bit-perfect duplication on a recording that's 12 analog generations old.

Sep 14th

• Put it in your yard in lieu of a guard dog: http://bit.ly/zNftj

Sep 15th

• http://bit.ly/2Cm0o6 -- "An American flying hunter-killer robot assassin rebelled against its human controllers above Afghanistan on Sunday"
• http://bit.ly/9Pdhu -- Man, remember when Activision was a brand associated with quality and innovation? (Hint: it was the early 1980s.)

Sep 16th

• If you are making a game employing variable reinforcement schedules to reward compulsive play, you are doing evil. Yes, every CRPG counts.
• Printing handcuff keys: http://bit.ly/6qsiM

Sep 17th

• Was I actually getting phantom stabbing pains simultaneously in my right ear and shoulder last night, keeping me awake, or did I dream that?
• Ow! Nope, they were real. Unless this is still a dream, and you'd know that better than me.
• Wonder if it's a spatial thing, like my proprioception is merging these body parts for purposes of pain because they're close to each other.
• Telltale is giving away the first episode of Tales of Monkey Island on Talk Like a Pirate Day: http://bit.ly/eH3yp

Sep 18th

• How to photograph the Earth from space on a budget of $150: http://bit.ly/3KPfwo
• Functional bionic arms for amputees: http://bit.ly/1hgS

Sep 19th

• The sporadic shooting pain in my ear and shoulder has pretty much stopped, and I didn't have to do anything at all. Checkmate, medicine!
• Sony is rebranding The Beatles Rock Band as a Singstar product: http://bit.ly/NkJGJ That's *weird*! Like playing a Sonic game on a Nintendo.

Sep 20th

• Hm. No more shooting pains in ear/shoulder, but now I'm getting them in the pinky that's been slightly crooked since a rat bit it in 2001.
• @alyankovic Damn it, I had popcorn ready and everything.
• The state of video game journalism circa 2009: http://bit.ly/jpsj
• @pnewnan Try plotting a chart from before that article existed to now. I've been running linear regressions all day, and the trend is clear.

Sep 21st

• http://bit.ly/aH3IZ -- Great marketing campaign. Might as well put up a sign: "You must be [this] pathetic to enjoy Ninja Gaiden Sigma."
• Team Ninja's done this before. One of the DOA3 ads was of guys on a couch scrambling for pillows to hide their erections. This could be you!
• Inferring friendship from mobile phone location data: http://bit.ly/kiSp
• Man, my roommate keeps baking delicious treats and offering them to me. I'm trying to meet a calorie quota here!
• http://bit.ly/dmpH - My analog synth tropism is flaring up again. I have software that's way more powerful; why do I need something tactile?
• "The Gömböc logo (2cm high) is engraved on both sides." -- Hey, this thing was supposed to be convex!

Sep 22nd

• The Korg Kaossilator is only $150 on Amazon. Sold! One of these days I *am* just gonna have to get something with a bunch of knobs, though.
• I say lots of UIs are the worst ever, but the Xbox 360 Media Center might actually be it. Can't even suss out how cursor manipulation works.
• Ogg Vorbis files show up as videos, and error out when you hit play. Try to close the error, and it opens an unlabeled text input box.
• And I could've used text input when trying to search! You can't use search with a controller; *that* interface explicitly requires a numpad.
• The "pictures" section claims to contain 226 items, but all I can find is the empty directory structure of my MP3 folder and no pictures.
• Oh, it *can* see the shared folders on my desktop PC. It just made me set up the Media Center service anyway, to prove to me who's boss.
• Good thing I don't have Natal, or I'm sure it would've asked me to do the truffle shuffle too.
• http://bit.ly/gKLi -- "Don’t leave unused code around because it might be useful someday. Even just sitting there, it’s costing you."
• No surprise, retailers have a problem with the PSPgo. http://bit.ly/lQL2V Why help sell the razors when you aren't in on the blades?

Sep 23rd

• http://bit.ly/15pgPy -- The fun way to clean up stray files on your hard drive.

Sep 24th

• Homemade ice cream is delicious. The inside of my mouth feels like I just ate a stick of butter.
• It's looking more and more like the C++0x standardization team might have to change the preliminary name of their project.

Sep 25th

• http://bit.ly/PMLXc -- "Shipping is a feature. A really important feature. Your product must have it."
• So I told my doctor about the ear/shoulder pain thing, and my proxy pain theory, and he said he had no fucking idea. In about as many words.
• http://bit.ly/tNvFl -- Latest fMRI results: the salmon is judging your social interactions as you grill it.

Sep 26th

• Blowing up your one-line ASCII art, with Figlet: http://bigtext.org/
• Carl Sagan in song form: http://bit.ly/yVRw4 -- Can't decide whether this being awesome adds life to the overt-autotune meme or shortens it.
• I haven't seen the film, but this may be the finest documentary poster ever: http://bit.ly/44CTq
• Bear Armor Guy is now designing a Halo suit for the Canadian military: http://bit.ly/mkzb4 (Does the Canadian military know about this?)
• You know how synths have show floor presets, awesome sounds, fun to play, but impossible to mix into music? The Kaossilator is *just* those.
• New Smush tune, inspired by Monkey Island: http://bit.ly/THfRE I don't feel like it's actually done, but I'm not sure where to go with it.
• @thealawson It's not technically impossible, and I intend to do it. But they're designed to dominate the sonic space, not fit into a mix.

Sep 27th

• http://bit.ly/Q1Acn -- Theory: the Half-Life 2 G-Man is metaphor for the game designer, guiding events while maintaining the facade for you.
• Back from Folsom St. Fair. Tamer than led to believe. Awesome like Comic-Con is: subculture allowed to go wild because the normals are away.
• All that bare skin meant lots of exposed pimples. I kept wanting to run up and say "hey, can I get that for you?"

Sep 28th

• @RareLtd I got Blast Corps used, couldn't figure out how to reset the save. Long story short: Diamond Sands was the first level I finished.
• "For years, I have made the joke about Richard Reid: 'Just be glad that he wasn't the underwear bomber.'" Joke's over: http://bit.ly/12tyGS
• http://bit.ly/UKOKE -- If you're unfamiliar, The Protomen make albums that are essentially rock operas set in the Mega Man universe.
• There's a guy on a walkie-talkie right outside my bedroom window. Nobody's ever back there, what's going on here?
• I remember back when I lived on the second floor, a repair man knocking on the window while I was napping and asking me to close the blinds.
• Walkie-talkie guy has gone into stealth mode. I still hear footsteps. I'm sure he's trying desperately to stifle a sneeze as we speak.
• There aren't enough single-screen platformers around. After 1985, every platformer had to scroll the same way every game has to be 3D now.

Sep 29th

• Bats don't have time to stop and drink: http://bit.ly/2RSni
• Me: "svn revert shares-behind" SVN: "Skipped 'shares-behind'" Okay, um. But I didn't want you to skip it. I wanted you to not skip it.

Sep 30th

• My 360 suicided, but it's *not* a red ring. Take that, Sony Defense Force!
• Stuck in Zork? Like prog rock? It's your lucky day: http://bit.ly/42gB6o
• Decided to play Left 4 Dead twenty minutes ago. Steam is still updating. This is why people don't do PC gaming any more.
• Hooray, the launcher finally launched. Now all I have to do is wait another 20 minutes for the game itself to update.
• The high point of owning a Kaossilator has been watching my friends lose respect for lame techno acts. So worth it!
• Goombas.org post on the parallel between BDSM and game design, awkwardly segued into experiential design decisions: http://bit.ly/1oDxtA