Friday, February 26, 2010

Friday Links!

It's a no-dogs-barking-behind-my-back-fence edition of Friday Links, so let's get started.

Paul Baxter sent in a link to a totally fascinating article about children titled Learning To Lie.

From The Escapist, a story about an astounding game called Exile that I've never even heard of before (this is not normal). Here's a teaser:
Released on the BBC Micro home computer in 1988, it crammed a sprawling open-world environment (along with digitized speech) onto a single side of audio cassette tape data. It also came bundled with a 20,000-word novella explaining the backstory.

...it was a landmark title that featured realistic gravity, inertia and object mass years before players understood the concept of a physics engine. It also had an astounding level of AI, stealth-based gameplay, a logical ecosystem governing the world's creatures and a teleportation mechanic that feels startlingly like a predecessor to Portal.


Some of the detail reminds me of a Dwarf Fortress precursor (although the game is quite different), and you can read all about it here.

From Tim Steffes, links to another crazy NES auction: Old Nintendo NES system and five games sell for $13,105 on eBay. Chris Kohler would have gotten all that for $5 at a thrift store. Here's one more, for a single game, and the bidding is over $22,000 with a day to go. Here's why it's worth so much.

Chulbom Lee sent in a link to a stunning, fan-made intro to show what a remade FFVII might look like, using clips from the FFVII movie and technical demo for the PS3.

From Sirius, a story about a LEGO robot that solves any Rubik's cube in less than 12 seconds.

Here's a link to a very funny and clever commercial for Nolan's cheddar cheese.

From The Edwin Garcia Links Machine, a story about a man launching rockets--that look like giant crayons.  Also, it's Lost Nazi nuke-project uranium found in Dutch scrapyard. Next, and it's pretty stunning, it's Su-33 near-miss with Kuznetsov carrier deck.

From Rob Varak, it's The World's 18 Strangest Airports.

From Neil Yamamoto, a terrific link (following up from last week's link about green/blue screen) showing an example of how sophisticated this work has become: when The Truman Show was filming, none of the buildings were higher than one story. Take a look at how the buildings were digitally altered in the final film.

From Andrew B., a story about the deepest part of the ocean--the Mariana trench. Also, a wonderful animated short called Accro.

From Steve West, a link to a street drummer video, and the guy is fantastic.

From Chris Meadowcraft, another Onion News Network parody, and this time, it's Denmark Introduces Harrowing New Tourism Ads Directed By Lars Von Trier.

From Dan Sheppard, a wonderfully rambling article by Stuart Campbell that is nominally about Psychocandy by the Jesus And Mary Chain, but is more about the feeling you get when you are young and music can still overwhelm you (in a good way).

Okay, I'm not sure the music is for me, but Brad Ruminer sent in a link to a visual feast: Neurosonics Live, Featuring Holographic Heads Projected on a Drumkit and Turntables.

Finally, from DQ reader My Wife, it's The 14 Funniest Police Composite Sketches.

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