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3
Jan 10

Link roundup – squid edition

  • An affectionate octopus – This sight will warm the cockles of any heart – even the three hearts of a cephalopod – though the huge welts from its gentle octopus sucker-love look a bit of a mood-dampener on the part of the human.
  • Squid at play – So squid indulge in mating dances which appear to be similar to lekking, a behaviour some birds employ in which males gather together and display in order for females to pick out the best. The term ‘lek’ comes from the Swedish terms for rule-less play (‘att leka’ means ‘to play’). This can only mean that squid either have a sense of style or fun. Biologist PZ Myers says that males gather to swim in large circles above the mating ground at dawn. The females arrive and they all dance together before pairing off and mating over and over again until after sunset.
  • Squidblog – Profoundly sadly, this blog has been mothballed since 2006, but it’s a delightful repository of old cephalopod news, including a 15-17m bull sperm whale with scars indicating tussles with 200-300kg squid all over its snout, research that squid inherit personalities from their parents, documentation of squid orgies and a cat wearing a squid hat.
  • Humboldt squid: Soft, gentle kittens of the briny deep? – Clive Thompson on how a biologist is refuting general horror at the six-foot Diablo Rojo, with its ‘fleshreaping beak’, saying that they kinda like attacking his equipment, but they’re frightened by his light.
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1
Jan 10

Sci-fi poster

Oh my, do I want this. Spotted: the Warthog, the spherical robot from The Incredibles, that bounty hunter out of Star Wars, and isn’t that a grunt out of Robotron?

149 Sci-Fi Icons on One Poster | Design You Trust (via n0wak)

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29
Dec 09

Infographic art

Beautiful in their organic, subjective and muddled attempts to represent the world and his own life with objective information, Simon Evans’ works explore, as Frieze excellently puts it, “that wonderful gap between the words and life itself”.

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28
Dec 09

Link roundup

  • Harris returns to the Capitol Wasteland – Armed with a gaggle of mods and tweaks to Fallout 3, chum Duncan Harris has gone to town taking pictures. This one, his character posing before the Washington Monument, is probably my favourite, but every one’s a winner.
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24
Dec 09

Link roundup

  • A short history of Team Fortress 2 updates – Smart Tom Francis looks at how Valve has built on its Team Fortress multiplayer shooter since release in 2007 with a raft of character abilities which have fundamentally changed the way the game plays (two of which Francis came up with himself, more or less).
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21
Dec 09

Link roundup

  • Troy Gilbert deconstructs Zelda movement mechanics – Superbly techy, this. Game developer Troy Gilbert looks at the pixel-by-pixel technique The Legend Of Zelda uses to stop Link getting caught on the scenery. It reveals Miyamoto’s lovely bit of clever trickery to, as Gilbert says, ensure “the player’s desire is successfully expressed in the gameworld, regardless of the potentially pedantic ways of the computer.”
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27
Oct 09

Link roundup

  • Playful – Anyone else going to this on Friday? With many of London’s technorati there, it promises to be a fun do.
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25
Oct 09

Link roundup

  • Lou’s Pseudo 3d Page – One of the things that delights me most about videogames are the little hacks that transform pixels into worlds, and in olden times, emulating 3D space was one, big, glorious hack. My favourite: background raster effects. Drool.
  • Is the Magazine Dead? « Jimmy Wales – “The death of the traditional magazine has come about because people are demanding more information, of better quality, and faster,” says Wales, touting Wikia’s new print-on-demand service. Better quality, eh? Really? Or do they just lap up fast and, most importantly, free information?
  • Small Worlds – It’s a special game, Small Worlds. As much as I’m often annoyed by intentionally lo-fi pixel graphics like this (I find them retro-fetishistic and a put-off to people who don’t hungrily treasure games’ mythically wonderful past), here they’re gloriously expressive, as Mike Nowak says.