Author: Scott

She’s apparently writing a post for Joystiq about gaming culture and pastries. In reality, I think it’s all a pretense for her to stare at pictures of pretty cakes for hours. Sitting across from her in our room, I’ve become slowly aware that she’s not only looking at these cakes, but also talking about them. To me.

Below are some choice utterances:

“The point is to see all cakes.”
“I think I’ve been looking at cakes too long.”
“I seem to just be mumbling about cakes. I’m not quite sure how it happened”
“These cakes are delicious”
“Shush now. I have found a cake”
“I must chart the uncharted world of– game cake. I found another.”
“CHICKEN!”

That last one is not cake-related. On her thirteenth page of Flickr “game cake” results, she inexplicably came across a series of rooster photos. As she was somewhat confused and shaken by this incident, I was able to coerce her into closing the search window, and moving on with her life. She’s writing the post as I type this, but I’m assuming the whole story won’t be told. I’ve taken it upon myself to fill in the gaps. Let the truth be revealed.

Update: Okay, so it seems I spoke too soon. Turns out Hotel Dusk does have a setting for left-handed folk, which essentially negates my entire argument. Oh well. I’ll leave this post here for posterity.

Hotel Dusk: Room 215 for the Nintendo DS sure sounds awesome, but the unique way you hold the system could potentially alienate left-handed gamers (comme moi) from the game. When playing Hotel Dusk, it seems that players must hold the DS vertically, like a book, with the touch screen on the right and non-touch on the left.

Unless the game has an option to invert the two screens (allowing the touch screen to be on the left), it’s going to be hella awkward for lefties, who’ll have to hold the stylus in their less-dominant claw in order to play.

I’d be okay with this if it hadn’t already been a nagging problem. In fact, the last two DS games I’ve played have had similar issues. The Sisters mode of Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin requires players to have one hand on the d-pad and one on the stylus at all times, forcing me to play rightie. All they had to do was add an option to use the four face buttons as an alternate d-pad, and the problem would have been solved (an especially heinous oversight considering that the face buttons aren’t even used in this mode of play).

Same issue in Animal Crossing: Wild World. While the stylus and face buttons can both be used to control all aspects of the game, it’s much easier to switch off between the two, moving your character around with the d-pad, and navigating menus with the stylus. This natural style of play, however, is not easily accomplished by lefties, who have to either commit to right-hand stylusing, or constantly switch between holding the stylus and holding the d-pad. Again, a minor gripe, but one that could have easily been fixed by swapping the functions of the d-pad and face buttons.

Even if Hotel Dusk lacks a southpaw mode, I’ll admittedly still buy it, but I’m getting a little tired of designers failing to consider these issues when creating their interfaces. Innovative controls are a hot trend in video games these days, but it’s all a wash if accessibility doesn’t evolve with the rest of the market.

You’d think that Mensa, being an organization comprised solely of intelligent people, would have at least one able web designer in their group. Oh well.

4, amd64 support around 3.
Imagine a backdoor which gives you full read and write access to all addressable memory.
Damien Bergamini: I live in France.
James and Intel only release the partialfragments that they feel will make them look “Open”.

— elegy [ corzhg@sasil.in ]

Let’s talk about Apple’s iPhone for a minute. From everything I’ve seen, it looks to be an incredible piece of technology. It’s going to shift paradigms, reinvent wheels, think outside of boxes, blah blah blah. It’s still calling itself a phone, and I think that’s a mistake.

While climbing down Masada, Bonnie and I indulged ourselves in an extended conversation on mobile devices, from cell phones to PDAs to Smartphones. We agreed (!) that Smartphones (like the Blackberry and Sony Treo) demonstrate the current generation’s obsession with “always on” internet tech, and that all modern mobile tech is heading toward the same eventual conclusion: the ubiquitous portable device.

This device is best compared to the portable Knowledge Navigators in Serial Experiments: Lain — devices that are, interestingly enough, based somewhat on the Apple Newton. Our conversation on Masada turned out to be quite topical, as Steve Jobs would announce the iPhone several days later. The iPhone very closely resembles the ubiquitous portable that I’m predicting, except that it seems reluctant to call itself anything other than a phone. And “phone,” in my opinion, is a very limited — and limiting — nomenclature.

I understand that it’s a marketing strategy. Everybody wants a phone; not very many people want portable NAVI’s, but the result of the iPhone’s branding is that it by itself won’t kill the idea of the phone. I’m in a bit of a gray area, so let me be clear: our future is in devices that connect us, without prejudice toward any one type of connection. These devices can do audio, but they do text as well, and images, as well as other forms of data, and there’s no emphasis on one form of communication over another. The iPhone reinforces the notion that phones are the center of communication, rather than expanding our understanding of what communication is.

I’m sure Apple still has a few tricks up its sleeve regarding its newest family member. We’ll see what comes our way before June. I’ll be a happy Scott Jon if, in the next ten years, we can retire the word “phone” from our daily vocabulary.

Returned from Israel early yesterday morning, and my time has been mostly spent in recovery: recovering the sleep I lost on an overnight flight; recovering my health after getting sick in the Negev; recovering the data lost when my hard drive failed.

Regarding Israel, the short answer: it was pretty incredible. Long answer later. My laundry smells like salt and sulfur.