Jammers Go Micro Brew

March 10th, 2010

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If you’re wondering what the Jammers, the budget-cyborg anarchist faction from Feng Shui and Shadowfist, have been up to lately, wonder no longer. It seems as if the group, led as we all know by cybernetic apes, are busily setting up a sideline operation. And unsurprisingly, it involves beer.

To tip me off further, they’ve set up operations in Barrie, my wife’s hometown.

Yes, mein amigos, there’s a Flying Monkeys brewery.

Now, flying monkeys are a common trope in pop culture, so I didn’t know it was them right away. But now they’re releasing a porter, and it’s called, wait for it… Netherworld.

If that’s not the Battlechimp Potemkin showing his furry hand, I don’t know what is. And isn’t it just like Jammers to cut me out of the merch arrangements?

Had the Battlechimp launched, say, Orangutank Cabernet Franc, I’d have the grounding to provide a quality assessment. Suds lie outside my wheelhouse, so someone else will have to test it out and report back.

Building Rounded Corners with CSS3

March 10th, 2010

In this first part of a series I provide you with a friendly introduction to building rounded corners with CSS3. In this initial stage I show you how to create this popular decorative effect on web pages using four different background images which were assigned to the same HTML container. This technique is impossible with current CSS methods….

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Banner ad

March 10th, 2010

I need a banner ad creating for my company web site. Whoe ever wins this will have to look at my site and come up with a suitable banner, I need one 250 x 250

I have looked at the online ones which can be made but thought there is probably more imagination out there.

I need this as soon as possible, so any early bids who can turn this round in 24hrs will have an advantage.

Location Wars

March 9th, 2010

So, the Location Wars have begun in earnest – Facebook and Twitter have joined Google in launching location based services.

NYT on Facebook:

Starting next month, the more than 400 million Facebook users could begin seeing a new kind of status update flow through their news feed: the current locations of their friends.

Facebook plans to take the wraps off a new location-based feature in late April at f8, the company’s yearly developer conference, according to several people briefed on the project, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss unannounced services.

In preparation for the introduction, Facebook updated its privacy policy last November. The new policy states: “When you share your location with others or add a location to something you post, we treat that like any other content you post.”

At that time, the company also offered some foreshadowing of the new feature: “If we offer a service that supports this type of location sharing we will present you with an opt-in choice of whether you want to participate.”

The temptation to do opt-out is going to be very strong though…..on past performance it wouldn’t be surprising is that “opt-in2 promise is very liberally interpreted,

Twitter too is gearing up – TechCrunch:

The service has just turned on geolocation on its website today for the first time.

While Twitter’s geolocation feature has been live through its API since last November, there was no sign of integration into the main twitter.com site until now. As you can see in the screenshot above, for tweets tagged with location, right next to the source of the tweet there is a location placemarker. When you hover over it, it turns blue, and clicking on it brings up a little Google map showing the location that tweet was sent from.

You can see these maps as overlays both on individual tweet pages, and on tweets in your main stream. In some cases, depending on how Twitter geolocation API is being used, it looks like place names are even passed through to Twitter.

Timing is of course to coincide with SXSWi, where Location startups Gowalla, Foursquae and who knows how many others are trying to get that lifegiving buzz going (Buzz – now there is another location ploy) in the biggest geekfest on the planet. SXSW lends itself to this sort of thing as thousands of hungry and thirsty (for knowledge, natch) geeks seek their networked friends for meals over the 12 or so blocks of Austin Olde Town.

What can we say that we haven’t said already (just search for “location” on the blog) except be careful – Location based services play faster and looser with privacy than anything that has gone before.

Evaluating Character Generation

March 9th, 2010

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The untitled GUMSHOE Space game has now entered in-house playtesting—meaning that I’m not done the manuscript, but have enough of it to get started with my own group. In the process we’ll be, one hopes, finding the stuff that breaks on impact and fixing it before it goes out to other groups.

At this stage I’m always looking for ways to measure the success of the initial session given over to character generation.

This length of time devoted to character creation isn’t a given, of course. Indie-style designs have taught us to focus on a quick process, often because the game is a one-shot. Skulduggery certainly follows that model, giving you a mix and match process that unfolds in a few minutes. It aims to be a) fast, b) give you an immediate creative connection to your character and c) to be fast.

Largely because players bring so many expectations to the space opera genre—they want their ship, their gear, their choice of alien species, and other categories of crunchy bit as well, the space game embraces the more traditional model of the choice-laden, involved generation process.

One might argue, in fact, that it’s better to have either a very short process, taking a few minutes, or a long one, taking an entire session, and not so great to have a process that falls between the two. Half a session of character generation and half of play doesn’t feel like you’re starting quickly, nor does it give you the range of choices that engage you with a more detailed character.

So when speed is no longer your prime consideration, how do you measure the success of your generation process?

As a GM, first of all, you have to realize that the bit that seems like a lot of boring book-flipping may be extremely engaging for the players. This is when they enjoy maximum possibility and range of choice. It’s when inspiration start to flow. Or it might actually be boring book-flipping. It can be hard to tell the two apart.

Clarity is clearly an important measure. If you can smoothly go through the list of steps without getting confused or losing focus, something’s going right.

Having players happily ooh and aah over the various options, whether they be bits of gear or super-powers, is a good sign.

If they’re still thinking out loud about the campaign as they head out the door, that’s a point in your favor.

An oft-overlooked element is the quantity of interaction between players during this phase. Choices the group must make or discuss collectively bring about the shift from a series of people working in parallel to a joint imaginative effort. For example, in space GUMSHOE you pick a ship type from a list of eight with various features and drawbacks. This seems like practical crunchiness at its height, but it also requires the group to agree on what kind of crew they want to be. The choice achieves collaboration by means of a genre cornerstone, the starship.

The group questionnaires as originally envisioned by Greg Stafford and now found in HeroQuest 2 serve a like purpose, though more obviously in the realm of collective narrative control.

Finishing a Casual Navigation Bar with CSS Sprites

March 9th, 2010

If you re interested in learning how to use CSS sprites to create engaging standard-compliant navigational mechanisms that can be used on different web sites with minor modifications you ve come to the right place. Welcome to the final installment of a seven-part series that shows you how to build CSS sprite-based navigation bars. This series walks you through the progressive development of a couple of appealing links bars which use a single background image to define the visual presentation of their sections….

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We can haz minimum wage nao?

March 8th, 2010
NotLOLCat

Talking about Sexy New Media Startups being as poor as churchmice, here ’s an example – the iconic LOLCat site is that most poverty-attracting thing, being a sexy and new media site. And it would appear its using Slave labour (or something like that) – Gawker:

Cheezburger Network might be the internet’s largest “meme aggregator,” according to Wired, with upwards of $4 million per year gleaned from other people’s pet pictures, supplied to the company for free. But that doesn’t mean the 30 or so employees share fairly in the bounty; as we reported last week, Huh has blogged about proudly offering jobs at Seattle’s minimum wage of $8.55 or slightly higher, at $10.

Those low wages permeate the company, insiders and their associates tell us, with some former workers also describing worker misclassification unpaid overtime.

On the bright side, it sounds like people have fun with their co-workers, as even some detractors tell us, and one employee wrote in to say his experience at Cheezburger Network beat the pants off her/his (other?) minimum wage jobs — not exactly a high bar, but, given the state of the economy, a practical one.

Seemed like it was only right to put up an appropriate LOLCat picture then (hat tip Patrick Hadfield for the caption)

The Hype Hyperbola

March 8th, 2010
The inverse relationship between a business’s sexiness and profitability

While we’re on the subject, Techmeme’s Mahendra Palsule pointed me towards this C:Net article arguing that the media focus on what is sexy, not a decent business (he was noting it as a part-answer to this article I wrote awhile ago). The gist of it is:

A new report by ITDatabase that examines tech coverage over the last six months from eight top business news publications raises some questions, in particular: Does the business press factor companies’ revenue and profits into their tech editorial agenda?

The report shows that Apple and Google dominate, while Twitter and Facebook are far more discussed in the business press than Intel, Dell, IBM, or even HP (the largest tech company in the world).

The eight publications surveyed are: The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Forbes, Fortune, BusinessWeek, The Economist, Financial Times, and USA Today. Over a period of six months, ITDatabase measured coverage by the number of times a tech company was mentioned in print and online in these publications, including blogs such as All Things Digital, which is affiliated with the Journal. (Disclosure: I am an adviser to ITDatabase.)

There is a chart in the post that shows Apple and Google getting the lions share of the publicity – its a power law graph by the looks of things – and it reminded me of a graph I saw many years ago, drawn in semi jest by a McKinsey colleague at the time, Ralph Lewinski. This curve explains the Hype Hyperbola (see the diagram above), ie the truism that sexy industries tend not to be profitable. This is typically due to one of 2 reasons:

- They are new industries, which usually tend to be unprofitable because they are giving away value to get market share (and/or have yet to find a business model)

- They are established and still sexy, in which case people will enter the market, and even work for them, for much less money than for less enjoyable industries

Which is of course why New Meedja startups are the poorest churchmice (its not a LOLcondition) of all as they fit both conditions :-) Social Media profits (if you exclude the purchases of sites by the Dumb Money) drive the current “biggest $0 billion industry” going.

Google and Apple are exceptions in that they are both sexy and profitable and so really get the press attention. Typically they are profitable because (like old fashioned TV, which was once sexy) they have built strong barriers to entry. They are also both very powerful, especially in the Valley – the difference in coverage tone on Google Buzz between the independent bloggers and the Tech Media (including the big blogs) was quite remarkable.

Media Memes – Navel Gazing Manouevres

March 8th, 2010

Techmeme has launched a new vertical, the fascinatingly recursive* Mediagazer:

Today we’re launching our first new news vertical in almost four years: Mediagazer, which will focus on the content production and distribution business, organizing topics as wide as journalism, blogging, video production, e-books, and digital distribution technologies.

Meedja types given a mirror to look at themselves with…hmm, I recall a Greek Myth on the subject – ended in tears of course :-). Anyway, the venture will still have the Human Editing function:

Mediagazer incoporates all these lessons. We’ve taken great care in its construction, have outfitted the site with the latest iteration of our automation engine, and have launched it from the outset with a dedicated human editor.

That editor will be Megan McCarthy. While Megan’s career in media has focused more on the technology space (both at Gawker and at Techmeme), she’s long developed an interest in media industry buzz and should feel very much at home at Mediagazer.

It was perhaps inevitable that such a thing aimed at The Meedja would happen, its is an interesting gambit, and I wonder if it will need more human editing than Tech. The sheer number of Media news magazines suggests it will work (I’ve always seen Techmeme etc as the equivalent of magazines rather than newspapers per se), with this most self-absorbed of sectors. What fascinates me is which other verticals will be launched – and survive.

*look it up:-D

Razed

March 8th, 2010

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The as-yet-unnamed Space GUMSHOE isn’t the only new core game in the works for that system. While I work away on the starships and the aliens, the estimable Will Hindmarch has destroyed the earth and will allow you to rebuild it in Razed, a game of post-apocalyptic exploration. Here’s the teaseblurb:

Earth is a ruin. Inscrutable alien machines wander the planet, looting the Earth’s body. Humanity dwells in the ruins, having almost no knowledge of how the planet went from its former heights to this sorry low.

The law consists of a rare few who struggle to hold some semblance of civilization together with words, with guns, with wisdom, with compassion, with cunning.

Want the food those vagabonds stole from your camp? Follow the trail.

Want to avenge the murder of your bodyguards at a local refuge? Find the killers.

Want clean water? Want batteries you can use in trade? Want to know where they took your wife? Want to know what the aliens look like inside those metal suits? Want to know what the hell happened to Planet Earth? Investigate.

Razed is a post-apocalyptic GUMSHOE game in which investigation is the key to survival.

Will will be sharing his design process over on his blog. Here’s his Razed tag, though if you’re not already you really should make a habit of his consistently thought-provoking content.