Favorites from cortex
Subscribe:
Displaying post 251 to 300 of 574
What's it like to have two eyes? In other words, can someone give an explanation or offer a resource that could help me see (pardon the pun) what it's like to have stereoscopic vision?
What's it like to have two eyes? In other words, can someone give an explanation or offer a resource that could help me see (pardon the pun) what it's like to have stereoscopic vision?
Hungry Hungry Kittehs
Scheduled, portion-controlled feeding is failing for my cats. One ravenous kitty versus one food-agnostic kitty equals lots of frustration for me. Can anyone share some tips for making this work?
Great old lenses on Canon EOS mount?
John Carey uses an old Olympus 55mm 1.8 lens on his Canon 5D with beautiful results. Which other similar old lenses have you found great on a Canon EOS mount?
I knew nothing
Made in one night and it probably shows. I liked the tacky sound so I kept it.
How can I stop a bird from playing on my car and leaving its crap all over?
How do I get a bird to stop sitting on my side mirrors and shitting all over my car?
Monster's Den Chronicles
Monster's Den Chronicles
is a turn-based Flash dungeon-crawler RPG with combat mechanics reminiscent of turn-based strategy game stalwart Disciples II.
In 129 the Dwarves made war against the Ogre
How to Host a Dungeon is a solitaire pen-and-paper game in which you create an underground complex of rooms, populate them with various fantasy races and monsters, and simulate its history. At almost any time you can stop and have the basis for a D&D campaign. Here's a YouTube playthrough of a game: Part 1 - Part 2
Go North
Playfic
is a community for writing, sharing, and playing interactive fiction games (aka “text adventures”) entirely from your browser.
ALIEN age 11
ALIEN age 11
- an adaptation created by an underage artist based on the Alan Dean Foster novelization and a few stills, without having seen the actual film.
The other side of YouTube.
TVTropes calls it a "Neo-Dada art form consisting of video remixes. . . to confuse, stun or entertain the viewer". A recent top ten list (more here) fills the gaps of that description with ample WTF, which is almost too appropriate for a video genre that first garnered attention as a misdirection troll.
The Tome of Awesome
If you enjoy playing Dungeons & Dragons or similar fantasy RPGs, or if you just like reading in-depth analysis of fictional worlds, then the Tome of Awesome [pdf] is for you.
Morpion Solitaire
Morpion Solitaire
is a very simple pencil-and-paper, line-drawing game for which the best possible score is not known! New records are still being set.
My Word
The Corpus of American Historical English
is a searchable index of word usage in American printed material from 1810 to 2009. Powerful complex searches allow you to trace the appearance and evolution of words and phrases and even specific grammatical constructions, see trends in frequency, and plenty more. Start with the 5-Minute Tour.
The (First) Crime of the Century
June 25th 1906, was the opening night of the musical revue Mamzelle Champagne on the roof of Madison Square Garden. In attendance were Stanford White, renowned architect (Washington Square Arch, Judson Memorial Church, Madison Square Garden itself), and Harry Kendall Thaw, eccentric coal and railroad scion. During the performance of the song I Could Love a Million Girls, Thaw "left his seat near the stage, passed between a number of tables, and, in full view of the players and of scores of persons, shot White through the head." (pdf) Standing over White’s body, Thaw said “You’ll never go out with that woman again.”
New to Final Cut Pro X, need tips on how to organize content
New to Final Cut Pro X, need tips on how to organize content. So I've got hours of interviews in large file segments, how best to cut/edit/organize them in the newest version of Final Cut Pro X?
Earl Campbell Thighs in HD!
Just in time for Turkey Day.
Recently something unique came into my possession: the original 16mm work-print of Manos: The Hands of Fate. (made famous by these guys).
Recently something unique came into my possession: the original 16mm work-print of Manos: The Hands of Fate. (made famous by these guys).
Music Ngram Viewer
The Music Ngram Viewer
from Peachnote tracks appearances of any given note or chord sequence in a corpus of 60,000 optically scanned public-domain classical scores, ranging from the 17th century to the present -- a la what Google Ngram Viewer does for words and phrases. A fuller description with examples. And if you don't like the Google-esque GUI, you can download the raw data and mess with it yourself. (Via Music Hack Day Boston.)
Everything is a remix, but you gotta start with something
So you want to try and remix someone else's songs, but all you have are a random collection of instrumentals and acapellas to work with. Fret not! First, you can find inspiration from the folks who share their reworkings at Tea's Björk Remixes, as there aren't many Björk acappelas to start with, but they still find a way. Then check out the Acapella Archives blog, for a lot of indie hip-hop acapellas and more vocal tracks. If you've browsed those archives, you might notice a link to Beastie Remixes, a community for remixers of Beastie Boys. They have an acapellas page which has more than just vocal tracks: there are also copies of show vinyl, with the tracks that the Boys have used to back up their live shows.
So the world may be mended.
Dark Souls, the spiritual sequel to 2009's Demon's Souls (previously 1, 2) and heir to the King's Field series of games, is out in most of the world this week. Reviews have been excellent, sales have been surprisingly robust; Dark Souls was the top selling title in Japan last week, with 279,567 copies sold, compared to an estimated 40,000 for Demon's Souls first week of release.
From Software has taken an interesting approach to players who somehow acquire the game early: rather than banning the player outright or limited online features, From Software is embracing Dark Souls' unique multiplayer model, sending super leveled invaders into player's games to hunt them mercilessly.
Why use 2.5d when 2 will do?
The Doom Roguelike is really much better than it has any right to be, and has come a long way over the last four years of development. Its spacey sister is the Aliens Roguelike (previously). Here are some tutorial videos to get you started, and mefi's own JHarris' review of DoomRL from 2007.
The world of perfect video game emulation
Accuracy takes power: one man's 3GHz quest to build a perfect SNES emulator. The author of the SNES emulator bsnes talks about the difficulties in creating emulators that accurately simulate classic game consoles, and why it will take lifetimes to generate enough computer power to perfectly recreate the most modern consoles.
Homomorphic Encryption
Described as 'cryptography's holy grail', Homomorphic Encryption/Computation is a form of encryption where specific algebraic operations on the plaintext translate into different algebraic operations on the ciphertext, allowing the plaintext's owner to 'outsource' computations to untrusted machines.
CS221
Stanford's 'Introduction to Artificial Intelligence' course will be offered free to anyone online this fall. The course will be taught by Sebastian Thrun (Stanford) and Peter Norvig (Google, Director of Research), who expect to deal with the historically large course size using tools like Google Moderator.
What comes after one? Usually four.
A corpus analysis of rock harmony
[PDF] - The analyses were encoded using a recursive notation, similar to a context-free grammar, allowing repeating sections to be encoded succinctly. The aggregate data was then subjected to a variety of statistical analyses. We examined the frequency of different chords
and chord transitions ... Other results concern the frequency of different root motions, patterns of
co-occurrence between chords, and changes in harmonic practice across time. More information, analysis, and explanation here.
How to unstick a dead mouse from floor?
How do I get a dead mouse in a puddle of dried molasses off my kitchen floor?
Jebediah Kerman is unfazed by his impending fiery death.
Fancy yourself a rocket scientist? Want to build rockets and shoot little green guys into space? Comfortable with your rocket flying apart and exploding into a thousand fiery pieces? Able to press the space bar? Try Kerbal Space Program.
Convection, subduction, confusion
How can I visualize geological phenomenons?
On Fallout: We had a time travel [setting] with dinosaurs for a while
Matt Barton's Matt Chat started as a series of discussions on classic video games from Elite to System Shock 2. It now features interviews with the likes of Chris Avellone (Planescape Torment), Tim Cain (Fallout pt.1, pt.2); Arcanum, Brian Fargo (The Fall of Interplay, Waste land and Fallout, Bard's Tale and Wizardry), John Romero (Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, Quake and the infamous Daikatana) and Al Lowe (Leasure Suite Larry pt.1 and pt.2).
Amidst the Hall Of that infernal Court
Solium Infernum, the most recent release from indie game designer Vic Davies (and one of Eurogamer's Games of 2009), is a turn-based wargame in which the players, as members of Hell's aristocracy, vie for control of Satan's recently vacated throne employing diplomatic measures and demonic armies. Over the last couple of weeks the boys at Rock, Paper, Shotgun have posted epic turn by turn battle reports of a month-long play-by-email game undertaken by two of their own and four acquaintances, two of whom have written up their own reports. Without fail the accounts are full of twists and turns, blunders and screwups, conniving, back-stabbing and all sorts of bastardry that make them fine examples of game writing as well as gripping page-turners.
Drum Mixing Woes
I trying my hand at recording and mixing drums in a full kit, and I'm having trouble getting it to have that sort of punch that most drum recordings have.
The Gostak: An Interofgan Halpock
Finally, here you are. At the delcot of tondam, where doshes deave. But the doshery lutt is crenned with glauds.
Glauds! How rorm it would be to pell back to the bewl and distunk them, distunk the whole delcot, let the drokes uncren them. But you are the gostak. The gostak distims the doshes. And no glaud will vorl them from you.
Delcot
This is the delcot of tondam, where gitches frike and duscats glake. Across from a tophthed curple, a gomway deaves to kiloff and kirf, gombing a samilen to its hoff. Crenned in the loff lutt are five glauds.
>
Glauds! How rorm it would be to pell back to the bewl and distunk them, distunk the whole delcot, let the drokes uncren them. But you are the gostak. The gostak distims the doshes. And no glaud will vorl them from you.
Delcot
This is the delcot of tondam, where gitches frike and duscats glake. Across from a tophthed curple, a gomway deaves to kiloff and kirf, gombing a samilen to its hoff. Crenned in the loff lutt are five glauds.
>
This is harsh. Evaluate me.
Demon's Souls, an action-RPG from Atlus, is the most notoriously difficult videogame of this generation (previously). If the game was too brutal for you to finish, this should add insult to injury: someone's completed it in just 54 minutes. Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4.
"MY MINIONS HAVE FAILED ME. YOUR DOOM AWAITS IN MY CHAMBER!"
Friday Flash Fun: Realm of the Mad God is a co-op MMORPG shooter with cute 8-bit graphics. Death is permanent, play addictive.
GIRP
Newly released GIRP is to rock climbing what QWOP was to running. (previously. also previously.) The games' creator, Bennet Foddy, appears to be a Doctor of Philosophy, focusing on biomedical ethics. His list of recent publications demonstrates an engagement with addiction studies. Proceed with caution. (via)
Bean plating brass lanterns
The IF Theory Reader
is finally out...a collection of some intriguing thought about the theory, craft, and history of interactive fiction (free PDF or buyable paperback). A must-read for both Ludologists and Narratologists.
Help a SXSW noob
What are your best SXSW Interactive tips for a first-time attendee?
Addictive as heck baseball game
The Baseball Club
is a game by MetaFilter favorite Taro Ito, best known for Dice Wars. In The Baseball Club you take control of a high school baseball team and attemp to lead them to victory in The World Baseball Tournament. You keep each player for three seasons and train them in batting practice. Warning: Absurdly addictive.
Online Corpora
Online Corpora
. In linguistics, a corpus is a collection of 'real world' writing and speech designed to facilitate research into language. These 6 searchable corpora together contain more than a billion words. The Corpus of Historical American English allows you to track changes in word use from 1810 to present; the Corpus del Español goes back to the 1200s.
"The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear. And the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown."
Lovecraft: Fear of the Unknown - A 90 minute documentary on HP Lovecraft with contributions by Neil Gaiman, John Carpenter and Guillermo Del Toro.
Bibliotheca Corviniana
The library of King Matthias I of Hungary, the Bibliotheca Corviniana, was "the second greatest collection of books in Europe in the Renaissance period, after that of the Vatican." Destroyed following the 15th century Turkish invasion of Hungary (despite the efforts of Matthias' vassal Vlad III the Impaler), a few surviving codices have been digitized by the National Széchényi Library and the Library of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.
Just add dice
List of Libre Games. Open Game Systems. Compendium of Free Role Playing Games. Free RPGs at 1000 Monkeys, 1000 Typewriters. Tired of role-playing game books the size and price of textbooks? You've got a lot of alternatives.