World of Goo

I found a fantastic game. It's named World of Goo. Here's a trailer. And here's the Wikipedia entry. Check those ratings - 9/10, 9.5/10, 10/10, 93%, 96%.

It's hard to summarize what's right about this game. Most everything is.

Let me start with few obscure details that might appeal specifically to a computer geek like me.

First, this game runs on Windows, on Nintendo Wii, and on Mac OS X. Linux version comes soon. And guess what, the Mac OS X version is not a lame "Win32 API linked with Wine" kind of port. Proof that it isn't is that Wine-linked Win32 API using Mac software only runs on Intel CPUs. Not so this game. It runs on Macs with PowerPC CPUs (either a G4 or a G5). It's pretty much a native version on Mac OS X. It runs crisply on my iMac G5. I asked the developers in e-mail about their development methodology, and the developer Ron Carmel was kind to reply. (The whole company seems to be just two guys, working from wi-fi equipped coffee houses in San Francisco. They have years of experience working for big name game companies, though.) Anyway, Ron's response was:

at some point, when we realized we're going to go multi-platform (wii/pc at the time) we simply abstracted away anything and everything platform dependent from the code. this meant graphics, sound, input handling, window creation, threading, that sort of thing. the game only deals with a set of abstract classs that it gets from a singleton "environment" class. those classes provide a set of services (like graphics, sound, etc) and we have different implementations of those classes for windows, mac, wii, and soon linux.

I can't say just how much I respect people who take this approach. It's one of hallmarks of professionalism in my book. More often than not, even much more complex software systems can (and should) be developed to be really multiplatform. At least on unices, it is fairly common to maintain software as CPU-agnostic (and often OS-specifics-agnostic) source code with small CPU&OS adapters. These guys however didn't only do it across different unices, which are all closely related OSes. They did it across Windows, Mac OS X, and whatever is the OS of the Wii. That's 3 operating systems, and likely 3 different CPUs too (Intel, PPC, and whatever the Wii CPU is, although AFAIK, it's also some PPC variant). Consider how most large software houses can't be bothered to do this - they just target Windows primarily, even though they'd have lots of internal benefits if they cleaned up their source code to be multiplatform.

Second obscure detail, the game has no DRM. None. These guys were smart enough to realize it'd be a waste of resources to bother with it. Another big tip o'the hat to them.

What this game does have though is: captive, immersive, innovative gameplay based on building structures out of gooey balls that bind to each other, and leveraging mechanics in a very realistic physics simulation (on various levels, you'll need to use tension, elastics, gravity, wind, flotation, and so on). It's tremendous fun. Immersion is further helped by the fact that there's no UI aside from the mouse pointer - all interaction with the game world is by directly dragging and dropping the otherwise aimlessly wandering goo balls with the mouse.

There's lot of humor and cuteness baked in. You can get emotionally attached to little goo balls as you could to those lemmings back in the day.

And then there's the beautiful visual art (that at times reminds me of Tim Burton movies, particulary The Corpse Bride), and music that perfectly matches it to create the immersive atmosphere. There are overarching motives and hints of a backstory that are intriguing on their own.

It's ideal for a casual gamer who needs to blow of steam for an hour after a hard day's work. My son is playing it every evening. My daughter is playing it every evening. I am playing it every evening. You can play it too in minutes - there's a downloadable demo with the full first chapter of the game (the full game has four chapters and an "epilogue").

While waiting for the fourth season...

I avoid most forms of filmed science fiction, reason being that most attempts underachieve badly compared to written works. The quality of written sci-fi is rarely matched or even approximated by movies and TV series. Notable exceptions are few, and the finest filmed sci-fi for the last few years is without a doubt the reimagined Battlestar Galactica (Firefly would come in close second). The final, fourth season starts in April, and I can hardly wait for it to start. In the meantime, there's a great two part interview with the show's creators about legal system, torture, and morality (part one), as well as economy and politics (part two) in the series.

If that weren't enough, here's a gorgeous Battlestar Galactica reinterpretation of Last Supper on Flickr.

Kurt Gödel: hacking the U.S. constitution

I've been wandering through Wikipedia yesterday, and at one point ended up reading the page on Kurt Gödel. Gödel's achievements in the field of logic are indispensable to modern mathematics, and his incompleteness theorem has very far reaching implications in disciplines other than mathematics¹.

It is safe to say he was your typical deep thinker, and inward facing, not-too-closely in touch with reality type of person. This snippet from the page made me laugh real hard, because it so perfectly illustrates certain aspects of a math nerd. Listen:

Einstein and Morgenstern coached Gödel for his U.S. citizenship exam, concerned that their friend's unpredictable behavior might jeopardize his chances. When the Nazi regime was briefly mentioned, Gödel informed the presiding judge that he had discovered a way in which a dictatorship could be legally installed in the United States, through a logical contradiction in the U.S. Constitution. Neither judge, nor Einstein or Morgenstern allowed Gödel to finish his line of thought and he was awarded citizenship.

(emphasis mine)

Does anyone know whether he was allowed to finish his line of thought at some other time? (Not that I'd be personally interested in executing the idea, mind you.)

---

¹ Including the fact that free will of any mind is just an illusion it has because it can't contain a complete model of itself it could use for correctly predicting its own behaviour in advance. Enjoyable presentations of incompleteness theorem for layman include Douglas Hofstadter's "Gödel, Escher, Bach" (if you're 16 or older), or Raymond Smullyan's "The Lady or the Tiger?" (if you're under 16).

Sim City goes open source

The source code for the original Sim City (the game responsible for countless hours I spent sitting in front of a computer when I was 16), have been released under GPL v3. If you ever played it (you did, right?), you had to admire all the cross-interaction of your planning decisions and certainly wondered about the underlying mechanics. Well now, you can read it first hand!
One of insightful quotes from the announcement:

The modern challenge for game programming is to deconstruct games like SimCity into reusable components for making other games!

That is a very important point, and illustrates well the unique aspect of exponential utilization opportunities of open source software. (Even if I personally believe more liberal licenses than GPL contribute towards this aspect more).

lolcatshost

Some people clearly have too much time on their hands, witness lolcatshost!
(Via Little Gamers)

UPDATE: actually, it seems like the site was inspired by that Little Gamers webcomic.

Laugh-Out-Loud Cats

I'll admit that I was mildly annoyed by the whole LOLCats meme. I don't say I didn't get it; I did, I just felt it overdone after a while and couldn't be bothered to pay attention to yet another photo with funnilz missspelt all-caps would-be-jokes superimposed on them.

Until Ape Lad created something wonderful out of it.

Ape Lad, or Adam Koford is an illustrator maybe best known for his graphical interpretation of various hobos from John Hodgman's book "Areas of My Expertise", but I think that soon he'll be referred to primarily as "the guy who created Laugh-Out-Loud Cats".

So, what is it he did with the LOLCats phenomenon? He created a 1920-style cartoon featuring two vagabond cats, as he himself says "one Meowlin Q. Kitteh (a sort of cat hobo-raconteur) and his young hapless kitten friend, Pip". These cartoons are produced traditionally, pen-and-paper, and have an incredibly authentically-feeling atmosphere of the '20s, plus a fantastic chemistry resulting from mixture of innocence, mischief, and cuteness overload in the characters. Just click on the image to the left for the gallery -- it's all available for free viewing on his Flickr account, and I'm looking at its RSS feed with most anticipation every morning for updates (and I'm seldom disappointed, because the guy is really prolific)!

Of course, you might as well check out his other fine works, like his graphical interpretations of various HTTP error codes (to the left, you can see "415 Unsupported Media Type").

Fish Tank

I'm an avid reader of about a dozen different webcomics. Today, I just discovered another one, and it's just incredible in its originality. It's the Fish Tank, about adventures of three fish living in an aquarium (and quite often venturing outside of it). What's original about it? Well, these fishes occasionally get rid of piranhas (on an occasional visit to Brazil) by deorbiting a communication satelite on top of them using a satelite telephone, or get rid of a cat using explosives. Or are (in the current storyline) kidnapped by, of all things, telepath moths. Rooms, houses, or city blocks sometimes get demolished, or Alaskan wild forests set to fire. In general, there's lots of "Mission impossible" action going on, with fish improvising all sorts of devices from stuff found in their tanks and household items (not necessarily plausibly, but that's really not the point of it; they actually have laptops too!). The drawing is loveably sketchy (but consistent), and the characters are incredibly well built, complete with their love/hate relationships and plenty of ingenious throwaway jokes and inspired dialogue. Totally love it.

Microsoft to the rescue of the mankind

(click on the link to see the original flash animated ad). It's not a fake - this ad was indeed published by Microsoft and for a while appeared on Battlestar Galactica's official homepage on Sci-Fi channel.

Related fun fact: Did you know no TV channel carries Battlestar Galactica in Hungary? One of the commercial chanells bought the rights for the first season few years ago, but they stopped broadcasting it after only (I think) six episodes, citing poor viewer ratings. Morons. (Someone was a moron. Either the TV channel producers, or the company measuring the viewership ratings, or, err..., the local TV audience.) If it weren't for BitTorrent, I wouldn't be able to watch it at all. (And I also wouldn't have any motivation to buy the mini series + the first two seasons on DVD + all the soundtrack CDs from Amazon either, which I did recently. So much for studios' fairytale of "lost revenue due to copyright infringement by file-sharing".)

Transparent Desktop Trick

Take a photo of what's behind your computer screen, and set it as your desktop wallpaper. With little care, the results are amazing. See it here.

Business trip DTD

<!ELEMENT business-trip (
    airport,
    (office,drink?,dinner,drink+,shower,sleep,breakfast?)+,
    airport
)>

There were efforts to somehow fit a new element, sightseeing into a revised specification, and specify it in the business-trip's content with an optional quantifier, however usability research has shown that real-world documents would almost never contain an instance of it, mainly due to external forces that work to keep the document size at minimum.

Broken LEGO (myth)

My wife found a broken LEGO brick in our son's room this morning. My kids apparently managed to break a LEGO brick in half, and with it the associated myth (well, at least a belief I held) that the damned things are in fact unbreakable in a domestic environment.

Absolutely coincidentally, several hours later today, Slashdot's cover page is graced with an entry "How They Make LEGO Bricks" that actually links to a BusinesWeek article "The making of a... LEGO".

(Very Useless Fact of the Day: I keep my laptop (when it sits on my desk connected to an external display, keyboard, and mouse) sitting on 4 LEGO Duplo bricks I stole from kids to provide better airflow to it.)

Japanese Algorithm Dance

Japanese Algorithm Dance (compiled from various episodes of Japanese children TV-show "Pitagorean Switch").

Even if you think you don't get it, don't stop watching until you have seen the part with ninjas.

(Via Little Gamers)

Jailhouse innovation

Via Bruce Schneier's blog:

A collection of 11 prison shivs confiscated over 20 years ago in New Jersey.

Think about these, and the adverse conditions they were made under, the next time you see someone's pocket knife being taken away from them at airport security. We can't keep weapons out of prisons; we can't possibly expect to keep them out of airports.

Not entirely unrelated, Prisoners' Inventions, an exhibition of reproductions of objects created by prisoners from the available materials by an incarcerated artist. From paper mache dice to a tatoo gun.

Slow Bob in the Lower Dimensions

Just discovered this: Slow Bob in the Lower Dimensions is a short psychedelic animation by Henry Selick, actually a pilot for an unfortunately never realized series (apparently targetted to be shown onn MTV). At the moment, Henry is directing (and has co-written its script with Neil Gaiman) the movie adaptation of Gaiman's short children's novel, "Coraline".

Dilbert: Land of unrealistic business assumptions

Scott Adams constantly proves how his work on the Dilbert comic strip should be required reading for businessmen and managers, but I think this most recent storyline beats everything I read so far. The first piece contains a brilliant "strange loop" reasoning from Dogbert (as well as a nod to Chronicles of Narnia, but that's sort of beside the point), and the following pieces (two so far) are just cruelly on point. Whenever anyone tries to sell you a failsafe business plan, make sure they read this first :-)

Political alignment

For what's it worth....

You are a Social Liberal (80% permissive) and an... Economic Liberal (36% permissive) You are best described as a: Democrat You exhibit a very well-developed sense of Right and Wrong and believe in economic fairness. loc: (112, -50) modscore: (22, 48) raw: (2646) Link: The Politics Test on Ok Cupid Also: The OkCupid Dating Persona Test

Magyar Crok

Found these on my kitchen table this morning, they presumably belong to my 6-year old son. You need to be a Hungarian to understand the cultural shock. (Click on image to see unobscured version on Flickr)