Today I woke up to the news that my favourite North American author of all time, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., was dead. 84 years old.
Continue reading ‘So it goes’
Archive for the 'Books' Category
Lewis tipped me about a brilliant computer program the other day; SPEAR. Brilliant! What it does is, basically, that it analyses any soundfile you care to give it and finds a way to represent it as a set of sine tones - partials. The result can be played back in the program and it will sound impressingly close to the original file. (I was particularily baffled by the percussive parts of pieces.) Since the sound is deconstructed, so to speak, in this way, we can do many very interesting things to the sound, like removing any partials below a threshold dB-level (to get the "main" tones), or selecting partials using a lasso tool and playing only "parts" of the full sound. You can also slow down, speed up - and even pause the reading of the sound while the playback is in perfect tune. Great fun!
One more very short post to advertise for an informatics seminar at the University of Bergen that I would have liked to go to if I could; “On combinatorial precursors of Sudoku” by Douglas Rogers.
Continue reading ‘Sudoku, math and serious games’
Since I didn’t get to post anything yesterday, I’ll take an easy way out today so that I’m sure I get at least one post. Here’s a collection of interresting links I’ve gotten from friends the last day or so. Enjoy.
The Guardian has published an interview with the Kim Stanley Robinson - author of the brilliant Mars-trilogy. Recent events in New Orleans has made his last trilogy on the consequences of global warming a bit too prophetic…
Continue reading ‘The Guardian interviews Kim Stanley Robinson’
“A Theory of Fun for Game Design” by Raph Koster is a really great book on what makes a game tick - it’s enterntaining but also informative and full of clever ideas and observations on games, game culture and game play. This post, though, is on one subject where I think Mr. Koster is wrong.
Continue reading ‘Storytelling and Games’
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