The Betacantrips Travelogue

Seen via crystallabs on Twitter: an article about Kickstarting your indie game.

"Crowd funding of the nature espoused by Kickstarter is a relatively new and unknown business model, and with such things, I’m somewhat realising that it’s best to start small and gradually ramp up to a larger scale. That most of the successful game projects I see on the site are in the low thousands seems to confirm this hypothesis, at least at this present time. I think it’s really a matter of how big one’s fan base is, since the vast majority of my backers are people I already know, whether in person or online, or at least people who have played and enjoyed one or more of my previous games. As such, I can see this fan base growing over time, as current fans spread the word to their friends about my work and they become fans themselves, but as we know, these things don’t always happen immediately."

One thing I would like to see more of in this kind of discussion is the relationship of patrons with the finished product. Most Kickstarter projects offer finished copies to their backers, but it seems to me that if I helped fund it, my "ownership stake" ought to cover making sure I can always play it, or play it on my platform of choice — in other words, source code. Of course, this cuts off business models based on getting funding from Kickstarter and then selling the product afterwards.

Of course, I think Kickstarter IS a really exciting development for the funding of art, and I’m really curious to see what will happen with it.

I had a discussion with someone lately about nerdiness. She’s from Korea where video gaming is like an official sport. It’s totally weird to me that in Korea you can’t get girls if you can’t play video games. Anyhow here’s some brilliant writing about being a nerd from Sumana:

Evidently I have the capacity to continuously raise the standard for what makes a real obsessed fan of, say, Star Trek or Cryptonomicon or whatever. I read the Memory Alpha wiki (Star Trek compendium), but I don’t contribute to it; I only know a word or two of Klingon; I haven’t *memorized* more than, say, ten lines of Cryptonomicon. So I can always say, "oh, I’m just a regular person who happens to like this thing, there are OTHER PEOPLE who are really obsessed." But that’s just No True Scotsman in reverse. These goalposts must be made of new space-age alloys, they’re so easy to move!

Lately there’s been some fuss about Google’s new privacy policy, with this post by Joey Hess (on Planet Debian) and Slashdot’s article about Google’s new opt-out policy.

Joey Hess writes:

With the decade over, and Google rolling out all manner of tracking cookies and javascript, it’s time to move on. Just keeping on top of the torrent of privacy-affecting changes Google is making, and trying to parse the real meaning in the chirpy googlespeak announcements has become more work than the value their search engine adds. (This was the last straw.)

At least for now, I’ll be using Duck Duck Go for search. It’s small, quirky, has features the big competition lacks, and works well enough for my mostly moderate and occasionally intense needs. Sorta like Google in 1999.

While I am in favor of privacy, have not been thrilled with Google’s behavior, and have come to resent the attitude of Google employees and officers, I have to say Duck Duck Go does not meet my search needs. Neither does Bing. Neither does Google, when it comes right down to it. Search is hard, and there are a lot of tricky bits. (Try searching for the Haskell type signature "Int#". For a while it was nearly impossible to find the emacs package "magit", as all you could get were results for "magic".)

So for the time being I’m still using Google Search. With luck, in time everything will just magically get better..

For those of us who are fans of A Softer World: a book!

Are you looking for the perfect Christmas gift for someone you want to confuse with about 300 mixed signals?

The second Softer World book is here. It is called Second Best isn’t so Bad and you can buy it right now if you like! 244 full colour pages (even the black and white images are printed in glorious full colour, for no reason at all! We are all about excess.) and at the end of the book there’s a collection of the original black and white photocopy versions of A Softer World that we made in an all night copy shop with a stack of photos and an old typewriter. This section is called "Not bad for a first try."

Also, the first Softer World book, Truth and Beauty Bombs is up for sale on the Topatoco site as well! Buy them separate, or together for a discount! What kind of crazy world is this!?

(also, we included all the alt texts. How? IT IS A MYSTERY!)

Seen via LWN, this quote about the Java methodology:

Google is forking existing FOSS code bits for Chromium like a rabbit makes babies: frequently, and usually, without much thought. Rather than leverage the existing APIs from upstream projects like icu, libjingle, and sqlite (just to name a few), they simply fork a point in time of that code and hack their API to shreds for chromium to use. This is akin to much of the Java methodology, which I can sum up as ‘I’d like to use this third-party code, but my application is too special to use it as is, so I covered it with Bedazzler Jewels and Neon Underlighting, then bury my blinged out copy in my application.’. A fair amount of the upstream Chromium devs seem to have Java backgrounds, which may explain this behavior, but it does not excuse it. This behavior should be a last resort, not a first instinct.

Preach it!

From Morta Jxurnalo de Totoro: Revelation.

I make bad decisions under pressure.

That’s it. There’s a simplicity here that I find appealing, the cleanness of finding a truth about yourself.

Seen on pixelstyle.

OK, what? Ymacs:

Ymacs is an Emacs-like editor that works in your browser. Which applies, at this state of affairs, only if your browser is Firefox. It looks pretty good with other browsers, but it seems to be almost impossible to catch all the required key bindings—only Firefox allows what we need. Perhaps it can be “fixed” for other browsers, but I haven’t got the time nor the motivation to try yet.

…

2009-12-04 — Look ma, M-x! M-x eval_region, even. And TAB completion for command names. Some commands from that list aren’t meant to be called interactively—I’ll start some refactoring for this soon.

Seen on JWZ:

Seen on Coder Who Says Py: a software-design quiz meme.

A good friend of mine has created a personality test to both let you know what kind of developer you are when it comes to designing software as well as gather data for his PhD. If you have the 10 minutes it takes to do the test, please do take it; turns out HR and secretaries don’t like letting PhD students talk to managers to let them give a short online test to their developers.

I’m an improviser (all results are here).