Parade of Awesomeness

This American Life: The Giant Pool of Money

Fri, 16 May 2008 11:42:05 -0400

This American Life: The Giant Pool of Money:

This American Life, a generally awesome hour long story-telling show from Chicago Public Radio, recently partnered with NPR’s All Things Considered to produce an excellent piece on the credit crunch.

Alex Blumberg, Adam Davidson, and Ira Glass clearly explain what happened and what everyone was thinking during the rise and fall of the housing bubble, and what we can expect from the economy next.

It’s no small trick to explain something as complex and obfuscated as the credit crunch, especially without demonizing anyone along the chain of events that led to this problem. But that’s exactly what This American Life did: provided clarity without the fiery condemnations you might get from talk radio or the 24-hour news networks.

If you want to understand what’s going on right now in the economy, I can think of no better way than downloading and listening to this episode of This American Life.

TimeTube is a neat service that takes a search for YouTube clips...

Thu, 15 May 2008 12:29:00 -0400

TimeTube is a neat service that takes a search for YouTube clips and puts them onto a timeline according to when they were uploaded.

It’s almost like a video history lesson: In the Barack Obama timeline above, you can start watching from the “I inhaled frequently” video in 2006 through the famous “Yes We Can video” to a recent video of Obama playing 3-on-3 basketball in Kokomo, IN.

You can track video memes back to their original source videos. So, for example, do a search for Dramatic Chipmunk, and you’ll find, first, an educational video of Japanese girls looking at a prairie dog, then the clip from that video with dramatic music that everyone was passing around about a year ago. Then you can see the meme evolve, with the “Curses!” video and other remixes, and then see the meme slowly fade out over time.

It’s a neat little web toy that might even be a useful research tool. (Via Lifehacker)

Race for the Galaxy is a beautifully elegant resource management...

Wed, 14 May 2008 11:13:51 -0400

Race for the Galaxy is a beautifully elegant resource management game set in space. Players become the governor of one of the four former colonies of Earth, with the goal of building the colony into a sucessful space empire.

Most resource management games, like Caylus or Puerto Rico, have lots of bits: In Puerto Rico you have five different colors of wooden cylinders representing different goods, brown wooden discs representing colonists, victory point chips, chips for buildings, and chips for the different farms and quarries you have in your colony. Race for the Galaxy is streamlined by comparison: You have a deck of cards and a set of victory point chips.

Here’s how the game is played: Each player has a set of seven action cards. At the start of each turn, at the same time, everyone plays one of their action cards. These action cards determine what phases will occur this turn.

There are five possible phases in a turn: Explore, Develop, Colonize, Consume, and Produce. Each player does each of the phases revealed by the action cards, but the player who played the action card for that phase gets a special bonus. So, for example, if I played an Explore card, everyone around the table gets to draw two cards from the deck and keep one, but I would get to draw three cards from the deck and keep two.

In the Develop and Colonize phases, players get to play development cards (ranging from new technologies to banking interests) and world cards respectively. These cards modify what you can do in the different phases. For example, the Research Station development card lets you keep an extra card during the Explore phase, among other things.

Each of these cards has a cost in the top-left corner; a weak card might have a one, while a strong card might have a five. To play that card, you must also discard that number of cards out of your hand. In essence, your cards are both your range of options for developments and worlds and your currency to pay for those options.

In phase four, Consume, you sell the goods that your worlds produce for either card draws or victory points, depending on the planets and developments you have in play. In phase 5, Produce, the planets that can produce new goods do so by taking the top card from the draw deck and placing it facedown on the corner of the planet card, marking its coffers as full.

That’s what I mean by elegant: The cards are used as currency, as tokens for goods, and as building options. Instead of a bunch of complex parts, you have one simple, multi-use part.

The cards are beautifully designed: The artwork is fantastic, and there is a well-developed system of symbols that make it perfectly clear what each card does, how much it costs, and how many victory points you get for playing it.

Not only is the game beautiful in both form and mechanics, it’s also fun and quick. There are lots of meaningful, difficult decisions to make throughout the game, largely as a result of using cards as currency. You find yourself having to throw away powerful cards that are too expensive and hoping that they’ll come back later when you can afford them. And since everyone gets to do all of the actions that are chosen, you can, for example, play the Develop action and hope that an opponent will play Explore so that you can afford to play your development card.

I am definitely buying this game the first chance I get.

The Parade of Awesomeness Podcast - Episode 10 - Breakable »

Tue, 13 May 2008 11:41:20 -0400

The Parade of Awesomeness Podcast - Episode 10 - Breakable »:

For the first two-digit episode we hear from Ingrid Michaelson via the Podsafe Music Network with her song Breakable.

If you have any thoughts about the show, I’d love to get your feedback at jeremy.harper =AT= gmail =~DOT~= com. Thanks for listening!

Little Brother by Cory Doctorow is a new young adult novel about...

Mon, 12 May 2008 12:37:26 -0400

Little Brother by Cory Doctorow is a new young adult novel about teenagers liberating San Francisco from a rogue Department of Homeland Security. I can’t sum up the book any better than Cory’s FAQ:

Marcus, a.k.a “w1n5t0n,” is only seventeen years old, but he figures he already knows how the system works–and how to work the system. Smart, fast, and wise to the ways of the networked world, he has no trouble outwitting his high school’s intrusive but clumsy surveillance systems.

But his whole world changes when he and his friends find themselves caught in the aftermath of a major terrorist attack on San Francisco. In the wrong place at the wrong time, Marcus and his crew are apprehended by the Department of Homeland Security and whisked away to a secret prison where they’re mercilessly interrogated for days.

When the DHS finally releases them, Marcus discovers that his city has become a police state where every citizen is treated like a potential terrorist. He knows that no one will believe his story, which leaves him only one option: to take down the DHS himself.

What’s especially interesting about the book is that the technology it portrays is real. It is entirely possible to clone RFID’s from passports, credit cards, and bus passes. You use the cryptography described in the book every time you buy something online. Geeks hack X-Boxes to run linux every day. The book’s setting is entirely believable.

Although the book has its flaws—primarily, that the main character seems more intelligent than any 17-year-old has a right to be, and that the tone of the book is a little didactic—it’s still a really fun book. And the plot is gripping: I bought the audiobook edition and found myself staying up until two in the morning because I just couldn’t turn it off.

Cory Doctorow offers all of his books free of charge in electronic formats, and Little Brother is no exception. If you like, you can read the whole book from your laptop or your phone. Personally, I recommend the $20 audiobook edition, which is extremely well narrated and offered as DRM-free MP3.

Note: Since this is a young adult novel, I do feel that a content advisory warning is needed here: There are some swear words, and a couple of non-graphic sex scenes. It’s no worse than an episode of Smallville, but I wouldn’t give the book to really young kids.

Hatcher Garden is my favorite place in my home city of...

Fri, 09 May 2008 11:26:51 -0400

Hatcher Garden is my favorite place in my home city of Spartanburg. It’s a carefully tended ten-acre garden just to the west of downtown, free and open to the public.

It’s absolutely amazing to go from the busy streets to a quiet, secluded garden in the space of about twenty feet. There are trees everywhere, blocking out the sights and most of the sounds of the city. There are plenty of benches where people can sit, think, and relax, watch the stream, admire the flowers, and listen to the birds chirp at each other..

It’s a beautiful place, taken care of by volunteers. Harold and Josephine Hatcher bought the land when they retired in 1969. They turned it from an abandoned, depleted cotton field to the garden we have today by planting thousands of trees, bushes, and flowers. They have the strong support of the City, local colleges, and local nature clubs.

If you ever visit the city of Spartanburg, SC, make time to spend at Hatcher Garden.

365 Tomorrows is one of my favorite blogs. Each day, they...

Thu, 08 May 2008 13:08:21 -0400

365 Tomorrows is one of my favorite blogs. Each day, they publish a piece of science fiction or fantasy flash fiction.

Flash fiction is extremely short-form fiction; submissions for 365 Tomorrows are capped at 600 words, which is roughly one printed page. It’s just long enough to reveal a setting, a couple of characters, and a plot, but short enough to digest in less than five minutes.

This form works particularly well for science fiction: There’s not enough space for a complex character drama, but there’s enough room for a snapshot of a possible future, with just enough detail to excite the imagination.

For example, Systema Metropolis imagines a future where the machines come alive—but not sentient—in ecosystems based on getting oil and metal. Q204 explores the plight of an English student waiting for rescue from a perishing Earth. The Next Season’s Hottest Flavor describes a chef getting rare exotic fruit from a colony on the outskirts of the solar system.

It’s a fantastic bit of daily entertainment that has been running for more than three-and-a-half years without a break, which is completely awesome.

Also: if you prefer audio fiction, subscribe to the Voices of Tomorrow podcast where they read some of the best pieces from 365 Tomorrows out loud. It’s not as regularly published as 365 Tomorrows, but it’s always good to hear more great stories.

I love the variety of things you can find on the internet, this...

Wed, 07 May 2008 11:24:06 -0400

I love the variety of things you can find on the internet, this giant collection of the free time of millions of people. There are at least a dozen people in the world who care deeply about any given topic, no matter how obscure, and the internet makes it possible for these people to share their passion with the world.

Today’s piece from the collection of obscure topics: Comically Large Things, an blog dedicated to photos of things which are abnormally big. There’s the giant Zippo, seen above, a giant ant carrying a giant sugar cube, a giant coffee cup about to turn over onto a car, and a girl eating a giant taco.

You can’t possibly tell me that a blog whose very first post contains this giant motorcycle isn’t awesome.

The Parade of Awesomeness Podcast - Episode 9 - monkey cymbals

Tue, 06 May 2008 11:02:54 -0400

The Parade of Awesomeness Podcast - Episode 9 - monkey cymbals:

Today we hear the song monkey cymbals by Robert Wade. I believe I first heard this song on the now defunct Savvy Solocast, one of the first podcasts I listened to way back when I first started listening to podcasts.

If you have any thoughts about the show, I’d love to get your feedback at jeremy.harper =AT= gmail =~DOT~= com. Thanks for listening!

MeFight Club

Mon, 05 May 2008 11:00:31 -0400

MeFight Club:

I know, I know. Another Metafilter post.

I can’t help it. This is the single most awesome community on the internet.

MeFight Club is a group of Metafilter users who get together and play my favorite FPS, Team Fortress 2, on a private server that only Metafilter members have access to.

While TF2 is a great game, it is an online team game, and therefore your enjoyment depends on the people who you are playing with. The public servers tend have problems: hypercompetitive jerks, people intentionally being stupid, hackers/exploiters, and revolting images sprayed onto the walls.

But a good private server, like MeFight Club, tends towards maximum fun. All of the people on the server are mature adults who want everyone to have a good time. Everyone is nice.

There’s a lot of variation in skill level, from newbies to (comparative) experts, but usually there are enough players on each side to keep the games balanced and fun for everyone.

You’ll need the password to play with us and to visit the site; you can find it in herrdoctor’s Metafilter profile if you’re a member of the community. And if you’re not a member, you should be!

More info available in the appropriate MetaTalk Thread.

Boing Boing recently reported on a turtle who was hit by a car....

Fri, 02 May 2008 11:41:29 -0400

Boing Boing recently reported on a turtle who was hit by a car. After some surgery, the turtle mostly recovered, but it had lost the use of its back legs. So Jim Lee decided to help it out by replacing its back legs with a pair of model airplane wheels.

Apparently, the turtle took to them pretty well, and was able to eat, drink, and explore Lee’s house.

And, as awesome as that is, here’s something even more awesome from the comments on this story:

This story is very personal for me because I too rescued a turtle, one who had lost the use of all his legs. We replaced his legs with RC Car tires and mounted a motor to the top of his shell, one that responded to the upwards and downwards movement of his head by a series of wires and levers (for steering left and right). It was quite a sight to see him fly past at 30 mph, chasing the neighborhood kids around. We set up a few ramps after he showed a predilection for jumping off things, and he would spend hours hurtling himself like a little turtle superman into various piles of leaves and whatnot.

It’s the Bionic Turtle, the fastest turtle that ever was. What could be more awesome than that?

Caylus is one of my favorite board games. In it, players take on...

Thu, 01 May 2008 11:01:13 -0400

Caylus is one of my favorite board games. In it, players take on the role of master builders erecting castle for King Philip the Fair of France. Their goal is to earn prestige by building the castle and by developing the city around the castle.

Each turn, players take turns placing workers on the board, paying them one coin each. The board has two major elements: The castle, and a long path that contains different buildings. These include a farm, which gives you a unit of food, or an architect’s office, which allows you to add a new building to the end of the path. Once a player drops out and stops placing workers, then all the workers cost 2 coins for the rest of the turn, and so on until everyone drops out.

Then you resolve the workers: Going in order along the path of buildings, the players get the benefits of the buildings they put workers on. After all the buildings are resolved, the players resolve the workers in the castle. In exchanging for discarding three resource cubes of diffent kinds (one of which must be food) to build a part of the castle, players can earn prestige points and royal favors, which give the players different benefits like money or a cheaper building. Then everyone gets two coins, and the next turn begins.

At the end of the game, whoever has the most prestige points wins.

The game is complex at first, but after a game or two you start to figure out the strategies involved. There are a lot of different ways to earn prestige points—building a building, having another player use one of your buildings, building the castle, using different specialty buildings to sell resources for prestige points, etc. That’s a big part of the game’s appeal: There isn’t just one way to win.

But while the strategies are complex, Caylus is pretty easy to learn, and everyone I’ve ever played with has enjoyed the game. It’s no wonder that this game is ranked among the top ten board games on Board Game Geek.

“Where do people find the time?” This is an...

Wed, 30 Apr 2008 15:16:16 -0400

“Where do people find the time?”

This is an excellent speech given at the recent Web 2.0 conference by Clay Shirky, author of a book called Here Comes Everybody. In it he argues that people are just now learning how to deal with the “cognitive surplus” of modern society, that people are starting to get off the couch, turn off the TV, and create something.

Among the highlights in his speech: Wikipedia, according to some back-of-the-envelope calculations that he cites, took about 100 million hours of thought to achieve its current state as a fantastic online resource. By comparison, the population of the United States alone spends approximately 200 billion hours a year watching television.

If everyone in the country turned off their TV’s and worked on something creative, we could see 2,000 Wikipedia-sized projects in a single year.

The speech runs about 15 minutes. Turn off that Home Improvement rerun and watch this instead. It’s worth it.

The Parade of Awesomeness Podcast - Episode 8 - Doctor, Doctor

Tue, 29 Apr 2008 12:23:53 -0400

The Parade of Awesomeness Podcast - Episode 8 - Doctor, Doctor:

This week we hear a fun song from Amy Can Flyy called Doctor, Doctor. It was recently featured on the PMC Top Ten Countdown. You can also find them on the Podsafe Music Network.

If you have any thoughts about the show, I’d love to get your feedback at jeremy.harper =AT= gmail =~DOT~= com. Thanks for listening!

Evernote is a program designed to help you keep track of...

Mon, 28 Apr 2008 14:49:00 -0400

Evernote is a program designed to help you keep track of information, no matter where you are.

Information is captured into notes. These notes can be clips of web pages using the Evernote bookmarklet, photos emailed from a cell phone, or even a note transcribed from a phone call using Jott. It can even pull text out of images or recognize handwriting on a Tablet PC.

Once you have the notes in Evernote, you can sort them into notebooks, tag them, and search for them using the program’s built-in search engine. In the windows client, at least, the search is very fast, filtering out all the non-matching notes and highlighting the search term on the remaining notes, even in images.

What makes this program particularly appealing is that by default Evernote syncs all this information to a web server, which means that you can access your notes from any computer. In addition to the web version of Evernote, there’s a mobile version of the site for when you’re away from your computer, and both a Mac and a Windows client for faster access to your notes when you’re at home.

If you don’t want some sensitive information to be synced to the server, you can set up a local notebook to store that information on only one computer. And on the other end of the spectrum, you can set up public notebooks that anyone else can see.

Evernote has been around for a long time. It began as a Windows-only piece of software that (regrettably) took its design cues from Windows Media Player 9. This new version of the software vastly simplifies the interface and makes the software an absolute joy to use.

Evernote is currently in private beta and (at the moment) is free. I’ve got a handful of invitations available if you contact me using the link at the top of the page.

It would take longer for me to explain this than it will for you...

Fri, 25 Apr 2008 15:06:51 -0400

It would take longer for me to explain this than it will for you to watch it. It amuses me, and I think it’s awesome. Enjoy.

I really enjoy the Steampunk design movement, which merges...

Thu, 24 Apr 2008 12:08:01 -0400

I really enjoy the Steampunk design movement, which merges modern technology with Neo-Victorian design aesthetics. For example, the Steampunk Workshop’s Jake von Slatt has produced (among other projects) this All-in-One PC by combining a discarded LCD monitor with wood, brass, and computer components to make a beautiful one-of-a-kind artifact.

I like the craftsmanship that goes into projects like these. It’s obviously not a 30-cent mass-produced injection molded bit of Chinese manufacturing; it’s a hand-crafted piece of art that is both beautiful and functional. It takes a rare combination of talent for electronics, woodworking, and metalworking that I can only envy and admire.

If you like this, you’ll probably like a lot of the Steampunk Workshop’s projects, like the matching keyboard you see in the photo above, the telegraph unit that clacks out RSS feeds in Morse Code, and the ongoing Steampunk Car project.

Last Night on Earth, The Zombie Game puts players in the role of...

Wed, 23 Apr 2008 11:33:42 -0400

Last Night on Earth, The Zombie Game puts players in the role of townspeople trying to survive a B-movie zombie invasion.

One player plays as a horde of zombies, while the others play such stock movie characters as Becky the Nurse, Sheriff Anderson, Jake Cartwright the Drifter, and Sally the Highschool Sweetheart. Each of these characters have different special abilities. For example, the nurse can heal another character in the same space, while the track star can move an extra space each turn.

The heroes have a limited number of turns to accomplish the goal of the scenario. In the game I played last night, we had to get at least two of the heroes in the truck in the center of town—after finding the keys and filling the truck with gas.

The game is simple to play, and it does a really good job of simulating a B-Movie experience. There were a lot of fun moments in the game last night: Jake the drifter was holed up the hospital morgue with a chain saw, taking out zombies left and right. Eventually he found the keys to the truck in the morgue. He started running towards the truck, but the zombies had cut power to the building and he was forced to pick his way slowly out of the hospital. By the time he got out, it was almost sundown. Billy the track star ran towards Jake, hoping to take the keys and run back to the truck, but Jake couldn’t quite make it to Billy in time.

The zombies feasted well last night.

This game is not a deep strategy game by any means; it’s a lighthearted romp through a cheesy horror flick. If you have any place in your heart for the kinds of movies mocked by Mystery Science Theater 3000, I think you’ll really like this game.

The Parade of Awesomeness Podcast - Episode 7 - Goodbye Planet Earth

Tue, 22 Apr 2008 11:55:03 -0400

The Parade of Awesomeness Podcast - Episode 7 - Goodbye Planet Earth:

To celebrate Earth Day, Episode 7 of the Parade of Awesomeness Podcast features Goodbye Planet Earth by Matthew Ebel. Special thanks to the artist for permission to play the song on my podcast.

I love both this album and his previous one, Beer and Coffee. I’d recommend getting the full CD’s rather than just individual tracks off of an online music store; Ebel likes to tie his albums together into a unified whole, and you’re missing out if don’t listen to it all together, in order, especially with his newest CD.

If you have any thoughts about the show, I’d love to get your feedback at jeremy.harper =AT= gmail =~DOT~= com. Thanks for listening!

Last Friday I finally broke down and bought Team Fortress 2,...

Mon, 21 Apr 2008 15:05:00 -0400

Last Friday I finally broke down and bought Team Fortress 2, after months of hearing how awesome it is. The game lives up to the hype—this is the most fun I’ve had with a first person shooter in a long time.

TF2 doesn’t take itself too seriously: the 1960’s spy movie soundtrack, the over-the-top characters, and the brightly colored animation (reminiscent of The Incredibles) give the game an atmosphere of silly fun.

In the game, you pick one of nine different character classes, each with its own style of play. You could choose to be the heavy and walk into battle with a ridiculously large machine gun, or you could choose to be a spy and sneak behind enemy lines, destroying their sentry guns.

(Note: Despite the silly atmosphere, this game is quite violent. There’s a lot of blood, and occasionally when you get blown up by a rocket, you’ll see your body parts fall to the ground where you were standing. Personally, I don’t find it to be too offensive, but I wouldn’t recommend it for little kids.)

Valve combined spy movie atmosphere with well-balanced, fun gameplay to come up with a truly awesome game in Team Fortress 2.