What to say...?
His short story, “Breaking Strain”, (if I’m remembering correctly) is a great example of how a science-fiction story can contain both good science and good fiction. How good science can even be an integral part of good fiction.
Rendezvous with Rama may be my favorite Clarke novel. A comparison (& particularly contrast) with Gentry Lee’s sequels really highlights the things I enjoy about Clarke’s writing.
RIP
Pathfinder RPG: “Today marks the beginning of a year-long Open Playtest of the new rules, which are based upon the popular 3.5 rules available under the Open Game License.”
The really odd thing here is that the company doing a minor revision to the D&D 3.5 rules are doing a year-long open playtest while the company that is doing a major revision did a six-month closed playtest.
(Yeah, yeah. Wizards of the Coast playtested 4e in-house longer than that. (In-house playtesting is not playtesting.) And they’re using concepts that were tested via 3.5e supplements. (Testing a concept is not the same as testing a specific implementation of that concept in the context of an entire system.))
I actually had a draft post about how, if I were Wizards, I would do inexpensive, low-production value preview versions of the rules and not put out a fancy hardback version until the system had been widely played and stablized.
I love my tattooed turtle girl & wife.
She’s beautiful. She’s sexy. She’s stylish. She’s smart. She’s fun. She’s crafty. She’s clever. She’s forgiving. She’s strong. She’s frugal (yet splurges). She’s generous. She’s a wonderful mother.
And so much more.
Jeff’s Gameblog: I got your threefold model right here, buddy!
This is beautiful. One of the best pieces on RPG theory I’ve ever read.
Though I think he should rename “Retro” as “Obsolete” as he mentions in the comments.
I think this says something about the whole “worse is better” paradox. It’s not so much that worse is better, but that we tend to measure good and bad in ways that don’t jibe with where the rubber meets the road.
Command-S has to go!—O’Reilly Digital Media Blog
The Mac took computing to a new level of abstraction. There is farther to go, however. The time for “beyond the Mac” has been here for a while.
In fact, many of us have already seen and used it: The Palm OS. The Palm OS hid so much of the boot, launch, save, quit, etc. machinery of computing. (And the iPhone seems to be building on that legacy.)
It’s long past time that these concepts came to the average workstation.
Too bad I was never the entrepreneurial type.
The Ministry of Type: Quote/Unquote
One of the mistakes of the Macintosh (and MacWrite and Microsoft Word): It gave people typographic tools without training them to be typographers. What should’ve happened:
1. The applications should have taken up more of the slack. They should have had many of the rules of good typography built-in. (e.g. hanging punctuation, orphan elimination)
2. There was virtually no serious effort to educate users about the differences between the typewriters or word processors they were used to using and the Mac, MacWrite, and Microsoft Word. There was the book referenced above, but you shouldn’t have had to seek out and buy a separate book to learn how to properly use your ground-breaking computer and its applications.
there he goes again (Lessig Blog)
It’s an odd situation. The difference between the professional and the amateur: The professional wants to make the most money with the least effort. The amateur wants to say/create something worthwhile despite not being paid for it.
When the amateur gets the opportunity to get paid for his work, he ecstatically agrees. Soon, however, he must compromise to survive in his new career.
(Though some of us strive for the middle ground.)
