Sunday Links #12

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Another meaty sert of links for this week. A bunch of interesting stuff has been happening. Commentary will be a bit brief though, since I’m pressed for time.


Oddly enough, the rise of the nerds ™ has become so hilariously mainstream, that the coolest character in a super hero movie are the nerds. Nice to see, considering I self-identify as a nerd. I am wondering though if nerds no longer glorify “jocks” but instead “nerds”. It’s not just about the Hulk, it’s a lot about Banner being a scientist. Regardless of my musings: the movie is indeed as awesome as people say so go watch it. Quick before the heavy meme-ification of the movie spoils you.

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Sunday Links #11

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And another issue of Sunday Links. This time with a lot of articles. Mainly because I finally found time to catch up on some of my reading backlog.

Link: Dwarf Fortress, the book

I’m still not entirely sure if this is a hoax but it certainly is awesome. Selling the manual to a video game as a book? Granted there’s been game guides for quite a long time but those usually were large scale commercial releases, and not obscure, hardcore freeware products. Oh, in case you haven’t heard of Dwarf Fortress, you probably best start by Boatmurdered. It gives you a good look into how Dwarf Fortress works and why it’s so awesome to see it fail.

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A MAZE Indie Connect Talk

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I’ve just finished my prep for my upcoming talk. I’ll again be talking about F2P but this time to a decidedly indie games focused audience. I will be at the upcoming A MAZE Indie Connect 2012. The festival is in Berlin, Germany at the 26th and 27th April. I’ll be on site with my talk The Indie Brain on F2P. A preview of the starting slide is below.

I’m quite happy with the results and I hope I’ll manage to squeeze it all into my time slot, considering I’ve only got 20 minutes (including Q&A). If you’re there feel free to say hi. I’ll also try to tweet about the conference as much as I can.

Sunday Links #7

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After some offline time during this week Gamearch is finally back. Unfortunately we had a compromised account and some injected malware code on the website so the blog was set up from scratch, which also explains the different theme. This might change back to the original should I find time to do so. Unfortunately because of this (and other work) I didn’t share too much today, so there’s only a few items today:

Video: John Cleese on Creativity (1991)

In this lecture video John Cleese explains his observations and theories on how creativity works. He cities a few scientific articles and experiments in his talk and there’s plenty of his trademark british humor. Even though this video it’s over 20 years old by now I still believe it holds very much true. The main gist of his talk is that there’s to “mental modes” in which we can operate: Open (spontaneous, unjudging, unfocused, humorous, creative) and Closed (focused, productive, goal-oriented).

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