“Sci-fi author and former writer and story consultant for Microsoft Game Studios, Eric Nylund, has joined up with Amazon Game Studios as its new director of narrative design.”
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Это означает, что кроме развития книжного, магазинного, инфраструктурного и медийного рынков Амазон решил двинуться в «большие развлечения», что в наши дни означает обычно безумную смесь из игр, кино и литературы.
“Iain M. Banks (1954-2013) was a Scottish writer best known for the Culture series of science fiction novels; he also wrote fiction as Iain Banks. An evangelical atheist and lover of whisky, he scorned social media and enjoyed writing music. He was an extra in Monty Python & The Holy Grail.
Asteroid Iainbanks resides in the Main Asteroid Belt of the Sol system; with a size of 6.1 km (3.8 miles), it takes 3.94 years to complete a revolution around the Sun. It is most likely of a stony composition.”
“On Monday, the J. Paul Getty Trust launched their Open Content Program, making more than 4,600 high-quality images of artwork available for free online. The digital images — of paintings by Van Gogh, drawings by Rembrandt, and watercolors by Dürer — had already fallen into the public domain, but the Getty’s program makes their digital reproductions much easier to use on the web.
They’re not the first museum to put so many images online this year. In the spring, the Rijksmuseum opened 125,000 digital images for use, with plans to digitize an additional 40,000 images from its archive every year.
When museums emancipate images like this, the benefits don’t only rebound upon the researchers, teachers, and students who can use and show high-resolution art in their books, lectures and papers. Putting images online helps anyone who wants to make a point with pictures, whether on their website or Facebook profile, on a t-shirt or, as a Rijksmuseum curator told the New York Times, on special Rembrandt toilet paper.
Below, we’ve listed the museums and research institutions that have large, high-quality, free-to-use collection of historically or aesthetically notable images online.” — The Atlantic
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Туалетная бумага с Рембрандтом, а-а-а!
On Jacques-Yves Cousteau, adventuremaker:Adventure is also the perfect pretense to get people on your fantasy train. Exploration involves a certain amount of guesswork and a whole lot of flimflam, so explorers need to wrap themselves in a cozy blanket of believers. To do so, the explorer must be irresistible. The Shackletons and Scotts were ringmasters of the first order. Cousteau too was damn good at making people believe his vision. “I am not a scientist,” Cousteau told The Christian Science Monitor in 1986. “I am, rather, an impresario of scientists.”“We enjoy imaginative experiences because at some level we don’t distinguish them from real ones.” —The Pleasures of Imagination
Television is how I know Cousteau. Growing up, I saw him as one of the idyllic explorers. Fraught in a landlocked state, I adventured through him and his sea. In Stefany Anne Golberg’s words, he “made exploration accessible.” And Stefany again:
[T]he single most exciting part of exploration — exploring is incomplete.One week from today would have been Cousteau’s 100th birthday. And decades after moving on from that television series, I’m happy to report that my own expeditions are far from complete.
Всё правда. • Be sure to hug your introverts today! (With permission, of course)
“People have come to accept surveillance cameras as a part of everyday life. But what happens when someone is carrying the surveillance camera instead?
That’s the question raised by a series of online videos in which an unidentified man takes a camera around Seattle and other parts of Washington state, walking up to people and recording them for no apparent reason other than to make a point: How is what he’s doing different than those stationary surveillance cameras tucked away in buildings and public places?”
— ‘Creepy Cameraman’ pushes limits of public surveillance — a glimpse of the future? - GeekWire
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На видео нет ничего особенного — человек с камерой ходит вокруг, смотрит на людей, заходит всюду, куда ему приходит в голову зайти, и снимает. Снимает, снова снимает. Его спрашивают, зачем он это делает, он отвечает «А почему бы нет?» Когда выгоняют — уходит и снимает дальше, возвращается и спрашивает, можно ли только звук записывать? А зарисовки делать? Нельзя? Ок. Кивает. И не выключает камеру, пока не станет совсем уж небезопасно.
Людям странно и страшно. Они не понимают, что происходит, и какое будущее на них наступило. Будущее не отвечает на вопрос «эй, это ты зачем так сделал?»
Тектонический сдвиг: Дисней покупает Лукасфильм. И собирается выпустить седьмой эпизод Звёздных Войн через три года. Как пишет Энди Байо: “includes ILM, Skywalker Sound, and LucasArts; Leia is now a Disney princess”.
Lucasfilm to join company’s global portfolio of world class brands including Disney, ESPN, Pixar, Marvel and ABC. STAR WARS: EPISODE 7 feature film targeted for release in 2015.
Отличная презентация Save For Later о том, как пользователи, которых изучали в Мозилле, пользуются закладками и сохраняют ссылки на потом.
От создателя TaskPaper и WriteRoom — текстовый редактор-аутлайнер, работающий на маркдауне, с поддержкой таск-листов (как в TaskPaper) и таймеров — и, кажется, из популярных редакторов такого устройства таймеров прямо внутри текста я нигде не видел. В сложных атомных электростанциях для текстовой обработки, вроде Emacs или Vi, наверняка, можно ещё и не такое, но нам-то зачем?
Заголовки схлопываются при желании — и не надо никакого OPML и сложных программистских кухонных комбайнов и Ворда с его шестью этажами панелей инструментов. Интерфейс без ничего, цвета и шрифты настраиваются примерно минуты за три в файле со стилями. С ним очень здорово экспериментировать, несмотря на то, что он абсолютно простой, как пассатижи.
Магия правильной работы с текстами всё ближе. Или, если и не правильной, то хотя бы нелинейной, не поточной и не такой топорно-однозначной. Текст окончательно превращается в пластилин, а не в тот насыпающийся песок, которым он стал с переходом в цифровую форму.
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Plain text productivity for geeks. As you type, FoldingText auto-formats your document into sections, lists, and paragraphs. Fold sections to see the big picture. Focus to see the details.
An intriguing new text editor for OS X from Hog Bay Software—home to WriteRoom, QuickCursor and TaskPaper—that combines the latter’s plain text todo list management with Markdown-ish formatting, automatic outlining, a text folding feature familiar from the full-blown editors aimed at programmers and, finally, a timer function.
That might read as an odd hodgepodge of features, but in practice FoldingText is a great way to take long-form, structured notes and redraft them into a final text. Even the todo list and timer feature are—at the risk of committing One Thing Well heresy—a welcome addition, once you realise they’re intended as document-specific helpers, not replacements for your todoing and timing applications tacked incongruously onto a text editor.