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Last week I called out game composer Tommy Tallarico on Cruise Elroy for insinuating that older video game music has less artistic merit, citing passages like this one from his biography:

Tommy Tallarico is a veritable video game industry icon. As one of the most successful video game composers in history, he has helped revolutionize the gaming world, creating unique audio landscapes that enhance the video gaming experience. He is considered the person most instrumental in changing the game industry from bleeps & bloops to real music now appreciated worldwide by millions of fans.

I referred to this viewpoint as “a load of bull.”

Tallarico himself then dropped a line in the comments to defend himself. As it turns out, I overinterpreted him, and we’re more or less on the same page:

I actually agree 100% with you!

I think you’ve possibly misinterpreted my words because of editing. Sometimes when interviews are done they don’t take all the words or parts.

I have always talked about how the “old school” game music was some of the best written because the only thing we really had back then was the melody!

So when I read the Onion A.V. Club’s interview with Tallarico today, I had to laugh at this exchange:

AVC: At that point, it was only programmers who made music?

TT: Yeah, all of the music that was being done was a very simplistic. And don’t get me wrong, some of the greatest videogame music of our generation was written during or before that time. Mario Bros., Zelda, Castlevania…

Anyway, I really recommend the interview. Tallarico is an interesting guy and an important industry figure.

Did you read Minus when I linked it last week? No? Okay, that’s fine. Just, you know, go back to reading Cathy. Philistine.

If you read and enjoyed Minus, though, check out the new blog MetaMinus. It interprets the strip as “a metanarrative of modern thought,” and while it is perhaps a little tongue-in-cheek (”It is significant that the entire comic series begins with a panel of a white ball and Minus. I do not think that I can adequately verbalize the importance of the symbolism found here.”), it’s great fun. Well, it is for me, anyway — this is the kind of thing English majors go apeshit over.

Back when iTunes 4.9 was released in June of 2005, I remarked that podcasts have been “gaining popularity recently, and their integration into iTunes will probably ensure their long-term success.” Naturally, I was right; as you know, I have astonishing powers of clairvoyance.

To be honest, though, I didn’t really get into podcasts until last year, mostly because I couldn’t find a good time to listen to them. I don’t have any long commutes, so I can’t listen then; if I put one on while doing something else, I end up losing track of the discussion. And if I’m out walking around or jogging with my iPod, I want to listen to music, not some dude(s) talking — regardless of how interesting said dude(s) might be.

The solution was to listen to podcasts the way I listen to a new album: lying on my bed with my headphones on and my eyes closed so that I actually pay attention to the damn things. Now that I actually concentrate on them while listening, I’ve found that these podcast things can be pretty enjoyable.

These are the shows I’m currently into:

• MetaFilter Podcast: I think of MetaFilter as my “home” web community; it’s where I spend most of my online time, and where I’ve been hanging out the longest. In the podcast, moderators Matt Haughey and Jessamyn West recap interesting posts from the site, interview members, host call-in segments, and post songs from MeFi Music. It typically runs an hour per episode and comes out once or twice a month. NSFW.
• The Brainy Gamer podcast: The Brainy Gamer is run by Michael Abbott, a theater professor at Wabash College. It’s where all the intelligent and critically-minded gamers trade ideas — the nexus of my corner of the blogosphere, if you will. The podcast features thoughts on games Michael’s been playing, interviews with people connected to the industry, and general discussion of the gaming community. It runs about an hour per episode, give or take, and comes out once or twice a month.
• Downloadable Content: This is the podcast from the Penny Arcade guys, Mike “Gabe” Krahulik and Jerry “Tycho” Holkins. It documents the strip-writing process, which involves reading the news, ridiculing each other, talking about video games, and discussing lunch (and the acquisition thereof). They’re two of the funniest guys around, so it’s frequently hilarious. Episode length ranges from fifteen minutes to an hour, and the release schedule is sporadic. NSFW.
• Play Value: A video podcast about the history of the console video game industry. This is one from the pros, so you’ll see some higher production values here than in the other ones on the list. A decent overview and great source of “Did you know?”-type info from a bunch of designers, writers, and fans (not that I’ve heard of any of them, but they seem to know their stuff). The shows used to be precisely eight minutes each, but are now ten minutes; they come out a couple times per month.
• The Talk Show: A no-frills conversational podcast primarily about Apple, but also covering technology, movies, and general nerdery. Another fine project from the endearingly haughty duo of John Gruber and Dan Benjamin. They go into ostensibly dull topics (e.g., keyboards) with so much enthusiasm and in such detail that you can’t help but enjoy it. Episodes are usually around half an hour, with the occasional double-length show; the release schedule is sporadic, but it usually comes out twice a month.
• You Look Nice Today: An irreverent comedy podcast from internet superstars/Twitter funnymen Merlin “hotdogsladies” Mann, Scott Simpson, and Adam “lonelysandwich” Lisagor. As is common with humor nowadays, the show is rife with inside jokes, so I recommend starting from the beginning. It’s well worth it, if you ask me. YLNT runs 30-45 minutes per episode and new ones are released weekly (or close to it). NSFW.

I mentioned on Twitter yesterday that I’ve been reading about what it’s like to be a video game music composer. My childhood friend Andy and my blogofriend Ben were interested in what I’d found, so here’s a mini link dump:

• An interview with game composer Winifred Phillips on Bella Online.
• An article called “Getting Started as a Video Game Composer” from Bobby Prince. I can’t tell how old it is, but it’s interesting even if it turns out to be out of date.
• Three interviews with game composer/Video Games Live dude Tommy Tallarico:
  • Guinness Book of Records
  • David Perry
  • Gamasutra podcast (haven’t listened to this yet)
• Two communities for game audio professionals, which seem to have some overlap:
  • Game Audio Network Guild (there’s a yearly membership fee)
  • GameAudio Forum (regular ol’ phpBB forum, free reg. required, lots of good info/links)

Ryan North mentioned that the webcomic Minus ended today. I had not heard of Minus before, but went to read it on his recommendation. It’s one of the best comics I’ve ever seen. I read all 120ish strips just now in one sitting.

Take a look.

One of the entertaining things about running this blog is that marketers seem to think it has an audience. Far be it from me to disabuse anyone of such notions, of course, but I thought they’d at least notice the cheap free ads in the sidebar and the bimonthly (if that) updates. It makes me want to wave my hand and say this is not the sales opportunity you are looking for.

A few days ago, “Jessi,” who has “been a fan of [my] blog for a while” (really? I don’t think I’ve seen you around), asked if I would check out a new band on her record label and tell her what I thought. She didn’t directly request that I put up a link — that’s not the kind of relationship that Jessi and I have — but she did suggest that I should “feel free” to do so. (Which is good, because I’d hate to be compelled to promote whatever random crap people email me.) “P.S.,” Jessi concluded, “You are hilarious. :-)” See, I was on the fence, but it’s hard to turn down a pitch from someone who appreciates your sense of humor.

Anyway, enough ragging on the friendly PR people. The group is called Feral Children, and you can download their EP for free here. As for the music itself…well, it’s not really my cup of tea, to be honest. But free is free, right? It’s only four songs; check it out.

A slice of life story from a YouTube commenter:

imbored1996: haha i had onece dreamed that i was playing outside and like fucking sephiroth comes and like fucking is trying to chop my fucking head off it was kewl!:)

EternalSailorKitsune: u had a kewl dream

imbored1996: yup it was one of the best dreams ever cuz i’m like outside and i go in my friends house and he’s outside and i notice it’s empty inside and everyone that lives in his house is outside and his lil brother tells me to get out and right when he tells me that i just see like sephiroth charging at me and i run to the back of one of the cars and he goes to the back and i got in one of the cars and come out throught the other side and he goes around fast enough so catch me on the other side. and then right when i get out he uses his sword on me but luckly i ducked and his sword hit the car and he sends the car flying with one strike and i keep on running really fast to my apartment complexes and i just keep on running and running with this running behind me and he appears in front of me and slices but all of a sudden theres this sword on the ground and it happens to be clouds swords so i quickly grab the sword and use it on him to defend myself and i could do any damage on him so i run around my apartment complexes and enter through the parking lot and i got near the dump lol and he comes flying down from the sky and wat i did is wat happened in advent children where cloud strikes the dude that becomes sephiroth and then sephiroth and his sword appear.so then this shock wave goes and all of the cars blast away and some exploded and we’re fighting in a fiery hell while the music played.before the song ended i did clouds special to kill sephiroth in advent children :)

Klaue77: Dude…you’re weird…

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Tufts gives all seniors an interminable (and mandatory) survey to complete online prior to graduation. I’ve been clicking radio buttons and check boxes and drop-down menus for the past hour. Below are some of the nuggets of wisdom I provided for the poor saps who have to read all of these things.

Survey question: Did you do a senior thesis?

Answer: No.

Survey question: Why not?

Answer: Towards the end of my junior year, I visited my advisor and asked him, “Should I do a thesis?” And his response was “Nah.”

Survey question: Is there anything Tufts could have done to make you consider doing one?

Answer: If he hadn’t said “Nah,” I might have considered it.

Survey question: Why did you double major?

Answer: No big reason. I like English, but I also like music.

Survey question: How did the double majoring affect your experience at Tufts?

Answer: Frankly, if I had just majored in English, I don’t know what I would have done with all the free time.

Survey question: Which course best characterized what a truly excellent college course should be?

Answer: Music for Multimedia II.

Survey question: Why?

Answer: When I took this course, there were only four students, and we learned to use state-of-the-art recording software in a fancy computer lab. We went on a class trips to visit a recording studio video game developer. It should be on the cover of every Tufts pamphlet.

Survey question: Any additional comments about your Tufts experience?

Answer: Tufts was pretty great. My high school guidance counselor encouraged me to apply to Harvard — we didn’t have enough Ivy-bound students, I think — but I told him I’d rather be here. I think I made the right choice.

I’ll be in Cambridge, MA at ROFLCon this weekend, and then CBC Saturday night with the MetaFilter folks. If you see a bewildered-looking dude with a mess of black hair, come say hi.

Web-savvy users have long known that YouTube has some of the dumbest comments on the internet, but the idiocy is really thrown into sharp relief when you put them side by side with MetaFilter comments. I credit the $5 signup fee.

Ammon Shea, in the Oxford University Press blog, writes about some of the weird stuff he found while reading the Oxford English Dictionary:

I’ll confess that on several occasions I thought that the editors of the OED were having a joke at the reader’s expense. The entry for unpoetic gives no definition, but there is a note that tells the reader to ‘cf. next.’ The reader dutifully looks ahead to the next entry which is unpoetical, the definition of which reads ‘cf. prev.’

Sure has been quiet around these parts, huh? Well, get ready for it to be a whole lot quieter!

Inspired by sites like The Brainy Gamer which explore video games from a more critical, intelligent angle, I’ve started a new blog about video games called Cruise Elroy. So far there’s only one real post, but I think it’s about as long as everything I’ve written here for the past two months put together. Take a look, won’t you?

Gary Gygax, co-creator of Dungeons & Dragons, passed away this morning at his home in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. He was 69.

I was never a D&D player, but I have indirectly felt his influence through video games for years. Alec Meer at Rock, Paper, Shotgun writes:

Would we ever have had PC RPGs without Gygax’s laying down of roleplaying foundations back in 1974? Oh, probably - in some form, anyway. But would we have had Ultima, Fallout, Diablo, World of Warcraft, even Deus Ex? Probably not. Baldur’s Gate, Neverwinter Nights and Planescape Torment? Definitely not.

In short, he was an enormously influential figure in interactive entertainment, and will be missed.

For further reading, the MetaFilter thread eulogizing Gygax has some great stories.

This is great:

When you send a text message on the Verizon network, you can address your text by choosing a name out of your contact list, or you can address it by typing in a phone number. You can also type in a name. And if you type in L-E-I-L-A, then– bizarrely– your text will come to me.
This is a blog about the texts I have received. All of them are from strangers, intended for other Leilas, but obviously they missed their marks.

I hope she has a good text messaging plan. (via)

Five things I am excited for:

1. ROFLCon
2. Super Smash Bros. Brawl
3. Béla Fleck and Chick Corea at Symphony Hall
4. Ryanhood at Club Passim
5. Spring break

One thing I am not excited for:

1. Graduation

For Randall Munroe’s LimerickDB:

A young boy set out on his own
To restore Princess Z. to her throne
Ere he took on the horde,
Said a man with a sword,
“It’s dangerous to go alone.”

I could do this all day.

Wikipedia’s list of humorous units of measurement.

Sheppey

A measure of distance equal to about 7/8 of a mile, defined as the closest distance at which sheep remain picturesque.

[...]

Donkeypower

This facetious engineering unit is defined as about a third of a horsepower (i.e., 250 watts).

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FlickrExport is a plugin for uploading photos from iPhoto to Flickr. It’s hands-down the best Flickr software I’ve used, even outperforming Yahoo’s official tools. All but a handful of my Flickr pictures have gone through FlickrExport.

Here’s the thing, though — I don’t really use iPhoto. My 45GB iTunes library and 32GB Windows partition have made me fastidious about my laptop’s limited disk space. So I dump all of my photos into iPhoto, tag and upload them through FlickrExport, and then erase my iPhoto library once they’re online.

Now I have a terabyte hard drive but there’s no good way to get my photos back. The only option I’ve found is FlickrBackup, but that loses the photos’ metadata — most importantly, the tags. What I need is FlickrImport — something that would add an entire Flickr photostream to iPhoto while keeping the tags, sets, titles, and so on. (While we’re at it, it could also sync my iPhoto library with Flickr, so that changes in one are reflected in the other. I’m not sure if that’s actually possible, but hey.)

This is funny on so many levels.

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Lyrics from Damien Rice and David Gray’s cover of Que Sera, Sera during Live Earth last July:

(Now it’s Saturday afternoon, it’s three o’clock, it’s Wembley Stadium…hello? There’s only one song we could sing. This is our cover version — a special Wembley song, so I want to hear the old Wembley roar.)

When I was just a little boy
I asked my father
How would it be?
Would I be able to play in the trees
‘Cause they’re cutting down forests and spreading disease
And here’s what he said to me:

Que sera, sera
Whatever will be, will be
The future’s not ours to see
Que sera, sera
What will be, will be

When I grew up and fell in love
I asked my sweetheart
What lies ahead?
Will there rainbows day after day?
Will we become just another cliche?
Having it all, yeah, and throwin’ it away
Here’s what my sweetheart said:

Que sera, sera
Whatever will be, will be
The future’s not ours to see
Que sera, sera
What will be will be

And now I have children of my own
They ask their father
What will we be?
Will we be bitter, filled with regret?
Will we be choking on our own shit?
I tell them tenderly:

Que sera, sera
Whatever will be, will be
The future’s not ours to see
Que sera, sera

Que sera, sera
Whatever will be, will be
The future’s not ours to see
Que sera, sera

(You have a go, come on!)

Que sera, sera
Whatever will be, will be
The future’s not ours to see
Que sera, sera

What will be, will be
Que sera, sera

Below are my two big projects from Music for Multimedia II, a course on film scoring and digital audio, uploaded to Vimeo for your streaming and downloading pleasure.

The midterm assignment was to score a given video however we saw fit using Reason and Digital Performer. The clip is from The Mind’s Eye.

Mus 52 Midterm from danbruno on Vimeo.

The final project gave us complete freedom over the video and sound. I wrote incidental music and did a voiceover in a dubious British accent. The clip, and much of the dialogue, is from Look Around You.

Mus 52 final from danbruno on Vimeo.

Delicious Monster programmer Mike Lee is attempting to mobilize the Mac and Mac developer community to help save the lemurs in Madagascar. He’s giving away a stuffed lemur with every $100 donation (or $10 recurring monthly donation). There are 50 donors so far; he wants 100 by the end of the day.

UPDATE: He did it. Mike, you magnificent bastard motherfucker.

This already strange tech support call to Palm suddenly takes a turn for the WTF:

So I asked employee C11329 to be transfered to her manager. She told me she was the most senior person at Palm. I asked her again politely to transfer me to her manager. She told me she had none. I asked to be transfered to the person that was reviewing her work, giving her assignments, etc.. I was told she had none. I told her I felt that was odd as, apart from the chairman and CEO, I didn’t know of anyone in a company not having a manager. She told me she was the CEO.

For a second, I paused. “You’re the CEO of Palm, Inc.?” I asked again, not really believing what I was hearing. “Yes, I am” she replied, now with a defiant tone. “So you’re telling me you’re Ed Colligan?” I asked. “I am the CEO and that’s all you need to know.”

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The Boston Globe reports:

A former faculty member at Tufts University is suing the college and a prominent professor for allegedly firing her in retaliation after she accused the professor of discriminating against female and minority employees and of singling her out for her sexual orientation.

Susan Lautze, a researcher on humanitarianism who cofounded the Feinstein International Center at Tufts in 1996, says she was fired in 2005 after she accused her supervisor, Peter Walker, of harboring bias toward women and nonwhites.

Good thing she’s suing the university — we all know Tufts’ bias against hiring gays, women, and nonwhites!

Seriously, though, I don’t know anything about Walker, so I’ll reserve judgment for now. If Lautze was wronged, I hope she takes him down.

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How bad is waterboarding? Someone on the Straight Dope message boards tried it himself to find out. Here’s an excerpt:

The water fills the hole in the saran wrap so that there is either water or vaccum in your mouth. The water pours into your sinuses and throat. You struggle to expel water periodically by building enough pressure in your lungs. With the saran wrap though each time I expelled water, I was able to draw in less air. Finally the lungs can no longer expel water and you begin to draw it up into your respiratory tract.

It seems that there is a point that is hardwired in us. When we draw water into our respiratory tract to this point we are no longer in control. All hell breaks loose. Instinct tells us we are dying.

I have never been more panicked in my whole life. Once your lungs are empty and collapsed and they start to draw fluid it is simply all over. You know you are dead and it’s too late. Involuntary and total panic.

There is absolutely nothing you can do about it. It would be like telling you not to blink while I stuck a hot needle in your eye.

Sounds like torture to me. (via)

Think Secret, the nexus of the Apple rumor community, is shutting down:

PRESS RELEASE: Apple and Think Secret have settled their lawsuit, reaching an agreement that results in a positive solution for both sides. As part of the confidential settlement, no sources were revealed and Think Secret will no longer be published. Nick Ciarelli, Think Secret’s publisher, said “I’m pleased to have reached this amicable settlement, and will now be able to move forward with my college studies and broader journalistic pursuits.”

That’s harsh:

XP comes with some impressive device support. In fact, every peripheral I’ve collected over the years works perfectly with it. Many have the device drivers preinstalled on XP, making their installation a snap, but for the rest it was easy to find device drivers on the Web. In addition I found the drivers quick and reliable, a far cry from the buggy, slow and sparse driver support in Vista. I’m glad to see that with their new flagship OS, Windows XP, Microsoft have finally learnt from the mistakes they made with the Vista launch.

Courtesy of Boing Boing Gadgets, here’s a video clip of a recording session for Super Mario Galaxy. This piece is the background music for the level “Gusty Garden.”

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Good stuff, but am I the only one who thinks the extravagant arrangements in Galaxy sound like they were cribbed from a Zelda game?

It’s widely known that video game designers love crates and barrels. But did you know that you can leverage this fact to objectively rate their games?

Games can be rated and compared based on the shortest amount of time it takes a player to reach the first crate, which represents the point where the developers ran out of ideas. This number is measured in seconds and is called “Start to Crate” or “StC”. The smaller the StC, the worse the game.

I have Mint installed on here as a novelty more than anything, but as I’ve been getting steady traffic (read: more than ten visitors a day) for months now there’s enough data to pick out a couple of interesting trends.

Referrers

Most of my referral hits come from three places:

• Google searches for “cool mac stuff,” which land here. Cool Mac Stuff is the most popular page on the site, and it’s easy to see why.
• Google searches for “naked quad run,” which land here (and will now doubtless land at this entry as well). Naked Quad Run is a tradition at Tufts in which people run naked laps around the quad to blow off steam before finals. Naturally it attracts a good amount of outside attention.
• StumbleUpon, which lands here. Someone added my roundup of the xkcd meetup to the database — under “Unknown,” for some reason — and every few days I get a big surge of Stumble-y traffic.

Of the other miscellaneous referrers, “expired salad dressing” recurs with notable regularity.

Browsers

59% of my visitors use Firefox!

Okay, that’s somewhat ridiculous, given Firefox’s ~15% market share. I blame the hordes of StumbleUpon fans for skewing the results.

After that, it’s 23% IE, 14% Safari, 2% Camino, 2% everything else.

Operating systems

65% Windows, 31% OS X, 3% Linux, 1% other.

No surprises here. The Mac percentage is likely bolstered by my incessant blathering about Apple. I do wonder about that “other” percent point, though.

Wired has a new article called “Why You Can’t Get Your Hands on a Wii.” The improbably successful game-console-that-could has been selling out consistently for over a year now:

[Nintendo has] bumped up production from about 1 million to 1.8 million a month, says Nintendo Senior Vice President George Harrison, with roughly a third of them earmarked for North America. Last week was Nintendo’s best since the Wii’s launch, with 350,000 sold in the United States alone. In comparison, Microsoft sold about that many Xbox 360s last month.

So how do you get one of these things, if you’re not willing to pay double the MSRP to an eBay scalper? Wii Alerts.

Give these guys your email address and they’ll notify you when there are Wiis in stock at one of their listed online retailers. Even better, give them your cell phone number and they’ll text you the moment they’re available. If you can get to a computer within a few minutes, you’ll have no trouble at all. I had one ordered within a week of signing up.

Good luck.

Today was one of the busiest shopping days of the year, and I spent it at one of the biggest malls in the country.

Yeah.

I think this picture encapsulates my experience:

(via Wet Riffs [NSFW])

If you’re a new Leopard user and you use Stacks, you might be interested in this clever little hack. It involves keeping translucent “drawer” icons at the top of your Stacks folders to keep the jumble of icons legible. Or, put another way, it makes your Dock not look like ass.

Here’s my Dock, which shows the drawers on the side.

“This unique ‘regular’ version of the classic board game will feature faithful reproductions of the Monopoly game board, paper money, and game pieces such as a thimble, top hat, and Scottie dog,” read a Hasbro press release on the new game, which also replaces the iconic, high-valued properties of Mariowalk and Luigi Place with its own fancifully named “Boardwalk” and “Park Place.”

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On the 10-yard line, with time left for one more play and the score 27-24, Mohammed Ali Hammadi lines up to take the kick and send the game into overtime. As you dive to block the kick, you realize quarterback Ibrahim Salih Mohammed al-Yacoub has snatched up the ball and is running toward the end zone unchallenged. During his victory dance, al-Yacoub releases a deadly airborne virus.

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Photo via presta. Some rights reserved.

The Tufts Daily:

Director of Student Activities Jodie Nealley was fired on Friday under suspicion that she embezzled approximately $300,000 from the university.

Nealley has admitted to Tufts officials that she took at least a portion of this money, according to Dean of Student Affairs Bruce Reitman.

“We are shocked, disappointed and angered by Ms. Nealley’s actions. She breached the trust that all of us at Tufts had placed in her,” he said in a statement.

See tomorrow’s issue of the Daily for further coverage.

Ruh roh.

UPDATE: Here’s the promised “further coverage.” Not much additional information, though.

There has been a slew of interesting gaming posts this week on MetaFilter.

From Disney blog MiceAge:

The boats and flume of Disneyland’s it’s a small world were originally designed in 1963 and installed for use at the New York World’s Fair in 1964 and ‘65. The Americans riding in those pastel boats almost 45 years ago were much slimmer than those boarding the same boats now. While the CM’s operating the ride try their very best to eyeball the girth and size of the riders coming down the line and purposely leave a row or two empty on many boats nowadays to hopefully keep them floating, even those discreet tactics don’t always work with today’s riders.

Quite simply, the boats weren’t designed to handle multiple adults weighing more than 200 pounds, and they now routinely bottom out in the shallow flume and get stuck. The Imagineers who designed the unique flume ride system for the World’s Fair assumed that adult men would average 175 pounds, and adult women would average 135 pounds. Needless to say, those 1960’s statistics are hopelessly out of date in today’s world. This same issue creates similar problems on the drops at Pirates of the Caribbean, or even on the older dark rides like Pinocchio or Alice In Wonderland as the more heavily loaded cars try to keep up their pace throughout the ride. But at it’s a small world, the weight related problems happen more frequently.

If you’re the kind of person who needs to know about the kernel improvements and GUI changes of an operating system in excruciating detail, you probably already know enough about Mac OS X Leopard to make your purchasing decision. If, however, you have somehow remained ignorant, this 17-page monstrosity by John Siracusa may be just what you’re looking for. He doesn’t even talk about Time Machine until page 14!

(Really, though, it’s an interesting review. Just don’t expect to understand everything he’s talking about, and set aside a good-sized chunk of perusal time.)

Writer Joel Turnipseed is filling in for Jason Kottke this week and will be posting a series of interviews with prominent bloggers. Today’s interviewee is Jessica Hagy of the excellent Indexed, a collection of funny, insightful graphs and diagrams drawn on index cards.

There’s a football game today at Wembley Stadium in London — an American football game. At 1PM EST, the Miami Dolphins will play the New York Giants in the only regular season match ever to take place overseas.

A Miami Herald reporter found the Brits less than impressed with our exported sport:

”One problem with your football is all of that padding,” volunteered Brian Bennett, 26, a Stoke fan who works on bicycle as a courier. “In rugby they let you know they’re men. But your footballers hide in there, isn’t it?”

A friend of his noted how silly it is that ”50 play on a side in American football.” I mentioned yes, but only 11 play at a time. He said, “Then why you need 50 then!”

Over at the Selhurst Park concession stand, I found Emily Waller unwrapping a steak- and potato-filled crescent pie.

”Football here has a fluency, an elegance to it even as the elbows fly,” she observed. “Whereas from what little I know of American football, it’s full of starts and stops. Doesn’t the game hiccup along?”

Ouch.

Awesome news from the developers of the Mac IM client Adium: voice and video chat are in the works! As usual, there’s little indication of how much progress they’ve made, but it ought to be worth the wait.

Yeah, it’s a not a new week yet, but that’s okay.

david gallagher nude photo blog

I love it. Mac OS X: Now with 25% more smug superiority! (Here’s a bigger picture.)

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If someone steals a base during the World Series, Taco Bell is going to away a free taco to everyone in America. UPDATE: The base has been stolen! Taco Day is October 30th.

What’s the catch? Well, let’s take a look at the fine print.

HOW TO OBTAIN A FREE TACO: If an eligible base was stolen during the Games, Taco Bell will make an announcement through selected media channels, including a press release and its web site (www.tacobell.com), that eligible consumers can obtain their free Crunchy Seasoned Beef Taco on Tuesday, October 30, 2007 (if base is stolen in Games 1 or 2 on October 24 or October 25, 2007) OR November 6, 2007 (if base is stolen in Games 3-7, October 27, 28, 29, 31, November 1, 2007) (”Redemption Date”) only.

All right, so you need to show up for your taco on a specified date. Fair enough.

To obtain the Free Taco, consumers must visit any participating Taco Bell® restaurant in one of the fifty (50) the United States or District of Columbia between 2:00 p.m. and 5:00 p.m. (local time) on the Redemption Date only and request a Free Crunchy Seasoned Beef Taco. Free Taco’s will not be offered on any other date or time, regardless of circumstance. Limit one (1) Free Crunchy Seasoned Beef Taco per person.

Okay, we’re down to a three-hour taco window. It’s a bit inconvenient, but they can’t have the freeloaders from swelling their lunch and dinner crowds, right?

On a side note, I’m digging the capitalization of Free Taco.

Participating Taco Bell restaurant manager reserves the right to deny Free Taco to any person he/she reasonably believes has already received a Free Taco or has engaged in any other fraudulent activity.

Whoa, whoa, whoa. Back up. Did they just use “Free Taco” as an uncountable noun? Because that’s pretty awesome. “Hey, you spilled some Free Taco on your shirt.”

More importantly: The manager gets to decide if I’ve gotten a taco already? That’s bullshit. Is he going to call up the other branches? Look for taco stains on my fingers? Smell my breath?

All eligible consumers: Everyone in line at a participating Taco Bell restaurant before 5:00 p.m. local time will receive a Free Taco, even if it is provided after 5:00 p.m.

Well, that’s nice of them.

Free Taco offer is subject to store availability and Taco Bell reserves the right to substitute an item of equal or greater value if due to unavailability.

Fat chance. What, are they going to run out of beef and give you a plate of nachos instead?

All restaurant managers decisions are final regarding to Free Taco offer.

Not if I bitch and moan enough. My breath always smells like this, you insensitive bastards!

As a condition of the offer, consumers agree: (a) to release, and hold harmless Major League Baseball Properties, Inc., Major League Baseball Enterprises, Inc., MLB Advanced Media, L.P., [etc., etc.] from any and all claims, demands, losses, promises, causes of action, and liabilities, in this contest/promotion or any use/misuse of the prizes awarded hereunder including a Free Taco,

Aww. And I was going to misuse my Free Taco so hard.

(b) under no circumstances will entrant be permitted to obtain awards for, and participant hereby waives all rights to claim, punitive, incidental, consequential, or any other damages, other than for actual out-of-pocket expenses;

I’d love to know what legal situations they’re hoping to avoid with this crap. Maybe they should have offered soft tacos Soft Tacos to mitigate the choking hazard.

(c) all causes of action arising out of or connected with this Offer or any Free Taco or any advertising, marketing, promotion or publicity materials in connection therewith, shall be resolved individually, without resort to any form of class action; and

In other words, “You can’t bring a class action lawsuit against us because we said so.” Sounds like a software license agreement.

(d) any and all claims, judgments, and award shall be limited to actual out-of-pocket costs incurred, excluding attorneys’ fees and court costs.

Ah, yes; the out-of-pocket costs of a free taco. They’re clever, those Taco Bell guys.

By participating, consumers agree that all issues and questions concerning the construction, validity, interpretation and enforceability of these Official Rules, participant’s rights and obligations, or the rights and obligations of the Sponsor in connection with the Sweepstakes, shall be governed by, and construed in accordance with, the laws of State of California, without giving effect to any choice of law or conflict of law rules. By entering, entrants consent to the jurisdiction and venue of the federal, state and local courts for Irvine, California.

This, of course, is because California has the loosest free taco laws in the nation.

Jesus, that’s the most fine print I’ve ever read in my life. I think I need to take a nap.

Matt Haughey makes a case for classical music as the future of the music industry:

1. People rarely spend money on classical music itself. I bought a Bach or Mozart CD once when I was 19 when I needed background sound while studying. For the last few years, whenever I want to hear some classical, I just put on the one radio station that plays it or I pick any random classical listing in iTunes’ streaming music area and let it play. It’s basically free and plentiful.

2. Old classical music has no copyright, anyone can cover anything by Beethoven and not owe anyone a cut. You can remix sheetmusic from the 1700s all you want and call it your own. If you’ve got access to an orchestra and a recording device you can go nuts making music and never need a lawyer for any of it. Everything before 1923 is in the public domain: it’s like a Creative Commons wet dream.

3. Classical music fans are tech savvy and embrace the internet. The majority of them rip music, and a sizable chunk own iPods and pay for downloads.

Despite these doomsday notions, classical music remains an industry and there are tens of thousands of professional classical musicians worldwide that make a living from it.

The linked New York Times article may surprise you. Money quote: “On Apple’s iTunes, which sold a billion tracks in its first three years, classical music reportedly accounts for 12 percent of sales, four times its share of the CD market.” That’s pretty sweet, Charles.

I should really make this a regular feature.

Seen in today’s logs:

what does the word “pimp” mean

Good God, this is ridiculous:

Samsung late Monday announced that it had produced the world’s first working NAND flash memory based on a 30-nanometer manufacturing process, promising a greatly increased storage density over today’s chips. The smaller manufacturing technique was made workable through a new technology known as self-aligned double patterning. By stepping up the use of lithography, the company is able to write both a coarser, more conventional pattern of memory cells as well as a finer pattern that fills the gaps; this makes the best use of the available space, Samsung says.

In a high capacity, multi-level cell (MLC) flash design, the improvement should allow for 64-gigabit chips that can combine to produce a 128GB memory unit; this would hold as much as 32,000 songs or 80 full-length movies at DVD quality, according to the company.

The iPods in 2010 are going to be insane.

(A word of warning: Others recommend experiencing Portal without any prior knowledge, and I’m inclined to agree. There are no big spoilers here, but there’s something to be said for going in with a clean slate. If you’ve already finished it, or have no interest in computer games and would never play it anyway, read on.)

First, for the non-gamers: Portal is a quirky puzzle game bundled with Valve’s Half-Life 2 compilation The Orange Box.

When the game opens you wake up in a testing facility. A droll AI encourages you to make your way through various obstacle-laden rooms — there will be cake at the end of the experiment, she promises. I don’t want to give anything away, but I’ll say this: some other stuff happens too, and it is awesome.

Anyway, the conceit of the game is the handheld “portal gun” you’re given, which creates orange and blue spatial warp fields that embed themselves into most flat surfaces.

Yikes. Did that make any sense? A YouTube clip is worth a thousand words here:

(link)

As you can see, it’s a fairly simple concept that has some fairly unexpected consequences. Jumping fifty feet down into a portal and then, maintaining my momentum, shooting out of a wall like a cannonball was one of the coolest things I’ve ever done in a video game.

For those who have finished the game:

• Schlaghund’s Playground has the best analysis of Portal I’ve seen.
• Jonathan Coulton, who composed a song for the game, wrote about his experience working with Valve (and posted lyrics and chords).
• And finally, from the department of questionable analysis, Heroine Sheik has the lesbian critique. Who says video games aren’t art?

Vanity Fair brings the funny with a test to determine your asshole footprint:

For ages 14–25
1. Do you refer to attractive members of the opposite sex as “smokin’ hot”?
2. Do you leave vitriolic comments in the “Comments” sections of blogs and Web sites, even if you’re commenting on something innocuous, such as an old Linkin Park video?
2a. When leaving such comments, do you use such rote Internet pejoratives as “asshat,” “douchebag,” and “‘tard”?
3. Are you convinced that it’s only a matter of time before the world recognizes you as the next Andy Samberg?
4. Do you write a dating column for your school paper or local weekly?
5. When you are being photographed, do you flash gang signs?
6. Are your birthday parties televised?
7. Is your name Skylar, Tyler, Taylor, Cat, Bryce, Morgan, Brandon, Braden, Hayden, Jaden, Brianna, or Keegan?

I’m pretty sure I know a few people who fit at least five of those.

I love SNL Digital Shorts.

(link)

For the MySpace fans in the audience, here’s Ze Frank’s Social Network For Two, a song about internet love. (Via Waxy.)

(For those still mourning the end of The Show, you might enjoy Hank and John Green’s Brotherhood 2.0, which I mentioned back in January.)

About a week ago the Washington Post had a story about Tom Murphy, a brilliant, homeless chess player who challenges passersby to blitz games in D.C.’s Dupont Circle. It’s a fascinating read, but I couldn’t resist posting this silly throwaway quote from fellow Dupont Circle chess player William Moore:

“I do like to teach people,” he said. “And I’ve taught so many kinds of people, you don’t even know. The proudest teaching I ever had was I taught a pimp in New York. His name was Comfort, as in ‘comfortable.’ I was going down the street to my friend’s house. I had my board with me. He said, ‘You know anything about that game?’ I said, ‘Yeah.’ He said, ‘You have time to show me?’ I said, ‘Yeah.’ He said, ‘Step into my office,’ which was a pink, long Cadillac. I got in. It had a bar in the car and everything. I started thinking, ‘Now how in the world am I gonna show this pimp how to play the game of chess?’ So he asked me, ‘What do the queen do?’ I said, ‘The queen do all the work.’ He said, ‘ Ohhhh, now what do the king do?’ I said, ‘The king don’t do nothing.’ His eyes lit up when he heard that. He said, ‘Man, I like this game already.’”

From the blog of David Gallagher at the New York Times:

As the name suggests, Dramatic Whitespace inserts a block of empty space on your page. You can change the size and color of your space, and add a dotted-line border, but its interactivity is otherwise severely limited.

[...]

[Author Adam] Bildersee told me the application, which took a few hours to develop, was meant to be “an awkward vortex of Internet 2.0 and existentialism.” He said reactions to it tend to fall into one of three categories: “People who say it’s the best thing ever and are melting with sarcasm (I like these people best), people who say the same thing but genuinely mean it and ask for more (I don’t understand these people), and people who ask what it does or how to use it (for these people there is no hope).” (This person was among the stumped: “Either I’m missing something, or it’s just a big white space on my profile.”)

Here’s the application. I’ve added it to my profile; so far, it seems to work as advertised.

I get a lot of hits from people searching for the same few things, mostly variations of “naked quad run” or “cool mac stuff” with the occasional tablature hunting. This morning, though, someone found me through the infinitely more entertaining query “what’s the goodness of an itunes.”

I hope you found what you needed, man.

Can’t get enough of Cute Overload? Try hugecrab.com. It’s a similar idea, except that instead of cataloging heart-meltingly adorable animal photos, it collects photos of monstrous, nightmarish crustaceans. A word of warning, though — make sure not to open both sites at once. They will annihilate, like matter and antimatter, leaving only a puff of acrid smoke.

A few shots from Saturday’s Great Glass Pumpkin Patch, an annual sale benefiting MIT’s Glass Lab:

The full set is here. (We were a bit late, so many of the pumpkins had sold already.)

Bungie, the company responsible for the Halo trilogy, is breaking away from Microsoft, which acquired the game studio back in 2000.

“Working with Microsoft was great for us, it allowed us to grow as a team and make the ambitious, blockbuster games we all wanted to work on. And they will continue to be a great partner. But Bungie is like a shark. We have to keep moving to survive. We have to continually test ourselves, or we might as well be dolphins. Or manatees,” said Jason Jones, Bungie founder and partner.

What does it mean? Well, in an interview with MTV games journalist Stephen Totilo, Bungie’s Writing Lead Frank O’Connor seemed to downplay the significance of the split:

MTV Multiplayer: The official statement informs gamers that Bungie will “primarily” focus on Microsoft platforms. What other platforms is Bungie considering? If you can’t say, can you at least eliminate any? For instance, would we see Bungie on handhelds or not?

Frank O’Connor: Right now, none. It’s all 360 – from the downloadable “Halo 3″ content to the Peter Jackson “Halo” project. Those are the big items on our docket at the moment. I can tell you confidently we are not playing with any new devkits.

On the other hand, in an interview with Macworld, company spokesman Brian Jerrard was encouragingly vague about returning to Mac game development:

“Although we have no announcements to make at this time, we don’t rule anything out going forward,” said Jarrard.

[...]

“But sure, now that we’re branching of [sic] and controlling our destiny, that puts us in a position where we could put ourselves back on the [Mac] platform definitively again,” said Jarrard.

I’d say that Bungie’s departure means they’re just sick of being a Microsoft-exclusive developer.

This is something I’ve always wondered about:

What if I opened every transaction to a haggle? What if I made my own bid on a TiVo? A counteroffer on dry cleaning? What if I treated the list price for a dress shirt as merely a suggestion? Could I insert myself into every transaction so that price wasn’t so much of an absolute? I wanted to know. For three months, I would haggle everything that came my way, insisting to everyone who would listen that price was a fluid force, a matter of argument.

It’s been hard for me to care that much about Leopard, the new version of Mac OS X which is due out at the end of the month. The new Dock kind of looks like shit, Cover Flow is a pretty lame addition to the Finder, the new HTML templates for Mail are a frustrating addition for someone who prefers plain-text email, and many of the other improvements just look awfully underwhelming. AppleInsider wrote something about the new-and-improved Dictionary application, which does look nice but is perhaps not something to purchase an operating system for.

Hopefully the under-the-hood improvements are fantastic, and Core Animation ends up being useful as more than just eye candy. And I really hope that whatever is still covered by NDAs is drop-dead amazing.