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Tag Archives: video games

Starflight

Wednesday, June 16, 2010

The best and most thought-provoking game of the DOS era was Starflight. Kids today, with their intuitive graphical user interfaces. They have no idea what a pain it was to use computers back in the eighties. DOS especially was an autistic nightmare. Bill Gates is some kind of genius to have convinced so many people [...]

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Blogging is a real-time strategy game

Wednesday, December 2, 2009

Anna watched me Twitter over my shoulder for a while, and then announced: “I get it. It’s a video game where you compete for attention from strangers on the internet.” She’s completely correct. Having a web presence is a real-world immersive internet game where the scoreboard is your stats page or follower list. Like any [...]

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Halo is a giant mashup

Saturday, October 10, 2009

My taste in video games mostly runs to the cartoony Japanese stuff: Mario, Zelda, Katamari. But I had access to an Xbox and a copy of Halo for a while, and I couldn’t rest until I finished it. I walked around thinking about it whenever I wasn’t playing. Every aspect of it was familiar, except [...]

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DDR at Turkey Day

Wednesday, September 30, 2009

My family does not, as a general rule, dance. Maybe individually. Very rarely together. It takes a wedding or bar mitzvah or other major state occasion to get even some of us on the dance floor. When left to our own devices, it doesn’t happen spontaneously. At least not until last Thanksgiving, when we tried [...]

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The Beatles were an electronica band

Tuesday, August 25, 2009

Why are the Beatles still so cool? By which I mean the late Beatles, Revolver onwards. I like Please Please Me as much as the next guy, but it isn’t why the Beatles are cool now. No, I mean the last few records, especially Sgt Pepper, the White Album and Abbey Road. If any of [...]

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Game controllers as musical instruments

Friday, August 21, 2009

This is a picture of my electronic funk-soul-R&B band doing a show. From left to right, it’s Nicole Bishop, me and Barbara Singer. We were the whole band for that show. I did all the beats, samples and keyboards from my computer using a video game controller. Here’s a screenshot of the program that the [...]

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Welcome to warp zone

Monday, August 17, 2009

When I was a kid I played a lot, and I mean a lot, of Super Mario Bros. My grandpa once asked me to explain the game to him after he’d watched me play it for the nine thousandth hour. I tried hard and couldn’t do it. There’s a lot that defies intuition. Like how [...]

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Tuning systems, jigsaw puzzles, Giant Steps and Tetris

Friday, August 14, 2009

Expanding on “Learning Music Theory With Autotune” If you’re a science geek and you find yourself in San Francisco, the most fun thing to do there is to go to the Exploratorium.

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Real guitars are for old people

Thursday, August 13, 2009

Here’s one of my favorite bits of South Park.

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How musical instruments work

Wednesday, July 29, 2009

There are a lot of different musical instruments out there. Just about all of them share four basic components: a harmonic oscillator, a source of noise, a control surface for modulation, and a resonator.

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