Tag: game

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Things 21: Trolley Problem, Hamster Gaming, Sky Font

(Originally sent July 2008)

This week’s films – one line reviews
If you like nice fluffy happy films you have to see Wall-E. If you like dark mind-bending films you have to see The Dark Knight. These are both extraordinary films that demand and deserve your attention.

Next Week’s film
I’ll be watching Mamma Mia.

I’ll be watching Dark Knight again.

One of the above is true, the other is completely ridiculous and out of the question.

A Puzzle
Inspired by the events in The Dark Knight, here is the standard “trolley problem” (where trolley actually means tram):

A trolley is running out of control down a track. In its path are 5 people who have been tied to the track by a mad philosopher. Fortunately, you can flip a switch which will lead the trolley down a different track to safety. Unfortunately, there is a single person tied to that track. Should you flip the switch?

A Quote
“The infinite possibilities each day holds should stagger the mind. The sheer number of experiences I could have is uncountable, breathtaking, and I’m sitting here refreshing my inbox.”

-XKCD: http://xkcd.com/137/

A Link
Baby bats in mini sleeping bags:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-495789/Adorable-baby-bats–honestly–snuggled-wool-animal-shelter.html

A video
Live action hamster video gaming:

A picture
A wonderful font. (Unfortunately this breaks the nice cute/dark dual theme this Things had going. Oh well).

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Things 20: Cake Division, Dinorun, Christian the Lion

(Originally sent July 2008)

This week’s film – one line reviews :
Hancock was like a TV mini-series compressed into 90 minutes, with the first half used to trick people into going to see it, and a plot that looks like it suffered from too many cooks.

Next Week’s film
Kung Fu Panda

Actually I saw this on IMAX last weekend, but would rather see it again in the cinema than see Prince Caspian, which I find so unappealing even Eddie Izzard as Reepicheep can’t make up for it. Kung Fu Panda was a very solidly entertaining piece of work, as the figures below attest.

IMDb rating: 8.1/10
Rotten Tomatoes rating: 88%

My youtube review:

A Puzzle
Alternatives to a first mover or an infinite past:

-time as a loop

-space and time merge as you go back in time (this makes no sense to me but is apparently one theory)

-time is an illusion

The real lesson here is that we have absolutely no right to expect our intuition for what makes sense, which we developed in our own particular tiny bit of the universe, to be any kind of a guide on this scale of issue.

This week’s puzzle
When you find yourself having to divide a cake between two children you know that at least one will complain they got the smaller slice. There is a classic strategy to solve this problem that is well known, which I won’t reveal since if you’re not familiar with it then that is an excellent puzzle already. For those that know: what if there are three children?

A Quote
A wonderfully distilled observation on what I think is one of the most fascinating debates of our generation:

Stewart Brand: “Information wants to be free. Information also wants to be expensive […] that tension will not go away.”

A Link
Dinorun – an old-school style game in which you play a dinosaur attempting to outrun extinction. Worth playing at least once just to see how awesome it is to be wiped out by an unstoppable wave of annihilation:

http://www.pixeljam.com/dinorun/

A video
Another bit of cross-species friendship – “Christian the Lion”, who was friends with some 70s dudes.

Short version with the best-suited music but, er, inappropriate message at end:

Longer version with the full story but annoying text:

A picture
An illustration of how technology will help us in the future:

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Thing 19: The Beginning of Time, Cat game, Animal Friendship

(Originally sent June 2008)

This week’s film – one line review
Wanted was an extraordinary hotch-potch of the ridiculous and the sublime, and I highly recommend it to anyone that liked the look of the trailers. Incidentally, it now has 71% on rotten tomatoes, and I can’t help noticing that WALL-E is on 98%, but we have to wait another 3 weeks for that.

My review of Wanted:

Next Week’s film
Hancock.

A comedy about what it would be like if someone with Superman-like powers was a degenerate reprobate played by Will Smith, which actually looks as if it could be a highly original kind of superhero story.

IMDb rating: 6.8/10
Rotten Tomatoes rating: 33%

A Puzzle
This week: philosophy.

One of the weirdest things about the universe is that it exists at all. Without even bringing God into it, either there was nothing and then suddenly it began, or something has been around (one way or another) forever, and neither of these two concepts seems plausible to our intuition. But in fact these are not the only two options. Can you think of any others?

A Quote
James Richardson: “The Man who sticks to his plan will become what he used to want to be.”

A Link
A game involving cats:
http://www.ferryhalim.com/orisinal/g3/cats.htm

A video
A wild crow with “no known history of humanitarian benevolence” adopts a kitten:

A picture
Continuing the theme of cross-species friendship, an infra-red triggered camera set up to try to capture a picture of Bigfoot ended up capturing something even more bizarre – a raccoon riding on a wild hog:

All part, incidentally, of an ingenious marketing strategy by the makers of the camera:

http://www.cryptomundo.com/cryptozoo-news/bushnell-bf/

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Things 18: Layton Squares, Lesson Learned, IWIWAL

(Originally sent June 2008)

This week’s films – one line reviews
The Happening was a huge disappointment, anticlimactic in every way.
(My review: http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=_Mpa9ViwoMg)

The Incredible Hulk was impressive yet strangely forgettable.
(My review: http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=ltWgo9TXvKk)

Next Week’s film
Wanted. It looks like the standard Hero’s journey (ordinary guy discovers he is in fact the son of the world’s best assassin and must take up his mantle to protect Fate itself!!) with a great cast. This is my personal most anticipated movie of the year, since it is directed by Timur Bekmambetov, who directed my favourite movie of last year, Day Watch. He has an amazing talent for making the incredible look plausible, yet still awesome. I am seeing this at the first possible opportunity.

Fantastic teaser trailer featuring a single illustrative fragment of the film:
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=oTRh66yvYpc [Video removed – this short teaser kind of does the job though – Tim 23/8/2010]

If that’s not enough for you, here’s the full trailer which probably has most of the awesome stuff in it.
IMDb rating: 7.8/10
Rotten Tomatoes rating: n/a (It’s not being shown to critics?!) [Currently 71% – Tim 23/8/2010]

A Puzzle
In answer to last week’s “what comes next”: heaven.

This week: Professor Layton and the curious village is a puzzle game for the Nintendo DS, and my favourite puzzle in it is number 100. The challenge is to work out how to loop seven elastic bands around the pins in the board so that each one is held in the shape of a square, and no pin is used as a corner twice:

A Quote
Another baffling moment from my friend Nick:

Nick: Have you heard of the psychologist, Wasslavich?
Tim: No…
Nick: Neither have I.

A Link
A lesson is learned but the damage is irreversible is the name of the webcomic, and each strip generally follows that theme and stands alone. It’s also mindblowingly insane and creative and I can’t just link to a single strip. So, depending on which opening line you like the most, take your pick:

“Dale, I owe the legendary ghosts of mafia bosses $80,000!”
http://www.alessonislearned.com/index.php?comic=20

“Caroline’s doppelganger is crying again.”
http://www.alessonislearned.com/index.php?comic=37

“The universe was so ashamed that you slept late, it is shrivelling into a raisin.”
http://www.alessonislearned.com/index.php?comic=31

A video
I can’t understand why I haven’t linked to this video before. It’s an excellent example of the “Anime Music Video” (AMV) format, in which scenes from anime are ingeniously edited to create a video for a song, in this case the brilliant “I wish I was a lesbian”:

A picture
The surprisingly rarely seen true scale version of the London underground. The stylised version we are familiar with is actually an incredible triumph of marketing that turned around the fortunes of the tube.