Review: Killing is Harmless, by Brendan Keogh

November 27, 2012

It was a formulaic shooter. Keogh’s mission was to play it, extract observations of interest, and then get the hell out of there. It seemed easy enough at first. An inverted American flag. 1960s protest music. A mad Colonel named Konrad, for Christ’s sake. It was on-the-nose, by the numbers, Creative Writing 101 stuff. Someone [...]

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Darthfield Minus Darthfield

November 15, 2012

I’ve been reading Tom the Dancing Bug for thirteen years now. This week’s Super-Fun-Pak Comix (“Supfunpamix” to us old timers) contains a “Darthfield” comic strip. Being a fan of Garfield Minus Garfield, I tried my hand at Darthfield Minus Darthfield. Bask in its absurd commentary on the sad-sack life lived by Jon… Luke… guy…

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Amazon Random Shopper

November 10, 2012

I built a bot that randomly buys me crap on Amazon and mails it to me. Full description here.

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DropN, or: Why7?

November 4, 2012

I made a programmatic exploration of the game Drop7. I call it DropN. Here’s the statement accompanying the game: Hi. I’m Darius Kazemi. I built this thing, DropN, as a programmatic exploration of Drop7. I play Drop7 every day. I’ve been playing it since it was an ARG for a mediocre TV drama. Anyway, I’ve always wondered: why 7? I was [...]

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Notes: Graham Harman, “Non-Relational Aesthetics,” CMU Oct 23 2012

October 23, 2012

Hi. This post contains my notes from Graham Harman’s talk on “non-relational aesthetics” given at the College of Fine Arts at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, PA on Oct 23, 2012. This is my attempt at something approaching a transcript. It’s not always verbatim, but where I condensed phrases or skipped sentences I did my [...]

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Backgammon epitaph, published 1640

September 24, 2012

This is really neat. I was searching through Google Books for references to Backgammon before 1700, and I found reference to an epitaph that consists entirely of Backgammon puns. The epitaph was collected in 1640 in a book called Wit’s Recreations (reprinted in 1663), and is attributed as the epitaph of John Crop. Whether this [...]

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Some FTL tips

September 21, 2012

So I just beat FTL, on probably my 12th run, on Easy, using The Kestrel. I am now full of ideas on why I succeeded, and what made this run different from the previous 11 for me. There are no spoilers in this article (unless you count “enemies tend to use strategy X near the [...]

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16 Xbox Live Indie Games you should play before I die

August 24, 2012

I play a lot of Xbox Live Indie Games. While the platform is full of shitty zombie games, shitty avatar games, shitty platformers, and shitty twin-stick shooters, there is also some interesting and/or fun stuff on there too. Here are 16 games that range from actually fun (Epic Dungeon) to jarringly strange (Wirral Railway). Fish [...]

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Some personal Kickstarter stats

August 7, 2012

I decided to look at my “backer history” on Kickstarter to get a sense of how much I spend on Kickstarter and how much I get out of it. I have funded a total of 21 projects that have been successful in their fundraising. Of these, 4 were funded in the last 6 months and [...]

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Listen to me babble about Spelunky’s procedural generation

August 7, 2012

I’m a guest on the latest episode of Roguelike Radio where I got to talk to Derek Yu (Spelunky‘s creator) about Spelunky‘s level generation algorithms. (I was invited because I’ve written about the topic: here and here.) It was a great conversation — thanks to Andrew Doull for inviting me to the podcast! (And apologies for [...]

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