Steam-Driven Dreams: The Wondrously Whimsical World of Steampunk
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The yearning for timelessness in a constantly renewing tech culture has led to a spike in interest in the steam-powered, brass-encrusted world of steampunk.
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Looking at the steam coming off the mail in my inbox this week, I definitely need a place to lay low for a while. One reader kindly recommended Geek Cruises, where I could work on my tan and my Perl programming skills at the same time. He also thought it would help my love life but I'm not so sure. The brochures are full of guys with goatees and laptops -- not exactly my idea of The Love Boat.
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Tycho:  With a couple days placed between this post and the release of the Bioshock demo, I feel far more comfortable discussing it.  You know what I do, now:  for example, you know that the Playable Intro as a storytelling mechanism has been refined to a ridiculous degree.  You've felt the jolt of voyeurism, peering into human lives via found audio.  And, perhaps most importantly, you know the dangers that plasmids pose to the young.
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Tycho:  I was in a guild with the guy who started FigurePrints, and when he extended coupons to the old crew I snapped them up and gave them as Christmas presents.  None of my characters ever reached the highest echelons of Azerothian Fashion, so it seemed like they were better invested in Gabriel and Keek, who poured night after night into Battlegrounds and Active Volcanoes fighting dragons and whatnot. The coupons I have described are difficult to secure, only available in random drawings at random intervals, or if by some twist of fate you happen to have been guildmates with a cunning entrepreneur.  It's really a way to ennoble the lost years you plowed into that game.  It's the sort of thing you'd think a person would appreciate.
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An image gallery containing creatures and objects made with Blender, an open-source 3D tool.
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The real question raised by Vernor Vinge's new novel, Rainbows End, is whether controlling our digital fantasies is a way of controlling the world. In Table of Malcontents.
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Tycho:  We still think about Eye of Judgment quite a bit - sometimes I will sit in silence and think about it, or think about it while I lay dormant in my charge casket.  I think about placing cards carefully on its luxurious cloth mat, smirking as distant foes are gnawed by my lizard proxies.  We are overjoyed (joymax!) that they stuck with the new concept, the card thing, as opposed to the brutally sardonic original.    I don't like constantly being pushed to pre-order things, but there is also a point (it would be easy to graph) where I'm not willing to let fate's whimsical machinery determine what I play.  So during a recent mall run I put down some money on whatever I could remember at the time - unscientifically, it was Metroid, Stranglehold, Halo, Stuntman, and Mass Effect.  This doesn't account for everything between now and November, certainly, but it kind of felt like a quiz show and I was intimidated.  Then I remembered Eye of Judgement and its manifold pleasures, endeavoring to append it, listwise.  It was at this point that "John" told us that both the game and the Playstation Eye peripheral had been cancelled.    At this assertion Gabriel stood up straight and still, like a meerkat.    "No, it wasn't," said he, quietly.  A cold quiet, like space.        When I am confronted with mere distortions of facts, I can typically slice through them to the beating truth.  But when a person says something that is flatly false, this is very disorienting for some reason and I am without my mind's full power.  Then the guy compounded things by saying they had very few preorders, and this was accompanied by a sneer, as though the number of preorders was some crucial consideration when assessing quality.  He actually thought it was funny that I wanted to buy it.    I wanted to ask him if he understood that a product not being available for preorder and a product not existing, or never being allowed to exist constituted profoundly different states, but these are the deep thoughts that occur to a person while they are tucking in at the food court and not when they are face to face with strange men at the EB.       When we returned from the store, almost as if on cue the product began to appear at online retailers - for sixty dollars.  Yes, that's correct.  The Playstation Eye peripheral plus the card game, for ten dollars more than a Sixaxis?  I won't say that I expected extortion, but I at least expected profit.  Assuming you have the Triple already in hand, they're making the Eye (and Eye of Judgment) an easy decision.    Let me take a moment to welcome PAX attendees to this year's celebration, even though it isn't especially useful to readers in Glasgow.  I hope the new venue is to your liking.   Be kind to each other, even to your defeated foes!  And be kind to your Enforcers, for they have toiled in your service.
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A first look at the most eagerly anticipated gizmo ever.
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Teaching online isn't unusual, but professors are taking advantage of Linden Lab's 3-D metaverse to shape meeting spaces to their needs and provide an added dimension to learning. By Daniel Terdiman.
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Tycho:  Kotaku carried a story yesterday that is (basically) the Nintendo DS version of that Playstation Pornable scare from six months ago.  You can see it here, and you should, because it's awesome.  It depicts a scenario so imaginative that it juts into the realm of speculative fiction:
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Tycho:  Page Two of "In The Service Of The Queen" will be available shortly, as he's taking the process very seriously.  Writing ridiculous poems used to be something I did with much more frequency, though it still happens occasionally. I did, at one point, seize the entire site to host a comic musical about TRON.  The urge just rears up sometimes, swiping at the air with its claws, and I must feed it tender, rhyming couplets to bed it back down.
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Christopher Conte turns machined metal, faux bone and vintage machinery into bizarrely beautiful works of biomechanical art.
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A look at three GUI front-ends for the LilyPond music notation software.
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Changes at The Journal: movable deadlines and a new taste for models.
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Usually it's the robots that oppress humans in the popular imagination. A Spanish art show turns the tables, producing fearful machines. By Daniel Terdiman.
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THANK God for Valve Softwareâs Kellie Cosner, who gave me a complimentary edition of one of the most anticipated games of all time, Half-Life 2. Kellie, whom I previously corresponded with
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A new experiment sends a simple idea racing around the web, and tracks its progress. All of this has happened before; all of this will happen again. By Robert Lemos.