Yes, it’s arguably a lot of PR boilerplate over at this PlayStation Blog post. But I’m linking to game studio Housemarque’s holiday card because they are behind Resogun, a legitimately great launch PS4 game. These guys are the embodiment of almost everything I wanted from the PS4 on day one; a simple fun showcase for the PS4 graphics with addictive gameplay. It’s perfect for a short break away from my day job. If you do have a PS4 over break and haven’t given Resogun a try, do so. It’s free on PS+ (which you should have for at least 30 days as part of your new console) and even a la carte at $15 it’s well worth its entry price.
It’s too last minute to be useful for holiday gifting, but for 2014 shopping, Canopy is a great site. It’s effectively a wrapper around Amazon with hand picked recommendations; most items selected are very design and/or tech friendly, and often hard to find elsewhere. I like the clean web design as well.
During the holidays I tend to travel more and rely on my iPhone and iPad for blogging and social media. But there’s a big problem when you find a cool link on RSS or Twitter: the URL is often littered with proxies, tokens, and other junk that’s unnecessary. Enter the free Clean Links app. Just copy whatever the URL is to your clipboard, open up the app, and a “cleaned” version of the URL is pasted back on your clipboard for use elsewhere. For those that want a faster workflow, Clean Links supports the X-Callback-URL scheme for use in apps like Drafts or Launch Center Pro.
I’ve usually come away very impressed with Polygon’s long form writing, and this article by Tracey Lien is a great example. Very solid reporting, smart illustrations, it’s the full package. Best of all, you don’t have to be hard core gamer to appreciate the content. If you’re vaguely interesting in marketing, even basic human psychology, there’s a lot of good stuff here.
Alice Marwick’s article has already gotten a lot of well deserved praise, but this passage really stood out as a smart (and simple?) observation that I’ve rarely spotted in other articles:
Certainly, a level of material wealth is necessary to participate in San Francisco tech culture. Very few pointed to the elephant in the room of assumed wealth: “People behave as if we all make kind of the same.” To forge the type of social connections necessary to move into the upper echelons of the tech scene requires being able to take part in group activities, travel to conferences, and work on personal projects. This requires middle- to upper-class wealth, which filters out most people.
The result of this mythology is that it denies the role of personal connections, wealth, background, gender, race, or education in an individual’s success.
I’m already a big fan of Chris Coyer over at CSS Tricks, but I think he outdid himself with his work on this article over at 24 Ways. It’s possibly the best completely from scratch introduction to the Grunt task manager (which is essential to my daily workflow) that I’ve seen. Now when I’ve got coworkers or friends that ask what the hell Grunt is, I point them to this article first.
Mark Harris writing for Grantland:
So, as a means of guesswork, right now it makes more sense to look at the voters than at the movies. The Academy is divided by branch — actors, writers, producers, sound people, composers, and so on — but thinking of Oscar voting as tribalism-by-profession often leads to fallacies like “Editors like movies with a lot of editing in them,” and it doesn’t tell you much about how Best Picture nominees emerge. Think of the Academy instead as a group of about half a dozen voting blocs divided by taste and predilection. This is who they are — and who’s targeting them.
There’s been countless articles on adapting a responsive design to make web sites mobile friendly. But what about in the opposite direction? What happens when you need to take a traditionally fixed width web site at 960px and make it look great on a 27 inch monitor. Designer Mike Pick goes through a few examples at A List Apart, both good and bad, to see what what works best.
I can’t say Scout Tafoya’s video essay defending Alien 3 won me over on that film based on memory; I found the tone and screenplay way too dark and nihilistic. But given what director David Fincher has done since, from Fight Club to The Social Network, makes me really want to rewatch this soon. It’s been over a decade since my last viewing.
There’s been a lot written regarding the PS4 post paunch, but a lot, especially the much hyped (and scored) review over at Polygon was far too premature. We’re just too early to know how these consoles will shake out. But Dan Solberg over at Kill Screen Daily has the right balance. There’s a few soft statements on what clearly stands out (e.g. the PS4’s focus on gaming, sharing, the inconspicuousness of the hardware) and a great analogy: buying a PS4 today is like “sitting in a waiting room”:
To purchase the console at launch is to subscribe to a patient stakeout with the promise of payout sometime down the line. A new Uncharted game has been announced, and both The Witness and the new Infamous game show tremendous potential, but you can’t play them this year. It’s no wonder that devotees are whipped up in a religious fervor about the new “console war” when they’ve chosen sides based mostly on faith.