never have been—a fan of first-person shooters (at least in part due to motion sickness). So I’m not necessarily up on the latest news in FPS game-dom, but even I’d heard of the anticipation, and disappointment, the release of Duke Nukem Forever generated.
What I hadn’t realized, however, was just how bad it was. Check out this blistering review of the game:
It’s not racy, it’s not funny, and it makes you feel dirty. Every time I put the controller down, I felt the need to rub my hands on my jeans as if the game were making me physically dirty. It’s like watching your uncle tell racist jokes at Thanksgiving and praying someone has the guts to tell him to cut it out, but this time it’s interactive—and you’re the uncle.
Ouch.
to play my mother at Scrabble, you may not know that she is a ruthless trampler of hearts, a destroyer of dreams. I had the bright idea to introduce her to Words with Friends the other day, and now through the wonder of modern technology, she can kick my ass from 2000 miles away.
on my Windows 7 VM. My impressions from 30 seconds with IE9:
- CSS3: Rounded corners, yes. Gradients, no.
- Better, if you can believe this, font rendering than Firefox 4.
If you’re a geek, you’ve probably seen this already. If you’re not, here’s the deal: Internet Explorer 9 will support WOFF, the Web Open Font Format, a technology that allows embedding real fonts in websites. Microsoft commissioned a website from some of the best designers around to showcase the typographic possibilities of the web, and this is it. Simply spectacular. My favorite was Atlantis.
Jeffrey Zeldman wonders why the Japanese, masters of minimalism in all other things, seem to prefer a much more cluttered aesthetic when it comes to websites. (via)
Some of this is immensely useful stuff, though my favorite one isn’t useful for much besides diversion. (via)
A consortium of Japanese railway companies is putting digital billboards that are capable of detecting the age and the gender of people who look at them in train stations in Tokyo. Though the billboards do not immediately update, à la Minority Report, to target the detected face, the information collected can be used to modify the billboards based on the prevalent demographic of passersby at certain times of the day.
DARPA is developing technology that can use the kinetic energy generated by the human body’s movement or the thermal energy generated by the difference in body and ambient temperatures to power batteries for electronic devices like contact lenses that can serve as HUDs or augmented reality devices. My first reaction is whoa. My second is the same as the Slashdot poster, who said: “If I remember the movie correctly, this didn’t turn out so well for the humans.”
It’s gorgeous, of course. And in accordance with the international laws of humor, existentialism and cellular service, the very first call I received on my spanking new iPhone…wait for it…dropped.