Sunday Links #12

Another meaty sert of links for this week. A bunch of interesting stuff has been happening. Commentary will be a bit brief though, since I’m pressed for time.


Oddly enough, the rise of the nerds ™ has become so hilariously mainstream, that the coolest character in a super hero movie are the nerds. Nice to see, considering I self-identify as a nerd. I am wondering though if nerds no longer glorify “jocks” but instead “nerds”. It’s not just about the Hulk, it’s a lot about Banner being a scientist. Regardless of my musings: the movie is indeed as awesome as people say so go watch it. Quick before the heavy meme-ification of the movie spoils you.

Link: “Remove a letter from a Game” Game
Originally found on Reddit by a buddy of mine, the original inspiration dealt with movies. The idea is to remove a letter from the title and use the remaining to come up with a new concept. Obviously hilarious. We spent some time coming up with great ideas of our own, and some of them being interesting on their own. So this thing felt like too cool a creativity tool to pass this up. So here’s my try at doing the same things for games. It immediately deviated into crude jokes (“Ass Effect”) but maybe it can be salvaged. Feel free to join in if you’re on facebook.

Link: Freelancer Pension Petition (german)
There’s a move in government to enforce freelancers to pay money for their pension. This isn’t an especially good idea as freelancers already have a lot of costs to battle with. Forcing this won’t make being a freelancer or entrepeneur easier. So if you’re in Germany feel free to join the petition

Video: Offspring Fling Retro Trailer

The retro vibe is spot on and the best part is how they portrayed Steam.

Link: A MAZE impressions (German)
A few words from various visitors to A MAZE Indie Connect at the german indie blog Indie Inside. I’ve said my share so if you’re curious.

Link: The $10.000.000 Kickstarter
Yes, I’m staying true to my one-kickstarter-link-a-week policy. This time it’s the Pepple E-Paper Watch. It’s broke the 10 million USD barrier and all I can say is “Wow.”

Oh and I guess I’ll have to write a more coherent post about my thoughts on this whole issue.

Video: Video on Fan Art

A video that talks about the relationship of fan art to creatives and content creators. I especially loved the way that the Adventure Time guys used the fan art and the fans reaction to it to feed back into the show.

Link: Badass Bavarian Foods
A hilarious article about German food. She doesn’t get everything right but it’s hilarious. Especially if you’re german.

Link: Urheberrecht, mein Rad (German)
In Germany the debate over copyright has flared up again and there’s lots of words flying around. In my eyes most of this is based on misunderstandings or ignorance on the topic. This satirical article uses the metaphor of the bicycle (that a politician came up with) for copyright to make fun of the “conservative view”. Obviously biased but still hilarious.

Link: Facebook App Store
This is important. Read it.

Video: Mass Effect 3 Indoctrination Theory

Another video on the ME3 indoctrination theory. This time they’ve blown it up to a 84 minute documentation. The effort spent by the fans to believe in anything BUT the ending of ME3 is commendable. Sad, but commendable.

Link: Japan cracking down on Game Mechanics
The Japanese government is looking into making certain F2P game mechanics illegal: a gambling based set collection that is deemed exploitative. Interesting. I can’t say I’m surprised, after all there’s a lot of companies running rampant with the F2P business model and basically abusing their customers. Understandable, because for big companies it often stops to be about the product (if it ever was in the first place) and more about the numbers. Then it’s pretty easy to justify yet another mechanic to squeeze more money out of your players maximize those KPIs. Having the state step in like they did with gambling might be a good thing? Maybe? I’m not sure yet.

Video: Doppler Effect as gesture recognition
A clever team of scientists use the speakers to emit an unhearable sound that the microphone then catches. Thus based on the way it comes back they can recognize gestures. Ingenious.

Music: Puscifier – Humble River

You may know this song from the War for Cybertron Transformers trailer a while back. Execellent song.

Link: Presskit()
From the guys behind Vlambeer comes a tool for Indie Game Devs (and anyone) to quickly and easily set up a good press kit site for the press (d’uh). It looks good from what I can see so far (haven’t tried it out yet). And even if it isn’t perfect I just love the sense of community with the indies – let’s just make this a tool and give it to people for free, cause we can.
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