I picked a pretty opportune moment to start writing for Unwinnable: it was the site’s “Death Week,” and if there is one thing I love to think about, it’s death.

One night I finally settled on an idea for “Death Week,” drank some beers, and wrote an article. It’s like a much shorter version of some of the longest articles I’ve done, so it was an interesting experiment. I really enjoyed writing it! I was comparatively concise!

You can read it at its real home, Unwinnable, or you might read it at Kotaku, where the heroic Kirk Hamilton has republished it. I recommend reading it at Unwinnable if only because I wrote it specifically for Unwinnable, but at Kotaku there is the benefit of the influx of comments. I love this. I already know what my article sounds like, so the real interest, for me, will be in what others say. When there are all these simultaneities in experience, I get really happy. So far the comments are really inspiring.

Finally—and I mentioned his article before, but—Mark Serrels’ piece for Kotaku Australia went a long way in influencing the piece I wrote, too. When I described his article last week, I started talking about my fear of kids, and this has probably continued to haunt me till now.

Related posts:

1. “Daily” Linksplosion: experiential games writing

There’s something anachronistically stylized—very late-80s/early-90s, I mean—about the forced perspective in this 1998 Game Boy Camera ad. Like, why is his hand way up here when the rest of his body is way over there? I don’t know.

The print ad for Girl Talk: the CD-ROM Game of Truth or Dare was what really gave me the heebie-jeebies, though. “It’s just like life but with better graphics,” the ad copy touts. Oh, dear. Worse, if I am interpreting correctly, there is single-player mode. So you are a 12-year-old girl playing Truth or Dare, at your desk, alone. That’s… well, it sounds a lot like my preteen years, OK, but my mother really tried her best to not encourage that type of loneliness.

I have the 1990 edition of the Girl Talk board game (I have it right here, actually), which was really only a pinker redesign of the original 1988 Girl Talk. Since my own girlhood, the game has been rehabbed as Hannah Montana Girl Talk, That’s So Raven Girl Talk, and—yes, I saw it in a Toys ‘R Us—Bratz Girl Talk. (Up-to-the-minute variants on Truth or Dare include “Girl Talk Sassy Stix” and Girl Talk Sparkle Spots.”

So I am staring at this ad for PC multimedia Girl Talk and I’m just like, I have no idea whether that were a good idea.

This video has been around for maybe a day and a half, tops—in Internet Time, it’s already months old—but I really enjoyed its not-too-malicious dramatic reenactment of the dumbest, most interesting Holiday Shopping Nightmare human interest story ever told in 2011.

Also, Revision3’s Anthony Carboni is nowhere near jacked enough to play Paul, the villain in this melodrama, and this bit of miscasting is charming all on its own. (Kotaku and Escapist have the full deets, but the video might be enough.)

There are a lot of things about this I don’t understand. I don’t quite understand why “Dave,” the unhappy customer, forwarded his ongoing, charged email exchange to Mike Krahulik (“Gabe” of Penny Arcade, AKA the hotheaded one), except that Dave needed some muscle on his side. Mike tried his best to mediate, which is weird enough anyway, but there was little reasoning with “Paul,” the erstwhile giant of PR (whether he is even a PR guy is up for debate) who until recently had mishandled the marketing for some weird video game peripheral. Which, if you are wondering, did not ship in time for the holidays, and how dare you email Paul about this, Dave.

In a way I do feel bad for Paul. When a shipment is trapped in customs, you might feel helpless, especially when the holdup is not your fault. You can’t get frustrated with other people, though. Like, you just can’t.

So it turns out Paul might be a little bit of a nutjob; unsurprisingly, Paul no longer has a job.

And yet, and yet. There is so much pleasure—so much schadenfreude!—to be derived from this entire Greek tragedy, and I’m trying to wrap my head around why I’m getting off on it, along with the rest of the mob. It’s just so much fun to see a juiced-up marketing guy finally get peed on, isn’t it?

But why do we even feel that way?

Er. Most games journalists have such a distaste for PR people—please, stop me if this isn’t a hard-and-fast rule—maybe because we often get stuck rewriting press releases as pretend-news. Sure, I’ve had misunderstandings; I’ve had tiffs. Ugh, marketing. Ugh.

Why the disdain, though? Most PR people are authentically very nice! Obsequious sometimes, sure, if they’re doing their job. Pesky? All right. And it does seem like some of the girls exercise and drink vodka-sodas and wear tight pants and go clubbing after work (sorry!). But no PR person has ever really made my life miserable. In fact, PR people have split cabs with me, asked me about my job and my life, and taken me to dance clubs. Like I’m a swan-in-waiting! Or the ugly sorority sister, I’m not sure which. So there’s this palpable cultural divide, but PR people do go out of their way to not be jerks. I think back on the inventive ways I’ve maligned PR people—they try to be so nice, and you can get away with murder, hilarious murder—and in retrospect I know who the real jerk is.

I am struggling, in fact, to think of even one marketing person I’ve ever sincerely disliked as a human being, and the answer is, Me, Just Me, Anytime I Ever Did Anything that Felt Like Marketing, Even in Passing. God, can I be passive-aggressive. (The other ugly reality is, a lot of professional games journos, the married ones [which is impressive in itself; I think very few journalists manage to stay married], when suddenly faced with unemployment—and I am describing people for whom the financial dangerousness of freelancing is not an option, because there is a house and all these mouths to feed—will move swiftly and directly and invariably into the arms of PR, or marketing, or community-management, or whatever can crush a writer’s dignity readily and wholly.)

For my own part, I can only think of one industry email exchange that ever even approached rudeness. Long ago, a famous video game developer, in keeping with the spirit of his ‘pose’, contacted me to “get the ball rolling” in an email that was flip and obnoxious. I was actually kind of giddy when I received this email—certainly not offended, because I myself have hammered out some peevish emails to bosses—but I also didn’t know where to begin with my reply. So I… didn’t… write… back. I didn’t write this famous important dude back! The next morning, I received a second email, and this one was apologetic, deferential, and over-polite. And I was giggling as I wrote a very professional reply, but I was also very “Oh, no! This guy thinks I’m mad at him! That’s awful!”

And lately, the only strongly-worded email I’ve sent was to a company that sells and ships dog ornaments. Dog ornaments. These were sculpted ceramic dogs, intended to be looped onto little paperclip-hooks. I was writing on my mother’s behalf, of course. I did not receive a strongly-worded email in kind; I fixed that ish right up. (No, my mother did not owe money for a dog ornament. How dare they.)

What I am saying is, Paul is anomalous. He is nothing like the average PR person, as the average PR person tends to be very nice. Or indie developers, who have to do their own PR, they tend to be very nice also. I don’t think Paul is representative of games culture at all?

Oh, some people are willfully bombastic—even twerpy—and yeah, I’ve emailed threats that I cowrote with my legal person up in corporate, but even those were, I don’t know, nice? They were nice, measured, understanding, compassionate legal threats. (Of course I would think I’m “nice,” but seriously, now. Nothing good has ever come of an email sent in a hurry.)

I am trying to wrap my noggin around my own schadenfreude, and I think the word I’m looking for is “horror.”

Many writers, for instance, are horrified at the very thought of PR—it’s the machine that kills artisticalness! or whatever—and they project that horror as a type of disdain. But PR people are paid to be nice. If you have ever been a CM or worked retail, you know how difficult it is to be paid to be nice. You will kill yourself trying to stay nice. This weirdo, Paul? He’s gaily breaking every marketing rule. That is horrifying. Why is it so horrifying?

And it’s great fun, almost always, to crucify every socially aberrant behavior.

Which is not to say that “Paul” is in the right—he isn’t, and for the love of God, he should maybe pursue a course other than marketing, some course that won’t tax his writing skills, say—but again, why do I hate Paul so much?

Why do we all hate Paul?

As Mike Krahulik tells it, it’s because Paul is a “bully.” Oooh. We hate bullies. I really hate bullies. I, too, wish bullies would lose their jobs, exactly the way Paul has lost his job, publicly and cruelly. But bullying is not aberrant in certain professions; rather, bullying can be the hatter of success. Few people have gotten far on “nice.”

But we are sitting here on the Internet at all because we believe in the Internet’s ability, when speaking in one chorus, to invert the social hierarchy, whether to recognize RAW TALENT that otherwise wouldn’t be acknowledged, or to topple bullies and give them what-for. That hope is why I boarded the Internet in 1993, as a miserable preteen, and I bet that is part of the reason you are here now. We champion underdogs.

But when I was briefly a CM I discovered how easy it is to suddenly become the “bully” in any given narrative—this is to say, to become the person at whom the rest of the Internet is angry. It is a surprising position to find oneself in. And while it feels interminable and is forever googleable, it thankfully does not last.

I think I’m talking about this because Dave, in the Kotaku comments, became so apologetic. (This might be due, in part, to Paul’s apology.) Dave never intended his customer-service complaint to explode the way it did, now that we all hate Paul. Has Dave ruined Paul’s life? Dave wonders; Dave worries. Dave worries about becoming our champion. Dave worries about the way we have all seized on Paul.

Paul isn’t a nice guy. Paul shouldn’t even be in marketing. The world is full of not-nice guys; less so, marketing has some not-nice people, people I myself have never chanced to meet.

Still, maybe Dave is right to worry about us.

Update: Owen Good of Kotaku took the same stance as I did, only stronger, and the backlash in the comments—-calling for his op/ed to be “unpublished”!—-is so extreme, I cannot even.

Sierra is pleased to present this living Christmas card. It is intended to help you demonstrate the color and sound capabilities possible with today’s personal computers while promoting the Christmas spirit within your store.

As an added bonus, you may customize this program each time you run it with a message of your own. This allows you to advertise your sale items, or to wish your customers a Merry Christmas in your own words.

This program is hard disk installable and is meant to be run in the morning and left running all day.

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I stand by my initial, glowing review of Glitch, for the most part, but I injected it with some lovey-dovey romance that now only feels disingenuous. Anytime I accidentally scroll past my Glitch review, I feel little stabs. So in the interest of truthfulness, I need to revise.

A week after I wrote that thing, we got into a weird fight. We were supposed to go on a date, which was going to be nice—we had been playing a lot of Glitch together, instead of working or hugging, and we never really got out and did anything nice for ourselves.

And I mean, he and I were playing a lot of Glitch. I can’t remember when I was so addicted to a game. (1993?)

Instead of being a metaphor for intimacy, maybe it became a stand-in for intimacy: just a young couple, late at night, sitting across the room from each other, typing more than talking. Or maybe we stopped playing as a team, because it was easier to wander off—an “every man for himself” sort of thing. It wasn’t like Portal 2 multiplayer; it wasn’t like collaborative play in Terraria. (Call of Duty is supposedly the number-one relationship-ruiner, since you were wondering.)

So I was getting dressed for our date while he waited. I don’t know why I was so nervous. I asked him, twice, to stop pacing. The first time was a joke. The second time I mentioned it, he shouted something and made for the front door. And then he stood there, giving me a chance to apologize to him. He stood across the room, and then he came very close to me and said something, and waited. I don’t remember what he said—I couldn’t hear him anymore—and I didn’t say anything.

I was so rattled. And I walked off. Then I heard the door slam.

I ran into the street in my socks, calling, but he wasn’t there.

It was a non-fight, until I did that thing girls do. I cried awhile, and then I got out my cell phone.

Ladies! Don’t do this, ladies! Don’t text angry things while you’re panicked! “Who do you think you are?” you might ask someone you supposedly love so much. “Why do you always do this?” you might lie.

I was really furious now, so I, uh, I moved out of my little treehouse in Tii Quarter, in Glitch.

Oh, how stupid. That’s what I thought to do? To go, “Boy, howdy, I’ll show this guy I mean business by moving out of a virtual place.”

But we had been operating only in metaphors for a few weeks, which is not healthy.

And I went from apartment to apartment in Glitch, looking for a new one, keeping one wary eye on the real estate listings, worried someone else was going to buy my treehouse and its two chickens and its crops and trees and pig because, OK, I just wasn’t sure I was making the right decision.

And I realized I regretted it—that there was no better place, in-game, for me—and so I bought my treehouse back for more than I’d sold it.

And I logged back in, once, maybe a few days later, and he was gone. He wasn’t there.

He’d moved out of his little treehouse next door, and someone else was already living in it.

So. That was the last time I logged into Glitch.

I mean, I leveled my character on my phone sometimes, thinking maybe something would change between us. I’d see that I had finished learning one skill, and so I’d tap to learn the next skill, and that was all.

I ran into a friend, and this friend asked me whether we had found an apartment together yet—and he meant in life, not in Glitch—and I put my hands over my face and shook, like such a girl.

He played a few weeks more. I couldn’t. Glitch was only fun with two people, for me. When I was up late at night, and he was fast asleep, I was still playing Glitch with him in mind, trying to get one level past him. I was only playing because we were playing.

Last night I finally deleted my Glitch account. It was not easy. It was not easy.

This is probably the dumbest, lamest thing I have ever written. I don’t know how to make it incisive.

Related posts:

1. What ‘Glitch’ can teach us about being alive

Put your pants back on and take that seat over there. Good, thanks. Let’s hash some things out.

Let me start by reminding you that I’m a girl. Not only that, I’m an angry girl.

Joel Johnson, Kotaku’s fairly-recently-appointed Editorial Director, posted a little article titled “The Equal Opportunity Perversion of Kotaku.” (Evidently, Johnson has been taking a lot of flack for Kotaku’s new editorial direction[s], which is increasingly fluid and interesting.)

And I enjoyed the post on its own terms because, let’s face it, it is filed under a blog category titled “Fan Service.” So the post was very conspicuously directed at Kotaku’s “old guard”: here, of course, I mean the Internet’s loathsomely entitled commenters, who are mostly white and heterosexual, and male, who might fulfill almost every possible permutation of “ordinary” and “normal,” and who tend to shriek for the smelling salts anytime a lady or queer struggles into their line-of-sight. (This is a terrible stereotype to perpetuate, yes, yes, and Gawker’s own comments sections do a bang-up job of perpetuating it, not for any fault of its editors.) But let’s be coolheaded. When you deal with that type of readership, you have to be very caring and compassionate and patient, even when you don’t want to be, and so you assert things in a debilitatingly accessible way.

“What’s happening to my precious Kotaku?” the old guard must have screamed through the tips of its nervous little fingers, illuminated as one in the glow of the laptop’s screen.

So Johnson defended all of Kotaku’s editorial decisions, and his argument was compelling, and if you aren’t going to just look at the post I’d better do my best to recount it:

Johnson did anticipate that some readers would have difficulty reconciling Kotaku’s overt legacy of, say, cosplay galleries, with Kotaku’s now-implicit stance on genderjamming. So naturally, he combined both arguments into a single blog entry. Maybe he shouldn’t have tried. Listen boys, he might as well have said, you can screech about “what’s with the scary minorities on my video game blog all of a sudden” as much as you like, but it’s about as ‘normal’ to love tits wrapped in cosplay as it is to be ‘into’ anything else. That was his argument to these folks in a nutshell.

And Johnson posited this assertion in a way that heteronormative fellows who have never had their realities rocked might understand, and he pursued his argument to its logical conclusion, which is that we all fetishize something—like it or not, I’ve seen Dan Savage make this exact same argument in his columns about sex and love—and maybe you fetishize cars, computers, video games, politics, girls dressed up as Soul Calibur characters, chubby people, Japanese things, French things, your own sex, whips and chains, quoting Jesus when you do it, whatever. And if you’re fetishizing—as opposed to exoticizing, right—what’s ‘normal’ versus ‘abnormal’ is kind of beside the point. You’re into what you’re into, and that is in some way neurologically hardwired.

Besides! Johnson sagely added, the site is actually called Kotaku, which riffs on the word otaku, which lends the notion that it’s, uh, cool to be into whatever you’re into. So let’s all be good people; let’s not fracture in dissent. Thanks!

Johnson posted all of this, not as an editor, but as a moderator. He explained all the sides of everything that has ever been, ever, just as well as he could. Maybe it got a little mangled in translation. Sure.

He probably posted all this and then ducked for cover, and with plenty of reason: every pocket of enthusiast readership he could have humanly offended was sure to let him know.

My first issue with “An Open Letter to Kotaku’s Joel Johnson”—which was published by the Border House, a blog you should absolutely add to your Feedburner, and please don’t think I am assembling a firing squad aimed at either them or at the letter’s goodhearted author, Mattie Brice—is the title. The title! Because: where does our issue lie? With Joel Johnson? Or Kotaku? I mean, “Kotaku’s Joel Johnson”?

If the issue is only with Kotaku, oh, boy, you’re coming a few years late to the party.

Kotaku is a Gawker-style website—what am I saying, it literally is a Gawker site!—and when you aggregate interesting factoids, you’re going to be slumming in the lowest common denominator’s neighborhood, always. No, please, stick with me. I hate to cop to my own subjectivity, but true story: since June, I have been writing for a celebrity gossip website for money, and it’s honestly the best gig I’ve had in maybe my whole life. I applied for the job a month before my (adoptive) dad’s death: I can write what I want usually; it super-coordinates with my life’s schedule and time commitments; I’ve actually been reading this gossip website since 2005ish; I love my coworkers; I am sometimes proud of my work because I am sneaking some pretty progressive stuff onto the site, probably to everyone’s horror; I actually replaced Molls McAleer, which is kind of cool; and all the rest. But I really do have to post nudie pics if I am the first to a “story.” It can be gut-wrenching.

I remember the first time I told my mother I was about to put a photo of a penis onto the Internet, and I think she could see I was basically begging her—her! This 80-year-old, immobile, mostly-blind, mostly-deaf, just-widowed and bereaved Christian woman on dialysis—to excuse me. Absolve me, please! And yet it’s just how that machine works, because I really do write for a celebrity gossip aggregator. Yes, duty calls! There are moral and ethical questions every day, and some days, there are even invasions of privacy and hacked cell phones and Scarlett Johansson’s ass, and it’s my first time ever being on the uglier side of certain ethical web dilemmas, all because I was the first of my coworkers to stumble across Scarlett Johansson’s ass that morning.

And so I do have to talk to my mother, every single time. Time and money, by necessity, have become important to me. Maybe I really am a bad person. But good God, it’s my job to post asses just as politely and ethically as I can, and I do my damnedest to personally mitigate that job requirement with feminist leanings and progressive politics, and I try to be satisfied with myself. Yes, open-letter author Mattie Brice, we do seek to be absolved, all of us. I only added these paragraphs because I wanted to. Let’s move on from this aspect, I hope.

So perhaps, at an aggregator site, you’re going to get a lot of facts wrong; you’re working fast; you’re going to post headlines as they siphon into your RSS reader, journalistic integrity be damned. That is how a certain style of paid writing works. No, I don’t know what to do about it. I don’t. (In acknowledging this, I am actively agreeing with Mattie Brice’s fine open letter, OK.)

Now, in my old life, where I worked at a big-budge video game website—one of the biggest, for a time!—we might have collectively rolled our eyes at Kotaku a little. We did! Us! We did! All of us at some gigantic corporate-owned website, where cosplay galleries were all the rage! Because when Kotaku was breaking a story, we knew we had to go back and fact-check every freaking headline, and we were left picking the wheat from the chaff. But the truth is, that big-budge video game website I worked for was waaaay-aaaaay less progressive than Kotaku from the very get-go, in part because we scarcely covered fringe culture—even though the real weirdos at work, who were into Game Center CX, independently developed games, anime, and video games that only released to Famicom, were trying so, so hard to cover those things.

But then, at Kotaku, something much more interesting started to happen? I mean, Kotaku has always been interesting, but when Stephen Totilo joined the ranks—and to be sure, there were already some pretty fine writers at Kotaku, but when Stephen Totilo signed on, as Deputy Editor, right under Crecente in the hierarchy of importance—I sincerely doubt I was alone when I arched an eyebrow. He’s a really fine critic, and thoughtful; his reputation well precedes him. The hell? I remember thinking. What is Stephen Totilo doing, defecting to Kotaku? I doubt the “old guard,” Kotaku’s longstanding readership, even understood what they were getting when they got Stephen Totilo.

The capable and artful Leigh Alexander had already been around awhile, a goodly time before Totilo, as a columnist. She has long contributed editorials to Kotaku even as she constantly relays these very developed news stories for Gamasutra. If you somehow aren’t familiar with her byline, she’s all business, but then, too, she’s the Average Jane guys love and girls adore, and even that assessment shortchanges the woman. But suddenly, suddenly! Here comes Kirk Hamilton as a Features Editor. The man worked at Paste, OK, but something fascinating and quirky and helpful and truthful has been happening to his writing for a long while, and here he is now, devastating Kotaku with his truth bullets. (No, how could I be subjective? I love these writers.)

I’m not sure of the exact timeline, but by the time Joel Johnson signed on, he was so totally screwed: something has been happening to Kotaku for a little while now.

Their white male readership has noticed, and they have taken aim.

Kotaku’s Joel Johnson? Kotaku’s Joel Johnson?

When I met him, he was Gizmodo’s Joel Johnson, telling the world about hip, hip cell phones. And then, suddenly, he wasn’t. Instead, he was Joel Johnson creating a communications network for victims of Hurricane Katrina. A little while later, he was Wired’s Joel Johnson; then he was BoingBoing’s Joel Johnson. Who is this Kotaku’s Joel Johnson?

What I’m saying is, you have very goodheartedly and inadvertently made it personal. I think your issue is not with Joel Johnson. It is with Kotaku, a job that the man was grandfathered into, and Johnson only just now has a say in its coverage. And here is the heart: you are confusing the person with the job’s role.

Moreover, Joel Johnson is strong enough to change the site’s editorial direction over time. So wait. Just freaking wait. I have done my very, very best to explain machines to you; this is how machines work. It’s ugly, and I hate it, and I’m sorry. But wait.

You can say that changes in Kotaku’s coverage aren’t coming fast enough. That’s fine, but it also defies the point of his Kotaku article, wherein Johnson is actually addressing a cultural whiplash, admonishing longstanding readers for their claims that changes are instead coming too quickly.

And here we have arrived at the crux of my ire: Joel Johnson is on your side. What side? Your side. Aformentioned writer Mattie Brice (I love you!) accuses Johnson of “handwaving,” of a lack of willingness to discuss “the issue,” and I just cannot begin to grok that. I might offend you with this, but Kotaku has never been for minority groups. No, I know, and I hate that, too, and I always have. But it’s changing. Let it change. Kotaku cannot, will not, be a “safe space” tomorrow. And that’s maybe the real point: Kotaku has always tried to maintain its finger on the pulse, and the fact that Kotaku is changing tells you things are changing.

P.S. May I remind you how entirely different this whole thing is from that dumb dickwolves thing, not that aaaaaaanyone has confused the two. But if they did? Remember: in posting, Johnson was opening up a forum for conversation and understanding, which means his intentions were different from the beginning.

• From Johnson’s Twitter, here’s an interesting deconstruction of both sides of the argument.

• ETA: Also, Jayson Young supports and encourages both Brice and Johnson for each stepping up to the plate.

Breakout, based on a concept by Atari founder Nolan Bushnell, was designed by Steve Jobs (with pal Steve Wozniak doing all the heavy lifting, of course). The game was released in May 1976, just two months before Jobs and Wozniak unveiled their first creation as Apple Computer.

Here are some game-winning tips:

Rubens’ Tube Zelda from Brad Silcox on Vimeo.

Young Princess Zelda by Salvador Ramirez Madriz (via Gamma Squad)

So yesterday I decided it was time to get serious, grow some professionalism, and brand my Twitter page as if I were suddenly some sort of social media maverick. And wow, what a bad fit. I don’t think putting my email address on my Twitter page was the right decision for me at all. It’s just so douchey, right?

My friend Chris has said to me—and I think this might be true—that my tweets are all “snark and mortal peril.” Ugh, I hate when Chris is right. I generally tweet only when I’m annoyed, or if something has just almost hit me. I can’t brand that stuff! And I will need to be extra-careful with Google+, because there are only so many ways I can announce that I’m angry before everyone in my “circles” “mutes” me. We’ll see.

Nonetheless, while I was working on my Twitter background in Photoshop, I started thinking of the 1982 short film Arcade Attack, which is all about how Space Aliens are Invading the City and Murdering Pinball.

Inspired (sort of), I found a Manhattan skyline, complete with a Radiator Building—which looked more like a Chrysler Building until I sawed the top off—and then I grunged everything up using Eduardo Recife’s Photoshop brushes. The Invaders are just dingbats, anyway, so I basically did zero work.

My new Twitter background, as I discovered seconds after I uploaded it, makes for a terrible Twitter background. So I debranded it, rebranded it, and uploaded it as downloadable desktop wallpaper for you! I don’t know who on Earth would ever want Infinite Lives desktop wallpaper, so I’m sorry.

Here’s the good news! The image’s dimensions are 1920×1440, which is the size of nobody’s monitor, so if you clip the top of the image to fit your widescreen monitor, it’s debranded again like magic.

On my MacBook, using the “Fill Screen” desktop setting:

• TL;DR: Here, have some wallpaper.

Skruffy based the kits on his own resin sculpt, and—well, see for yourself, how amazing his Pip-Boy is:

My favorite part is the Pip-Boy’s “LCD,” which is just a little pane of plexiglass illuminated with LEDs. With the light diffused through a slip of paper, and with a green gel on top, the screen gets that authentically murky glow. (Don’t even get me started on the hinge.)

Also, I really admire that Skruffy took the long way around. Because some people have simply been cramming iPhones into their cardboard Pip-Boys, OK. And while running iOS 3000 (or better yet) is fine and dandy, physically putting your iPhone into your PipBoy is, just, what?

I am saying this as a person who is trying to figure out what to do with her spare iPhone, in fact. Hm.

Anyway. What was I talking about? Ah, yes: craftsmanship.

• The RPF – Pip-Boy 3000 Build-Up

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2. Felted Game Boy case for your mobile phone

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2. Daily Linksplosion: Monday, November 16, 2009
3. Daily Linksplosion: Wednesday, February 25, 2009

• GameSetWatch – Mister Raroo at E3 2011: I Need a Cup of Coffee
  Mister Raroo rates E3 2011’s most promising game titles. Special guest appearances by Attract Mode’s Adam Robezzoli!
• OMG Posters! – American McGee’s Alice: Madness Returns Prints Now Online!
  Prints from Gallery 1988’s ‘American McGee’s Alice’ exhibit now available
• Sprite Stitch – Arcade Button Light Switches
  Please, no button-mashing.

Follow us on Delicious! »

• EPICponyz – Pac-Man: Alternative Art
  Pac-Man, you big bully! Stop punching Inky McFly!
• Troy Hunt .com – A brief Sony password analysis
  Via waxy.org: "Two thirds of people with accounts at both Sony and Gawker reused their passwords." More intriguing, though, is the catalogue of the 25 most common passwords. What do "maggie," "peanut," "princess," "sunshine," and "cookie" have in common, I wonder. My guess? They’re all the names or nicknames of precious children and/or pets.
• Super Punch – Video of someone playing Zelda on the Wii U
  Hi again! It’s me, and I’m still wearing my fanlady hat. IGN has hands-on footage with the Wii U tech demos directly from the E3 floor. And I’d be lying if I said these videos didn’t make me tingle.

Follow us on Delicious! »

Related posts:

1. Daily Linksplosion: Thursday, May 28, 2009

Oh, great. Great. In August 2005 I predicted the Nintendo “Revolution” would feature a wireless touchscreen controller that might double as a portable, handheld game system—a little like the Dreamcast’s VMU, but 800x better. And what’d we end up with? Glorified television remotes, you guys.

At Tuesday’s E3 press conference, Nintendo confirmed persistent rumors: the Wii’s successor, the “Wii U,” intends to make waves with its touchscreen controller. Is this genius? Yes. Could Nintendo have released it six years ago, far predating the iPhone’s ubiquity? Yeah, no, OK, probably not.

I’m kind of a fanlady, sure, but this thing is exceptional. It’s as if its designers took a Wii Classic Controller—which, thanks to the slow perfection of several generations, is a perfectly calibrated configuration of buttons, dual analog sticks, and a directional gamepad—and yanked at both ends until there was room for an iPod Touch in the middle. Add a microphone, a camera, subtle stereo speakers, and God knows what else, and they’ve cooked up something formidably functional.

Can we talk about me again, though? Can we go back to my prescient, six-year-old doodle again? (My doodle is now old enough to draw its own doodles.) This inane, jokey mock-up was COMPLETE WITH TILT ACCELEROMETER ACTION, AND ALSO, A CLIP-ON STEERING WHEEL. Today, clip-on racing wheels actually exist! For Wii Remotes! My dream became a reality! But does anyone remember my prediction? Absolutely not. This E3 game = totes bogus.

P.S. I also anticipated a cooking game where players would make frying pan “flipping” gestures. No one cares. I know.

• Wired.com – GameLife – Hands On: Nintendo’s ‘Wii U,’ Touchscreen Controller Could Radically Change Games

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When you play games on your iPod Touch, do you find yourself, erm, all thumbs (so to speak)? The Fling mini is here to correct that!

The mini, based on the original Fling for iPad, is a pair of “analog” joysticks that suction onto a smartphone’s touchscreen, grafting a physical controller right atop the onscreen one. Smart! And since the joysticks provide “haptic feedback”—that’s leetspeak for “gamefeel”—you might discover that these joysticks offer just what your iPhone (or Android) hack-and-slashes have been missing.

And though the joysticks certainly take up a whole lot of touchscreen real estate, the designers promise that, once the stick itself is backlit, it becomes nigh transparent. (Its designers also promise that the joysticks are “compatible with hundreds of great games,” but by all appearances the Fling mini has, so far, been tested against just seven. Oh, well.)

The Fling mini doesn’t appear to be in production quite yet, but you can pre-order each pair for US$24.95. Ah, the high price of high design.

• Ten One Design – Fling mini Joystick via TDW Geeks – Smartphone Joystick of the Day

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