Luke Alexander's blog

I’ve resolved that this year will be the year I join in with NaNoWriMo. For the uninitiated, this is a global month of novel-writing, where everyone who has at some point considered writing a novel is challenged to actually write one during the month of November. Last year they had more than 119,000 participants.

The goal is to get to 50,000 words by the end of the month – the “Great Frantic Novel” – with the idea being to concentrate less on crafting the perfect phrase and more on actually writing a novel.

I’ll be updating my profile at NaNoWriMo and posting updates here if anything exciting happens.

Wish me luck!

I couldn’t let today pass without marking it in some way – though certainly not as expertly as XKCD has done.

My first ever web presence was on Geocities, and I can still remember the excitement of having contributed something on a global level in a way few people had ever done before.  As time goes on and the web relentlessly increments its version numbers, it’s important to remember how significant and emotionally impactful this was for the first ‘mainstream’ users of the web.

Geocities – with its free accounts, easy page creation and ‘anyone can be a web publisher’ attitude – is a shrine to that, and in a way it is the first ever global, virtual ruin.  A reminder of how innovation is an evolutionary process.

When Yahoo! bought it it was already one of the web’s running jokes.  In less than a decade, its naive, optimistic attitude and steadfastedly Web 1.0 attitude had become hopelessly out of date, and it didn’t even have the geeky elitism of Usenet and IRC or the early adopter community of Livejournal to redeem it.

So RIP Geocities.  I can’t help feeling something should go permanently in its place to mark the occasion.  Preferably surrounded with BLINK tags…

(I can’t remember the exact URL of my Geocities site, but I remember it was in the Area51 ‘neighbourhood’, that it had a purple background, and orange text, all achieved through judicious use of TD, TR, BGCOLOR and FONT FACE tags.)

Update: xkcd has now taken down its tribute; sorry if you missed it

I try to avoid commenting publically on work I am doing – this, after all, is a personal forum. And, of course, because a blog such as this should be uncluttered by professional bias, objective in its considerations and subjective in its opinions.

None of which matters for this particular topic, as the game is so good I really don’t have anything but praise to give it.  Of course I’m sure I could find something to nit-pick, but as an entertainment experience, it pretty much ticks all of my boxes.

Last week I went along for part of the Uncharted 2 European Media Tour, with Arne and Justin from Naughty Dog, the developers of the game.

I thought I’d share some things I learned or gleaned during the tour.

1. Playing (or even watching) Uncharted 2 on a full-size cinema screen is AWESOME.  The Naughty Dog guys played through ten minutes of the game and the audience (including myself) was completely awestruck.
2. My girlfriend isn’t the only one to have loved sitting through the entire first game.  It’s such a popular game for onlookers that they’ve even come up with a new ‘very easy’ mode to try to encourage those people to pick up the controller for this outing.
3. The motion capture and voice acting really are taken into consideration all the way through the game – even to the extent that they capture all voice while the actor performs the action the character will perform in the game.  Having played it with this in mind, it’s really obvious, and makes me think of all the times I’ve watched a character half-heartedly soliloquise while sprinting away from an explosion, and what a difference it makes.