Author Archives: joshua

Blade Runner, Laid Flat on a Giant Cube

September 2, 2010 – 1:45 pm

BLADE RUNNER revisited >3.6 gigapixels from françois vautier on Vimeo.

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I Am LOLBAT’s Sidekick.

September 1, 2010 – 10:13 pm

By day, I’m mild-mannered game and graphic designer Joshua A.C. Newman. But by night… by night I don a disguise as reasonable as Superman’s and I become…
@JoshuaACNewman!
I post there when a comment doesn’t warrant a blog post.
Not that this warranted a blog post.

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Game Design Studio: Doors (forced) Open!

August 27, 2010 – 10:59 am

I forgot to open up the doors to the Game Design Studio, but young rowdies are already cramming in there, helping each other, so who am I to stop them? If you’ve got something to submit, read the How to Critique post, and join the rest of the class!

Posted in community, game design, information and object design | Comments (0)

Nausicaä of the Valley of Wind

August 26, 2010 – 12:46 pm

There’s an earlier, crappier version of this, and a later, better edit, and I don’t know which one this is. But man, this movie’s good, and the comic is even more wonderful in the ways you’d guess.
I think it’s probably still too scary for my niece, who’s excited about Totoro and the nonscary parts of [...]

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Shock:Retroactive Bundle with Human Contact

August 25, 2010 – 5:28 pm

I don’t know why it didn’t occur to me to do this before: if you own Shock:, send an email to humancontactbundle@glyphpress.com and I’ll send you freed PDFs of the two Human Contact preview editions, both the January one I made for Dreamation and the March one I made for PAX East!
Human Contact is inspired [...]

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Pioneer 1

August 10, 2010 – 12:55 am

I’m really excited to get to see this. $30000 of funding made this entire series (of which $27k+ has been raised — if you like it, donate!).
This is the future of media, everyone. Artists making money making art. I hope it works. I might just fire up Kickstarter to make sure I can afford to [...]

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Human Contact Summer Reading List

August 9, 2010 – 5:17 pm

I’ve read a good number of books leading up to the creation of Human Contact. They’re all about the challenges of interacting between cultures. If you like these books, you’ll probably like the game!

The Telling, by Ursula K. LeGuin
The Left Hand of Darkness, ibid.
The Player of Games, by Iain M. Banks
Use of Weapons, ibid.
Foundation, Isaac [...]

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Alien Contact? The Beginning of the Singularity? Financial Terrorism?

August 5, 2010 – 5:44 pm

My favorite quote from this article, discussing the spontaneous market crash last April:
The trading bots visualized in the stock charts in this story aren’t doing anything that could be construed to help the market. Unknown entities for unknown reasons are sending thousands of orders a second through the electronic stock exchanges with [...]

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The Jank Casters get Shock:ed

August 3, 2010 – 9:42 pm

The Jank Cast crew played Shock: and really dug it. Their game was Human Cloning vs. Aging and Reproduction. It got good and gnarly.
After Granther torturing Granther torturing Granther, I kinda needed a shower.
—Todd
Brilliant scene there, guys. I’m glad you enjoyed it.

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Quantum Computation and the Contactors

August 3, 2010 – 1:06 pm

I’m just now writing the Quantum Computation section of Human Contact, and lo and behold, there’s a really weird article on io9 today about a novel — and frankly paradigm-reshaking — use of the (still impractical) technology.
Quantum computing is interesting for a number of reasons, but the biggest one is that it can solve mathematically [...]

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