lowspec

Lowspec’s been on the back burner while I’ve been scrambling to manage a multitude of other projects. Hence the post dump that will follow.

What you’re about to see is the online detritus of several weeks’ worth of reading and writing, deceptively post-dated so topics are at least in chronological order. It won’t be pretty, but at least I’ll have it all here for later reference.

The machinima is entertaining, but not nearly so much as the prose that inspired it, ostensibly penned by a 9-year-old.

Via Kotaku:

Via the Rock Band album creation method Bill Harris mentioned last week:

The name of the band is Ban Khor Sign Language, the title of their first album is “Invite Them to Yourself,” and here’s the cover of their soon-to-be multiplatinum release (photo by Assis K. Chat):

It’s remarkable how unintended shades of meaning weave their way into these odd little associations. Take away the whole rock album aspect, and it’s still a fascinating excercise.

I do love Flickr’s random photo page. I hadn’t seen it before, but now I’ll be checking it regularly.

…I would keep this gorgeous music “visualizer,” apparently a feature of the 2.10 firmware update, up and running all the time.

Over at Gamasutra, developer Q-Games’ technology chief James McLaren says this about the console’s latest little gewgaw, appropriately titled Gaia:

This representation of the earth is a 3D model with some shaders and SPU trickery going on. We tried to accurately model the earth’s atmosphere and have all the correct highlights on the oceans, etc. The texture data is sourced from the NASA Blue Marble project.

They have some data that they’ve patched together from hundreds of satellite passes over the earth, which is really top-notch quality, as you can see. We really owe NASA a debt of gratitude for the data, as without it we wouldn’t be able to produce something that looks this good.

Very, very cool, even if it doesn’t actually react to music. I’d love to have something like this spinning on my desktop.

I’ve recently had the pleasure of contributing regular op-ed and review features for the Escapist Daily. I’ll be updating lowspec with (backdated) links to these articles in the next day or two. I’ll also try to be more regular with updates here.