03.11.10
Posted in casual gaming, seattle, tech, websites at 9:30 am by Zee
Seattle based technology firm Spoon specialize in technology that lets games run instantly from the web without installations. Today they announced the immediate availability of the online IGC and IGF Sandboxes.
The IGC, or Indie Game Challenge, is an annual competition for aspiring game developers to showcase their skills, pitch their games to top publishers and win cash. This year’s winners, Cogs by Lazy 8 Studios in the professional division, and Gear by Team 3 in the non-professional category, each won $100,000 grand prizes.
The Independent Games Festival is an annual event that allows indie game developers to meet, show off their games, learn from and network with their peers and compete for cash prizes. This year’s IGF kicks off March 13 in San Francisco.
Spoon allows users to access these hot new games with a single web click.
“Spoon is pleased to support the independent game development community by offering online versions of the IGC and IGF game competition finalists”, said Spoon CEO Kenji Obata. “These sites demonstrate how Spoon can bring the benefits of instant, single-click launch to full DirectX- and OpenGL-based download titles.”
The IGC and IGF Sandboxes are available free of charge on the web at http://spoon.net/igf and http://spoon.net/igc, respectively.
Rather work on your own games than play someone else’s? Spoon offers a free Spoon Studio tool which allows developers to quickly adapt existing apps for deployment on Spoon.net and Spoon Server. Spoon Server allows enterprises and publishers to host apps on internal servers, manage users and licensing, and view detailed usage analytics. The Spoon.net online app portal, powered by Spoon Server, offers free hosting of hundreds of virtual apps on the web.
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03.10.10
Posted in casual gaming, meta, personal at 12:25 am by Zee
Dear Zynga:
You don’t need me to tell you how successful Farmville is. After all, you already know that it’s the most successful application on Facebook with over 82 million users and over 22 million fans. Farmville users represent more than a fifth of all Facebook users and (at least per The Guardian) one percent of the (real) world’s population. That’s huge.
So huge, in fact, that it can be hard to put a human face on it. Let me help by giving you one: my sixty-something year old mother is a woman who previously left all of her computing to her assistant until she retired, at which point she used her old, slow computer (on dial-up, no less) primarily to look up airfares. Until she discovered online casual gaming, at which point she promptly bought a shiny new computer with all the bells and whistles, signed up for Facebook and started adding apps.
She now calls me on a regular basis to remind me to harvest my crops.
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03.09.10
Posted in Uncategorized at 10:58 pm by Zee
The Independent Games Festival, which opened today in San Francisco, bills itself as a sort of Sundance Festival of independent game development.
Now in its 12th year, the IGF allows indie game developers a chance to get together with professional peers and aspiring applicants into the industry to show off their skills, learn new techniques and technology advances, network and compete for prizes. Highlights of the festival include the Independent Games Summit which includes discussion on such topics as indie game distribution and guerrilla marketing techniques and the IGF Awards, honoring an outstanding set of finalists from all over the world with over $40,000 of prize money for categories including he prestigious Seumas McNally Grand Prize, the Audience Award, and the ‘art game’-centric Nuovo Award.
This year’s IGF Awards ceremony will be streamed live for anyone not able to get down to the festival in person. The ceremony begins Thursday, March 11, at 6:30 pm Pacific time and is available on GameSpot as well as TV network G4.
A complete list of finalists can be seen on the IGF website.
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03.04.10
Posted in theater at 11:17 pm by Zee
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03.01.10
Posted in tech at 2:14 pm by Zee
If, like me, you’re in the market for a new TV, you may want to hold off on buying a new one for a while: Philips and XpanD have hooked up together to provide consumers with co-branded versions of XpanD’s patented pi-cell active 3D glasses with Philips 3D television sets. Gaming and movies are going to be just that much more entertaining now.
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02.16.10
Posted in visual art at 7:07 pm by Zee
Norman Laliberte’ is a North American artist who was born in Massachusetts, raised in Montreal, and educated at the Institute of Design in Chicago where his teachers included the likes of Buckminster Fuller, Groplus, and Mies Van der Rohe. His skills include teaching, painting and illustration. He has written, designed, or illustrated some 35 books, and taught at the Kansas City Art Institute, Boston College, Notre Dame, and the Rhode Island School of Design.
Influenced by such artists as Marc Chagall, Rauschenberg, and Rouault, Laliberte’ has amassed an impressive body of work in his six-decades long career. His work has appeared in hundreds of shows and has been honored by five retrospectives, including at the Chicago Public Library and the Saidye Bronfman Centre in Montreal. His major public works include banners for the 25th anniversary of the Chicago Lyric Opera, aluminum panels for the International Terminal at Logan Airport, and large scale projects for the New York State Bar Association, Standard Oil, IBM and Alcan Corporation.
Next up for the accomplished artist is a new retrospective of his work including textural paintings on tar paper, handmade books and a variety of mixed media pieces. Animals, flowers and various whimsical figures populate his abstract expressionism style.
Laliberte’: 60 Years of Joyful Creation opens March 5 with a Gallery Walk Exhibition and runs through April 9 at Gallery DeNovo in Ketchum.
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Posted in Uncategorized at 6:53 pm by Zee
Happy Fat Tuesday!
Cities all across America celebrate Mardi Gras but no one does it quite like New Orleans. Huge floats in huge parades attract revelers for one of the biggest parties on the planet. One of the most popular features of these parades is a tradition that dates back to the 1830s: the tossing of beads from float goers to their clamoring audiences begging: “Throw me something, mister.”
This simple plea used to be enough to have a chance at scoring some of the highly-prized beads, but as Tom Jacobs reports in this piece for Miller-McCune, University of Louisiana, Lafayette criminal justice department head Craig Forsyth took his toddler son to Mardi Gras and couldn’t figure out why no one would give the kid some beads until a nearby woman explained that there’s no catching beads when the female flashers are around.
Forsyth interviewed 51 women and 54 male float riders about stripping for beads. His conclusion? “Some forms of deviance apparently do ‘work,’” he concluded, “and parade stripping is one of them.”
Check the story’s links for more details on the social science tied to Mardi Gras.
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02.03.10
Posted in seattle, theater at 10:58 pm by Zee
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Posted in classes, music at 5:35 pm by Zee
One of the Northwest’s most talented musicians is Carrie Akre who has a long history of brilliant musical work with Hammerbox, Goodness and her own singer-songwriter career. Carrie has a massive amount of musical intelligence and now you can learn from her: Her six week singer/songwriter course begins February 24 and runs for six weeks at EMP/SFM. EMP members pay a mere $135 for the course; non-members pay $160. In either case, it’s a genuine bargain for the opportunity to learn the basics of writing and performing your own songs in a friendly, encouraging, and artistically challenging environment with one of the best instructors you could ever imagine.
For more information on the class, check out the class listing online.
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02.02.10
Posted in film, new york at 2:40 pm by Zee
If I were going to be anywhere near NYC in late February or early March, I would totally go to the New York International Children’s Film Festival (NYICFF).
If it seems to you like children’s movies are inherently dumb, only appealing to the young and unsophisticated, then you probably only watch mainstream releases which are, indeed, by and large glurge churned out in the hopes of making a buck or a few million via merchandising. Consider what the major houses seem to think of adults’ level of intelligence and it’s no wonder that so many kids’ movies are written as if children are inherently stupid.
Ah, but there are plenty of excellent movies made for children, many of which have a genuine appeal for adults, too, and not just in that arrested development in which would-be hipsters co-opt childhood as a substitute for actual personality.
Michel Ocelot’s Kirikou and the Sorceress (France, 1998) retells an old African legend with stunning, wonder-inspiring imagery. Another French film, 1973’s Fantastic Planet has long been a cult classic among adults for its psychedelic artwork and complex, provocative storyline but is an entirely suitable film for tweens and teens as well.
The French are really good at animation; this is represented at NYICFF with a program of French short animation and several more shorts and features.
NYICFF also features shorts and full-length films from places other than France. Notable is In the Attic from Czech filmmaker Jiri Barta, a leading light in stop-motion animation who hasn’t made a movie in 20 years. Like any good fairy tale, his story about a doll and her toy friends is equal parts dark to the light.
Film production workshops help educate kids and their families to what it really takes to make a movie and, who knows, maybe influence them to make their own.
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