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How well do you know your fonts?
Monthly Archives: April 2008
It Was the Fat Guy. No, Wait: The Bearded Guy. At Least He Was Franciscan!
Amanda and I completed a test playthrough for the first time tonight of a game quite like a shaken-up adaptation of Clue: Mystery of the Abbey. We’d been looking at it for some time, especially liking the theme of the game and the supposed changes it made to the standard “murder mystery” gametype, so this afternoon I gave it a buy and decided to see what it was all about.
Due to the deductive mechanics of the game, Mystery of the Abbey requires at least three players to function, so for our test run we decided to each take the place of two players and see how the game ran with four. I doubt we will try this methodology again, as it was quite confusing to keep track of which hand (left or right) knew what, and to not conflate the knowledge of the two sides for an unfair advantage.
As it was, I ended up making an incorrect guess at the end of the game, and Amanda made a correct one. She would have won the game anyway, as I had been barking up the wrong tree for most of the game and didn’t even have the right suspect.
Mystery of the Abbey is played much like Clue. The basic premise is the same: the titular abbey is a waystation for pilgrims on their journey, and one of the brothers has been found murdered. It’s your job to find out which one of the other brothers committed the heinous deed, while making sure you attend the Hours (here always called Mass) and asking questions of your fellow monks.
links for 2008-04-10
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Please file this under “you can’t make this stuff up.”
links for 2008-04-08
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Validation for bloggers and their position in the “media”, or ridiculous lawsuit-mongering?
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Tim Bray’s notes on Twitter and his reactions to it as a social service. Read the “Why?” section for a really good reason why I’m unhappy that I no longer have access to Twitter during the day.
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You *know* you want to play a board game that lets you re-enact the political strife of the Reformation. Well, you might if you were me. And I figure that I could find exactly one or two other people in the world who might play it with me.
Mahalo Daily Hits the Pinball
Pinball: the lost art of gaming. I would give handsome sums of money to have one of the machines I used to play when I was in high school; there wasn’t a pinball machine I wouldn’t try.
links for 2008-04-04
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I – for one – welcome our new, non-packaged, digital retailer overlords.
links for 2008-04-03
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An entire book on work happiness and productivity that you can read online and then buy a copy if you want one. The author also maintains a blog speaking about this sort of thing, and it’s really good, so I’ll recommend this sight-unseen.
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Awesome tip for Firefox 3 Beta for the Mac to get rid of that ridiculously large Back button in the toolbar.
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An awesome profile – with examples in Flash – of the artist who has drawn every fold-in in the back of Mad Magazine for the last 40-some-years. This is an amazing talent.
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A converter box for the PlayStation 3 that converts iR signals (like those from my Harmony 880 remote) into Bluetooth commands to control the PS3, including powering on/off. Good reviews from several places; pricey, yet would be worth it.
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How else do you explain financial analysts?
links for 2008-04-02
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Sometimes, fixing a mistake by owning up to it and making proper and public restitution for it is even better than not making a mistake at all. A great decision by a truly Internet-savvy company. The author is correct: it’s free marketing.
links for 2008-04-01
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Awesome post by Jensen Harris on the origins of the Ribbon interface element in Office 2007. I haven’t looked at the presentation video yet, but the slides are a good example of UI development stages and evolution of design.
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Good list of reasons for all developers of all kinds of products to consider when thinking about customer requests, especially feature requests in software. This has broader implications for other markets as well.
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Good advice on how to write *about* products and services, not write *around* them. Make sure you’re telling people exactly what they’re going to get when they buy something.
