2012/05/20
Lately I have been thinking about various problems for which the simple, direct solution had negative effects. In particular, a problem that China is currently experiencing (warning: unsubstantiated claims ahead): city traffic. China's traffic problem is very serious right now and the government understands that fact. Unfortunately, their solutions have been too direct. Too many cars on the road?
Solution: make it illegal to drive cars with certain license plate numbers on certain days. This has had the unfortunate and rather ironic side effect of encouraging people to buy multiple cars in order to circumvent the block.
2012/05/16
This is a somewhat humorous response to the recent (don't) learn to code debates on Hacker News (arguments against and for). I'm here to advocate a somewhat perpendicular viewpoint, which is that scripting is the thing we should be worrying about, not coding.
2012/05/12
makeblog and nongraphical.com now support Twitter integration! Nothing fancy yet, just pulls my latest tweets and slots them in-between blog posts accordingly. (Still working on getting URLs to linkify, hashtags, etc.) One cool feature is the ability to collapse multiple consecutive tweets, using jQuery. This prevents tweets from completely dominating the front page.
2012/05/10
As you can tell, I'm in the process of completely redesigning the website! There are still a lot of rough edges--commenting isn't supported yet, old posts look somewhat unpolished, etc.--but be patient and everything will be running smoothly again in a few weeks. The two big changes:
- New design (lots more whitespace), subject to change
- Rewritten backend software (makeblog)
2012/05/10
This is how the site has looked since 2008.
2011/09/17
Since I last wrote about "social gaming", my term for gaming as a medium for socialization (as opposed to gaming for the sake of gaming), my opinions on the topic have changed quite a bit. For clarification, I am still talking about video gaming, and my goals are still more or less the same: to use video games as a medium or an excuse, really, to bring people together and create social bonds. Video games are already quite successful at doing this- the aim is to make explicit this desired effect and therefore be able to optimize our gaming activities toward this end.