Michel Vuijlsteke's weblog

corsix-th – Open source clone of Theme Hospital – Google Project Hosting
This project aims to reimplement the game engine of Theme Hospital, with the capability of loading assets including graphics and levels from the original game.

Revenge of the Reality-Based Community | The American Conservative
I know that it’s unattractive and bad form to say “I told you so” when one’s advice was ignored yet ultimately proved correct. But in the wake of the Republican election debacle, it’s essential that conservatives undertake a clear-eyed assessment of who on their side was right and who was wrong.

Looking to the Future: 8 Science Fiction Movies to Watch for | Movie News | Movies.com
Since this is a science fiction column, how about we do a little time traveling? After all, 2012 is just about over — so what awaits us in the years ahead? Although smaller films are surely going to emerge at festivals, here are eight science fiction films coming out within the next year or so that may very well deserve your valuable time and money. Since we're using a time machine (and because this is the Internet), I will also prejudge each movie without having seen a frame from most of them.

A Handsome Atlas: Wildly Awesome Data Visualizations from the Nineteenth Century
Zo mooi.

Stoya™, Not-cool things to do, bro… Part 1
Before you try to tell me that it’s because I take my clothes off for a living, let me tell you that this started way before I was 18. Let me tell you that every single woman I know has at least one truly terrifying story of street harassment and a whole bunch of other stories that are merely insulting or annoying. Let me remind you that in a room of pornography fans, who have actually seen me with a dick in my mouth and who can buy a replica of my vagina in a can or box, I am treated with far more respect than I am walking down the street.

Gamasutra – News – In-depth: Is it time for a text game revival?
In a market where books and games are close rivals for the most popular category on app stores, what happens when today's new gamers are hungry for something more than word puzzles?

Datavisualization.ch Selected Tools

RUDI: Bookshelf: Classics: Christopher Alexander: A city is not a tree part 1
It is more and more widely recognized today that there is some essential ingredient missing from artificial cities. When compared with ancient cities that have acquired the patina of life, our modern attempts to create cities artificially are, from a human point of view, entirely unsuccessful.

Calming Manatee

Glueslabs
One last thing: If I could trouble someone out there to do me a small favor, I’d like you to contact the manager of my apartment building. Or I guess you could call the Seattle PD. It doesn’t matter. I just don’t want to sit in here too long without being discovered and I’d like for my cats to be rescued.

Improv Everywhere – Spinning Beach Ball of Death – YouTube
It's rare that two obnoxious phenomena completely jump the shark at the same time.

Striptekenaar Jean Giraud/Moebius overleden – De Standaard
Met de dood van de Franse stripmaker Jean Giraud, die ook publiceerde als Moebius, verliest Europa een van zijn invloedrijkste auteurs.

U.S. Warns Apple, Publishers on E-Book Pricing – WSJ.com
The Justice Department has warned Apple Inc. and five of the biggest U.S. publishers that it plans to sue them for allegedly colluding to raise the price of electronic books, according to people familiar with the matter.

Stephen Wolfram Blog : The Personal Analytics of My Life
JALOERS.
"One day I’m sure everyone will routinely collect all sorts of data about themselves. But because I’ve been interested in data for a very long time, I started doing this long ago. I actually assumed lots of other people were doing it too, but apparently they were not. And so now I have what is probably one of the world’s largest collections of personal data. "

How I Helped Destroy Star Wars Galaxies » Medium Difficulty
I couldn’t even bring myself to fight back. I just stood there. I was one of the few true Dark Jedi Masters, and I let him kill me. That very act illustrated perfectly what SOE did wrong. Those of us who had faithfully put in the hours and weeks and months required to earn those lightsabers were spit on and betrayed by the very architects of the game we loved.

Ready, Set, Render! Part2
In the previous "Ready, Set, Render!" thread, I demonstrated the use of BPR when rendering a 'hard-surface' model. This time, I opted to demonstrate the use of Z4R2b BPR for rendering an organic surface, in particular, a skin surface. For this test, I used an excellent head sculpt created by ZBrush artist Majid Esmaeili.

Brendan’s blog » Visualizing Device Utilization
These visualizations have been created to illustrate different ways to observe device utilization on large scale environments.

I frequently need to analyze urgent performance issues on these environments using a variety of tools, and with varying degrees of success. Sometimes a customer has been unable to resolve a crippling issue because their visualization hides important details (the most common problem is a line graph showing average device utilization, making it impossible to identify that single or multiple devices are at 100%). I’ve condensed years of such pain and frustration into the problem statement at the start of this post, and then presented various visualizations that could satisfy those needs.

My Family and Other Gypsies
A short family saga challenging stereotypes, misconceptions and outright lies about gypsies.

Mr. Plinkett’s Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull Review! |
Yayyyyyyyy!

Legend of the One Platform Master | MetaFilter
Ulillillia is an Internet celebrity who's famous for his writing, videos on Youtube, personal website, and game design. The Platform Master is a documentary that was filmed earlier this year about his life, and is scheduled to be released this coming summer.

Social Games vs Multiplayer Games: A Commentary on Raph Koster’s Social Mechanics Presentation
I thought that since I’m not at GDC, it might be interesting to write a review-from-afar. I looked at the core of his ideas, many of which center around cooperative gameplay, then raised questions over whether they were appropriate to the social game space. Below, I suggest some alternatives that may have been missed in the presentation, and finally I ask whether social games have a next level of sophistication to them at all.

Weatherspark: Gent
infoporn!

Augmenting a Live Talk with Overhead Projector Style Infographics – information aesthetics
MAYA Design CEO Mickey McManus has recently demonstrated the power of using subtly animated infographics during a live TEDx talk. While the talk on "Information Liquidity" is already mind boggling by itself, the short visual interruptions that merge sophisticated illustrations with the concept of old-school overhead projectors (or maybe they represent the prototypes of next-gen thin film computers…) is quite an original approach to keep the audience engaged

A Week on Foursquare
We collected every check-in on location-sharing service Foursquare for a week starting at noon Eastern on Friday, Jan. 21 until noon on Friday Jan. 28. Foursquare, which provided the data, removed all material that could identify an individual user.

Notabilia – Visualizing Deletion Discussions on Wikipedia
Visualizing Deletion Discussions on Wikipedia

BuzzFeed’s Jonah Peretti On Why The “Facebook” Media World View Wins
Viral Lift is the new metric. Ha.