Screen on the Green

Screen on the Green

I wish they didn’t do this in the part of the summer when the weather’s the lest pleasant of the entire year.

Stop-Motion Human Space Invaders

Stop-Motion Human Space Invaders

Good stuff.

The top 10 unintentionally worst company URLs

The top 10 unintentionally worst company URLs

The Pig and the Box

The Pig and the Box

Peculiar little parable about copy protection.

Netflix Guilt

Netflix Guilt

“City of God, the award-winning 2002 Miramax film about the slums of Rio de Janeiro, is the most expensive film I’ve never watched. By my calculation, it cost me $66. I hear it’s great.”

Flavored U.K. KitKats leave Nestle with bad taste

Flavored U.K. KitKats leave Nestle with bad taste

When Nestle introduced flavored KitKats in the UK, sales dropped 18%. Sometimes people just want the classics.

McDonald's new sundial billboard

McDonald’s new sundial billboard

Very clever billboard. Amazing how 5000 year old technology can still be super cool.

The Superman Code

The Superman Code

Recent readings paint Superman as Jesus, though he should probably be looked at as a Moses figure instead.

Sinistrals

Brain Age, for the Nintendo DS, has two remarkable features that don’t get a lot of press:

1. Before any puzzle that requies voice recognition, the game first asks if you’re in an environment where it’s appropriate to be talking to your handheld video game system, lest you look like a crazy person on the bus.
2. When you set up your profile, it asks if you’re left- or right-handed. If you’re left-handed, whenever you log in it flips the screens for you so that you can write with the touchscreen on the left and not have to cross your hand over the other screen, which is awkward.

On the first, point, I’ll just say that it amazes me how fast Bluetooth headsets have caught on in DC. Do none of those people walking around and talking on them not see other people doing the same thing and notice how crazy they look? It’s not uncommon for me to actually pass by a person talking on a headset who’s standing right next to a real crazy person talking to himself. Oh, wait, the people with those headsets are the same staffers with their Blackberries who walk around looking as uncool as one can look, thumb-typing away emails that certainly could have waited until they were back at their keyboards.

Fact (well, a Wikipedia fact): 8-15% of the world’s population is left-handed. The Brain Age people were smart enough (heh) to realize that if 1/10 of their customers were going to be inconvenienced when trying to play their game, it was worth the time to engineer something to make it more pleasant for them.

At least a few DS games require you to control your character with the directional pad, which is on the left of the console, and use the stylus to interact with the game’s environment. This is very difficult for a lefty to do. You can either try to figure out a way to use the D-pad with your right hand (and not drop the DS while you’re doing that), or learn how to hold a pencil in your right hand, like a 19th century child being forced to act against his nature.

I like that the DS has a cool user interface, and I like that game designers are having fun and experimenting with new ways to interact with their games. The Wii will take this even further, and I’m very excited by the idea. Still, I don’t like the idea that these new ideas, which are, as stated by Nintendo itself, intended to make games more accessible to more people, are creating an accessibility problem for able-bodied left-handed gamers.

(I’m using a bit more hyperbole here than maybe is necessary, but seriously, if I got a game that I couldn’t play well because it made me hold the stylus in my right hand, I’d have to return it. The level of precision required is relevant here of course.)

Solve Sudoku (Without even thinking!)

Solve Sudoku (Without even thinking!)

This method not recommended when trying to improve one’s Brain Age.