I am pro-April Fools! At least in its modern incarnation as a web holiday about making up stupid shit. Practical jokes aim for funny but fail into cruelty, which kind of sucks; the worst a web page can do is bore you. And, yeah, there are some cliches to grind down the world-weary. But in general: it’s a festival of publishing untruths, and it’s actually somewhat observed. I’m not going to hate.

The “people who are bad at funny shouldn’t try to be funny” attitude chafes a little. Most of the time, that’s true! But the point of holidays is to temporarily relax the rules, not to create artifacts of value for future generations.

Apparently they’re using this tech in the new Metal Gear engine: you build clothes out of patterns (like real clothes!) then hang them on your characters. Their cloth sim is really convincing, too. “Oh my god I need this,” says Bradley, who’s already sculpted a lifetime’s worth of skate clothing. “But I will miss painting on wrinkles :(“

(Source: marvelousdesigner.com)

a-proposed-world:

A proposed map for a future London.

Even in the past it was the future!

Dsquared’s at it again, choosing his own adventure in Cyprus’s bank disaster.

He’s got a new mechanic this time:

In this game you will need two dice. At various points in the game, chance will govern the outcome. When instructed to roll the dice, you should follow the accepted methodology:

1. Check both outcome to see which is the good one
2. Decide whether you really think you deserve a bit of good luck, whether I was wrong in setting the probabilities, in general whatever rationale for picking the good outcome you can think of
3. Go back later and see whether the bad outcome was really gruesome.

But there is a familiar face!

“I didn’t expect to see you again”. There’s a somewhat awkward silence between you and the occupant of the room, who is sitting on the edge of a desk drinking tea. It’s Maynard. “We didn’t part on the best of terms”.

“No, we didn’t”, he replies, guardedly. “And the fact that we’re back here working together shouldn’t be taken as a good sign. Either for our own careers, or for the problem itself. This situation has landed on our desks precisely because everyone with enough clout to wash their hands of it has done so.”

I don’t know if Argentina-style Greek default is canon or if it’s in IRL continuity.

Holy crap! Ancient Workshop (James Brown) is making an origami editor. As he says in his blog, it started out as a game in which you’re made out of origami, and the editor got more and more honest and then at some point it just became the game.

I’m impressed; I can imagine taking so many shortcuts along the way to something you’d call an origami game. And the translucent paper is a nice touch.

I’m going to stick with the quick brown fox, but every so often font browsers try to get clever with a quartz sphinx. Microsoft’s jackdaws love my big sphinx of quartz, while Adobe demands: “Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow!” I judge it among the shortest of ‘em that actually reads like a sentence, if that’s any help.

There’s not a lot to work with at the expensive end of the Scrabble dictionary.

charmian:

mirrorful:

google reader ;_;

Huh, I use it too. Anyone have any suggestions? I know there are others for Android, but I want something that I can pop up in Firefox.

The popular contenders seem to be feedly and the old reader; I’m leaning towards the old reader right now because it’s actually loading (though it’s taking hours to import my feeds) and because its interface (as the name would suggest) is comfortably greaderish.

Yglesias is taking the Marco Arment line that with Google gone we’ll start to see real competition and innovation in the world of RSS readers, which… it would be nice! They’ve got two and a half months.

google reader ;_;

I’m watching Borgen. “It’s the Danish West Wing!” they said, and really, what else do you have to say?

(I’ve been reluctant to watch the American West Wing again; Bartlett’s America was refreshing when viewed from Bush’s America—or, really, from the wreckage of Clinton’s America—but from here in Obama’s America I fear that it would look remarkably timid. With a side of naive. But I still love the characters, and the walk-and-talk—in my head there’s a version of Game of Thrones with fewer whores and more walk-and-talk, and I’m watching the shit out of that show.)

But, yeah, it’s neat. I like watching political stuff from other countries, particularly since almost nobody is dumb enough to do it like we do. The multiparty stuff I sort of knew about, but it feels really weird to have people care so much about the Cabinet.

Also: there’s a dude who’s like the PM’s #1 minion, but I think he’s a civil servant and was there when she moved in? Ihni what his real job title is or what he’s doing. Also, they got an awesome troll-looking dude for the leader of the far-right Freedom Party, and he can be counted on to chortle gleefully and/or say something racist when the situation demands.