Around the Interwebs

This week was pretty good for news that interested me.

By which I mean actively blocking most of the political yamhammering.

Game News:
A retrospective on the development of Dear Esther. I've been a huge fan of this guy from the beginning, and it's quite a riveting piece on the turmoil and craziness involved with launching the remake of the mod. Also, he's super talented.

If you don't have enough DRM-free games to play on your Android, Linux, or Mac (I'm gonna assume you have plenty on your PC) Humble Indie Bundle has yet another bundle. I now have games to play on my phone while I poop that aren't Dominion.

Homefront was a AAA-ish shooter back in the day. It didn't do too hot. Here's the story of the poor dev studio. The byline is The long, tortured journey of Homefront, so that kinda gives a glimpse of what it's about. Still a fascinating read of what AAA game development is like.

The Dystopia mod announced patch 1.4. I thought they had stopped developing this! For those that don't know, Dystopia is a free Source game in a cyberpunk future. It involves meatspace and cyberspace, awesome weapons, cool tech, implants, classes, and really inventive maps. Biggest problem is navigating the maps and "solving" each map, due to the symmetric nature of each one. However, it appears they're trying to remedy the map/UI problem once again.

Tech (the future):
Microsoft announced they can not only transcribe your speech, and then convert it based on sentences/context, but then play it back in your own voice. :O

Inspirational:
The Fight by Dustin Curtis. Pairs well with
 

Politics:
In case you were wondering how the map looks for this last election, but setup so the size of a region represents its importance.

Just plain COOL:
Walk off the Earth is a YouTube band. They have several good covers, and have made some of their own songs. You probably know them best from their 5-person-on-1-guitar cover of Somebody That I Used To Know by Gotye. They made this video using a single cut, but the parts are all out of order. Fastforwarding and rewinding puts them back in order. WUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUH?

Install Chrome. Jam with friends.