thatgamecompany:

You wake alone and surrounded by miles of burning, sprawling desert, and soon discover the looming mountaintop which is your goal.

Faced with rolling sand dunes, age-old ruins, caves and howling winds, your passage will not be an easy one. The goal is to get to the mountaintop, but the experience is discovering who you are, what this place is, and what is your purpose.

Travel and explore this ancient, mysterious world alone, or with a stranger you meet along the way. Soar above ruins and glide across sands as you discover the secrets of a forgotten civilization.

Featuring stunning visuals, haunting music, and unique online gameplay, Journey delivers an experience like no other.

Paul Theroux:

Travel is mostly about dreams -- dreaming of landscapes or cities, imagining yourself in them, murmuring the bewitching place names, and then finding a way to make the dream come true. The dream can also be one that involves hardship, slogging through a forest, paddling down a river, confronting suspicious people, living in a hostile place, testing your adaptability, hoping for some sort of revelation.

Listening to music while driving through a lovely landscape is one of life's great mood enhancers.

John Keats:

"Beauty is truth, truth beauty," -- that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

Journey

Mike Mike:

The Face of Tomorrow is a concept for a series of photographs that addresses the effects of globalization on identity.

Adam Harvey:

CV Dazzle is camouflage from computer vision (CV). It is a form of expressive interference that combines makeup and hair styling (or other modifications) with face-detection thwarting designs. The name is derived from a type of camouflage used during WWI, called Dazzle, which was used to break apart the gestalt-image of warships, making it hard to discern their directionality, size, and orientation. Likewise, the goal of CV Dazzle is to break apart the gestalt of a face, or object, and make it undetectable to computer vision algorithms, in particular face detection.

And because face detection is the first step in automated facial recognition, CV Dazzle can be used in any environment where automated face recognition systems are in use, such as FaceBook, Google's Picasa, or Flickr.

Insafe:

It's more than a game, it's your life.

Marco Arment:

Think of the crappiest iPhone app you ever saw that made it into the store. Now imagine what they must reject.

Mary Meeker, Scott Devitt, and Liang Wu:

Do humans want everything to be like a game?

Michael Lewis:

You can't forget to bear-proof the garbage cans, and expect the bears won't notice.

Higgins, via Kara Hansen:

One bear will teach another bear, and then that bear will do it.

Silvio Berlusconi:

I am not worried in the least.

First, sit back and twist open a tasty bottle of Dungeons & Dragons Spellcasting Soda. Ready?

One time, at cyber camp ...

Winners of the Cyber Challenge will be invited to attend Cyber Camps at California State University, Sacramento, where they will further develop the technical skills needed to become cybersecurity experts.

One time, at D&D camp ...

It was the summer of 1982, at the Shippensburg College Dungeons & Dragons summer camp ... There were a lot of other summer camps going on at the Shippensburg campus at the same time: baseball, tennis, cheerleading, etc. Everybody stayed in the dorms, with different buildings for different camp groups ... All the usual coming-of-age stereotypes were in force: gamers gawked at cheerleaders and were hunted by baseball players. The cheerleaders were in the neighboring dorm and literally did their practices in our front yard. Every morning. I was always curious whether some clever administrator intentionally put the cheerleaders next to the relatively-safe gamers (as opposed to baseball players), but that's just speculation.

To be fair, the gamers were pretty busy just getting to know each other -- you're packed in a dorm with more gamers than you've ever seen in your entire life. There's a lot to talk about.

Murray Gell-Mann:

I was still discouraged, though, about having to go to MIT, which seemed so grubby compared with the Ivy League. I thought of killing myself (at the age of 18) but soon decided that I could always try MIT and then kill myself later if it was that bad but that I couldn't commit suicide and then try MIT afterwards. The two operations, suicide and going to MIT, didn't commute, as we say in math and physics jargon.

Tamar Lewin:

Many high school seniors avidly follow student blogs at the colleges they are interested in, and post comments. Luka, one of dozens responding to Ms. Chinea, for example, wrote: "I didn't know about the anime club. I would have never guessed that people at M.I.T. are interested in anime. Oh well ... +1 on my 'Why should I go to M.I.T.' list."

Chris Mills:

"Now you know what you're in for, you know the sleepless nights and frustrations are never far away, but this knowledge can't seem to remove the exhilarating smile on your face. And it's in that masochistic moment that you realize who you are. That this is what you're made for."

From the archive:

Thirty-one years after the invention of Dungeons & Dragons, the original role-playing game remains the most popular and financially successful brand in the adventure gaming industry.

Killer Flu!! Or, maybe, “non-killer flu” to describe the current outbreak of swine flu! Here is a game that allows you to learn more about how the influenza virus is transmitted and how it changes every year - which explains why you can get more than one dose of the flu over your lifetime and why vaccines need changing every year. We also hope it will be a bit of fun.

The second level of the game is an opportunity to understand why pandemic flu is a bit different to normal yearly (seasonal) flu. Remember: even pandemic flu generally kills fewer people than you would think. Try to kill too many people in the game and see how difficult it is!

See also, Oiligarchy:

Now you can be the protagonist of the petroleum era: explore and drill around the world, corrupt politicians, stop alternative energies and increase the oil addiction. Be sure to have fun before the resources begin to deplete.

UK CVN Killer Flu

"I have my ways," was the evasive answer.

We all want to associate ourselves with dignified people and dignified ideas.

It is a wealth transfer from the future to the present.

This game is entrancing.

Pixeljunk: Eden

On sale Tuesday.

Grand Theft Auto IV is a violent, intelligent, profane, endearing, obnoxious, sly, richly textured and thoroughly compelling work of cultural satire disguised as fun. It calls to mind a rollicking R-rated version of Mad magazine featuring Dave Chappelle and Quentin Tarantino, and sets a new standard for what is possible in interactive arts. It is by far the best game of the series, which made its debut in 1997 and has since sold more than 70 million copies. Grand Theft Auto IV will retail for $60.

Hardly a demographic escapes skewering.

It looks like New York. It sounds like New York. It feels like New York. Liberty City has been so meticulously created it almost even smells like New York.

I will happily spend untold hours cruising Liberty City’s bridges and byways, hitting the clubs, grooving to the radio and running from the cops. Even when the real New York City is right outside.

Grand Theft Auto Takes On New York

Avery’s ploy had been unorthodox, unprecedented, and, as players and sages would declare afterward, “embarrassing” and “bush”—akin, maybe, to doing pushups over the twelfth hole at Augusta while an opponent is putting for par.

The next day, amid Pan-Canadian outrage, the NHL issued a decree, informally known as the Sean Avery Rule, or the Nitwit Rule: no more doing that, whatever it was.

The innovation, like midget batsmen and airplane shoe-bombing, would prove to be short-lived.

I don't care about hockey, or agitators, but I am positively intrigued by the idea of "pan-Canadian outrage."

Puckhead

An addictive (mostly frustrating) little Flash game. Like a one-player variation on Go. You can win.

Chat Noir

FreeRice has two goals:

1. Provide English vocabulary to everyone for free.
2. Help end world hunger by providing rice to hungry people for free.

After you have done FreeRice for a couple of days, you may notice an odd phenomenon. Words that you have never consciously used before will begin to pop into your head while you are speaking or writing. You will feel yourself using and knowing more words.

This has the potential to be considerably more addictive than the ESP Game.

FreeRice