Koralatov

“Fucking Internets”

@brandonnn: I ran 5400m before hitting a wall and tumbling to my death on my iPhone. http://www.canabalt.com/
@stephbysteph: I ran 6139m before hitting a wall and tumbling to my death on my iPod touch. http://www.canabalt.com/
@stephbysteph: @brandonnn heh.
@brandonnn: @stephbysteph >:O
@schlarb: I ran 7464m before hitting a wall and tumbling to my death on my iPhone. http://www.canabalt.com/
@schlarb: That last Canabalt run was dedicated to @stephbysteph and @brandonnn.
@stephbysteph: @brandonnn @schlarb fucking internets. you can't feel awesome for more than 1 minute
@brandonnn: @stephbysteph WHOSE FAULT WAS THAT

Introducing Saffy

Some photos of Saffy from her first few days with us.

Clients From Hell: The Forbidden Fruit →

Client: Hey, just one final question before I send the deposit. Do you use a PC or a MAC?
Me: I use a MAC.
Client: That is a problem. Do you have access to a PC? I am not a supporter of Apple products.
Me: No, I don’t have access to a PC, but this will have little to no effect on the work itself.
Client: I am a Christian and Apple products are sinful, I do not want our website to be created by a product made by this corrupt group. You need only look at their logo, an apple with a bite taken from it. Do you not know the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden? If I allowed you to create my website on a MAC I would be just like Adam, taking a bite of the forbidden fruit. [Silence]
Take my advise, destroy your mac and repent for when judgement day comes. It shall be you who is cast to hell for your sins.
Me: [Block Contact]

I. Am. Fucked.

Totally ignoring Adobe UI Gripes’s legitimate issue, the first thing that jumped out at me when I saw this was the almost-total abandonment of Mac-native UI elements. WTF is with those awful, ugly buttons? This is the kind of shit that makes people look really, really hard for Photoshop alternatives.

More Fringe Typography

A collection of establishing shots from the two-part season two finalé of Fringe that — you guessed it! — irritatingly stuff giant, bevelled, plastic-looking all-caps Helvetica into the shot. Just to keep things fresh, though, some of these take place in the alternative universe (see if you can guess which ones).

1. New rule to be inferred from the below capture: establishing place should be done with your Xara 3D-rendered Helvetica, but establishing time absolutely must be done using Copperplate Light (because, obviously, using horrible, chunky, floating-in-scene text would just be a hack job, and Fringe is classier that that):

   

2. This seems to be a lazy reuse of an earlier establishing shot which I also hated the first time: 

   

3. You can probably just about walk under this without hitting your head, unless you’re tall (tough shit, Special Agent Broyles):

   

4. This one doesn’t need deserve much in the way of explanation:

   

5. And finally, back to Harvard (this one is in the present, so we don’t need any Copperplate Light)…

   

‘Super Mario Galaxy 2’ Review: Nintendo Perfects Platforming →

Is anyone at all surprised? Really?

Mary Wachsmann:

Yes, I’m watching Blade Runner again. For the 50th time. Why is this my favorite film? Because it’s too bright and too dark. It’s too beautiful and too horrible. It’s about one of my favorite subjects, artificial life, but it’s about all life, too. It’s too bad she won’t live. But then again, who does? (Source.)

That’s a pretty perfect way to describe Blade Runner. (I’m also reblogging this because I have a huge, super-secret crush on Rachel.)

Via Mary Wachsmann.

Flood Fill is exactly the kind of game that validates the existence of Flash as a platform: a beautiful æsthetic reminiscent of Modrian, simple, and far too short at a mere twenty levels. Highly recommended.

Facebook’s Gone Rogue; It’s Time for an Open Alternative →

Cameron Moll:

While I’d love to see Facebook lose its AOL-in-the-90s grip on the web, Ryan’s vision of an open alternative is nothing more than a pipe dream, I’m afraid. About the only “open” anything gaining traction these days — despite all the hype and chatter about open over the past decade — is HTML5.

And, as someone pointed out in the comments, the real irony of this argument is the Facebook “Like” button at the end of the article.

I’d agree with Moll that it’s unlikely a free-and-open alternative will supplant Facebook. Singel’s suggestion of using “Posterous [or similar] to build a profile page in the style of your liking. You’d get to control what unknown people get to see, while the people you befriend see a different, more intimate page” is a nice dream, but woefully unrealistic because it fails the hackneyed “Mother Test”; Facebook (and MySpace, Bebo, et al before it) is successful precisely because it’s easy and requires almost nothing in the way of technical know-how or expertise to use. That’s the reason that there are over 9,000 million people using Facebook. (I’m ignoring, for now, the snowball effect of everyone you know already being on it which acts as an incentive to use it in the first place.)

“Social networking” (puke) sites are finally reaching something approaching maturity, and it looks like Facebook is poised to become the Windows of social networks — hugely flawed, run by a company that’s terribly far from perfect, but what people ultimately stick with because it’s familiar.

Also, kudos to Wired for choosing possibly the sleaziest looking picture of Zuckerberg ever.