-
How to Be Polite
Most people don’t notice I’m polite, which is sort of the point. I don’t look polite. I am big and droopy and need a haircut. No soul would associate me with watercress sandwiches. Still, every year or so someone takes me aside and says, you actually are weirdly polite, aren’t you? And I always thrill. They noticed.
Politeness buys you time. It leaves doors open. I’ve met so many people whom, if I had trusted my first impressions, I would never have wanted to meet again. And yet — many of them are now great friends.
An excellent piece by Paul Ford on the often underestimated value of politeness.
-
Missingno. in Pokemon Fusion
I’ve made a small update to the Pokemon Fusion site, and added Missingno. as a hidden pokemon.
I was inspired by the incredible Mewtwo x Missingno. fusion artwork that was posted by StarvingStudents on his deviantART page
Missingno. appears whenever there is an invalid ID in the URL, so acts as a fun 404 page. You can try it out here
-
Censoring Chinese Scammers
Q: What do you do when you’re being scammed by a Chinese scam artist? A: Use their country’s internet censorship against them.
LINE, the hugely popular Japanese messaging app, has been seeing a recent surge in scamming activity. In the most common scenario, the scam artist will gain access to a user’s account and message their friends, asking them to purchase online gift cards and send the serial number. Many people were targeted by this scam, and it received some mainstream media attention.
But once it was determined that the majority of the scam artists were Chinese, the users began fighting back in a hilarious way.
-
Creating Fun
My long-standing goal, in both work and personal life, is to create “fun”. I currently make games for a living, so I’ll be focusing on games for this post.
What is Fun?
Games like Flappy Bird and 2048 show that as long as you have one crucial element that provides fun, even the simplest of games can be a huge hit. And in fact, for games like these it is necessary that they be the simplest of games, with no other elements distracting from that core nugget of fun.
-
「面白い」を創る
仕事でも、プライベートでも、自分の昔からの目標は「面白い」を創ること。 ゲームを創る職についているので、今回はゲームの話が中心となる。
「面白い」とは？
Flappy Birdや2048のようなゲームが見せてくれたように、 根本的な面白い要素さえあれば、どんなシンプルなゲームでも大ヒットする可能性がある。 むしろ、これらのゲームは最もシンプルであることが必須で、根本の面白さの邪魔をする要素がない、というのも成功の要因だと言える。
-
Nobody. Understands. Punctuation.
Peter Welch has published an excellent piece on punctuation and writing style in the English language.
Yes, you can use punctuation in incorrect ways, but that does not mean there is only one way to use it. A friend recently told me publishers don’t care whether you use an oxford comma or not, as long as you pick one and stick with it. This is stupid. If punctuation obscures or distorts the meaning of a sentence in an unintended way, it is wrong, but apart from that, punctuation is about rhythm. An Oxford comma is not a flip switch in an author’s voice, it’s a decision made in the moment to maintain the flow of the idea. Momentum, syncopation, rhythm and pattern make a sentence flow, because writers are trying to transfer the voices in their heads into yours.
I own a copy of The Elements of Style which is one of the most prescriptive books around regarding what “good writing” is. Though Welch’s essay has a nearly opposite message, urging writers to do what they must at the expense of constrictive rules, I love both for describing excellent writing and leading by example.
I do believe that there can be a single guiding principle for good writing. At their core, the two contrasting works in fact have the same core message: be deliberate.
-
San Francisco Is Dead. Long Live San Francisco
Gary Kamiya has an excellent article in San Francisco Magazine, talking about the many factors and consequences of San Francisco’s economic growth.
(I)f present trends continue, the city could soon become a moated citadel of info-money, accessible only to venture capitalists, Twitter engineers, and the creators of hookup apps.
[…]
This prospect worries me. As someone who loves San Francisco’s maverick tradition and its class and ethnic diversity (I celebrated both in a book I wrote last year called Cool Gray City of Love), I find the idea that my beloved town is on the verge of becoming another Manhattan—a picturesque but increasingly expensive, homogeneous, and sterile burg—distressing, to put it mildly.
[…]
And yet, the political, cultural, and class war that has erupted over what is happening to San Francisco—call it the Change—strikes me as wrongheaded to the point of surreality.
[…]
I’m all for rushing the barricades when there’s an enemy to fight and a battle that can be won. I’ve engaged in my share of such battles. But it’s time to reckon with reality: There is no enemy here. Or if there is, it’s an enemy that won’t be defeated. What has hit San Francisco in the last couple of years can be summed up in one word: capitalism. And that is a tsunami that no seawall can keep out.I love what San Francisco has been, and I sure hope I also can love what it’s becoming.