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Let’s make an Oscar-winning movie…
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1–2 minutes·
2 comments on Let’s make an Oscar-winning movie……or not. There’s an interesting article on the New York Times about the recent blossoming of internet comedy, partly thanks to the Writer’s Guild of America strike (will it continue after it ends, I wonder?). In it, there’s an interesting quote: “I love it when people say, ‘I want to make a viral video,’ because…
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Mass Effect
I was so impressed with the first two minutes of Mass Effect, the new sci-fi RPG for the Xbox 360, that I had to play through it twice and then show everyone at work. While it’s essentially nothing but an extended cutscene, it’s a beautiful, well-directed, well-paced and astonishingly atmospheric introduction to the game. If…
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English Literature
At my school, all students were entered into the English Literature GCSE. What this meant was that a couple of times a week, we would take out copies of ‘English Literature’ – things like The Crucible, A Passage To India, various Shakespeare plays, poems – and take turns reading them out. There is nothing that…
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Getting old younger
Imagine a device, similar in appearance to the iPhone, that you could point at a street sign in a foreign language, and it would display that sign on the screen – translated. I described this dream device to some friends a few weeks ago, explaining that there was nothing technically insurmountable about it – optical…
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Schubert and the Trout Quintet
Schubert, I feel, would have no sympathy for procrastinators. Before he died at the age of 31 – the age at which Beethoven wrote his first symphony – he wrote over 1000 pieces. More than 600 of those were ‘just’ songs, but they also included major works such as operas and symphonies. A friend of…
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Puzzle Quest, and the USA alone
Unfortunately I’m going to have to disappoint you – I’m not actually going to write a review of Puzzle Quest here; there are plenty of good ones already out there. The one thing I will say is that the game ended far earlier than I imagined – it comes with a large, scrollable world map,…
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Ratatouille and Mario and Sonic
A brief roundup of things I have watched, read and played over the Christmas period: Ratatouille Ratatouille is in contention for my ‘most rewatchable movie’ award. This has previously been the sole province of Master and Commander, another movie that doesn’t adhere to normal traditions of pacing and plotting. I’ve watched Ratatouille about four times…
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Masque of the Red Death – almost an Adventure Game
Over the course of history, scientists and philosophers (who, until recently, were essentially the same thing) tended to interpret the universe – and, interestingly, the human brain – through the lens of their era’s technology. During the Renaissance, the universe was thought to operate like a clock, mechanistically and predictably. Later, during the Victorian and…
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STT
The acronym TTS is well known among those who develop call centre software, GPS car navigation devices and software for the blind. It means ‘Text To Speech’, and is more commonly known as voice synthesis, such as the conversion of written text (e.g. ‘Take the first turn on the left into Coronation Street’) into a…
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Thoughts on the Amazon Kindle
I feel ambivalent about the Kindle. The Kindle is a new eBook reader from Amazon that can download books anywhere (without a computer) and surf the web. It costs $400 and the cost of books for it from Amazon are significantly cheaper than the new physical versions – which doesn’t mean that they’re cheap, though.…
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