That date has a lot of 2’s in it, so maybe I’ll double (or triple) up on links for each thing.
- One of the best uses of WebGL: showing old videogame levels in your browser, a lovely open source project. My favorite so far is the Cancer Constellation in Katamari Damacy, which includes animation – even works on your phone.
- I discovered this podcast, Building the Open Metaverse, through a tweet from Morgan McGuire. As chief scientist at Roblox, he has some interesting things to day.
- Another podcast about videogame creation is Our Machinery. Episode 9 sounded interesting, interviewing the creator of Teardown, which is a pretty amazing voxel-based simulation game engine. I only just started this podcast, and the first seven minutes were mostly just chit-chat; looks like it gets more technical after that.
- While we’re in videogame mode, I liked this album of models from Assassin’s Creed: Unity, particularly this and this (but they’re all quite nice).
- Want a full-featured, battle-tested, physically based camera model? Give Nick Porcino’s a look. He kindly pointed it out to me due to my Twitter poll on “film back”, which has some interesting comments.
- The New York Times has a number of Github projects, including a US COVID data set. A friend made a short movie of it (spoiler: it doesn’t end well, so far). There are tricky data visualization questions he’s grappling with (and hasn’t landed on answers yet), e.g., if a large area, low population county gets just a case or two, it lights up like it’s a major outbreak. Which remind me: I recommend the book The Data Detective (which sounded dull to me, but was not – Tim Harford is great at telling tales). And that, in turn, reminds me of Humble Pi, which I gave to a lot of people for Christmas – a great bathroom book. The author, Matt Parker, has a ton of YouTube videos, if that’s your preference.
- Tesla owner mines crypto-currency with his car. The auto’s computer controls some separate GPUs, plugged directly into the car’s motor. This sort of stuff looks to be the epitaph on our civilization; see the endless stream on Web3 is going just great for more, more, more.
I love the crabs, I admit it (and if you’re a crab lover, check out these robot crabs). The plastic teddy bear driving the horseshoe crab is my favorite:
