It feels like it’s rare to wait more than a few weeks before another JavaScript-powered open source MVC framework comes along. That’s exactly why Lauren Orsini’s article on ReadWrite is so helpful. She goes over the strengths and weakness of the three most popular frameworks. For me, especially coming into a Ember.js completely fresh, it’s an excellent starting point.
Damon Houx of Badass Digest, describing the plot of Knock Off:
Marcus has to confront Eddy about the nanobombs in the knockoff product, and it gives Van Damme his finest acting moment to date, where he tells his semi-brother that he made a deal for him with the feds as he’s threatened with a gun. Sure, you could compare it to the “pull the strings” speech in Ed Wood, but Van Damme is fully committed. That scene then ends with Eddy being targeted by a missile which sends him flying outside, to die in a green flame explosion. It’s followed by an action scene starts where Van Damme and Schneider must escape from a fruit warehouse, which is a stunning set piece of claustrophobia as most of the fruit workers have long but dull knives, and the fruit around appears to be spiky pineapples (it doesn’t have the stems so I’ve never been sure) which makes even the fruit hreatening. The sequence ends with Schneider and Van Damme escaping and mumbling “Hoola, hoola hoola. Hoola hoola hoola.”
Completely unavailable via streaming rental. I’m not spending $8 to buy this one either. Unfortunate.
Mike Barthel, writing for The Awl:
These are the lines on which the critical battle-lines have been drawn: narrative-heavy AAA games get pushed to a mainstream audience as breathtaking advances in realism and size; critics respond by championing the difficult and the handmade. Each side represents a competing argument about how games can justify themselves as art. AAA games, and consumer game reviewers, use the logic of Hollywood blockbusters: big budgets, big successes, big names, big pictures…
…Indie games, on the other hand, are justified in the same terms as mid-century modernist art, especially poetry. They are not for the masses, but for a discerning elite. They are intentionally out of step with current trends. They are by single creators, generally, and those creators are lauded as heroic…
…Both of these approaches feel incomplete.
Great, thoughtful piece.
Author, manager and developer Michael Lopp:
This morning I realized I might have a productive way to twist status reports into a useful exercise. Let’s call them context reports. A status report documents actions both completed and planned. A context report documents the reason why (and to a lesser extent how) you’re completing these actions and I suspect this information is far more useful to everyone involved.
Being in a job where I’m rarely physically present in most meetings, it’s annoying when I see bullet after bullet point of exactly what happened. The why is so much more important.
The sound and picture quality isn’t pretty, but it’s wonderful seeing Spielberg and a much younger Harrison Ford make history. It’s an hour filled with interviews and behind the scenes footage. Speilberg’s direction bits to the actors is especially interesting (via Jason Kottke.)
Ask almost any developer: we’re picky about our color schemes in our text editors. I see a lot of suggestions online, but many are poorly thought out or don’t have decent coverage among multiple programming languages. But Lavavel developer Dayle Rees really outdid himself with this package. It’s available across several of the most popular editors (Sublime Text, Coda, VIM, XCode) and he provides 50 plus variations, in both subtle and more high contrast forms. Best of all, I couldn’t find one that isn’t well designed.
Generally I’m a die hard fan of Solarized Dark out of the default Sublime Text 3 setup. But Dayle’s color schemes are tempting; I’m running a few test development days with some of the darker variations that match my style.
A.A. Dowd, The A.V. Club:
Taxi Driver is rarely as much fun as Goodfellas or Mean Streets or The Wolf Of Wall Street is. There are no iconic classic-rock montages, no Rolling Stones boogies. The ugly characters tend to be really ugly, not hilariously so. (Marty himself appears in a very unflattering cameo, oozing violent misogyny and racism from the backseat of Bickle’s cab.) Where many of Scorsese’s most popular movies unfold as a breathless series of great set pieces, Taxi Driver has a more cumulative brilliance; it’s a downward spiral into madness from the first frame onward.
We’ve all seen our share of “edgy” and “dark” films. It’s almost become a punchline in the independent theme, especially in the horror genre. But it’s hard to top the darkness that Scorcese nails so perfectly in Taxi Driver. What a film.
I’ve been linking lately to several of these Dissolve “keynotes”, where a movie of the week gets dissected and kicked off with an extended essay on the film’s themes and impact. And for good reason; the writing is uniformly excellent, and every so often there’s a selection that I’m already a huge fan of. Case in point, 1987’s violent, lurid action/social satire RoboCop:
The dualities of RoboCop are also reflected in the movie itself, a sleek hybrid of genres, creators, motives, and influences: hyper-violent 1980s action and dystopian science fiction, two American writers and a Dutch director, commercial savvy and artistic ambition, real-world blight and comic-book cartoonishness. Like RoboCop himself, the film is a complex organism that’s made to seem stark and simple, and it makes other Hollywood action movies look like ED-209—big, lumbering machines that look fearsome, but sputter, pop, and break down with alarming frequency.
Excellent opinion piece from Wired’s Chris Kohler on the indie game resurgence in quality and risk taking:
The question used to be, could independently produced games compete with the big studios? Now I think the question should be, can the big-studio model continue to exist? Right now, indie games are serving niche audiences that were left behind by big studios. What happens when small teams start to make shooters that can pull audiences away from Titanfall? Football games that are more fun than Madden?
For players, it really doesn’t matter where the great game experiences are coming from, as long as they’re coming from somewhere.
True Detective is getting an incredible amount of buzz, from the lead actors to the dark, Twin Peaks like storyline and high end cinematography. I’m not quite onboard yet with all the high praise; the jury is out until we see where this eight episode season ends up. But one aspect is undeniable: Matthew McConaughey is doing amazing acting work and remains the most interesting aspect of the show. This LA Review of Books delves into the show, but really is most about McConaughey’s resurgence from romantic comedy punch line to A-list actor:
While McConaughey certainly signed off on those roles [in many romantic comedies], it’s difficult to blame him for what was, in essence, the work of the contemporary star machine, with its imperative to find charisma, cast it in a blockbuster, flatten it out, and relegate it to B-pictures when the concept, not the star, fails to catch hold. McConaughey was never a bad actor: he was just a bad Hollywood actor.
He was bad, in other words, at playing the annoying manchild who “grows up” to be a bourgeois provider, bad at playing supporting actor to a CGI franchise, and bad at being a palatable white guy who stands in for the audience. Think back to Dazed and Confused: McConaughey isn’t either of the main dudes who earn our identification. He’s the weirdo in the peach-colored jeans hanging outside by himself and giving no fucks.