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A large chunk of my waking hours this weekend got sucked in by Psychonauts, Tim Schafer’s (DOTT, Grim Fandango) new action-adventure 3D-platformer (XBOX and PC now, PS2 in June). It was really, really good. Some links:

• Psychonauts is only $29.99 for the PC (ooh, comes with some neat game-themed playing cards) – and there’s also a $10 mail-in rebate until May 1
• Razputin’s Domain – a Psychonauts fan/community site
• Psychonauts on GameRankings (see also Metacritic ratings
• The GameSpot Psychonauts Forum seem the most active
  • What everyone ELSE sees – using clairvoyance on everyone
  • What are your favorite lines?
• Psychonauts has an insane amount of depth, here’s a list of funny things to do that only begins to scratch the surface
• Help on collecting figments: Topic: Figment Help (RE: BEST GAME EVER)

(PS: the Gogglor in the Lungfishopolis was probably the funnest/funniest video game level I’ve experienced in a long, long while)

So, I did a crawl this morning. Here’s some videos online that are good (and some comments on things I saw that I liked – I didn’t have media/vip access and I didn’t feel like waiting in line for anything, but in general things felt more crowded and less fun than previous years, but maybe it’s me, as well):

• Killzone 2 – is it real, is it not? Who cares, it’s the best demo of the show.
• Enemy Territory: Quake Wars – looks more fun than Quake 4
• Marc Ecko’s Getting Up: Contents Under Pressure – I didn’t see much of the gameplay, and its sort of weird with the shooting thing. I think a pure graf game would be awesome (maybe its just from watching Style Wars too many times) — The Midway and Atari booths are actually a bit out of the way (off to the side of West Hall), but worth stopping by. The new Mortal Kombat and Gauntlet games actually look good, even the Area-51 PC port looks like an entertaining diversion
• Were they showing Spore there? I didn’t see it, but OMG
• Gears of War – OK, I wasn’t motivated enough to sit through the UT2007 or GoW line, but holy crap, if you thought the UT3 tech demo looked good, here’s what they’ve done with it
• Ultimate Spiderman has some really neat cell-shading/comic-frame action that looks great (Hulk looked fun as well, lots of smashing)
• Ghost Recon 3 – one-ups even America’s Army in its fetishizing of the US military
• Shadow of the Colossus – from the makers of ICO
• Blizzard, as usual, had an insanely long cinematic, this time for Ghost, their upcoming shoot and sneak. (not online, worth trying to catch on-screen at the UV booth (update: looks like some of the cinematic trailer is available here)

And there you have it. All in all, newer and higher resolution ways to shoot at and kill each other. So, all in all, rather good I’m too busy to play any games (serious time sinks), but if I do, I’ll probably bite the bullet about control pads (vs mouse+kb) and pick up some next-gen consoles instead of upgrading my PC. It’s just way cheaper.

Jane gets caught up in Microsoft’s new convergence vision. While the description is breathless, I have to agree that the Xbox360 most definitely is a part of a strategic play that extends far beyond gaming consoles.

If this diagram is correct (showing that Microsoft recognizes the power of an open-platform), MS could very well dominate in the living-room space. Of course, based on their continuing pushes with Windows Mobile and WMP probably means this is more marketing hand-waving than true sea-change. Still, the way the XboxLive Silver/Gold have been positioned is still ingenious and hints at some sort of cluefulness…

OTOH, Sony, continues to be, well, Sony – software and hardware units still at war with itself (the appointment of Howard Stringer doesn’t bode well). For all that people argue about Sony’s continued strong presence in consumer electronics, Sony’s “Sales Prevention Team” still seems to be in full effect, crippling otherwise brilliant gadgets with ridiculous proprietary formats and poor interoperability. (Everything cool about the PSP that you’ve seen, from web browsing to emulation is being actively fought by Sony. Even within brand — my spanking new Sony T7 shoots movie files that can’t be viewed by the PSP!)

(Nintendo’s Revolution, with availability of the entire Nintendo back-catalog is also ingenious, but it doesn’t look like Nintendo is necessarily interested in expanding into convergence-empire like MS is)

Guardian Unlimited: Galloway and the mother of all invective

The culture clash between Mr Galloway’s bruising style and the soporific gentility of senate proceedings could hardly have been more pronounced, and drew audible gasps and laughs of disbelief from the audience. “I met Saddam Hussein exactly the same number of times as Donald Rumsfeld met him,” Mr Galloway went on. “The difference is that Donald Rumsfeld met him to sell him guns, and to give him maps the better to target those guns.”

Here’s a local mirror of Galloway dressing down the panel. Definitely not your regular US Senate proceedings.

The Independent has a useful summary of the story thus far for those catching up.

Today kicked off the first day of this year’s Social Software in the Academy Workshop, with some fairly interesting discussions on how recent technologies have been affecting pedagogical practice, both in theory/abstract and in practice. Too much stuff to exhaustively comment about, so some brain dump:

• ssaw del.icio.us tag – I’m sure people will regret not agreeing to ssaw05 next year (maybe not, since del.icio.us is rev-chronologically listed
• Public wiki (that bombards me constantly w/ basic auth messages. urgh)
• The room was quite a bit more crowded this year, which unfortunately forced some really squishy seating. Those laptops get hot. Also, the wifi wasn’t bridged, which made Rendezvous Bonjour and SubEthaEdit a real pain. OTOH the food (and drink!) was stupendously good. Thanks, Todd!
• A very active, pretty healthy backchannel. Here’s a link to the final log
• Speaking of backchannel, Justin’s presentation was lots of fun (post video with animated hand action), probably my favorite of the day. As far as value, the breakout sessions and one on one discussions were probably the most useful
• Hopefully some SubEtha notes get online sometime

Also, the our panel tomorrow: Planning for Campus-Wide Integration of Social Software. I’m playing around w/ trying to Nicecast it, but would involve figuring out tunneling on SSH which isn’t working for some reason.

I’d post more videos, but the process has been slightly above my pain threshold. Here’s some from a recent dump:

A pan of Random’s installation [4.7M]

A closeup of the installation [3.5M]

A short clip from the motivational speaker skit [8.6M]

I posted a mini-review of Ryan’s show w/ the Flickr pic. There’s a second performance next Tuesday @ the Improv Olympic.

While I’m complaining about software, I’ll also mention I’ve been disappointed with Mail 2.0. Simple things like moving messages to folders aren’t exposed in Automator, the Scripts menu is gone, along w/ all my hot-keys, and my favorite extensions are all broken, with no fixes in sight. Also, the vaunted Spotlight works crappily on my 2GB mailbox (expanded in size 3-4 fold by the mbox->emlx conversion). While mail-wide searches are marginally more responsive, inbox filtering is even more useless. If it wasn’t for Thunderbird’s continued beyond-lame IMAP handling, I’d switch back (if GreaseMonkey came out for Thunderbird, I’d probably switch even w/ the retardo-IMAP).

Update on AppleScripting: I did a bit of poking around, and the Script Menu can be re-enabled via the ‘AppleScript Utility’. You’ll then want to move your old Mail scripts from ‘~/Library/Scripts/Mail Scripts’ to ‘~/Library/Scripts/Applications/Mail’. According to Mail 2.0’s help, you should be able to use keyboard shortcuts, but this appears to be broken (scripts that previously worked w/ the ___ suffix don’t anymore, even w/ the renamed ctrl). The documentation may be out of date, it mentions and ‘Update Scripts Menu’ option when that option doesn’t exist anymore. Here’s a coversation on the Apple support forums about the script menu funkiness.

While putting off real work, I took a couple minutes to look at what, if anything new on the OS X RSS reader front, taking a look at the latest version of NetNewsWire, Shrook, and Pulp Fiction, and Newsfire. Conclusions? They all still suck.

• the last thing I need is an another icon on my dock telling me how behind I am, RSS readers need to be stream-based, the e-mail model is retarded
• every single one of these apps offer smart lists for items, but none of them offer a way to have a way to tag/facet feeds (NetNewsWire, Shrook, and NewsFire have the ability to ‘Group’ feeds, but not to put feeds in multiple groups, or if they do, they’re treated as separate sources, so changes to one doesn’t reflect in the other)
• Not one of them has an ‘blog’ view like online aggregegators (NetNewsWire and Pulp Fiction are three-paned, w/ Pulp Fiction taking the email metaphor way too far, Shrook uses a column-style view, NewsFire uses a two-pane view)
• Tags would be nice (and solve the grouping problem)
• None of them offer useful views, like identifying top links in your feeds, tracking usage patterns, etc (the only thing I’ve seen that even begins to touch on this stuff is Chameleon). There’s so much implicit metadata to extract (but I’d settle for something that’s just has a humane UI)
• NNW doesn’t keep items indefinitely? wtf?

See also:

• ponyboy’s rant on Glassdog last year
• lmorchard’s thoughts/improvements
• jveen’s system for trying to make the best of a bad situation
  

  “I feel like I make things un-bold for a living now.”
  — Lane Becker

[A full review and video dump will be forming over the next couple of days]

In summary, Coachella kicked ass. The weather of beautiful, beyond the occasional mixing gaffes, the sound was surprisingly good, the crowds and lines were bearable, and the music… the music was awesome.

Set reviews (I took some video, but the clips are mostly too short and not metered properly, still learning to handle the T7…):

• Boom Bip – even though we got to Indio early, we ended up not getting to the festival grounds until the show was almost over, which is too bad because what we did catch was very good. From what I had read/seen, I was expecting something very electronic, but it turns out that the set had a surprisingly guitary (live-band) post-rock sound going for it. Boom Bip is kicking off a NA tour. He’ll be in LA @ the Echo w/ Fog on the 26th
  • 16s of Boom Bip [5.6MB]
• Nic Armstrong and the Thieves – Nic Armstrong’s fuzzy retro sound seems like it was made for sunny afternoon festival gigs, and sure enough, it came off great on the outdoor stage. There was lots of room and the grass was still in good shape, so Dan and I broke out the hackeysack for a couple songs
  • 7s of Nic Armstrong [2.7MB]
• Buck 65 – Buck 65 is a Nova Scotian folk-hop w/ some real underground credibility and some critically acclaimed albums. Unfortunately, his stuff on stage just wasn’t working for me, and was pretty underwhelming on the main stage.
  • 14s of Buck 65 [5MB]
• k-os – an interesting contrast is k-os, another Canadian rapper, who absolutely rocked the Gobi tent. If he ever makes his way down to LA, I will definitely be showing up
  • k-os Hit the Road Jack call/response (w/ Crabbuckit) [10.4MB]
• M83 – I love the albums, and this was one of the few sets that I camped and moved up on (it was early in the day, in the same tent after k-os). I was sort of surprised that this as a live-band act, which for the most part worked, although sometimes when the sequencing took over duties, it seemed to deflate some of the energy… I can’t really explain it, just that, while I wasn’t disappointed, despite digging the music, I’m not sure I got all that much out of the live version.
  • M83 laptop rockin’ [5.7MB]
  • M83 guitar rockin’ [3.5MB]
• Snow Patrol – for a couple weeks last year I was completely obsessed with these guys. So, hmm, they played a lot of the songs I liked on their old albums, and they debuted some new songs (nothing grabbed me though). Maybe it’s just that chewed-bubblegum thing, but their live set definitely didn’t grab me at all, and seemed to get worse as it went on. Anyway…
• Tiga
• Jean Grae
• Wilco
• Weezer
• Sage Francis
• Secret Machines
• Bloc Party
• Chemical Brothers
• Spoon

• Diplo
• Autolux
• Jem
• M.I.A.
• The Futureheads
• The Arcade Fire
• New Order
• Aesop Rock
• Pinback
• NIN
• The Faint
• The Prodigy
• Bright Eyes
• Black Star

Bands that I missed that I heard were good:

• Keane
• Cafe Tacuba
• Gram Rabbit
• Gang of Four
• Dresden Dolls
• British Sea Power

I also took a few photos, but I’ll be the first to admit that they aren’t very good or interesting. Mediaeater’s photoset is much better (some great crowd-shots too). I’m still looking for someone who bothered to shoot interesting pictures of the festival itself (it’s easy to get caught up in snaps of the bands).

Coachella fun tips:

• Park from the south and thumb your noses at the lemmings waiting in line. Suckers! (Go down Jefferson or Jackson until 52nd Ave and head into Madison, Monroe, or if you don’t mind walking a little extra for getting out extra quick, park off of 52nd)
• If you get there early (before 1-2PM), you should get through the lines in 10-15min, you’ll probably also catch some suprisingly good bands you’ve never heard of
• Bringing a bag is worth it
• Sound is surprisingly good far back, so if you’re not going to ‘camp’ for a fav band, it’s just as good to hang back, wander, and take it all in
• If you can carry it (w/ the aforementioned bag) buy water in volume. It’ll save you line-hassle and towards the end of the day the water they sell isn’t cold anyway)
• For crowded tents, be sure to try the far side of the tent for better luck.
• For the main and outdoor stages, you’ll be surprised how much room is on the sides
• Sprint has awesome reception at Coachella, is much less likely to drop, and has solid SMSing (some friends on other services intermittent problems sending)
• When leaving at the end of the night, use the exit before the entrance (there’s major rubbernecking leaving via the entrance)