SHORTLIST FOR 2012 DIANA JONES AWARD ANNOUNCED

The committee of the Diana Jones Award has announced the shortlist for its 2012 award. The list contains five candidates that in the opinion of the committee exemplify the very best that hobby-gaming produced in 2011. In alphabetical order, they are:

•  BURNING WHEEL GOLD, an RPG system by Luke Crane, published by Burning Wheel.
• CROWDFUNDING, with particular acknowledgement to Kickstarter.
• NORDIC LARP, a book by Jaakko Stenros and Markus Montola, published by Fëa Livia.
• RISK LEGACY, a board game by Rob Daviau, published by Hasbro Inc.
• VORNHEIM, an RPG supplement by Zak S, published by Lamentations of the Flame Princess.

The winner of the 2011 Award will be announced on Wednesday 15th August, at the annual Diana Jones Award and Freelancer Party in Indianapolis, the unofficial start of the Gen Con Indy convention.

ABOUT THE AWARD

The Diana Jones Award for Excellence in Gaming was founded and first awarded in 2001. It is presented annually to the person, product, company, event or any other thing that has, in the opinion of its mostly anonymous committee of games industry luminaries, best demonstrated the quality of ‘excellence’ in the world of hobby-gaming in the previous year. The winner of the Award receives the Diana Jones trophy.

The short-list and eventual winner are chosen by the Diana Jones Committee, a mostly anonymous group of games-industry alumni and illuminati, known to include designers, publishers, cartoonists, and those content to rest on their laurels.

Past winners include industry figures such as Peter Adkison and Jordan Weisman, the role-playing games Nobilis, Sorcerer, and My Life with Master, the board-games Dominion and Ticket to Ride, the website BoardGameGeek; and the charity fundraising work of Irish games conventions. Last year’s winner was Fiasco by Jason Morningstar.

This is the twelfth year of the Award.

More information is available at www.dianajonesaward.org or at the Award’s Wikipedia page at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diana_Jones_Award.

There’d be the patents for the sensing strips themselves and the methods through which you design the capillaries to draw the hood sample up. The ways in which you could keep the rest of the sensor package sterile. The way that you would account for changes in sensor sensitivity in each strip, presumably resulting in the requirement (or non-requirement, as it seems to not exist these days) of coding.

And that’s just the strip. Then there’s the design patents for must-fit functionality, ensuring that you can only put the strip in the right way. The. The sensor package in the reader itself, and you haven’t even started on the numerous software patents for assessing, interpreting, recording and displaying the sensor data on a one-time and historical basis.

And I thought: if I were rich, I mean, really really rich, Gates Foundation style rich, and I wanted to be massively disrupting…

what would be the n top patents you would buy, then license out, for free, to get the biggest bang for your buck in terms of saving lives?

I’m obviously hand waving things like building infrastructure and distribution of the end goods, but what would you choose?

There’d be the patents for the sensing strips themselves and the methods through which you design the capillaries to draw the hood sample up. The ways in which you could keep the rest of the sensor package sterile. The way that you would account for changes in sensor sensitivity in each strip, presumably resulting in the requirement (or non-requirement, as it seems to not exist these days) of coding.

And that’s just the strip. Then there’s the design patents for must-fit functionality, ensuring that you can only put the strip in the right way. The. The sensor package in the reader itself, and you haven’t even started on the numerous software patents for assessing, interpreting, recording and displaying the sensor data on a one-time and historical basis.

And I thought: if I were rich, I mean, really really rich, Gates Foundation style rich, and I wanted to be massively disrupting…

what would be the n top patents you would buy, then license out, for free, to get the biggest bang for your buck in terms of saving lives?

I’m obviously hand waving things like building infrastructure and distribution of the end goods, but what would you choose?

• Overview | Nokia Sensing X CHALLENGE – another one for the "if I were creating a startup" list
• Doctor Who: The Eternity Clock Review • Reviews • PlayStation 3 • Eurogamer.net – "2/10" – BBC Worldwide still incapable of licensing out a good game.
• ‘Flame,’ a cyberweapon that makes Stuxnet look cheap | Beyond The Beyond | Wired.com – Flame's payload–or code base–is 20 megabytes, according to reports. Even though it's not clear whether that 20meg is decompiled or source, has anyone made (an infographic, I suppose) charting the increase in code base of Trojans and viruses over the past 30 years?
• Nanosatellites equipped with Kinect could join together like space LEGO | The Verge – 2012, and this is what the world is like: sensor technology developed for the Israeli military is combined with software developed by the pure research arm of one of the world's largest software companies in order to combat a competitive threat for dominance of the home living room through video games consoles, licensed and sold as a loss leader to get units out in the open and to create a software hardware ecosystem that enables research teams at a university at a country without its own space launch capability to develop self-assembling and flocking nano satellites. This is 2012.
• Innovation Under Austerity: Eben Moglen’s call to arms from the Freedom to Connect conference – Boing Boing – "So a little thug in a hooded sweatshirt made the Web easy to write, and created a man-in-the-middle attack on human civilization. " – paging the internet's cstross.
• Viral marketing doesn’t work …tell everyone you know | MetaFilter – "The worst bug I ever perpetrated in my coding-for-a-living days was first reported to me via NTK, when for a short period the good citizens of Scunthorpe were unable to post the name of their town to the website of a certain well-known broadcasting corporation in Britain, and it was entirely my fault." – and this! Fully expecting this thread to turn up on best of mefi now.
• Viral marketing doesn’t work …tell everyone you know | MetaFilter – Metafilter thread Roth a read for the nostalgia. wondering now if we're going to get a slew of Killer Net and attachments re-watches.
• Four signs America’s broadband policy is failing | Ars Technica – Broadband access in America is so screwed it's a joke.
• “Doctor Who,” “Community,” and Cult TV Fans : The New Yorker – Cult shows, such as “Doctor Who” and “Community,” often have this quality: they shrug off the condescension that people have toward their “lower” genres, using their constraints to find a greater freedom. When you look at a show like that from a distance, it might seem too narrow to contain much of interest. But it’s so much larger when you’re on the inside.

• Overview | Nokia Sensing X CHALLENGE – another one for the "if I were creating a startup" list
• Doctor Who: The Eternity Clock Review • Reviews • PlayStation 3 • Eurogamer.net – "2/10" – BBC Worldwide still incapable of licensing out a good game.
• ‘Flame,’ a cyberweapon that makes Stuxnet look cheap | Beyond The Beyond | Wired.com – Flame's payload–or code base–is 20 megabytes, according to reports. Even though it's not clear whether that 20meg is decompiled or source, has anyone made (an infographic, I suppose) charting the increase in code base of Trojans and viruses over the past 30 years?
• Nanosatellites equipped with Kinect could join together like space LEGO | The Verge – 2012, and this is what the world is like: sensor technology developed for the Israeli military is combined with software developed by the pure research arm of one of the world's largest software companies in order to combat a competitive threat for dominance of the home living room through video games consoles, licensed and sold as a loss leader to get units out in the open and to create a software hardware ecosystem that enables research teams at a university at a country without its own space launch capability to develop self-assembling and flocking nano satellites. This is 2012.
• Innovation Under Austerity: Eben Moglen’s call to arms from the Freedom to Connect conference – Boing Boing – "So a little thug in a hooded sweatshirt made the Web easy to write, and created a man-in-the-middle attack on human civilization. " – paging the internet's cstross.
• Viral marketing doesn’t work …tell everyone you know | MetaFilter – "The worst bug I ever perpetrated in my coding-for-a-living days was first reported to me via NTK, when for a short period the good citizens of Scunthorpe were unable to post the name of their town to the website of a certain well-known broadcasting corporation in Britain, and it was entirely my fault." – and this! Fully expecting this thread to turn up on best of mefi now.
• Viral marketing doesn’t work …tell everyone you know | MetaFilter – Metafilter thread Roth a read for the nostalgia. wondering now if we're going to get a slew of Killer Net and attachments re-watches.
• Four signs America’s broadband policy is failing | Ars Technica – Broadband access in America is so screwed it's a joke.
• “Doctor Who,” “Community,” and Cult TV Fans : The New Yorker – Cult shows, such as “Doctor Who” and “Community,” often have this quality: they shrug off the condescension that people have toward their “lower” genres, using their constraints to find a greater freedom. When you look at a show like that from a distance, it might seem too narrow to contain much of interest. But it’s so much larger when you’re on the inside.

There’d be the patents for the sensing strips themselves and the methods through which you design the capillaries to draw the hood sample up. The ways in which you could keep the rest of the sensor package sterile. The way that you would account for changes in sensor sensitivity in each strip, presumably resulting in the requirement (or non-requirement, as it seems to not exist these days) of coding.

And that’s just the strip. Then there’s the design patents for must-fit functionality, ensuring that you can only put the strip in the right way. The. The sensor package in the reader itself, and you haven’t even started on the numerous software patents for assessing, interpreting, recording and displaying the sensor data on a one-time and historical basis.

And I thought: if I were rich, I mean, really really rich, Gates Foundation style rich, and I wanted to be massively disrupting…

what would be the n top patents I would buy, then license out, for free, to get the biggest bang for my buck in terms of saving lives?

I’m obviously hand waving things like building infrastructure and distribution of the end goods, but what would you choose?

• Manhattanhenge | Hayden Planetarium – What will future civilizations think of Manhattan Island when they dig it up and find a carefully laid out network of streets and avenues? Surely the grid would be presumed to have astronomical significance, just as we have found for the pre-historic circle of large vertical rocks known as Stonehenge, in the Salisbury Plain of England. For Stonehenge, the special day is the summer solstice, when the Sun rises in perfect alignment with several of the stones, signaling the change of season.
• Make mainframes, not war: how Mad Men sold computers in the 1960s and 1970s | Ars Technica – Sidenote: I can't help but feel that The Verge is doing this kind of journalism better than Ars Technica is now.
• Coming Soon: Jennifer Egan’s "Black Box" : The New Yorker – "The story was originally nearly twice its present length; it took me a year, on and off, to control and calibrate the material into what is now “Black Box.”" – when was the last time you took a year to edit something to publish on Twitter?
• Jennifer Egan, "Black Box" : The New Yorker – The New Yorker's Page-Turner collection of day one of Jennifer Egan's Twitter-based fiction.
• In Lead-Up to Launch, Obvious-Backed Lift Leaves Gamification Behind – Liz Gannes – Product News – AllThingsD – Includes clarification and definition of "naked gamification", i.e. the shit one.

• Manhattanhenge | Hayden Planetarium – What will future civilizations think of Manhattan Island when they dig it up and find a carefully laid out network of streets and avenues? Surely the grid would be presumed to have astronomical significance, just as we have found for the pre-historic circle of large vertical rocks known as Stonehenge, in the Salisbury Plain of England. For Stonehenge, the special day is the summer solstice, when the Sun rises in perfect alignment with several of the stones, signaling the change of season.
• Make mainframes, not war: how Mad Men sold computers in the 1960s and 1970s | Ars Technica – Sidenote: I can't help but feel that The Verge is doing this kind of journalism better than Ars Technica is now.
• Coming Soon: Jennifer Egan’s "Black Box" : The New Yorker – "The story was originally nearly twice its present length; it took me a year, on and off, to control and calibrate the material into what is now “Black Box.”" – when was the last time you took a year to edit something to publish on Twitter?
• Jennifer Egan, "Black Box" : The New Yorker – The New Yorker's Page-Turner collection of day one of Jennifer Egan's Twitter-based fiction.
• In Lead-Up to Launch, Obvious-Backed Lift Leaves Gamification Behind – Liz Gannes – Product News – AllThingsD – Includes clarification and definition of "naked gamification", i.e. the shit one.

Optimism, pessimism, fuck that; we’re going to make it happen. As God is my bloody witness, I’m hell-bent on making it work.

- Elon Musk interviewed by Wired in August 2008.

Optimism, pessimism, fuck that; we’re going to make it happen. As God is my bloody witness, I’m hell-bent on making it work.

- Elon Musk interviewed by Wired in August 2008.

Each Friday afternoon, this will deliver a 15 year timeshifted copy of the ‘Nasty. British. Short’  geek newsletter, NTK, which originally ran from 1997 through to 2007ish.

Anno NTK is a Bad Thing, for three reasons.

Firstly, it’s all much too fey and fashionable.  NTK would have ruthlessly taken the piss.

Secondly, their ruse is sufficiently elegant for people to refrain from giving the NTKers a hard time for giving up in the first place.  I remain pitiless in my scorn. Quitters.

Thirdly, its arrival has required me to delve into the dark corners of my emailarchive to fix various urls on assorted esoteric webservers. Tracks once carefully covered then should remain thus, while joy shared then should once again be celebrated.

(Respect to Demon for keeping that last webserver running for 17+ years. Please don’t send me the invoice.)

• FuelBand for alpha waves (16 May., 2012, at Interconnected) – Matt on a follow-on Fuelband for alpha waves makes the following note:

  "And then I thought: I don't give myself enough time to exercise either, and what I did in that case was buy a Nike+ FuelBand and monitor how many steps I take each day. (There was a surprise there: Factoring out exercise, there's a huge variation in my regular everyday activity, a four-times difference between quiet days and active days although they feel much the same.)"

  This seems to happen with everyone who starts a QS regime. You're not who you thought you were.

• Cantina Creative – Design and visual effects studio.
• jayse – "Story-telling data + UI design for film"
• Avengers – jayse – "This is just an image dump of marvel approved stills and screenshots of my work on the film. I'll do a proper post soon – this is a fraction of the work – But I had the distinct pleasure of working with Cantina Creative, leading the design of the glass screens for the Helicarier in the Avengers. I also led the design and animation of the all new and upgraded Mark VII Hud. "
• Danny O’Brien’s Oblomovka » Blog Archive » NTK, Fifteen Years On – dob on the re-emergence of NTK, 15 years later. Reading today's issue, it's amazing how things are still the same.
• Introducing XOXO – Waxy.org – Very excited to be going to this.

• FuelBand for alpha waves (16 May., 2012, at Interconnected) – Matt on a follow-on Fuelband for alpha waves makes the following note:

  "And then I thought: I don't give myself enough time to exercise either, and what I did in that case was buy a Nike+ FuelBand and monitor how many steps I take each day. (There was a surprise there: Factoring out exercise, there's a huge variation in my regular everyday activity, a four-times difference between quiet days and active days although they feel much the same.)"

  This seems to happen with everyone who starts a QS regime. You're not who you thought you were.

• Cantina Creative – Design and visual effects studio.
• jayse – "Story-telling data + UI design for film"
• Avengers – jayse – "This is just an image dump of marvel approved stills and screenshots of my work on the film. I'll do a proper post soon – this is a fraction of the work – But I had the distinct pleasure of working with Cantina Creative, leading the design of the glass screens for the Helicarier in the Avengers. I also led the design and animation of the all new and upgraded Mark VII Hud. "
• Danny O’Brien’s Oblomovka » Blog Archive » NTK, Fifteen Years On – dob on the re-emergence of NTK, 15 years later. Reading today's issue, it's amazing how things are still the same.
• Introducing XOXO – Waxy.org – Very excited to be going to this.

Which had the lens I needed in stock. And would also let me do in-store pickup! And the store was only a few blocks away!

So I ordered the lens, walked over to the store and waited for forty five minutes, staring at the lens I had bought, but not able to yet buy it, because someone hadn’t picked it and placed it on a shelf so I could pick it up.

I guess I could’ve cancelled my order and just bought the one I could see, but then I’m British and that would’ve been messing with the Order of Things.

Suggestion for Best Buy: when I go to the in-store pickup section to collect an order and you can tell that it hasn’t been picked yet, but you can tell from your inventory that you do indeed have the product in stock, why don’t you just call up to the floor, cancel my pickup order and get someone to sell me the damn thing so I don’t have to wander your store aimlessly adding things to my Amazon wish list?