Sam King's Verbose Letters

Extra Credits is a series of 5 minute videos on video games as art, and it is superb. Its target audience is video game aficionados, developers, and critics, and if you like video games, I highly recommend it.

My favorite books:

Fiction

140 is a minimalistic rhythm platformer.  The basic idea is that the game mechanics are tied to the music.  So, if a platform moves, it will move on the beat.  That gives it a very intuitive feel. At the end of a level, there's also a boss fight,  which is an interesting digression from the main game.  The bosses keep to the tempo and all feel very unique.

Jeff Atwood, who made StackOverflow among other things, wrote a blog post arguing that most programmers can't program.  A lot of people have accepted the conclusions at face value (eg, in this Quora post), but there are some serious problems with it, so I decided to weigh in as well.

The Way of Kings is the first book in the 10 book Stormlight Archive.  And what an introduction!

Warbreaker is a fantasy novel where magic comes from perception ("breath") and color. A person can give part of their perception away to others. Someone who has bought the perception of many others will see the world as supremely beautiful. Magic happens when people give their perception to inanimate objects.

Elantris is Brandon Sanderson's first novel.  I checked it out because I enjoyed Mistborn, and I liked Elantris as well.

Elantris is the city of gods.  However, one decade before the book takes place, the gods fell from grace, losing their magic and throwing the world into political turmoil.  

People are weird, and Amelie explores that idea to wonderful effect.

I first heard of Amelie in a Design School class.  They showed a clip from the start of the movie that describes Amelie's parents.  I can't remember if the lesson I was supposed to take away from the clip was that people are weird or that you can tell a fairly full story with a few short descriptions of some interesting characters.  

My cousin went to a Quaker high school, so when I went to her graduation, I had the opportunity to attend a Quaker service.  

At a Quaker service, everyone is silent until they have something meaningful to say.  Then, they say it.  Since it was the service before graduation, a fair amount of parents spoke, including one person who kicked off the service by telling a potty training story about his son (I think there was a moral to the story, too...).  His son took it well.

I discovered Guitar, as I normally do with new music, on Pandora (Akiko started appearing on my Paramore station).  My perception of Guitar's album, Tokyo, changed a lot once I actually bought it.  At first blush, the music seems like active, rhythmic, instrumental music.  And, as background music, it is.