Matt.Tarbit.org

Ode to a Bygone Era

In the pub on friday the subject of geek pilgrimages cropped up. Trips to MIT, One Infinite Loop, the Googleplex, that sort of thing. I've yet to partake myself, but I can definitely see the appeal.

In a similar vein, I mentioned Code Rush, only to be met by blank looks all round.

A documentary from the close of the nineties, about crunch time at Netscape in the run-up to the release of Mozilla. If you haven't seen it and those words evoke anything for you, then you should. Jamie Zawinski, Brendan Eich, history, pathos, what more do you need?

(Credit due to Andy Baio who was fairly instrumental a year or two ago in re-kindling interest in the film and inspiring the film-makers to re-release it under a Creative Commons license.)

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Sound & Vision

So you're an internerd who spends far too much time thinking about games, right?

In that case, I'm sure you have some favourite websites that regurgitate press releases and opine at great length and so on, but don't your eyes get tired reading all those cramped-up little letters? Seems to me that the audio-visual side of things is sometimes under-explored. There's some great episodic stuff out there that you might be missing out on.

For example, are you following any of the following?:

Audio

• Idle Thumbs - Industry types meet to talk games. Infectious giggling, stream of consciousness riffing, and passionate discourse ensues.
• A Life Well Wasted - Polished mix of documentary, interviews & soundscapes in the manner of This American Life.

Video

• Hey Ash, Whatcha Playing? - Sibling duo. Fast-paced. Dick jokes. Lovable.
• The Independint Charles Show / Downtimetown - Consolevania creator Robert Florence infrequently reviews XBLIG releases and board game purchases.
• I Hit It With My Axe - Footage from the regular sessions of the D&D With Porn Stars guy's role-playing group.

There's a few more that I tried but couldn't stick with. Zero Punctuation was OK at first, but the style got old pretty quickly. There's the various offerings from the Penny Arcade media empire, but their latest PATV stuff seems a little bit self-aggrandizing in places. And there's Tom Vasel's Dice Tower. That guy's just too prolific to keep up with, although I liked the Top 100 run-downs with his daughters.

So that's my contributions. Know of any others I should be paying attention to?

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The Yorkshire Fork

So my lovable lady vife has started an emblogulation over at theyorkshirefork.co.uk. It's food-focussed, since that's the great love of her life (sniffle), but it's also entertaining enough that it'll hold your interest even if, like me, you're not a foodie by nature.

She's been posting up a storm on a roughly daily basis so there's plenty to see already. And I know I'm biased and all, but I reckon you'd be doing yourself a disservice if you didn't read a post or two and see how you like it.

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