The upcoming educational website Method of Action features two online typography games to discover kerning and spacing, and letter shaping.
Both of them take less than 15 minutes to complete, unless of course you start over and over to improve your score.
Last month at the Norwegian demoparty Kindergarden, Gloom and Kusma of the group Excess released a short and stylish PC demo: cortex sous vide. Here is a video of it on Youtube, but if you have a decent PC I recommend you to download the actual demo and run it to enjoy the slick rendering. Kusma later announced they were releasing the source code of some of their demos.
Ealier this year, on Easter, the group Dead Roman released at The Gathering a very unusual production, spheres on a plane, that impressed me both technically and artistically. Here is an article on the thoughts and work behind the demo: Behind the spheres on the plane.
Back then I wasn’t so much of a blog reader. I had at most a dozen of sources I would read on a regular basis. Then somewhere around 2008 I discovered Google Reader: an awesome tool that allowed not only to subscribe to feeds, organize them and read them through a unified interface just like any news aggregator, but more importantly allowed to share news of interest with other people. By following people I knew were interested in topics relevant to me, I would get insights from those topics without the burden of browsing other hundreds of sources by myself. I used Google Reader daily for the last years, sharpening my fields of interest over the time.
Until that fateful day when Reader was shot in the head after someone decided Google+ was the way to go. They probably thought people would have no choice but embracing it. I don’t know how things went after that, but from what I saw most felt less than happy at having it forced down their throat. The user base of Newsblur skyrocketed, much expectations were put on HiveMined, but then came the status quo: Newsblur doesn’t have the social feature yet, and HiveMined is not ready yet either. Meanwhile, some argue Google Reader is still the best newsreader around.
We Google Reader orphans are looking for a new home to party again, but we all know the community is shattered. What made the strength of Reader was its ubiquity. Many of us wouldn’t even try Google+, because of the feeling that we were betrayed by Google and that it’s likely to happen again anytime. And now we are waiting to see where everyone will go.
Until we have that answer, supposing it ever comes, I thought I would give a try at a good old blog. One thing I learned while using Reader is that just gathering things one find of interest can already make an interesting editorial line. So from now on I will use this blog the way I was sharing things, making it a reliable bookmark reference for myself and hopefully an interesting feed for other people. Oh, and I plan to write things too: it will be an opportunity to try myself at publishing in English, since it’s not my mother tongue. For more autenticity, feel free to read with an outrageous French accent. :)
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