ja2ke

It is absolutely not a Common Core hit piece! The teacher talks about how providing context (teaching!) allowed Common Core material to provide a very worthwhile lesson.

"If we are to truly make progress in getting our students to understand the concepts presented in the Common Core to the depth intended we must help them learn to stop looking for a right answer and start looking for a right reason."

Talking to a lot of teachers it is often not the provided Core material that is the issue, but not having enough time to actually provide the structure and context to help the kids internalize why any of it is important. It's also not a surprise that is the case, given that at least where I live (California) the school year is measurably shorter and class sizes are measurably bigger than they were when I was in the same grades.

Twitch.tv has offered this service for ages, but maybe it started offering it after splitting from the Justin codebase?

Third announcement has got to be a controller of some type. The O + O probably = dual analog sticks and a d pad, or some other dual-thumb input controls. There's no way Valve is going to announce a living room platform and then give away the most visible part (the controller) to Microsoft's wired Xbox 360 controller (currently the standard bearer for PC controllers despite being from a console).

I think the issue here is that off-duty police officers speed aggressively with the knowledge that, if caught, they will be almost certainly let off the hook due to their job. That makes the situation completely different than people with any other "just a job" job.

It's usually what makes the game actually feel good to play.

I've heard looking at the first person movement code for Valve's games will make you wish for your own death, but stripping out the weird stuff which looks ideologically wrong just makes the game play worse.

The word "tweet" to refer to a post. A bird as the logo! Twitter started as barely more than a faceless service, and most of what is "Twitter" as a brand came from its users and developers.

Not that there isn't precedent for their model. I remember being fascinated to read that the Big Mac and Ronald McDonald both came from local franchise restaurants, not corporate HQ. It's just a frustrating position to take. It feels short sighted.

A really cool fried who suddenly shows up for lunch in a suit, then eventually stops calling you. Your mom reads about them in a magazine and excitedly tells you what they're up to for a few years, then you stop hearing about them.

I think we're just going to see a rise in more "architectural" styled development renderings, over fully polished marketing-style imagery. I welcome that.

It's brand diluting all the same, though. I guess they (probably correctly) see that they are doing a lot of things right with online purchases/downloads that other places aren't, but part of what I think they are doing right is having and keeping focus. Of course, people said the same thing when Amazon stopped just selling books, and that worked out alright for them.

This will dilute the hell out of what I actually use Steam for -- video games.

The Steam front page, though it may seem a little sloppy or insane, is extremely successful at pointing me to games I am interested in, at a cheap price. It's going to get weird, and very nebulous, if a copy of Adobe Premiere is up there in the hot picks slider along with Assassin's Creed 3.

"Dropbox Pro now comes in flavors of 100 and 200 GB, but at the price of the original 50 and 100 GB plans." I don't know what's complicated about this. It reads like new pricing = old pricing with 2x the storage. Am I missing something, too?

Yep, most "consumer-level" end users would prefer to not be asked. I'm probably a bad nerd, but it's even true of me. When I go to my parents house for some holiday or another, I used to meticulously check everything on my mom's computer to make sure it was working well. Now I basically just jam on the manual software update button for everything she has installed that doesn't autoupdate, because she's too afraid or inconvenienced by the manual update button. Everything else, though, is just managing itself and she doesn't notice.

They've always been at least "Applications" on the Mac, which is probably where the NeXTSTEP team got the file extension. On DOS/Windows it was and still is "Executable," though people are starting to casually use "App" everywhere.

Amnesia is fantastic example of using gameplay mechanics and rules to create mood.

Amnesia wants to use its interlocking game systems to make you feel afraid: You stay sane longer in the light. You have a limited amount of lamp oil with which to create light. Monsters make you insane (and kill you). Monsters can see you better in the light. Monsters make you go insane more quickly if you look directly at them (in the style of Lovecraft, gazing on things you should not see rend your mind).

The end result of this is a pretty wonderful set of rule balancing where, upon seeing a monster, the player immediately douses their lamp and hides in a dark corner staring at the wall, slowly going insane from a horror they cannot look at, knowing that looking at it will make them go truly mad, and turning on light for comfort will bring them a swift death.

It helps that on the art side, the visuals and audio are all built around creating and enhancing the mood, of course, but it's rare that there are a bunch of interlocking systems which can shape your behavior in a way that's that harmonious with an expected emotional output, a mood, tone, etc.

The game is rough around the edges and definitely created by a small team, but what it achieves is pretty rare.