Cricket and pixel cityscapes

15.58, Wednesday 5 Jun 2013

Okay I’ve been blocked on a bit of writing for about two weeks. And since it appears I can’t think my way out of a paper bag, how about we have some random links from my open tabs.

  • Shane Warne’s Ball of the Century – there’s a video, way down the page, of Warne bowling Gatting out with a leg spin back in 1993. Amazing.
  • Startup advice, 95 stanzas. All good. I like this: A lot of the best ideas seem silly or bad initially–you want an idea at the intersection of ‘seems like bad idea’ and ‘is good idea’. (It’s important to note you need to be contrarian and right, not simply contrarian.)
  • Pixel City home screens for the Sony Ericsson XPERIA X2, by us two. Lovely pixel art panoramic cityscape on your phone, and: As a user pans through the cityscape, all the different elements link to the functionality of the user’s phone. Text messages appear playfully on billboards, calendar events arrive by train, a passing airplane shows your call history and much more. 2009! Wonder and joy. Facebook Home is po-faced by comparison. Nintendo are cowards for not making a smartphone with Animal Crossing as the interface.
  • Wikipedia’s list of shibboleths. A shibboleth is a word, sound, or custom that a person unfamiliar with its significance may not pronounce or perform correctly relative to those who are familiar with it. It is used to identify foreigners or those who do not belong to a particular class or group of people. I’ve seen these referred to as “class markers” and green beards (which is unconscious), but I think the password/admission/in-group associations of “shibboleth” make it a useful term.

Fingers crossed, now unblocked.