Painfully Obvious.

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thought
2

GitHub now has even better commenting on commits. Better UI (collaborator highlighting, comment preview), better functionality (repo collaborators can edit anyone’s comment), better aesthetics. I use Git. I’m not wild about using it. I could take or leave it, to be honest. But I would stand in front of a tank for GitHub.

There are many geeks out there with a soft spot for Mercurial, or Bazaar, or darcs, or an even‐more‐neckbeard‐y DVCS, and they often wonder why Git is getting all the love. It’s because Git has GitHub. Mercurial seems to be feature‐equivalent to Git (at least in my limited experience), and Mercurial has BitBucket, which seems to be pretty good. But it’s not as good as GitHub.

Nobody should be ashamed that they can’t replicate GitHub’s success. It’s really hard to do the web well. It’s hard even to really smart people, of which I’m sure there are a few at BitBucket. The only people who think it’s easy are idiots. You can spot these people easily: they’re the ones who comment on TechCrunch posts and chortle that they could build a Stack Overflow clone over a weekend.

article
2

Designing the Census

• Posted in Articles, Government

The recent mailer from the U.S. Census Bureau struck a chord with two of my hobbies: information design and open government. Today I’ll be redesigning a piece of paper that looks mundane but has an astonishing impact on the amount of money our country is spending to conduct the 2010 Census. Sometimes good design can solve large‐scale problems.

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review
Heavy Rain

Heavy Rain

Verdict: 87/100 (Minimum score is 0; maximum is 100.)

A couple years ago, I stumbled upon a game called Masq. It’s a simple game with the art style of a comic book — a bunch of still frames with no sound — but each choice you make affects the final outcome in significant ways. I played at least four times and never had the same ending twice.

I’d forgotten about Masq until I played Heavy Rain. They’re both interactive dramas (a sparsely‐populated genre, to say the least), but the new PS3 offering aims to meld the forking plotlines of Masq with the atmosphere and immersion of high‐tech games.

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quotation

The fantasy that is indulged when Bob Costas speaks breathlessly about an upcoming ski race where he already knows exactly what happened is no longer even a fragile fantasy; it’s a blatant fiction that everyone knows about.

Linda Holmes

Bus Route of Tears

Misspelled protest signs have become a strange, hilarious art form over the past year. Terrence Nowicki reminds us that we only laugh at them to hide our own tears.

February 20, 2010
Image: Bus Route of Tears
quotation

I’m always a little confused by this stuff. Are we supposed to believe that Barack, Michelle, and Anita Dunn are secretly Maoists, but they keep forgetting to actually seize power in a violent coup and instead got confused and put internationally famous neoliberal economist Larry Summers in charge of economic policy?

Matthew Yglesias
review
Bioshock 2

Bioshock 2

Verdict: 83/100 (Minimum score is 0; maximum is 100.)

For most sequels (though Mass Effect 2 is a notable exception), my expectations are largely diminished — even when the original is one of my favorite games of all time.

That’s why I was satisfied with Bioshock 2, even though it’s not as good as the first. The gameplay improvements (dual‐wielding weapons and plasmids!) are much appreciated. The setting and backstory are solid; it was nice to see how Rapture’s other half lived, and how the city’s class stratification laid the grounds for a collectivist counter‐movement.

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quotation

Don’t slip a concrete dildo into someone’s box of Fruit Loops. They won’t be happy with your Morning Breakfast Surprise. Put the concrete dildo in a clearly labeled box, with instructions. Then when someone encounters a problem, “Hey, something is screwing me here. Maybe it’s the concrete dildo?” at least they know to ask.

The Higgs Bozo
quotation
1

Surprisingly, there was no press release with a rationalization for the name or any explanations of how the logo represents cutting edge technology and XFINITY’s commitment to its customers. Or whatever. The new name feels at the same time pompous and clichéd — as if there is no brighter horizon than the infinity of XFINITY but, really, nothing is as depressing as a badly placed “X,” a gesture better reserved for extreme games and products, for bad dot‐com era start‐ups and for strip‐club dancers not named Destiny. It might sound more fun than “Comcast” but at least Comcast sounds like a real company with almost fifty years of experience.

Brand New
video

Victorious Return

Since the 2006 season, the most zealous of Saints fans have gone to the airport to welcome the Saints back from road games. After landing, players and coaches leave in their own cars — but fans line up along the path to the airport exit, forming a gauntlet of adulation. As he creeped along, coach Sean Payton hoisted the Lombardi Trophy out of his sunroof.