The Gamer's Quarter

[internisus]

Sometimes, a tool that I can use to do something can be the primary inspiration for undergoing that activity in the first place. For example, I am only somewhat interested in writing my own interactive fiction, but when I look at the Inform 7 webpage and read its extensive list of features or look through the long gallery showing how it functions in OS-X, I terribly want an excuse to play with it. Go look at it! Don't you want to write IF all of the sudden?

Another application I feel this way about is Scrivener. It makes me excited to write for all the wrong reasons -- just to play with the organizational program! But just look at it! Between these two applications and the cleanliness of OS-X, I'm sold on a mac laptop of some sort.

So, what about you? You don't have to mention a computer tool! This sentiment could be towards just about anything you use to make something or get something done!

[Ging]

[internisus]

You are one click away from being banned, mister.

[Ging]

[Intentionally Wrong]

Oh, nonsense. We were all thinking it, anyway. I have (perhaps irrational?) faith in you, Ging!

There was a program I stumbled upon a long time ago. I think it was linked on metafilter, most likely, though it might have been memepool. This program was designed for Tablet PCs first and foremost--lots of gestural commands, the default mode for entering text was with the mouse, etc.--but I don't have one, so I used it on my desktop. It was a program for make flow charts and planning web pages. By drawing little mock-ups of pages, you could draw lines linking the text on one to the body of another, and then you could test it out as if it were a real web-page.

One night, in a moment of grievous error, I uninstalled it. I was trying to make space. It didn't seem important, mostly because the command gestures didn't make sense with a mouse.

It would have been perfect for designing maps and plots for interactive fiction.

I've been trying to find it ever since.

[internisus]

fine fine just stop vomiting on the forum

[Nana Komatsu]

UNIX is love and there's nothing beautiful about UNIX.

[TOLLMASTER]

[Perseus]

Scrivener looks wonderful! It's a big step up from the multi-tab text editor I'm using anyway. Are there similar writer's tools for the PC?

[dessgeega]

i was tempted to take a picture of a flogger or wartenberg wheel, but instead i'm going to write about the beauteous beauty that is the gameboy camera.

the gameboy camera is a fantastic device. as a camera, it only takes four-color heavily dithered photos. there are much more capable cameras out there, especially now, but what makes a gameboy camera worth having is all the love that was put into it. there are so many completely frivolous features that were put in because the developers just decided that they were neat ideas. like all the different mirror and split-screen shots, the games that you can insert your own head into, the completely inexplicable click-through hotspot editor. the slideshow that plays "blue danube". the jrpg menu. the ability to pick from five different "photo snap" sound effects. i have a digital camera, but it doesn't have this kind of energy, this charm.

and i think the photos are pretty distinctive, actually.
_________________

[GcDiaz]

Any old-school Mac users should know this one:

Canvas 2.0

I'd always doodled in class and such, but this program had me spending HOURS on the ol' Mac SE, messing with polygonal perspectives and faux-gradient effects (actually, I'd line up a bunch of rectangles, with no borders so they "merged" together, and color each one with progressively darker greyscale tones; from a distance it looked natural). I wish I'd saved some of them, I actually got pretty decent.
_________________

[DaleNixon]

screen

[km]

[DaleNixon]

If anyone wants my .screenrc let me know. Also dasher is interesting!

[shrug]

[Lackey]

The previous image reminds me of that notoriously cryptic Gary Larson comic:


I would really enjoy a gameboy camera, I saw an awesome page once where all the pictures were of geometric things that just became strange designs whith the dithering. It would require getting a gameboy first though, which doesn't seem completely worth it.

I really enjoy Sauerbraten/Cube 2 for the editor and the game not at all. I get no joy at all from the jumpy, generic FPS action, but erecting colossol megastructures in minutes in a live editor is really amusing. I hope the game mechanics become more flexible in the future.
_________________
| Little bird fighting against a bat sect game |

[internisus]

[shrug]

I suppose that my preferred forging hammer is really a suprisingly heavy old ball-peen someone found me at an antique store anyway.

Unless I really have to move a lot of metal or something.