CrunchyTech: The Latest from Boing Boing

Monday, May 11, 2009

The Latest from Boing Boing

Posted: 10 May 2009 09:48 PM PDT

Recently on Offworld Tom Armitage donned Plants Vs. Zombies (above) his official game for the weekend, admitting that its "charming character design and inventive array of zombies ensures that it's never long after a play-session before you're double-clicking on it again," and I take a longer look at my first week with my own most-played tower defense game -- ngmoco and Rough Cookie's spherical iPhone Star Defense -- and how everything I was skeptical of might became the very reasons it'll win me over. I also gave my first-hand diary account of sneaking across the digital Canadian border to be part of Microsoft's unveiling of its massively-multiplayer Xbox 360 version of the game show 1 Vs. 100, which will be played for real prizes (in the form of Microsoft Points) and looks geared to be the first successful run of a truly interactive TV show (commercial breaks and all). Elsewhere we took a quicker look at games due out in the coming months: Konami's revival of its long-running Contra series for WiiWare, a Mr. Driller team reunion with Sony's PS3/PSP number-puzzler Qruton, and Sonic the Hedgehog creator Yuji Naka's latest rhythm game for Wii, which asks that you not even hold the controller at all. And we saw the first look at a comic-book-style SimCity game Maxis never made, the first details of BioShock 2's multiplayer campaign, listened to a live glitch-out chiptune performance and chiptunes done instead on ukuleles, and, for the daily 'one shot's: a space invader weathering a placid Paris winter, a rusted ironworks decayed arcade, and the first look at UK comics legend 2000 AD and Judge Dredd's new home on the LittleBigPlanet.

Joel Spolsky on the perfect electronics store

Posted: 11 May 2009 04:14 AM PDT

Writing in Inc. about what a crummy story Circuit City was before it died, Joel "On Software" Spolsky describes what may just be the perfect electronics store, B&H at Ninth and 34th in NYC.

And what a roof it is: The whole operation is a crazy Willy Wonka factory. If you want to check out a product that's not on display, a salesperson orders it by computer terminal from a vast stockroom in the basement. Moments later, as if by magic, the product arrives at the retail counter, via an elaborate system of conveyor belts and dumbwaiters. You can try out the gear, see if you like it, and, if you do, the salesperson puts it in a green plastic box and places it on another conveyor belt, which runs, above your head, to the pickup counter. There, an employee bags your purchase. Meanwhile, your salesperson gives you a ticket, which you take to a payment counter. After you have paid, you get a different ticket that you take to the pickup counter to get your merchandise.
At first, this all seemed like incredible overkill to me. But then, as I thought about it more, I developed a theory as to why B&H operates this way. With all the expensive electronics and cameras and lenses and laptops floating around the store, the system creates a series of checks and balances -- typically, five employees are involved in every purchase -- in order to reduce shoplifting and employee theft. That it works at all is not the most amazing thing about B&H, however. The most amazing thing is that the prices are so low that I don't even bother to comparison-shop anymore.
No, wait: The most amazing thing is that the salespeople at B&H really know their stuff. When I recently bought a portable digital recorder, the salesperson knew that some gear was not compatible with flash memory cards larger than 2GB and spent a few minutes surfing the Web to make sure that the 8GB card I wanted would work with it.

Why Circuit City Failed, and Why B&H Thrives (via Consumerist)

(Image: B & H=Headquarters, a Creative Commons Attribution photo from The Talented Mr. Nimo's Flickr stream)

Antifascist collages that made Hitler crazy

Posted: 10 May 2009 04:47 PM PDT

RJ sez, "Very few people have heard of John Heartfield, the German born artist whose photomontages in the late nineteen thirties outraged Adolf Hitler. However, as part of the resistance against the inexorable rise of Nazism, he contributed some of the most biting satirical photographic mashups of the day - and all without the aid of Photoshop. Nice."

The Extraordinary Anti-Nazi Photomontages of John Heartfield

Martians Learn about the Free Market from the Oil Industry

Posted: 10 May 2009 06:01 AM PDT

Douglas Rushkoff - author of the book Life Inc: How the world became a corporation and how to take it back - is a guest blogger.

Here's another great cartoon we found on archive.org when we were researching corporatism propaganda for Life Inc. In Destination Earth, sponsored by the American Petroleum Industry in 1956, Martian dissidents learn that oil and competition are the two things that make America great.

In spite of its unfaltering market bias (or maybe because of it) the film is still quite an entertainingly assembled piece of work.