I’m pleased and touched that Michael Jackson’s voice, and the spirit of his message lives after him to do good in the world. (He wrote the original song and brought together the artists for the USA for Africa project.)

This version is to raise money for Haiti. Not sure how thrilled I am with some of the new performances, but who cares right? It’s for a good cause, and the video has some great moments. (Try not to cry!)

Maybe we’ll see more remakes of this song… Perhaps to raise money for banker bonuses.

Thanks @ccarella for pointing me to the song.

Watch the whole thing starting with clip #1, it reveals a place where Smith says, “shares no similarities with our own culture.”

I have completed development for the new card game I designed, Laugh Riot!

This is a project I started working on many years ago, so I am really excited about it. I think it’s a fun game, and so far, all the playtesters have had a great time, laughing their asses off.

I used a payment system called Kickstarter to fund the first run of decks. Kickstarter uses a “pledge” system, where “supporters” can pledge money, but that money isn’t charged to your credit card until the project end-date, and only IF the goal is reached. It’s a perfect system for what I am doing, since I can’t afford to print decks unless I know people will buy them.

The first 100 decks have been printed. If you’re interested, please visit www.LaughRiotGame.com, and consider making an order. For the price of two movie tickets, you’ll get a card game that up to 10 people can play over and over, in the comfort of your own home. (That means you can play NAKED!)

It’s an innovative project, and here’s why: Unlike most other examples of Augmented Reality, we created a simple puzzle game that uses the marker itself as the input device. To Patrick and I this seemed like a pretty obvious thing to do, but apparently there are not a lot of other examples that do the same (at least not outside of academia.)

Augmented Reality is in a sort of awkward adolescent stage… the printed marker is clearly not an ideal way of doing things, but it’s all we have right now. So in order to make the best use of that limitation, it just seemed to make sense to take advantage of the toolkit’s ability to recognize how the marker is oriented. (It helps that Patrick is such a great programmer.)

Although our example is pretty simple, and the game mechanics are that of a child’s toy, I think the experience itself turns out to be pretty good one. I imagine that using the marker as the input device will probably catch on with other developers.

Hopefully we’ll be able to do some much more interesting AR for smart phones and other devices soon.

Game Credits:

• Me: Game Design, UI programming, Art Direction
• Patrick O’Shaughnessey: Game Programming (gameplay, 3D rendering, FB connect)
• Shaun Bingham: 2D art and layout
• Sam Pizzo: 2D art and layout
• Chris Leathers: 3D art and animation
• Tim Wagner: Sound design
• John Swords: Project management/production
• Adam Broitman: Sales and account management

I co-founded ILL Clan animation studio in 1998 along with Paul Marino, Manu Smith, and Frank Dellario. Frank is still at it, with Paul Jannicola, Kerria Seabrooke, and Tom Donelly. Tiny Nation is a machinima feat of strength (a.k.a. ‘tour de force.’ But why speak French when we don’t have to?)

It’s funny and subversive, and it looks great.

Looking forward to more great work from the ILL Clan.

from the NIH Challenge Grant website:

Funded projects would develop and implement virtual collaborative environments to facilitate biomedical and translational research, e.g. addressing issues of privacy, technology transfers and sharing resources.

There’s also talk of Facebook and Second Life style applications helping to “eliminate barriers to scientific collaboration.”

According to the NIH, there’s $200 Million available for as many as 200 grants. Not a lot if you want to actually build something, but if you’re looking to research the effects of teledildonics on sex-addicts who enjoy watching avatars girate to techno music then you’re in luck!

Oh, and here’s the very interesting list of areas that are most likely to get a “challenge” grant…

High Priority Topics Within Broad Challenge Areas:

(01)  Behavior, Behavioral Change, and Prevention
(02)  Bioethics
(03)  Biomarker Discovery and Validation
(04)  Clinical Research
(05)  Comparative Effectiveness Research (CER)
(06)  Enabling Technologies
(07)  Enhancing Clinical Trials
(08)  Genomics
(09)  Health Disparities
(10)  Information Technology for Processing Health Care Data
(11)  Regenerative Medicine
(12)  Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics Education (STEM)
(13)  Smart Biomaterials – Theranostics
(14)  Stem Cells
(15)  Translational Science

Thanks to David Horowitz for finding the buried treasure and letting me know about it. He’s a technologist and entrepeneur with experience navigating the complex maze of paperwork and red tape associated with applying for and securing funding opportunities from the private sector and local, state and federal sources. So if you have any ideas that might warrant a grant from NIH, he’d make a good partner.

Oh, and by the way. The deadline for proposals is NEXT WEEK!

But it’s easy to type random TinyURLs, since they are made up of random numbers and letters. I stumbled upon this recently when talking to a friend about TinyURL over IM, and typed an example. Just out of curiosity I clicked the resultant link to discover that the University of Greenwich is looking for an offshore hydrocarbon mapping engineer. http://tinyurl.com/376453

Who knew?

So I started typing in some more random TinyURLs and here’s what I found…

a viral app where you can add your own subtitles to a Bollywood movie clip
http://tinyurl.com/jk76o

Human beatboxer, Kid Beyond, demonstrating an Ableton sampler
http://tinyurl.com/9345g

a helpful list of “Jewish Motorcycle” related websites on google
http://tinyurl.com/8132q

An insightful (if somewhat bitter) comparison of The Matrix and Dark City, auto-translated from the original Spanish, complete with side-by-side images.
http://tinyurl.com/3yk87

some lovely (and slightly racy) pictures of Japanese fruit and nuts
http://tinyurl.com/896tv

I could go on and on (since I don’t have a job,) and TinyURLs are practically guaranteed to be good since it wouldn’t be a TinyURL unless it was awesome enough for someone to share it.

If you find anything interesting, post it to the comments.

My Mom playing Resident Evil 4

She has an unusual relationship to her games that I thought I’d share here, which is best illustrated by some quotes:

Resident Evil 4:

• He saved a dog. But then those men tried to kill him, and he shot them. See those are their dead bodies.
• Oh, I didn’t know they were supposed to be zombies, I just thought they wanted to kill him.
• This is silly, why can’t he walk up that incline? It’s not that steep.

Tomb Raider – Legend:

• Oh, I’m so excited to have Lara back in my life!
• She was on the edge of a cliff, and she couldn’t reach the rope to swing across, so she kept falling and dieing.

Zelda Ocarina of Time:

• The little boy went in the whale’s mouth, but then he kept getting shocked by those damn jellyfish.
• He has to throw the bomb in the monsters mouth, but it’s too hard. You do it for me!

As you can see, she doesn’t relate to the game characters as herself, the way most gamers do. I asked her why, and she said, “Well, it’s not me. I don’t look like that.”

She also was just talking about games recently and said, “I think I know why I like those games so much. They put me in another world, like an alternate universe to escape to, and it’s a lot more fun than my boring life.”

Move your mouse around the page to read my silly commentary, and feel free to add your own captions in the comments.

Enjoy.