Amit Patel

“I think that you, Flash game developers, are some of the most talented and inspirational people working today in game development. Your passion for building games burns so incredibly brightly. Your ability to quickly make and distribute games is second to none. You hold immense potential to transform the future of games.” - Amit Patel from Bookmarklet

danc recommends directly charging for Flash games instead of going with ads. And there are lots of recommendations too. - Amit Patel

In the comments, Colin Northway (Fantastic Contraption author) writes: "1) You don't have to be a cockroach, be a monkey instead. While your hands are busy doing your real job write your game on the side with your feet. Then quit the real job when the money starts to flow. 2) Be a free game with pay content instead of a pay game with a demo. The culture of Flash is the culture of free.... more... - Rob Shillingsburg

I need a service that my Aardvark questions to Friendfeed and posts the answers back on Aardvark. - Jérôme Flipo

I need a service that hooks up Jérôme's service to my service. - Amit Patel

Something's happened at Lassen since my last visit a few years ago. The boardwalk at Sulphur Works is gone. And there's a new large mudpot right at the edge of the road. I wonder if it'll eat into the road at some point. - Amit Patel

Folks, don't litter. And especially don't litter into a boiling mud pot!! Ugh. (You'll have to see the larger version to see the litter) - Amit Patel

Kevin Kelly on the growth of cities. People go to cities for greater freedom, more opportunities, and to invest in their children's future, and they're choosing to live in slums instead of their villages or farms. - Amit Patel

Uses bitmap operations to repeatedly grow colored areas. Try the Euclidean vs. Manhattan metrics too. - Amit Patel

“A group to get some programmer to adapt the popular BBS game, Solar Realms Elite (SRE) to get his shit together and make an SRE app. I've been jonesing to acquire some more territory since 1995.” - Amit Patel from Bookmarklet

Asynchronous games like SRE do seem like a good fit for Facebook. But I have lots of other projects I want to do :) - Amit Patel

“Lately I've been doing a lot of research into how games can make money, particularly Flash games. I've come across some very intriguing new monetization models, including some that have been successful in other games but have not yet been widely applied to Flash. I'd like to share what I've found, and hopefully inspire you to try some of these new strategies in your own games.” - Amit Patel from Bookmarklet

Gmail has been making the label UI look&feel more like folders, and people are using them more now, even though they're still labels underneath. - Amit Patel from Bookmarklet

“A single mega-colony of ants has colonised much of the world, scientists have discovered. Argentine ants living in vast numbers across Europe, the US and Japan belong to the same interrelated colony, and will refuse to fight one another.” - Amit Patel from Bookmarklet

Everyone wants fast travel in MMOs, so why don't they just give it to us? Comments on this post and on the original post have several people saying Oblivion and Everquest were worse with fast travel. I felt that way with Second Life. Once they added teleportation, I never bothered seeing anything, and there might as well be no virtual world. Ultima Online's “bookmark” approach seems interesting. - Amit Patel

Best site ever? - Amit Patel from Bookmarklet

Classic - Louis Simoneau

“Given that all the reading research psychologists I know support some version of the parallel letter recognition model of reading, how is it that all the typographers I know say that we read by matching whole word shapes? It appears to be a grand misunderstanding. The paper by Bouma that is most frequently cited does not support a word shape model of reading.” - Amit Patel

The conventional typographical wisdom that fonts with longer descenders and ascenders are more legible is still consistent with the evidence though. The longer descenders and ascenders may make the letter shape (rather than word shape) easier to recognize. - Ruchira S. Datta

“NanoDiamond is a theoretical material with such an amazing strength-to-weight ratio that it challenges our intuitions about what is physically possible.” - Amit Patel from Bookmarklet

“Why do many environmentalists trust science when it comes to climate change but not when it comes to genetic engineering? Is the fear really about the technology itself or is it a mistrust of big agribusiness?” - Amit Patel

"The answer that IAASTD came up with was that, after billions of dollars already spent, the promise of genetically modified (GM) crops remained unfulfilled. Answers to future global hunger will need locality-specific, carbon-sequestering, fossil-fuel-free and water-frugal solutions. Environmentalists applauded that, too." -- Raj Patel - Tracy

eek! - Amit Patel from Bookmarklet

“For seven months, The New York Times managed to keep out of the news the fact that one of its reporters, David Rohde, had been kidnapped by the Taliban. But that was pretty straightforward compared with keeping it off Wikipedia. ” […] “The sanitizing was a team effort, led by Jimmy Wales[…]” - Amit Patel from Bookmarklet

Philipp, can you see this: http://www.nytimes.com/externa... ? - ianf ⌘

Your anti-predictions are getting harder. I can't disagree with any of these. :-( - Daniel Dulitz

“A new study holds potentially unwelcome news for wind power developers: wind speeds in the United States have dropped 15 to 30 percent over the course of about 30 years. And one possible cause, according to the authors, is climate change.” - Amit Patel from Bookmarklet

That blows. - Mike Reynolds

I mostly like noisy game art instead of smooth surfaces. - Amit Patel

Animation of monthly vegetation on the earth! - Amit Patel from Bookmarklet

Clever idea: replay historical events on twitter, so you can get a sense of timing of how things unfolded. - Amit Patel from Bookmarklet

What are you doing Amit? I think you should print and frame this (in a leased but expensive-looking frame) and have it displayed somewhere with a price tag > $10,000. - τorƍue

Jesper: I was drawing some random polygons of various sizes in Flash, for possible as game graphics. - Amit Patel

“The process uses seawater to cool and humidify the air that ventilates the greenhouse and sunlight to distil fresh water from seawater. This enables the year round cultivation of high value crops that would otherwise be difficult or impossible to grow in hot, arid regions.” -- neat idea - Amit Patel

Also see http://seawatergreenhouse.com/Downloa... for some more details. They use wind, sunlight, solar power, cold seawater, hot seawater, and an enclosed greenhouse. - Amit Patel

They think if you build enough of these you could induce climate change — “So, if this growth were concentrated where it could do most good, in say North Africa, it could increase rainfall in the Sahara and shift the delicate balance by helping to restore the vegetation that used to be there.” - Amit Patel

I knew everything was available for USB .. shavers, blenders, cup warmers, etc. But a monitor?? With its own video card? Completely powered over USB? Crazy. - Amit Patel from Bookmarklet

It's my dream come true! I've always wanted a USB-powered monitor. That's very handy, esp. for servers in a rack when you are out of power plugs. The only thing that is a bit scary is that I've had machines go blue screen because of a short in the USB jack... - τorƍue

“Like many rodents, capybaras are very smart and Caplin is no exception. When he was a month old I taught him to shake hands by saying “shake” and tapping his paw until he picked it up. It took 15 minutes for him to figure it out. The last trick I taught him was to go in a circle when I signal. I saw a video of a capybara in a zoo in Japan that could do this trick. There aren’t many other capybaras that can do any tricks at all and I didn’t want the Japanese capybara to one-up Caplin. To teach this I used one of his favorite foods, a fruit popsicle. Keeping the popsicle just out of reach, I led him in a little circle, rewarding each correct step. After two popsicles, he knew the trick.” - Amit Patel from Bookmarklet

The capybara is facinating! Did you know that it is edible? - τorƍue

I did not know that it is edible. Mmmm - Amit Patel

“This is the power of waste. When scarce resources become abundant, smart people treat them differently, exploiting them rather than conserving them. It feels wrong, but done right it can change the world.” - Amit Patel

What the heck? Razors for gamers? It wasn't enough to have 5 blades. Now it has a motor and a microchip. (Read the reviews, too.) - Amit Patel from Bookmarklet

What, no networking support? - James Leard