Rob Beschizza

What it’s like at CES

I thought I’d have a stab at describing the mundane details of how the world’s largest consumer electronics faire goes, beyond the gadgets but short of the existential despair. If nothing else, you won’t be curious anymore.

Fissure opens in chess AI scene

Rybka, a powerful chess program, was stripped last year of its titles and its author publicly disgraced. Declared a plagiarist by the International Computer Games Association, Vasik Rajlich was also handed a lifetime ban on competition and ordered to return thousands of dollars in prize money. But the investigation’s conclusions are now being challenged, opening a fissure in the computer chess community.

Extremely mundane places in Minecraft

People are always showing off the spectacular places they’ve found in Minecraft, or their latest epic creations: a 1:1 scale model of the Starship Enterprise; the world of Studio Ghibli; and vast mechanical computers among them. But I feel there is a glaring omission here that needs to be corrected: no-one is making anything boring.

What the Vaio Z says about Sony

Sony’s latest ultraportable laptop is stunning. It’s beautiful and lightweight, with a classy metal chassis and tasteful trim. It has a powerful i7 CPU, 1600×900 13.1″ display and a lightning-fast SSD. It’s half a pound lighter than the competition. And it exemplifies everything that is wrong with its creator.

Dune Without Words • Remix

A scene from David Lynch’s dune, stripped of dialog as a critical experiment. By removing all that talking, we could transmute the 3-hour epic to about 45 minutes of Lynch’s imagery, unburdened by the need to make a story out of 650 pages of verbose political maneuvering by people who spend half the book analyzing their own superhuman, chess-like conversations.

Mixtape of the Lost Decade • Stories

“Evidence is mounting that points to a “lost decade” between what we now remember as the 1970s and 1980s, a time whose full cultural trauma and resulting suppression from memory was so complete as to effect itself even on the living. Some of those who have recovered seek to reveal the secret history through unusual media such as fashionable tumblogs and private filesharing forums. By sharing elements of an intricate and rigorous symbology drawn from this interstitial history, this cabal works quietly to prepare us to learn the truth and its astonishing consequences.”

TinyHack • Games

Amazing favicon hacks such as Matheiu Henri’s Defender of the Favicon made me wonder: just how small could a game go? So I had a go at making an adventure game only 8×8 pixels in size. It’s barely-playable and has all the charm of a malicious lite-brite. But once you’ve found the sword, shield and the all-important, all-healing pub, you can dash through it in a few minutes. As it seems more like a 1970s electronic toy than a video game, I also made sure to include the original box, which explains exactly what those meaningless pixels are. (And you can refresh the page for a randomly generated one)

Game Deaths • Video

The music is a cover of Mad World, originally by Tears for Fears.

Nomen Ludi • Stories

“Pixels shone like gemstones in darkness. Phosphors moved over the face of the deep and formed into random landscapes. Every play was different, a 64Kb window onto a universe of iterations. Music, naked square waves, rang out. I’d forgotten that place for a decade, but it had not forgotten me. In the blackness of the monitor’s glass, I caught my younger self’s eye; a chill tightened my skin and I was back in the airport terminal, staring at the contrails of my fiancée’s flight home.”

Such Bravery • Stories

“Though dusk fell, the painted adventurer’s contours were clear, violence in her kohled eyes, in lips stained with berries and sap. … Secco touches were ruined where young hands had scraped at painted gems. I remembered a dark and faded icon in the church of my own youth, a window into another world. ‘There’s nothing in adventure,’ I said, approaching the painted wall. ‘Just death’s touch and those who escape it.’”

Mixtapes in collision

“This is a selection of mixes in the celestial sphere that were taped in historical times. In these mixes the planet Earth participated too. This mix describes two acts of a great drama: one that occurred many centuries ago. Accordingly, this volume consists of collisions between selected examples of techno.”

Gray’s Shapes • Stories

“Lucas Gray was a mathematician, born in Hespeler, Ontario, in 1949 and dead in 1978, succumbing to Hodgkin’s lymphoma while completing his doctorate at Waterloo. He constructed eight mysterious puzzles, seven of which were found among his effects. His mother did not wish to speak to me, but described them as “the unremarkable products of a hobby.”"

Microsoft announces 20 editions of Windows 7 • Shoop

How Computers Work • Remix

Spontaneous gadget generation amid mushroom rings in woods near Worthing, England. • Stories

“A few yards away, however, we found a motorcycle, laid down in the bushes. Bear in mind that this is probably a hundred feet from a muddy path, and half a mile from anything one might actually be able to reasonably traverse on motorcycle. And then, a few feet from that, a TRS-80 Model 100 portable computer, half-hidden by the ivy. Turned on.”