Blaine Allen Brown

I wanted to make some generic control icons for games. This would solve the problem of displaying "Press X" on screen. Because if you look at the 3 major controllers, X is in a different place on each. It's the Up Face Button on Nintendo consoles, the Down Face Button on Sony, and the Left Face Button on Microsoft. Jump So for example, here instead of showing a graphic for A (which is in two different places on the Xbox and Nintendo Controllers) a graphic like the example on the left could be displayed. Obviously you would draw it better to fit in with the theme of the game. Open Door Again, if you draw the icon as well as everything else in the game, you wouldn't need the rounded rectangle, I'm just making a quick demonstration. Movement I think Jon Blow had the right idea with this indicator. I would like a way to indicate whether it's left or right. You could probably just put an L or R on the icon, but I was trying to make it non-lette...

The following is a comment I posted on a Lifehacker post titled How to Be a Vegetarian and Peacefully Co-Exist at Meal Time . In social situations, we often respond to people with an excuse. "I can't eat this because I'm vegetarian." Even this great article suggests we say "I already ate before I came here." Which is a totally reasonable suggestion. My question is, why is "No thank you" never enough? It's true that people ask why, or try to goad you into eating something until you give them a concrete reason. We do this for a lot of things and I think we should stop. Giving a reason might make you more sociable, but it also takes away your power. Don't want to date a guy? Don't say it's because "I have a boyfriend." Simply say "I'm not interested." If the person has something to say against that then you're not in a safe situation and you should leave. People look at being vegetarian as a choice t...

Today, Lindsay Small-Butera, co-creator of Baman Piderman , posted a complaint on her Tumblr about a site called Videohall that downloaded her work from YouTube and posted it to the Videohall Tumblr without including a source. I have a few thoughts about the whole thing. "Hey mother fuckers. Thanks for stealing my video by ripping it off of youtube, putting an mp4 of it on your site, not sourcing it at all, and getting a ton of notes." "Stealing" is kind of a nebulous term. Usually we use stealing to indicate taking a physical object, but in media it is often called stealing when a number of different things happen. Piracy is one example, where someone takes a digital item (video, music, software) and distributes it to other people without paying the creator. So the kind of "theft" that Videohall has committed is much more accurately categorized as piracy.

Design Rules is a series of posts I'd like to continue to make, where I focus on one aspect of design. This one is a mistake that is so obvious, and yet, it keeps happening in new products that come out. Hopefully I can worm my way into the backs of people's minds so that they will intuitively know that these designs are bad ideas. Design Rule #1: Never install a lanyard into the cap Imagine you purchase a product like a flash drive. It comes with a cap to cover the metal contacts that will connect to your computer. Also, for your convenience, the flash drive has a lanyard, or some sort of lanyard attachment hook, so you can connect the drive to your keychain. The problem is, the lanyard is attached to the cap. This raises an obvious red flag for me. I immediately imagine carrying around a lonely cap attached to my keys, while my flash drive sits in an abandoned park. You see this kind of design constantly, and not just on tech products. Poor lanyard design is present on a...

Cards Against Humanity I hate Cards Against Humanity. They were playing it in anime club (I also hate everyone in anime club). It all started when one of the openly gay members of anime club ran into a room saying, "Who wants to go to hell? We're all going to be racist and sexist!" I mention his sexuality only because 1.) he did and 2.) the irony of his insensitivity. He cleared off a table and they all began to play. I don't have any friends in anime club (or anywhere else, really), so I sat nearby and watched. Eight white kids and one black kid circled around and started passing our cards. "It's okay to send the racist cards to him," the leader, who also claims to be a stand up comedian, said. "He's the only black guy here so it's not racist." To this I said, "Wait, doesn't that make it more racist?" "That's what makes it funny!" the black guy exclaimed. I laughed uneasily. What was I going to...

Apparently [on Tumblr] you can't reblog yourself. WHY ARE ALL THESE LIMITATIONS ON WEB SERVICES?! Someday I'll make my own social network. It will be a service you can install on your own website and your friends can join. But! it's a protocol that can talk to other sites that host that service. Think like email. Yahoo, Gmail, Hotmail, and even Schools and Organizations all have their own version of email, but they can all talk to each other! how great would that be? So like in my idea, people can use tumblr if they want to host their social media. Or they could use missing e. Or they could host it on their own website (like I would use halloweenbagsearly.com). Anyway, this is how things should work. The only reason services don't do this is because they want to be able to sell you ads and have control over your information. Boo.

Widgets are applications that run in the background all the time. If you have a widget on your computer it is probably a clock, a calculator, possibly even an animated fish tank. On your phone they may be a weather service or something that tells you where the lowest gas prices are. These are useless. Widgets take simple things that need to be done maybe once or twice a day and run them constantly. The weather service is the worst offender of this. No one needs up to the minute weather information. In fact, the weather app should have the current weather as the smallest bit of information. When people look for weather info they want to know what the weather will be like. This can be accomplished by looking at the weather once in the morning before heading to work. Weather App running on Android Why do people think they need widgets always running and taking up battery life? They look cool and they represent the future, where information is always at our fingertips. Hint: that...

It's generally known that educational games do not work. They are often subsidized by governments, kids are forced to complete them, and they never accomplish their goals to instruct. This is because video games are an emotional medium. It's not that games cannot teach facts, it's that in order to do so an emotional connection must be made that affects the player. Playspent is an interesting attempt to bridge the gap between emotional connection and fact. In it you play as an American citizen. The simulation saddles you with a fictitious family and presents you with decisions that must be made for them. The game gives you the opportunity to get a job. I chose the best job I could find, but maybe less stable? If you choose the job of "temp" then the game asks you to type something accurately and quickly to prove you can do the job. Yay! I got a job.  Many Americans don't have the skills I have. Once you find out whether you got the job a message a...

Apple revealed the new iPhone 4S yesterday. Slimmer, better camera, better antenna. That's it? Listen, I understand why you want the new iPhone. I've been there. I thought it would make my life better. Now I only have to carry around one thing! It's my mp3 player, gps, and phone all in one. Plus I can search the web on the go! I can be always connected. Always connected. How often in a one on one conversation do you pull out your phone? If not you, then your companion? The draw of being always connected affects us all. We cling to knowing whether the people we talk to online are reading our stuff. Do they like it? Did they comment on it? Even when a real person is right in front of us. iPhone 4S ( source ) The new iPhone is a slight upgrade to the hardware. And it's another step closer to the nebulous internet, and a step away from the people around you. See also: mnmlist  and good.is

source Have you ever have a friend that worked for CutCo? After they tried and failed (or succeeded) to sell you some knives, you probably found it hard to trust that person again. They used your friendship to sell you something. Everyone knows that salesmanship is sleazy business, so when our friends try to do it to us whether it's CutCo or Avon, we start to feel uneasy. LivingSocial , Groupon , and other sites such as these are the same thing. There is a product being sold, it could be tickets to a thing, food, massages, whatever. Some product is being sold. The brilliance of these services is they use your friends to advertise these things to you. One of your friends sees that if 10 people buy tickets for this concert, then every ticket is $10 off. So they post on their Facebook: "Hey guys! We can all see String Cheese in concert for only $40 if we get ten people together." The ticket service just won. Instead of your friend shelling out $50 dollars for a si...

Facebook Logo ( source ) Take a look at the icons for your social media sites. Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Flickr. Look at the shape and font choice. Look at the letters that compose these icons. Notice any similarities? First of all, they're all blue. Take a look at the letters. All of them are lowercase: f, t, t, f. Now look at the f's and flip them. Now look at the t's and flip them. In this Helvetica font style all the letters look the same upside-down. All of our social media is dominated by one letter shape. Is this the result of some market research? Did people decide that the most social color is blue? Or does blue just look good on the internet? Helvetica, the font, is a result of some  research  and even a  documentary . It is known as a clear, normal looking font, which was created to be easily readable for sign use. On the internet font is becoming less and less important. Content rules, and fonts like Arial and Helvetica dominate web pages.

I don't know where you, the reader, live. I live near a huge military base. Normally, this makes me feel quite safe. Any sort of terrorist attack would be least effective in a town like this, so that gives me a sort of peace of mind. For this reason and others I choose to live here but it comes with a few inconveniences. One such issue is that drills must be run with the planes. So there is a lot of jet noise. Sometimes, the jets fly really close to where I am. The ground rumbles, and as the planes descend I can hear that familiar cartoon whistle; like Wile E. Coyote falling from a cliff. At times like this, I hear the deafening roar and the falling whistle; I am struck with a vision of horror. What if the plane crashes right here? What if it's all over? After experiencing it the first time, it has at least crossed my mind ever since. What if that which is supposed to protect us destroys us? What if my life is over due to an error? A miscalibration? A terrorist attack?

Government Debit Card Sophisticated Prototype Visa and Mastercard rule the internet. Most people like to pay with card at physical businesses and online you have almost no choice. Even if you want to pay cash you still have to use a bank to buy things from a website. With the recent buzz in the news about Bank of America's plan to charge $5/month for debit fees, it occurs to me that the government needs to step in here. I don't mean they need to tell Bank of America they can't do this. I mean the government needs to come up with its own form of electronic currency. The government gives out cash bills without a third party. Why should we have to submit to Bank of America in order to use electronic currency? The US Government needs to get with the times. Plus there are plenty of articles describing how much it costs the US Government to print money, wouldn't it be easier to issue cards?

I resist the urge daily to quit Facebook for good. I read my news feed and think "I don't care about any of these people." Mind you, I'm not friending random strangers, these are people I used to know. They are friends from high school, previous employers, distant family, current and ex-girlfriends, and friends of friends. I realized recently that Facebook has it all wrong. Like most people who grew up in the 80s and 90s, I want my life to resemble a tv show. When I think of how relationships work in those shows there aren't hundreds of old friends hanging around the cast of F.r.e.i.n.d.s; there are six people who know each other really well. Sometimes they meet an old friend, but just for an episode. This is what I want. I want a core group of friends that I hang out with and we have adventures meeting and communicating with "the outsiders." After our adventures alone or with a subset of the core group, we come back and tell the rest of the group. I...

Extrapolation of what gaming will become Dear Nintendo: What is the matter with you? For years people have made fun of the Wii because it lacks many things the other consoles have. For one the controller doesn't have two analog sticks. That's because you can't fit a second stick onto the motion controllers you created. You were so focused on getting that "Family" market that you ignored your hardcore audience. The people who have been with you from the beginning. You tried to get housewives to buy your system and then the third parties provided the world with dancing games. And then the market was flooded. You see your success as your number of sales without realizing that the housewife market is not sustainable. They don't understand that they need to buy games every once in a while to support the industry. They bought a wii and a dance game and haven't played it since the first day. You traded your hardcore audience for a gimmick that will dry up...

Short answer: you probably can't. I recently purchased a new keyboard and mouse combo from Logitech: the K520. The one I chose was the one that looked the most standard (I would've rather gotten a mac keyboard, but those wireless ones don't have numpads). I failed to notice the Fn key that takes the place of both the Context Menu key and the Right Windows key. I spent most of last night scouring the internet looking for a way to remap this key to a Windows key (who uses the context menu key anyway?). I already knew that the function key, by itself, does not send a signal to the computer. I had hoped, however, that Logitech provided some sort of key combo feature that I could at least tell it to pretend Fn + Left Arrow was Win + Left Arrow. But the Fn functionality seems to be hardware based, and the only configuration I could tell it was to ignore the signal of the preprogrammed functions or not. Anyway, give up all hope. I really need to find a standard wireless ke...

What's your pseudiac sign?

I spend a lot of my time thinking about minimalism. First it was just as a design principle, but soon it became a way to approach living. For years I've read mnmlist and tried to adapt Leo Babauta's ideas into my own life. I just did an exercise I made up in which I list major possessions and get rid of anything I don't want. Possessions of note: PS2 and accessories and games Wii and accessories and games PSP and accessories and games Nintendo DS and accessories and games HP PC with Windows 7 Bamboo Pen + Touch Tablet Microsoft HD Life Webcam Cheap-o Microphone (looking to upgrade for podcast setup) 32 inch Olevia LCD TV HP Printer Scanner Copier Logitech Wireless Keyboard and Mouse Combo (one dongle!) Canon Rebel XS DSLR T-Mobile MyTouch 4G (with unlimited data) One backup phone (for when I drop this one) One Full Size Bed Four Armchairs (uncomfortable) Two Ottomans One Refrigerator One Space Heater Some Clothes Some Tools One Yoga Mat As you ...

 didn't participate in Earth Hour yesterday (because it's stupid), but it did get me thinking (which is probably the point). I am already somewhat energy conscious. For example I have things I use infrequently on separate power strips so that I can turn them off when they're not in use. This includes my PS2, Wii, and chargers for my DS and PSP. I feel like this is just common power management. Anyway, I wasn't home for Earth Hour and I thought about all that was running at home with no one there: 4 computers. I believe this is a remnant of the early Windows XP era, in which you always disabled the "Sleep" option on every computer you used. Anything could happen when a computer returned from sleep! The wireless card could have stopped working, all your programs probably crashed, and it was slow from some incorrectly stored memory from running programs. You might as well have turned the thing off, but starting a Windows machine still takes too long for me sinc...

My ploy to quit Facebook didn't quite turn out how I wanted it to (I quickly figured out that I can just Google "Facebook" and to there to avoid my block). Yet that extra step has kept me from going there as often. I usually only go there when I get an email about something now. Which is great. I always knew that Facebook wasn't very rewarding, but since it was on my bookmarks bar, I would click it every couple minutes. I still update my status to Facebook via Ping.fm, though, usually with jokes. Which reminds me, seriously guys, "Master of Marital Arts" Mare it ull. You ruined my joke. My tumblr has taken over as the thing I open every 3 seconds. But I can tell when I've come to the things I've already seen, so it's okay for now. But friends! I still want to know what you're doing. Make a blog or something to let me know. Post some pictures of the robot you built or come up with a more frequently updated rival comic. -Blaine