In a really great series of blog posts, Erik Dietrich describes how a person can unknowingly believe they are an expert in their field, while only having beginner level skills. He writes about programmers, but this situation could apply in a lot of other fields, too.

The Expert Beginner has nowhere to go because progression requires an understanding that he has a lot of work to do, and that is not a readily available conclusion.

And for a fun chaser, here’s a hilarious example of an expert beginner.

This video looks like it was really fun to make. It ~almost~ makes me miss high school. Who knew something so cool could come from Pocatello!

Adrianne Jeffries from The Verge writes about a handful of groups launching all sorts of projects into space, backed by Kickstarter. It’s absolutely inspiring.

The amounts are small, with the average donation falling between $24 and $157, depending on the project. But the sentiment is powerful: space is no longer an exclusive club.

In the video, Zachary Manchester, creator of KickSat, sums up why this is so important:

“I think science and technology, they’ve always been the way forward. Even if we don’t really know what to do with it when it comes along the first time.”

Jonason Pauley and Jesse Perrotta spent the last two years shooting a live-action, shot-for-shot remake of the entire Pixar classic, using live actors, real toys, the original movie’s soundtrack, stop-action effects, and plenty of awesome puppetry.

The other outstanding part of this story is how Pixar reacted. Rather than punish these fans by issuing take-down notices of their work like so many companies would, Pixar gave them a tour of their headquarters, and let them give away DVD copies in front of the offices.

Twitter feels like continually moving to NYC without knowing anyone whereas Facebook feels like you’re living in your hometown and hanging with everyone you went to high school with.

This article, and the essay Why I love Twitter and barely tolerate Facebook it refers to describe exactly how I feel about these sites. I made the mistake once of cross-posting my Twitter stream (which is typically retweets of the new, fresh things I find interesting) to Facebook, but I quit when it became clear that I was only confusing the people who I grew up with. I prefer to spend my time on App.net and Twitter, which really are “fun, fantastic, and all about the here and now” to me.

Skrillex Quest is browser flash game, and a combination of the fun dubstep music Skrillex is known for, and the designer/retro video game style in Sword and Sworcery. The theme of the game is to battle the glitches in the game world caused by a speck of dust in the game cartridge. Killing them results in a satisfying dubstep glitchy crash, and finding random treasures rewards you with happy snippets of music. Summit, the Skrillex song with Ellie Goulding, plays in the background as you battle your way through the world.

It’s a short game, but extremely enjoyable.

This awesome photograph by Ben Canales captures just how small you can feel when looking up into a starry night sky. If you like astronomy and good photography, it’s worth your time to check out more outstanding photos by him at 500px.

Forget linear storytelling, we have to come up with new paradigms for this. We cannot tell stories in the same way to make this thing work; in fact we have to give up some authorial control. But not all of it, give up just enough that the players /think/ they are in control. That’s most important.

I’ve always seen gaming as a type of storytelling. A holodeck experience would be an awesome evolution of the medium.

This weekend I was wandering the web in search of some design ideas for an upcoming project, and came across the most beautiful posters! Back in the 30’s and 40’s, the Works Progress Administration commissioned all sorts of posters as a way to support artists. One project was to showcase our national parks, and the results are amazing. I’d love to collect these and hang them in a cabin. Here are a few of my favorites.

You can find the posters for sale at a few different sites, but Ranger Doug’s site seems to have the most options, including a few adaptations.

In this lecture, Steve Klabnik goes over some of the great and ‘meh’ things coming to Rails 4. Definitely worth watching if you work with Rails at all.