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Into the uncanny valley of Xbox360…

moleitauLeave a comment
Junior/Senior
Junior/Senior

I bought an Xbox 360 yesterday as a companion to getting a nice big HD flatscreen – so far haven't really done anything more than been a UI nerd about the 'blades' interface, downloaded a trial of Viva Pinata (which Foe seemed to get into, but looks like a lot of hard work to me), enjoyed a bit of Boom-Boom Rocket (but not sure it will have that much longevity – esp. with Foe shouting about how much it pays 'homage' to the fireworks minigames in VMK!) and gotten beaten a lot by the computer (console?) in Rockstar Table Tennis.

RTT really is my first gaming experience of the uncanny valley as has been described by Clive Thompson with reference to hidef gaming. I wonder however if the valley can be escaped by getting the high-polygon-count NPCs to be possessed like puppets from afar.

Which is a long winded way of saying: can get I get your gamertags?

Mine is moleitau.

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On having a really long notice period in the gelatinous cube

moleitauLeave a comment

I gave my notice at Nokia in March, and my contract stipulated a three month notice period. I love the team of people I work with directly, there's no bad blood I'm aware of with my boss, and I'm not going to go work with a competitor.

So, I asked to work for all of the notice period, as opposed to taking it as 'gardening leave', which is normally the default for large organisations.

I'm about to enter the last month of my notice period, and I'm starting to become more peripheral – partly through my own engineering, partly through the engineering of others, and partly through some kind of weird autonomic self-healing capacity of large, slow-moving corporations.

It's like slowly escaping a gelatinous cube.

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