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The Daily Grind: Do you celebrate game accomplishments in the real world?
After many, many attempts, my free company finally downed Titan in Final Fantasy XIV on Saturday. That meant a relic weapon for me (followed immediately by relic +1) and a trip out for ice cream and celebration for my wife. Yes, all it took to encourage us into outside celebration was beating up an irritating fat man made of rocks. On the one hand, this was silly. Titan is just a boss; beating him is the equivalent of the rats figuring out how to run the mazes in those maze-based experiments scientists love performing. On the other hand, it was a major challenge that I had been grappling with for quite some time, because darn, this is hard. So what about you, dear readers? Do you celebrate major game accomplishments in the real world? Have you and your friends hit the bar to commemorate your first major boss kills in Star Wars: The Old Republic? Or would you rather stick to in-game celebrations for in-game accomplishments, if indeed you even need that? Every morning, the Massively bloggers probe the minds of their readers with deep, thought-provoking questions about that most serious of topics: massively online gaming. We crave your opinions, so grab your caffeinated beverage of choice and chime in on today's Daily Grind!
Interview with the creator of the Apple startup sound
We met them while they were shooting on the Apple Campus, and now the creators of the Dutch site onemorething.nl have posted their interview with Apple sound designer Jim Reekes (who also appears in Welcome To Macintosh). They met up with Reekes while at Macworld in San Francisco a little while back -- he's the guy that programmed most of the sound in the early days, including the famous Mac startup chime and the legendary "sosumi" chime. What's most interesting to me is all of the math behind it -- while making music is traditionally seen as an art, there's a lot of technical know how and information that actually went into the sound's creation. Essentially, you're creating a beep that has to represent a brand, and that mix of technical data with artistic representation is fascinating. Plus, Reekes definitely seems like a guy who's been around both the technical and musical blocks a few times before, and it's cool to hear him pontificate on all of the hard work he did back in the day. It's also interesting to see someone who has such a personal tie to a sound that is so ubiquitous and means so much to so many people -- an "ear-con," he calls it. Very nice interview.
