Evony gives up

The lawyers for Evony have dropped their Australian libel-tourism suit against Bruce Everiss. In accordance with Australian law, they will have to pay his legal fees. In light of Evony's advertising strategy, it seems only natural to celebrate this news with a picture of some boobies:

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Obligatory PAX post

Like several thousand gamers, I spent the past weekend at PAX East. It was great to finally meet a bunch of the people I regularly communicate with on Twitter, Wave, and other places. There really are too many to be named, so I won't even try, but if I introduced myself to you at any point during the weekend it was because I felt it was a genuine pleasure to meet you, and I hope to see you again soon. Unfortunately, with the press of people and the absurdly long lines for some panels, I wasn't able to hook up with everyone I knew who was there. Hopefully the next iteration of the Expo will handle the lines a bit better.

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How native-like is a cold-denatured structure?

A protein has several different levels of structure. The primary structure is the arrangements of atoms and bonds, and it is formed in the ribosome by the assembly of amino acids as directed by an RNA template. The secondary structure is the local topology, the helices and strands, and this forms mostly because of the release of energy through the formation of hydrogen bonds. The tertiary structure is the actual fold of the protein, the way helices, strands, and loops are arranged in space. The fold forms primarily because of the favorable entropy of burying the protein's hydrophobic groups where water cannot access them, analogous to the formation of an oil droplet in water. This suggests that, in addition to the well-known phenomenon of proteins denaturing, or losing their higher-order structure, under conditions of high heat, proteins might also denature when they get too cold.

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Dynamics conservation in the Ras superfamily

The proposition that general fold architecture is preserved within a family of evolutionarily-related proteins is not controversial. The amino acid sequence of a protein determines its structure, and countless studies have substantiated the idea that proteins with similar sequences will adopt similar folded conformations. Because structure and dynamics are intrinsically linked, one could reasonably assume that many features of a protein's dynamics get conserved along with the fold. A growing number of experiments show that this is indeed the case, including a recent paper in Structure (1).

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Even more lab courtesy haiku

Alert your labmates
if your prep will require all
the lab's baffled flasks.

Refill or reorder
reagents before you empty
the goddamn bottle.

Touching toxins, gloves
go on. Touching telephones,
take those nasty things off.


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Capsule: Star Fox Adventures

Final Status: Complete.

Put this on your box: It's Star Fox without anything that you liked about Star Fox!

Most intriguing idea: Translating a sci-fi dogfighting character to a magical adventure setting. (It says intriguing there, folks, not good.)

Best design decision: The surprisingly smooth inventory/command system.

Worst design decision: The first-person targeting reticle's aggressive recentering behavior.

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Camp

The ultimate Camp statement: it's good because it's awful. ...Of course, one can't always say that.

—Susan Sontag, "Notes on 'Camp'"

This game is so bad, it's not just become good. It's pretty close to perfect.

—Jim Sterling, review of Deadly Premonition

Jim Sterling gave Deadly Premonition a score of 10 points out of a possible 10, easily the highest score the game received among major gaming review sites. In his review, he makes it plain that this game does not deserve that score in any "objective" sense. The graphics are dated, the gameplay is limited, and its systems pay too much attention to irrelevant details. This is to say nothing of its absurd plot and characters. In comparison to almost any other game, Deadly Premonition is awful, but within the bounds of a certain kind of sensibility, that does not preclude it from also being good. Sontag identifies that sensibility as Camp, and it's an idea worth thinking about in connection to games.

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