Warcraft III changes
A detailed look at the design decisions being made for Warcraft III. Some huge changes, moving the game back toward traditional RTS. I don't think I've read an article this heavy in design theory before, even in a Gamasutra post-mortem. I have to say, GameSpot is unmatched for gaming journalism right now.

AoK post-mortem on Gamasutra
Two interesting quotes: "If a patch for AoK is out by the time you read this, then you can conclude that we finally established our process." (Oh well.) And: "Any of our future games will probably require connecting to a secure server of our own design to operate, even for single-player games." (No playing when the connection is down or when someone's on the phone? Update: this only refers to betas. Call off the dogs.)

Rowenta Surfline
There is nothing new under the sun. Here's an iron that predates the iMac by five years, but clearly comes from the same school of thought. The page includes a feature by feature comparison of the two products. Found on Slashdot.

Ars Technica reviews the MP3 encoders
Executive summary: Fraunhofer wins.

Moriarty talks with William Goldman
Long and charming conversation with William Goldman, famous screenwriter and wise man. "All we've got when we write are those stories in our heads, and if you fuck those up, you don't have anything."

Mind of a Dog
A New Scientist article about how dogs' minds have adapted to living with humans. The main point I took away from the article is: Tim wants a dog.
        (By the way, the porcupine quill example in the article is weak. I don't want to write about it here, but e-mail me if you're interested in a refutation.)

High Tech Public School
An American public school that is having success teaching its kids Linux, networking, Perl and other technical hardball. My faith in schools has been shaky lately because of some dreadful student English I've been seeing. The most amazing part of the story is that the school was linked on Slashdot and their homepage is still up.

Noise Cancelling Headphones
High on the list of products I never knew existed. From Sony via elan.org.

Plump Cow
An oddly named service that lets gamers trade games that they're not using anymore. In exchange for mediating the trade and ensuring that no one gets cheated, Plump Cow charges USD 9.99. You pay shipping on top of that. It's a good idea, but the price seems steep, even given that they (claim to) install and test every game they pass along. Maybe I'm just cheap. Does anyone know of an alternative service? I'd trade away Baldur's Gate or Age of Empires for some past game I'd overlooked.

Mutant Watch
It disturbs me to see a Senator making political capital out of what should be a straight-forward medical issue. Just because a person can move objects with his mind, this does not necessarily make him a threat to decency and world order. But trying telling that to my parents.
        Be sure to read the news story about schools banning mutants -- "We are not prepared to handle the risk, educator claims."

A Macabre Sim Tale
What evil is afoot at the Sinister home? And what does the villain mean by this mysterious term "Terrarium"? (I don't understand the appeal of tormenting one's Sims, but the captions in this story are delightfully creepy.) From Apathy.

Serializing novels over the web
Some genre authors have found success serializing their novels through mailing lists. They seem to be the sort of author who can write, for example, 27 screenplays. I do not appear to be That Kind of Author, unfortunately.

Elian's school
Graham was asking what happened with Elian, now that CNN doesn't seem interested in the story. Here's a Miami Herald article that quotes extensively from the Citizens Training Handbook in use at the boy's new conservative private school. [Found at The Hotsy Totsy Club]

1-800-CALL-CUT
An insidious long distance proposal from the Brunching Shuttlecocks. The thing is, I don't they realize that they could probably make this evil offer fly.

The Off-screen Movie
An excellent new Wordplay column about why it's important to leave a lot of movie action to the audience's imagination. My most recent screenplay revision does that, so I feel smart. The column, written on a plane, has a great dramatic end, so even if you aren't interested in screenwriting, scroll down and read the last section: "Oh, shit! I'm looking out the window, and there's a thin, white vapor trail coming from the right side engine. I swear it wasn't there before."

Miniature machine made out of diamond
It looks like a space invader and has teeth. How cool is that? The teeth are 0.002 mm apart and are used to eat peanuts.

Fantasy War
I don't actually recommend visiting this site. It requires plug-ins for the menus and has too much advertising. The reason I mention it is that Fantasy War is Greg (Paranoia) Costyikan's new play-by-web game and it has an interesting pricing model: you pay US $2.50 per game. (Your first 3 games are slightly cheaper.) On a per-minute basis, this is probably cheap, but it still seems expensive to me. Surely I played more than 20 long games of Civ and god knows I played 100 hour-long games of Age of Empires. My worry wouldn't be that I disliked Fantasy War but that I might actually like it. Fortunately, the game's plot seems as innovative as the name, so I don't think liking it will be a problem.

Game Industry recruiter
Looking for work in the game industry? Visit Mary Margaret. Her site loads faster than Gamasutra too.

Reviews for A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Heh. I think David Eggers of McSweeney's has been reviewing his own book. Some of the comments at Amazon: "If only every book on programming algorithms were as lucid, well-illustrated, and--yes--FUN as this one!" or "A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius is a collection of case studies of actual self-defense situations." or "My favorite part is when Rebecca and the Melrose Sharks swam their way to the National Title." [A quick visit to McS reveals they're having a fake review contest! Tim Church of the magazine has done similar clueless Amazon reviews of other books.]

Space Chicken!
You mouse pointer has been followed before, but not by a space chicken.

Shields Up!
This site will scan your system and report back what information it could find. It's kind of fun too, watching the reports come back like slot machine cherries.
        It revealed to me that Windows had turned file sharing on not only for my household LAN but for my cable modem connection too, which meant that anyone who could guess my simple password could access my files (or print on my printer, which would be kind of cool and freaky). I'd actually suspected that I was vulnerable this way, but the site confirmed it and told me how to fix it.

Slashdot eavesdrops again
It happened again! Last night I was talking about free will and the uncertainty principle with my sweetie and now it's on Slashdot. I think the cat might be a security leak.

Buttons ahoy!
So what happens when you turn on all the toolbars in Microsoft Word? Oh. [Update: Here's the full article with other good pics.]

Correspondence.net
Correspondence plans to celebrate the rebirth of letter writing by posting e-mail exchanges that people submit. As the editor notes, the site is currently underfed. I like the idea, though. I'll have to search my archives for something intriguing. Found at Katie.Vurtified.

19th Century in Political Cartoons
Someday I'll read this. I promise! Oh, go away.

Generation 5
An AI weblog. I probably don't have the programming background to absorb half their content, but I thought I'd add it here. [Update: there are some good introductory essays here too, including a fine refutation of zombies, a possibility which had been troubling me lately. Yes, I was worried about zombies. But philosophy zombies. Not the brain-eating kind. Although come to think of it, brain-eating zombies would be worrying too.]

The Grey Book
Notes from Ian McKellen as he films The Lord of the Rings in New Zealand. McKellan plays Gandalf.

E-mail! Fight!
Enter two e-mail addresses and see what this site considers their hit points, strength and intelligence to be. Then watch them duke it out. Reminds me of that Japanese UPC game that swept Japan eight crazes ago.

Salon: My favorite author, my worst interview
Orson Scott Card, the author of a few of my favourite books, is a homophobe. It doesn't enter into his fiction, so for the most part I shut that fact away and pretend I don't know it.
        This article is written by a lesbian interviewer who wanted to love Card and ended up hating him. It's a strange piece because the author has made herself so central. She talks about her own abusive childhood and generalizes about how abuse affects people and she keeps a running commentary of her reaction. For a while, I found it very amateurish, especially given her repeated references to herself as a journalist, but then I realized that all interviewers have personal reactions to their subject. This author is just putting hers in the foreground. I'd be interested in seeing more articles like this: what-I-really-thought pieces. It's like Jan Wong's approach, but done more as a rant than entertainment.

Arcanum
A few days ago I was wondering what Tim Cain, creator of Fallout, was working on. The answer fell into my lap today after scurrying away from a stats-heavy Roller Coaster Tycoon article. Cain is working on Arcanum, a game set in a world of both elf-fantasy and steamship technology. It's not an untapped genre, but by the space marine standards of video games, it may as well be. At this stage, Cain is still the most interesting thing about this game, but the concept art of an orc in a morning coat is promising. [Update! The most interesting thing about Arcanum is that they're including the game design tools. An RPG scenario-maker! Yay.] Here's a Gamespot preview that is actually more revealing than the official site.

The Sims
The free toys have already hooked my love and I on this game, and it's not out until next week. Check out Sim Face Lift which lets you design new faces for your artificial people.

The Most Important Unreported Story
The big pot of geniuses at Edge.org offers 100 choices from "The Planet Itself Is Becoming Self-Aware" to "OJ's Search for the Real Killers." I could barely take time away from the article to post this recommendation. Bye.

Independent Game Festival
The winners of the first round of the IGF have been announced. I haven't heard of any of the games, but some look intriguing. At least one, Blix, has a web-based demo.

Movies over the web
I had no idea that streaming video was so far along. The link above, KKRS.net, has some public domain movies that you can run in full screen if you've got the bandwidth. And I just visited Yahoo's Broadcast.com which is worth a glance too. I'm too twitchy and the picture quality is too grainy for me to watch more than a few minutes, but it's still a promising sign.

Older Mooselessness entries
The last entry before I archived the page was the Old Testament Text Adventure. You can also visit my full archives page.