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The Old Testament Text Adventure
"Welcome to the world.... You have no boils. You have 10 children. You have 100 goats. You have pottage." [Link and description ripped shamelessly from Pigs & Fishes]
Is Jeeves Gay?
That's one of the questions you can Ask Jeeves. There's a cute answer too. This, by the way, is smart marketing. By adding one good natured entry to their database, they just had me and a zillion other people refer folks to their site.
Uploading minds (II)
Jeez. My wife and I were just talking about this prospect last night and now it's on Slashdot. At least they didn't put up our discussion about who does the dishes. Bonus link: Nagel's "What's It Like To Be a Bat?"
Frictionary from Suck
Suck.com creates its own private language. (I never noticed that Polly has fish for eyes before.)
Polar lander sends signal?
Has Hollywood bought NASA? Is the lander coughing, fluttering its eyelids and drawing a breath after all? Perhaps not, but the story writes itself.
Chihiro no Kamikakushi
From Hayao Miyazaki, the creator of Princess Mononoke, this quote about his next movie: "For the people who used to be 10 years old, and the people who are going to be 10 years old."
Current 10 year olds will presumably have their asses kicked if they try to sneak in.
MS error outdoors
One good thing about the incredible penetration of Microsoft is that we get to see familiar error messages popping up in unfamiliar places. There's probably a sweet grad school word for that, but I'll just say jarring. [From Good Experience]
Bartleby: great books online
Disney's ongoing effort to keep Mickey forever out of the public domain disheartens me, because it will make it more difficult to create sites like this in the future. Here's the online version of Winesburg, Ohio.
Douglas Coupland tour diary
I wish more authors and Super-Famous-People found the time to do this. I haven't read Miss Wyoming yet, because I forgot to put a hold on it at the library. Probably 112 holds on it now. Sec.
Bah! Victoria's dreadful new web based catalogue doesn't even tell you how many holds there are. Moving from telnet to HTML should not lead to feature loss. Anyway, I held the book (which sounds sweet). I should consider buying it, I know. I read the first chapter while waiting for my love to buy boots and enjoyed what I read.
A warning about the tour diary: it's graphic heavy. Dial-up people may want to turn off images and load one or two to taste.
Dark Basic
The creators of Dark Basic bill it as a game creation tool for non-programmers. Given that I was looking for something that would basically let me move circles around on the screen, this could meet my modest needs. I'll have to see how full featured the demo is though. And their spelling of "artificial integelence" leaves me wondering. [They fixed it.]
Geometry of Voting
Different ways of making voting more fair from a mathematician's point of view. Comes with counterpoints by other mathematicians, which support approval voting: vote yes or no on every candidate. The most yes votes wins. [From Factovision]
Battle Beyond the Stores
Since my automatic redirect to the Brunching Shuttlecocks site isn't complete yet, I'll just link one more article. The main factor behind the success of Pokémon is bafflingly obvious. If you want to make a toy that appeals to both boys and girls, there's no need to break down centuries of gender role stereotyping. Heavens no! Just make cute little cuddly characters that beat hell out of each other! D'accord!
Star Wars lego figures
Big deal, right? There's Star Wars everything: video games, popsicles, designer underwear, cologne. But actually take a look at these Lego guys. Not only are they from the original Star Wars series, they are damn cute for seventies movie heroes/ancient-archetypes-old-as-myth-itself. Comes with Brunching Shuttlecocks commentary as an added bonus.
Movies of levitating objects
The berry one is soothing. I assume one day the frog will escape and use his newfound powers to avenge himself on the giggling scientists. This eases my mind.
Mugger leaps between skyscrapers to escape
No more TV for you, mister. (There's more too. Wait until you read how he escaped from the second building.)
Sid Meier's Dinosaurs!
One of those concepts which demands "why didn't you think of this, foolish mammal?"
Halo screenshots
I don't normally have the constitution for these 3D shooter games, but with Halo, maybe I'll just hide from everybody and go for a walk. What a gorgeous game. If you've just seen the movie clip that was circulating, try these new screenshots.
Unfortunate Christmas Cards
All right, it's late, but it's only going to get later. Until July anyway. [From Strange Brew]
Crazy Week
What a week. I continue to receive fan mail for that Christmas Age of Kings scenario I wrote. A game company is now offering me noteworthy American dollars to write scenarios for them. My mentor's agent turned down my screenplay because it was too dark for kids (possibly true). I placed in the top five of The Well's online fiction contest, but then got binked because I wasn't an American. (I guess it pays to read the rules.) And to top it all off, I'm on Marmalade's list of sites she reads often. So many things to pay attention to. I think I should quit my job.
Mind Uploading
The speculation gets a little goofy by the end of the article, but the concept is one I've been wanting to explore in fiction.
Steve Martin on the 3rd Millennium
"I offer the advanced student of moral history the following summary: Roman era: anything goes. Medieval era: nothing goes. Renaissance: anything goes...."
The 200 most entertaining moments of the millennium
From the Daily Radar/Next Generation folks. Tron appears twice, so you can assume it's a pretty idiosyncratic list.
100 Mistakes of the Century
I'm back. If anyone reads this page, besides the folks I was visiting over Christmas, my apologies for not saying bye. Here is Ig Nobel's list of 100 mistakes of the 1900s that are far worse than mine.
False Advertising: A Gallery of Parody
Boy George nearly killed by glitter ball
"It would have been both ironic and glamorous to be finished off by a four-foot glitter ball," Boy George told the Sun tabloid on Thursday.
Canadian CD levies announced
The levy on data CD-Rs and CD-RWs is going to be 5 cents, much less than feared. Strangely, there's a 61 cent levy on CD-RW audio. I thought CD-RW didn't work in stereos. Who's selling CD-RW audio? Who's buying it?
Cell towers disguised as trees
To make them more agreeable to local communities, some companies are disguising their cell towers. It's a clever solution. [from Cam]
GalaxyQuest series fan page
Okay, stay with me here. The movie GalaxyQuest is a comedy about a group of actors from a cheesy science fiction series who get swept up into a real alien war. This page pretends to be a fan page of the original series, the one that never existed. It's really a studio production and a satire of the thousands of cheesy fan pages that really do exist for other shows. Animated gifs off the port nacelles!
Lama in the hood
I don't know if it's true, but I wish it were true. An interview with Pema Jones Rinpoche, the 13 year old Tibetan lama raised in America. "Some of my best friends in our gang are Chinese. It’s strange to have Chinese friends when your family has been treated so badly by the Chinese, but this is America, I gotta live here with my own karma. Some skinheard doesn’t care whether I’m Tibetan or Chinese. He just wants to stomp my head." Another interview. [From the Bud.]
Patent for cat exercise
"A method for inducing cats to exercise consists of directing a beam of invisible light produced by a hand-held laser apparatus onto the floor or wall or other opaque surface in the vicinity of the cat, then moving the laser so as to cause the bright pattern of light to move in an irregular way fascinating to cats, and to any other animal with a chase instinct." [Found on Vacuum, which come to think of it is another way to exercise cats.]
Reviews for my Christmas Scenario
I made a Christmas scenario for Age of Empires II. It's being received very well in the design forum linked above. Now I've got to make an encore! :) If you own the game, give the scenario a try. It's short and seasonal. [Over 1000 downloads so far.]
Orrin Hatch and the trochaic tetrameter catalectic
I can't link every McSweeney's article, but I like to remind you now and then. A political theory based on the rhythms of names.
Classic Atari games on Shockwave
Shockwave is generally used for evil, but here is one application I can approve of: very faithful ports of Frogger, Missile Command, Centipede and Breakout. I just wish I could resize the windows.
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