General

“What has she been working on?” you might well ask. “All this raiding, all these long long long comments on everyone else’s blogs but precious little here?” Well. Aside from raiding with Eternal Chaos and occasionally visiting Nagafen, I have been trying to solve a puzzle on the children’s MMO/Community Site, Neopets. This place… is deceptive. There’s stuff there for adults. In fact, I sometimes think there’s two tiers to the game; the lower tier, where children socialize, play games, earn Neopoints and play with their Neopets; and then there’s the upper tier, where adults think of innovative ways to fleece the children of their money and items through legitimate methods, such as the thriving commodities market in the game. ...

The Ancient Gaming Noob had an interesting post today about the spam comments he gets in his blog. I’ve often complimented him before on how his well-designed site has changed my life, caused me to burst into laughter unexpectedly and inspired me to become a better person – many of my heartfelt comments, he displayed there for everyone to see. Well. Here at West Karana, we get spam. Most of it gets captured and shunted off by Akismet, and what remains doesn’t get past the filter that cuts off comments to older entries. But, we do get some spam. Here’s some highlights of what is being held by Akismet right now. ...

Cuppy of Cuppycake.org asked bloggers to post pictures of their gaming setups. Mine’s in a bit of a flux; my main gaming computer just died, and I have a laptop replacement. Here’s mine. The left rear screen is for Supernova, my recently deceased computer. In front of it is Darkstar, its replacement (after a star goes supernova, it becomes a dark star… Hey, my LAN is called GALAXY, I have to keep with the theme). The widescreen and keyboard to the right are Baphomet, my Linux computer and the one I use to watch movies and program. Waaaay to the left you can see a bit of my 15" TV, and on top of that is Spock’s Brain, the external USB drive enclosure that has Nova’s main drive in it. You knoew you’re a geek when you just happen to have a USB drive enclosure lying around. ...

The Hartford is sponsoring a traveling exhibit of billboard-sized artworks on the theme of Coexistence created by the Museum on the Seam in Jerusalem. From the Hartford’s website: Coexistence is a giant public art exhibition, featuring approximately 45 billboard-sized images created by artists from around the world. It encourages people to think about human relationships and the meaning, use and misuse of words such as tolerance and respect. These images create the potential for initiating valuable dialogue on issues of diversity such as race, ethnicity, religion and gender. ...

This is Bon Jovi week, and all the idols had to take a Bon Jovi song, and mentored by Jon himself, embarass themselves in front of thirty million people… I love this show so much and feel like kicking myself for not watching it all those years when, well, I wasn’t watching any television and rationalized that it was all junk anyway. Sturgeon’s Law says that “Ninety percent of science fiction is crud, but that’s because ninety percent of everything is crud.”. Television is no exception; it’s 90% crud, but that implies that 10% of it is worth watching. With a hundred channels available, there could be ten programs on showing stuff you might enjoy watching. And I have recently discovered my own corollary to Sturgeon’s Law, which is: Just because 90% of people enjoy something, it doesn’t follow that it’s crud. ...

Which will rank and which will stink? I’m probably the least qualified person to rank movies but… well, Next made me so mad… Spider-man 3: Tobey Maguire says SM3 lets him explore the web-slinger’s dark side. Well, Tobey doesn’t even HAVE a dark side. Special effects look phenomenal, but the hype is so thick. Stupid situation set up in first movie and gotten stupider in second reaches apex of stupid here (no, Spidey didn’t kill your dad. Your dad was EVIL.) It’ll make a ton of money and then be forgotten. ...

That’s how cold it was in Hartford, Connecticut yesterday morning. That’s how cold it was when I spent four hours in and waiting for buses because my car had finally made it to Connecticut from California and I had to return my rental then go home. Slowly. Coincidentally, that very night I flew back to California to finish up things here and to pick up our new cat. (It was 59 degrees in Los Angeles when I landed at 9:30 PM. By the way.) ...

I started a new job in Connecticut, which involved a cross-country move and a snowstorm… my computers get here today, Internet by Thursday, so soon i’ll be back gaming. I haven’t yet been desperate enough to play a MMO – any MMO – that I buy a WoW time card and a few hours of play at the Gaming Cafe in the local mall. It’s nice to have that option. It’s a great mall – they have that LAN Cafe filled with gaming PCs and Xboxes, two games stores, and even a Games Workshop store for tabletop gamers. ...

I mentioned in a comment to a previous post, and it has been said many times by others, that the world is poised on the brink of spending as much time in the virtual world as the real one. Project Darkstar was maybe the first step along the path – a shared “back end” that can support any number of people and any number of games, given enough raw computing power and bandwidth. Darkstar could be the universe. ...

Day 1: Bloglines releases the Bloglines Image Wall, a dynamic collage of images taken from the blogs they index as they index them. Day 2: Teachers, librarians and parents of young children discover the content of a large portion of the images Bloglines finds on the blogs they index…