Tuesday, August 28, 2001

Lucas Arts' Star Wars Starfighter a postmortem from Gamasutra. I'm posting this for reasons that will hopefully come to pass.

Thursday, August 23, 2001

The New York Times has an article entitled The Art World Starts to Pay Attention to Video Games which details and then expands upon a lecture I attended at the SFMOMA.

Friday, August 17, 2001

There are so many unfortunate things about this page that I can't possibly begin to describe them. [via jcat]

This is totally geeky, but you know, this is where my head is at the moment. In a hole in the ground... is a look at the evolution of hobbits and halflings in books, movies and RPGs throughout the 20th century. From the bumbling fat-asses of Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, through the nasty thieves of Time Bandits, to the friendly kleptomaniac of the Dragonlance saga, and right back up to the stoic bad-asses that would just as soon pop a cap in your ass of uh... The Lord of the Rings. Halflings are the fun-house mirror of human society.

Wednesday, August 01, 2001

Call me a great big geek, but I've posted my many D&D related bookmarks. I'm mainly doing this because I'm outgrowing my ability to manage within the bookmark list.

Tuesday, July 31, 2001

Tuesday, July 03, 2001

Since I'm giving in to my inner geek with wild abandon I've been collecting links on the net to good D&D resources. Roleplaying tips is a newsletter dedicated to roleplaying that has some good advice, and is maintained in a readable, easy to understand site.

Thursday, June 28, 2001

So I've been puttering around lately and trying to rediscover an old geeky hobby of mine. Dungeons and Dragons. I've formed a group amongst my peers to start up a campaign. We're all a bit too excited by it. I've been saying that it's now the best of all worlds for us. We can now play D&D, just like we did in junior high, but now we can drink beer, and we have beautiful girls that hang around us that let us touch their goodies. What more could geek want out of life?

In the process of starting the campaign and making the adventures though I'm getting interested again in a newer hobby. Free, powerful and easy content management systems. When I stop and think about the impact these things could have if only done right it staggers me. Again I'm confronted with the need for some tool that can handle a living document. Not something that is just handles revisions in a document, but something that changes in relation to how I use a document. Playing D&D is just showing me yet another place where it would be indispensable.

For instance, while making an adventure I need to make reference to various monsters that the players would be fighting, while there are a lot more tools out there on the internet for running or playing a D&D campaign (wait a minute, D&D players are interested in computers?) I am still feeling the need for a tool that will allow me to think in an object oriented, dynamic, living document manner. I need tools that will help me author documents where I can insert dynamic objects without breaking my creative flow, where I can generate content that generates at author time within certain ranges. I want to put eight skeletons in this room, print out there stats and roll all the variable elements like hitdice, or this is a town description and a farmer lives here so *BOINK* here is his name, stats and a little side fact to give him character. Then while reading it I want to put my document into certain states. The players did not prevent the sentries from sounding the alarm, so the castle of orcs is not feasting and celebrating, but are on full alert, or when going through the adventure I have seven players instead of five so many of the encounters have to be balanced accordingly to make it a challenge.

These are examples that are specific to running a D&D campaign, but the problem or thought process isn't. I can see all of these factors applying to a business proposal or a design document just as easily. Even just brainstorming what will become a linear, "standard" document could benefit from a tool that could do this. This is how my brain has been working lately, and I suspect this is how your brain has been working too you digerati you.

So what am I going to do about it? Well I've downloaded Zope - YET AGAIN. Let's see if I can get through python, it's interface, and what products it offers to find out what I want this time. I like Zope. It's so much better than it was a year ago, it's grown a lot. But I can feel it in my eyeteeth that for what I want it to do (and it's totally capable of doing it) I'm going to be up to my neck in python manuals, Zope newsgroups, and faqs. I'm going to be coding a CMF derivative instead of designing my campaign world.

The more thing change, the more they stay the same.

Friday, June 15, 2001

Scott McCloud has published another "I Can't Stop Thinking". I still disagree that micropayments are the answer to content on the net's financial woes. But I'm glad that Scott is championing the cause of finding a way to let authors make a living publishing online. We'll look back at all the proposals in a few years and wonder how we could have ever been so naive and foolish to try out the schemes we proposed. But it will be the attempt at moving towards the flawed schemes that will have given us the insight to find the workable solution. So as always I'm glad Scott is beating the drum.

How on earth did I overlook Alicebot when I was programming Cursorbot? Alicebot is an open source chatterbot that won the Loebner prize. Alice uses an xml format called AIML (Artificial Intelligence Markup Language) to power her, and is available in both C and Java. There's even a flash front-end kit available. When I revisit Cursorbot, I think I'm going to Alice him.

Tuesday, June 12, 2001

I'm not a big golf fan, ok I hate the game. Why do I like this little mini-golf game so much?

Paul has written a good article about search engine optimization for Webmonkey where he tells you the best way to get your site linked correctly. If you were to make a link to it from your blog with the term "search engine optimization" then others could benefit from his advice, and the semantic web would be just that much closer.

Thursday, June 07, 2001

I'm an EKS (Explorer 86% Killer 53% Socializer 40% Achiever 20%) which is very different than what I was about six months ago. What are you?

Wednesday, May 30, 2001

Removed dack from the weblog list, and removed glish. Both have stopped publishing. The list is getting smaller. I think I need to branch out more and look up some sites that inspire me.

Friday, May 25, 2001

Being Real. File this one under "must read when I get around to upgrading Cursorbot". [via cam]

Wednesday, May 23, 2001

So rather than just repost all of Lum the Mad today I'll just do one post that points to many good reports from E3 on highly anticipated games. Everyone's favorite combat game Shadowbane is revealed to contain a lot more bread baking than would be obvious from previous reports. See for yourself. Star Wars Galaxies is taken a look at, and it looks really really good. And Anarchy Online will choose your name for you, but you can pay to change it back.

The Fall of Online Advertising (or So You Want To Start a Gaming Site?) is a good analysis as to what's wrong currently with online advertising for smaller sites. [via lum the mad]

Tuesday, May 22, 2001

The New Yorker doesn't seem to have an archive for it's stories, and links to the top of the directory section for the current issue. So chances are that this link to their interesting article about Ultima Online won't be working next month. Oh well, you'll never hear about the fascinatingly complex resource system that was developed and then abandoned in Ultima because players laid waste to the virtual environment with their rampant consumerism.

Hey, it's my 30th birthday. I guess I know what I'm going to be doing when I grow up.

Monday, May 21, 2001

Dack publishes his final issue. I understand how you feel sir. Good luck with the movies and the golf. Please continue to record things that suck.