From my friend Andy, to his friend, Gillian (whom I’ve actually met), I got this fun little activity :

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open it to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of said sentence along with these instructions.
5. Don’t search around and look for the “coolest” book you can find. Do what’s actually next to you.

So I quickly reached about eleven inches to the right of my mousepad, and grabbed one of my currents :

“As we’ll see shortly, even when these payoff matrices are only a very abstract model of a game, they can be useful in balancing different elements of the design.”

This is from, Game Architecture and Design, by Andrew Rollings and Dave Morris. If you’re interested in game design (I am! I’m currently designing one in my second life), this book is highly recommended. Not only because of what the text says, but because of those little sideways “thought-jaunts” that reading the material will send you on. I love it.

ice cream stealers
Originally uploaded by Kafka_.

We had fun taking this picture at work, and the idea is that I would send it out to my co-workers as a “who stole all the ice cream? here is the surveillance shot!”.

I sent the note and picture to everyone in the office. It went over like a lead balloon. I don’t think anyone made any comment or came up to share a laugh. Oh well! I have some other pranks up my sleeve…

I absolutely, positively, one hundred percent despise the word, “blog”. It sounds like a sickness, or a verb one performs as a result of being sick.

There are people who live and breathe them. They link up with other opioninati’s out there, and feel they’re in a closed loop of specialdom. Anyone outside the loop is “not important” or “not relevant”. Its a very interesting foolishness to believe that non-bloggers aren’t important to the “web”. I don’t think that any of these people, many of whom took to the web in the late nineties or early aughts, would even think to question the grossness of the word, “blog”.

I’ve been aware of the “blogging phenomenon” for a long time, even back when they were called “personal webpages”. Now, when I look out over the vast web every day I see the word “blog” tacked on to gazillions of other jargon-y buzzes.

Its enough to make me blog all over the carpet.