Metaplanar Babel

Shanghai to lift lid on high-tech toilets - Tech News & Reviews - MSNBC.com

There’s a World Toilet Expo. Who knew?!

Best. MMO. Quote. Ever!

anyuzer said:

Playing an MMOG is much the virtual equivalent of being violated by a dragon. You purposely subject yourself to peasant status, where you are literally worthless in a massive world, and sort of hope to make your way up the sadistic ladder.

It’s sort of the same as how we all loved Jon’s Earthdawn games, despite (or maybe because of) the sadistically evil things he threw at the characters. What the hell is wrong with us?

Cruinh mentioned in a comment that he’d been reading a lot more stuff on the web than he had prior to starting up his blog, and I have to note that I have done the same thing.

What’s interesting is the types of things I’ve found my way into reading, like the various ramblings over game designers, MMO theory, roleplaying theory, etc. There are a lot of people out there, very educated and eloquent people, who think and write about these sorts of things. It’s not all just the B-net kiddies and the Fires of Heavens. It’s amazing, really, and I wouldn’t have found any of it if I hadn’t started up this blog.
(Continued..)

While surfing around on my break (no really, it was my break), I stumbled upon a couple of interesting articles. Some of what is said in the one about IAD reminded me a lot of the scene in Johnny Mnemonic where Spider goes off about NAS. Obvious, NAS was a bigger problem in the context of the movie, but the simularities are there and generally sum up to “data overload”. Yet another sign of how far ahead of his time William Gibson is. His most recent, Pattern Recognition, kinda goes into the daily inundation of data, too. We all have a lot to absorb - even those who don’t really browse the web much. There’s advertising everywhere, constant sound from TVs, radios, iPods, cars outside, you name it. When was the last time you went outside and heard nothing but natural sounds? I can’t even remember when that was for me.

Of course, my very posting the links to these articles and my blog in general are just adding to the clutter, but what can I say?

Fur flies over rabbit death threat - Nightly News with Brian Williams - MSNBC.com

*sigh* Oh look, it’s made the national nightly news. Granted, I can’t imagine they’re taking it seriously, given the number of rabbit jokes throughout the article, but still, did these people really need that attention?

My parents were in town for the weekend, having taken the trip to relieve themselves of a lot of my old furniture and miscellaneous stuff that I hadn’t yet reclaimed. It was nice to see them, as usual, though I’m always afraid that my dad ends up spending a lot of the trip bored as Mom, Jon, and I gabble on about WoW. We also met up with one of our friends from WoW that Jon works with, along with his wife, for lunch, which was interesting. I’d never met him before either, but Mom apparently talks to him a lot in game, so she wanted to meet him.
(Continued..)

Randomly surfing through blogs occassionally brings interesting results. By reading Greg Costi-whatever’s blog (linked in the sidebar), I found the afore-linked forum, which has had some very interesting discussion. I had no idea that there were so many people who philosophized and theorized about gaming and/or roleplaying (and there are people who make a strong distinction between those two things, believe it or not). The discussion (at least in the areas I touched - RPG Theory, mostly) is on a fairly high, scholarly level, and I’ve yet to see any discussion lose its civility. Folks agree, debate their points, and move on. It’s great.

I should note that it’s a good idea to scan through some of the articles, since the posters use a lot of terminology that isn’t immediate self-explanatory.

I suppose I should mention that the article that led me to the Forge was actually pretty interesting as well. I had no idea (again) that roleplaying was taken so seriously over there. Anyway, just a couple of things I thought might be interesting~

So it’s a stupid title, but someone in the comments of this article said something similar that I thought was amusing. Anyway, the article is either concerning the lack of thought most people put into any given task or whether designers of web sites should encourage people to think with their interfaces. Interesting read, though honestly I think some of the comments are more interesting than the article itself; I guess we can say it’s an interesting discussion and leave it at that. (Can I fit one more instance of the word interesting into that sentence?) At any rate, it kind of made me think, which is a good thing all around (except for the fact that I’m neglecting work to think, which isn’t exactly good). Just thought I’d point you guys at it if you were interested. I don’t have much to say that hasn’t already been said, more eloquently, over on the article.

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I hate seeing this! *grumble*

Computers obey brain waves of paralyzed - General Health - MSNBC.com

The age of DNI is upon us~