Can anyone think of a practical use for this? I’m coming up blank, and it was apparently designed more as a social experiment than anything. Weird though.
Avatar Machine – Marc Owens’ wearable simulator of virtual worlds. – Boing Boing TV
Arcade Nostalgia
For the old-skool gamers among us, here’s a post that’ll take you back:
Coding Horror: Rediscovering Arcade Nostalgia
I really miss the days of (relatively) easy programming languages. You could make a simple game in Atari Basic pretty easily, and I spent countless hours typing in games from magazines (not easy on the Atari 400 chiklet keyboard!) and then tweaking/customizing them. Then saving them on cassette tape. Heh, frustrating good times.
Building your Twitter network
WebWorkerDaily has a post with a couple of webapps that’ll find you more strangers to stalk follow on Twitter. One of them just checks who you are following, and sees who they are following, and if a bunch of them are following a particular individual, it suggests you follow that individual too. It’s a good way to expand your “Celebrity Twitterers” circle, I guess.
The other one looks at your tweets and compares them to what other people are tweeting about, and suggests matches. I actually found a guy who has been tweeting about some web stuff he’s been playing with that looks pretty interesting. This feels more useful, as this person doesn’t have a huge network or anything and its pretty unlikely I’d ever have found him through ‘normal channels.’
Anyway I don’t want to totally rip-off WWD so I’ll send you to the post to check out the apps.
Targeted by aliens
And here is the story of some poor bastard who is being targeted by aliens, who keep slinging meteors at his house!
Photoshop Disasters
This is an awfully fun and amusing blog: PhotoshopDisasters
Mudcraft
Here’s a pretty neat little indie game that I found thanks to Play This Thing (Greg Costikyan’s site).
Mudcraft is a real-time strategy game that challenges you to work with Mother Nature as you build a strong mud community while foregoing the violence associated with most RTS games. Mudcraft is a lighthearted game designed to be enjoyable to male and female players of all ages.
Technorati Tags: indie games, gaming
Weird “flat-faced” fish discovered
Isn’t this a strange looking creature? Flat-Faced Fish: First in Family? You can just make out one if its “leg-like pectoral fins.”
Insert obligatory “mysteries of the deep” quote here. But seriously it is pretty astonishing that we’re still discovering new species when we think we have the world all figured out.
Podcastle is live!
This week the fantasy podcast Podcastle (from the same folks who bring you Escape Pod and PsuedoPod) launched. The first story was Peter Beagle’s Come Lady Death and it was marvelously read by Paul Jenkins of The Rev Up Review podcast.
The story was wonderful, and narration superb. A strong, STRONG launch for the newest member of the Escape Artists family of podcasts. I can’t wait to see what’s in store for next week!
Technorati Tags: escape artists, podcastle, podcasts
Choosing a Home Theater Receiver
My stereo receiver is older than a lot of the people reading this blog, so I’ve been starting to thing about replacing it (right after I hit the lottery). Electronic House has a nice article up about Choosing a Home Theater Receiver.
(Disclosure: I work for the company that publishes Electronic House.)
The blogosphere does some good
I often rant (ironically enough) about the blogosphere and what an awful place it can be when it comes to propogating (sometimes harmful) rumors. Usually because everyone copies other blogs (yup, myself included).
But here’s some good news. Wal-Mart: Brain-damaged former employee can keep money If you hadn’t read this story, some poor woman who worked at Wal-Mart and paid for their health & disability plan was in a bad car accident that left her brain damaged. Thanks to her Wal-Mart disability program her health care was being paid for. But the woman and her husband sued the trucking company that hit her, and won $1 million US, of which they got $417,000 (pause for ranting about how much lawyers and the legal system took). Wal-Mart turned around and sued the couple for $470,000 to recoup her healthcare costs. Apparently in the fine print of the Wal-Mart health care policy it says you have to turn over any lawsuit settlement to Wal-Mart.
Anyway you can read the details in the story. The good news is, after CNN ran the story, the blogosphere went wild with vitriol towards Wal-Mart, including calling for boycotts. Yes, everything Wal-Mart did was legal, but it still stank of corporate greed. Faced with this, Wal-Mart did the smart thing and relented, and dropped the lawsuit.
One moral of the story would be to read the fine print on the healthcare package your employee offers, but really, what good does that do? It isn’t like most of us have an alternative. Paying for healthcare out-of-pocket is beyond the means of many of us, and I’m sure particularly so of those who work for Wal-Mart wages.
But the better moral is that the blogosphere has a voice, and it can be used for good. Let’s hope we see more of that, and less petty squabbling and ugly rumor-mongering.