Posted by Mike Sugarbaker at 12:03 am on 9/14/2005
Do you like to bookmark web pages and show them to people? Use del.icio.us, then. Do you like to mess around with what your browser shows you and do cool stuff as a result? Use Greasemonkey, then. (Do you like to do either of the above? Use Firefox, then.) Would you like to bring all this together and see why I’m writing this post?
del.icio.us Topdecker leverages all of the above to let you quickly and easily bring up whatever web page you’ve most recently bookmarked (on del.icio.us, that is) with a given tag. I find this sort of thing handy when I’ve just nailed a page about something unusual (say, with the incredibly unstoppable Super-Fast Delicious Bookmarklet) and I still want to do stuff with it (like pastebomb it to my friends via AIM), but don’t have the URL handy (because, er, that’s why I put it in del.icio.us).
Just add it to your user scripts per Greasemonkey’s instructions, then follow the instructions at the top of the script itself to exploit Firefox’s “bookmark keyword” functionality and complete the transaction – “close the loop,” as they say. As the Super-Fast Thingy up there demonstrates, we have so many small pieces now, just waiting to be loosely joined. It feels like power… but that’s illusory… but it’s not too bad these days to have power over illusion.
Do you not care about any of the above? Stare at this for a while. Maybe you’ll feel better.
link here
Posted by Mike Sugarbaker at 4:27 pm on 9/11/2005
[There is a nice discussion of this post going on over here. Some flattery also.]
So I was rereading _why‘s uncharacteristically low-style essay on how the replacement of PCs with video-gaming consoles in the present generation’s childhoods doesn’t bode well for the future of computing. (It’s eminently readable by non-techies and will especially delight those who remember dorking around with C64s.) I’d just been doing some OgreCave stuff and idly wondering where all the kids who played Pokemon and Yu-Gi-Oh! are going to go now that those are over – likely to conventional video games, or out of gaming entirely. A huge missed opportunity for the unplugged-games “industry.”
And I thought, with regard to the first question, what are the reasons nobody’s made a simple programming game for consoles? It’s apparently hard to sell (or else someone would be doing so). So, what are the possible approaches to selling programming to console players? A Game Construction Set of some kind is a possibility – Allan and I owned one back in the C64 days (it was an EA product, in fact). Why does nothing of the sort exist today?
(more…)
link here
Posted by Mike Sugarbaker at 4:10 pm on 9/5/2005
The still-marginally-new Ruth Reichl book, Garlic and Sapphires – Mom had read and loved Tender at the Bone, and I’d flipped through it and enjoyed the grazing, but for some reason it took the promise of big-city glamour and intrigue to get me to buy a ticket. This new one is mainly the story of the odd effect that method-acting had on her as she donned various disguises to facilitate her work as NYT restaurant critic. Most of these disguises are meant to confer low status, even invisibility, and the most satisfying element is the loud, clear message that, if high-end restaurants are going to be so expensive and elitist, they had better earn it with their food – and better still if they ditch a measure of the elitism and remember that they’re in the hospitality business. But the book’s also about status itself, and the hazards of being such an aficionado that you become insufferable to others, even when you are not being negative in particular. Where’s the line between talking something up because you love it, and talking something up because other people don’t? Is that whole question just a morass that you can only really deal with by retreating to cooking for yourself? (Certainly a wonderful thing that everyone should do – that’s not my point.)
Scott Pilgrim’s Precious Little Life and Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World by Bryan Lee O’Malley – our hero is 23 and unemployed in Toronto, in a crappy band, lives with his gay friend in their one room, and is chastely dating a high school girl. His friends give him all sorts of shit for all of the above but he is pretty much okay. Then he meets the girl who’s been using his brain as a hyperspace shortcut across town, falls in love, and has to fight her league of evil ex-boyfriends. Some of them don’t even drop any items when he beats them. This could describe a dozen normal-guy-dropped-into-fantastic-world stories, but it doesn’t. What makes Scott Pilgrim great is that nobody blinks, or rather, they blink just enough and not more. It’s just autobio comix with the anime and good cheer turned up until it drowns out the masturbation and suicide. It’s like someone imagined a comic that its own lead character might want to read; it’s like a Street Fighter II clone exploded and some hipster kids stole a couple of the pieces and built a soap opera out of them. In short, this is the only superhero comic that matters. It will back up the awesome truck into your face, BEEP BEEP BEEP and unload a truck full of awesome.
Another comic I should review is Carla “Speed” McNeil‘s Finder collection, Dream Sequence. On the surface it’s about VR, but McNeil is good enough at science fiction not to be all five-minutes-ago cyberpunk about it. I can say more, but I’m going to do it in a Fictionsuit-related forum because it’s relevant to that quest.
Next to come: Michel Houellebecq’s book-length essay H.P. Lovecraft: Against The World, Against Life. I keep thinking it’ll be fun but every time I read a few pages I look up thinking, “Dooooom… doooom…” and probably have dark circles under my eyes. I guess that’s fun in its way.
link here
Posted by Mike Sugarbaker at 3:09 pm on 9/1/2005
Hi all. Fictionsuit has launched, only 16 hours late. I’d like to thank Ouroboros and the Portland crew, Kalina, my brother, Neel Krishnaswami, the board, Madame Olcott, Matz, DHH, Fox Tall, Fox Small, and Jack Daniels.
What are you still doing here? THE TIME HAS COME TO ROCK
link here