• Ed Castronova is the biggest name I know of when it comes to studying sociology in massively multiplayer online roleplaying games. Nevertheless, the MacArthur foundation giving him $240,000 to build an Shakespeare-themed online world strikes me as a really, really bad idea. First, it’s probably not enough money to make anything anyone would want to play. Second, it’s really not enough money to deliver a game produced by people who aren’t game designers and are going to make lots of project planning mistakes along the way. Third, players may not be keen to play a game that’s just as concerned with using them as guinea pigs as it is with entertaining them. Fourth:

  “If you collect the ‘To be or not be’ speech and then take it to a lore master or to a skilled bard, he can then apply the magic to your broad sword or you (could) utilize the magic in a battle situation to give you this massive (advantage),” Castronova explained. “So there (will be) this intensive competition to get the best speeches of Shakespeare in your play book.”

  No there won’t, because that idea is LAME.

• It might be tough to deciper this comic, even with the associated blog post if you’re not a huge geek. Here’s my shot at it: ads in games are nothing new, but it’s only been in the last few years that they’ve become dynamic, able to be sold throughout the game’s lifespan and downloaded to update players’ machines. Now we face the prospect of that in-game advertising becoming more targeted, thanks to the game rifling through your hard drive, checking your browser history and work documents and musical taste. I would be extremely surprised if there was any law stopping this practice that game company lawyers couldn’t get around with a creatively labyrinthine End User License Agreement. But maybe I’m just being pessimistic.

Just seen on NBC Nightly News: a piece on the President’s sliding popularity among Republicans featured a clip of Tim Russert asking Congressman Jim Talent, “Do you believe that President Bush is a great president?” His reply: “Certainly he’s going to end up better than Jimmy Carter, probably not better than Ronald Reagan.”
My close personal friend David Gregory then tried to spin this into proof of a lack of enthusiasm on the right for the commander in chief. But of course that’s unreasonable. Remember the rule of thumb: whenever a conservative says “Jimmy Carter”, you can swap in “Don Knotts” (or possibly “Bob Denver”) without significantly altering the speaker’s intent. The same trick works for “Ronald Reagan” and “Jesus Christ”.

Stop it, you pretentious twits. It’s HALLOWEEN. Halloween. Not “Hallowe’en”. You are not living in the Victorian era. You are not a medieval alchemist recording observations about phlogiston and aether. You are (hopefully) not Tori Amos.
So cut it out. We’ve already got a perfectly fine convention for representing that word. It doesn’t need to be gussied up with superfluous apostrophes. Besides, there’s a decent chance that you’ll mix up the words “entomology” and “etymology” when you try to justify this outrageous behavior. Don’t risk embarrassing yourself further.
And hey, while you’re at it, see what you can do about the following:

• Use of the word “whilst” by non-British people
• Employment of the phrase “ceteris paribus” for any purpose other than getting a philosophy TA into bed
• Incorrectly utilizing the word “viola” as a synonym for “presto”. Unless, of course, the revelation it refers to has something to do with a small string instrument.

On behalf of the internet, I thank you for your prompt compliance.

Some of you might’ve seen my post on DCist yesterday about Count Gore De Vol, DC’s hometown horror host. I have to confess that I wasn’t aware of his existence until recently. Now that I do I’m an instant fan.

Local broadcasting sounds like a lot of fun — in one interview I read, Dick Dyszel, the man behind Count Gore, recounts the character’s origins: the station needed a horror movie host, and he already had a lot of white pancake makeup on hand since he also helmed the channel’s Bozo the Clown franchise. In addition to the makeup, he says he already had a cape lying around because “it was the seventies” (which I find mystifying and vaguely scandalous). Transylvanian accents are cheaper than either of those things, therefore: vampire.

But not only was I ignorant of the Count’s existence, I didn’t even realize that horror hosts were a national phenomenon. Of course I knew about Elvira, Mistress of the Dark. But it turns out that her only real innovation was having enormous breasts. There are horror hosts all over the country, presiding over plywood coffins and quietly helming late-night showings of abysmally bad scary movies. Some are charming, some are kind of sad (yet apparently popular), and others look like they might be legitimately spooky (check out the guy’s sample video).

Even though he’s no longer on the air, it’s nice to know that Count Gore is ours — particularly since he seems to be among the most venerable and lighthearted of the horror hosts. And his webpage contains regular columns from a bunch of hosts from other parts of the country, which implies to me that there’s a real sense of community among these guys. I like to imagine them all getting together for barbeques.

Anyway, I find it all pretty heartwarming. I’m still not ready to subscribe to Fangoria, though.

Wow. Thanks to Matt for alerting me to the lineup of the next F.W. Thomas. Someone’s been holding out on me (or perhaps she’s just been too preoccupied with her campaign to spread bronchial disease throughout the city).

I have to say, though, that I was a little disappointed to read that the author of Get Your War On is rounding out the bill. Don’t get me wrong — the strip’s fine and all (if a bit over-praised). But when I read that the performers will be “Hodgman, Coulton and Rees”, he’s not the first or most potentially-hilarious contributor with a qualifying surname who comes to mind.

Not the good kind, though. The kind that run web hosts. Here’s what greeted some of you this morning:

Accidents happen, but this is the third time in two weeks that the same accident has happened. They assure me it won’t happen again — but then, they offered the same assurance and the same rationale for why it won’t happen again *last* time. So apologies in advance for the next failure. Oh: and don’t use HasWeb.

Here’s something that might make my excitement over this Processing stuff a little more understandable: salary versus performance over the course of the 2006 MLB season. Use the slider at the top to advance through the season. There are a huge number of ways that this project could be used to visualize interesting data.
Thanks to son1 for leaving the link to Ben Fry’s site in comments, which led me to this.

Once you publicly identify yourself as a geek, you start to hear a lot of ideas for internet projects from acquaintances. Anybody who’s spent much time on the internet has at one time or another had an apparently monumentally great idea for a website that convinced them, for about half of an afternoon, that they were about to be rich. I’ll refrain from reciting some of the more embarrassing ones I’ve heard, but they’re frequently pretty bad.

There are three things working against you when you try to become a geek’s idea man. First, the idea’s probably terrible. No offense, it’s just how these things go. Second, someone’s almost certainly already done it, and folks generally don’t bother doing any research before pitching it to a geek (who then has to figure out how to politely demur). Third, geeks have their own ideas for projects, and will usually find them more interesting and/or potentially profitable than third-party ones.

Hmm. This blog post is off to a strangely negative start. Well, nevermind all that. All I really wanted to say is that a while ago I had an idea to offer band-specific RSS feeds from Pollstar at a central site, letting folks track when their favorite bands were coming to town. I never got around to it, since it’s not all that interesting an idea from a technical standpoint. But look! Somebody went ahead and did me one better, adding news and reviews and presales to the feed. Doing me two better, they programmed a Java applet that scans your hard drive to identify the bands you want on your watchlist.

Sadly, the Java thingy didn’t work very well for me. I keep my music on my ipod and a server backup rather than my laptop hard drive, and I had to click the “find more music” link after the first round of searching to get it to look through the mp3s there. And once it started, it stalled out after 60some songs.

Still, it’s a pretty nice idea, and if you keep your music on your hard drive it might really come in handy.

[via techcrunch]

Remember this thing? Pretty neat, I know. It made the interrounds back in May or so. Most people completely misinterpreted it, wrongly assuming that it tells you something about your site’s relation to others. In fact, it tells you about your webpage’s HTML structure. Not quite as exciting, unless you’re a huge dork who gets a thrill out of his wondrously-parsimonious XML code.

But there is something fascinating about this project (aside from its value as eye candy, I mean). Check out the credits: Processing, Traer Physics, and HTML Parser. Those last two aren’t that interesting — the third is an HTML-parsing library, and the second is a physics library (although this is kind of cool).

Door number one is where the action is. How have I missed this project for so long? Apparently Processing was designed as an educational tool, providing a quick visual payoff to new programmers. And it does that. But it also provides a quick visual payoff to people who aren’t Java programmers, but would like to make something cool-looking and animated that works across platforms. People like me. Check out the fruits of some very brief labor:

Sinusoidal dots may not be that exciting to you (although I do get significant enjoyment out of using the word “sinusoidal”). But the fact that those dots were made with a mere 67 lines of totally-unoptimized code should be — especially since more than half of those lines are variable declarations and stuff to read in configuration directives that could’ve just been hardcoded. Have a look here to see just how much Processing can accomplish with very little code.

Still, crappy graphic demos can only get you so far. I wouldn’t be nearly as excited about this if not for the collection of libraries that are available for Processing — including an implementation of XML-RPC. So you could make one of these visualizations talk to Flickr, or Technorati, or Google, or del.icio.us, or a data source you programmed yourself. There’s database, webcam, input and audio stuff, too (just for starters).

Anyway, more on this as I get a chance to play with it. And hopefully more on how I found it, too, which is a completely different (yet slightly related) and extremely cool tech platform in its own right.

You know what they say about God never closing a door without opening a window: