(no subject)

The RIAA settled with the girl's family by taking $2,000 from them. Note that she is from a poor family living in a housing project, and didn't know she was doing anything wrong; her mom paid a monthly service fee for KaZaA, and she thought this entitled them to download whatever they found thereon.

Personally, I find this the private-sector version of the "Bring 'em on" utterance: the action which switches my stance towards some powerful domestic entity from guarded negativity to disgusted loathing, and a deep desire to make them go away.

roll to see if i'm getting drunk

Picked up the Mac version of Neverwinter Nights a couple of days ago. I ha-ha that I got it so that, as a student of networked computer game design, I could examine its interface and communication dynamics. But that's only half ha-ha, in that I can't help but actually pay attention to all that stuff, and doubtless it'll influence the MIGS design, even though MIGS is for entirely different sorts of games. Example: not only does it use pie menus (contexual menus whose options form a circle around the clicked object), but it demonstrates how they can work hierarchically. That's pretty neat.

A very impressive piece of software, anyway. It's a MUD in a box, basically, except using the most modern computer game design paradigms (versus the text-adventure-based MUDs of yore); running the game in single-player mode actually launches a network server on your machine and then opens a connection to it for you, and from there it's a trivial operation to invite friends to join in over a network or the Internet. It happens to ship with a very well designed default game module, but it's ready from the get-go to use any other module you download or create. I haven't even begun to explore the modules that people have made, but examples on the Bioware site show everything from complete D&D adventures in the classic sense to in-world implementations of chess, blackjack, and cockfighting. (Well, chickens fighting penguins, anyway. And the chickens actually seem to be hens. But still.)

From a MIGSy standpoint it's actually really quite inspirational, and I feel it's fifty bucks well spent. Research, it's all about research.

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In other slacking news, I've offically let class registration slip past. Happy about decision, and confident that it's the right one, though it would have surprised me a month ago. In the meantime, I get to work on MIGS, maybe get into performing, spend time with friends, and otherwise have fun, and oh ma-a-a-an am I looking forward to the upcoming year.

Upcoming year? Yes, I've reverted to academic time; despite my avoidance of actual acadmeics, I have nonetheless been entrenched in academia for a whole year, and find myself naturally embracing its cycle once again. The summer is when all hibernates, and fall is the time for new awakenings. And, indeed, so many of my friends seem to be going back to school, getting new jobs, and generally taking stock of things. Ah, yes... Fall is surely my favorite of the seasons.