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Maybe mostly for radiotelescope who has a cool cover of the original song in the office MP3 collection, but anyway: lunchboy's four-part cartoon about Future John Henry. Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4

(Can traditional folk songs that predate the advent of recorded music have "covers"? Whatev.)

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Had a subtly nasty nightmare last night. Were I one to write horror stories I would spin the basic premise into a story most terrible. As it is I feel the dream is wasted on me, so I'll just write about it.

( Zzzz )

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Assertion: Most Americans have no idea what the national debt is, nor why having a large debt is bad. This despite the fact that anyone plugged into any news source knows that we have a national debt, and that it is apparently very large indeed and growing ever larger. But I don't think anyone in the mainstream news ever stops to go into any more detail about it.

I assert this because I don't know what I means. That it, I know its dictionary definition, but I couldn't enumerate with confidence what trouble we as a nation are inviting by running up such an enormous tab. One could draw parallels between national debt and and personal debt, but this metaphor seems to have little practical application; if the country gets harassing phone calls from foreign bill collectors, we are not privy to it.

I think of this when I see an elegant argument that part of the appeal of the current administration lay in its favoring a borrow-and-spend strategy versus a tax-and-spend one. Rather than taking hard-earned money away from its citizens, it *poof* makes money appear by arcane magics. And isn't that better?

Opponents of Reagan, Bush41 and Bush43 have ever leaned on the horn that shouts the ever-increasing depth of our debt hole. But until there's a national awareness of why any average American should care, I think this effort is wasted.

Impending volity shtuff for YOU

The betapalooza is this Thursday evening from 7 to 11. Come visit us in person at 2 Linden Ave (bringing a laptop if you can), or stay home and log in with Javolin. I posted the latest release of the client (0.3.0) yesterday. You should download and use that.

Yeah, we still have the same old games as the last two events. ONLY MORESO. Some (especially Fluxx) have received more bug-fixing and fine-tuning lately, and Javolin itself has lots of little new features and improvements that need testing.

So, turning to the issue of actually getting some new games on the system...

I am working today on bringing ALL of the Perl documentation up to date (including taking recent critiques from Bill and daerr into account), and providing clear, simple example code with that distribution.

I will then commence a push to start our developer-beta period with posts to both the volity-devel mailing list and this LJ (which is the closest thing we have right now to an official Volity blog, at least with the Volity-tagged posts). I know a lot of potential Volity game hackers are reading this (and are subscribed to the mailing list as well), and I hope to finally activate all of y'all with this. Stay tuned...