Still dreaming

I am still having election dreams. They fit into the current timeline; early this morning I stubbornly hallucinated that I was following along with John McCain's continuing adventures, following his defeat. Unlike before, my mood about it was more merely curious than anxious.

Come to think of it, all my election dreams have been McCain-centered. I just can't let him go. Why, John. Whydja do it.

(This was maybe triggered by a pretty good 90-minute Frontline doc about Lee Atwater that I watched last night. It's being rerun about 50 times this week; check your local listings.)

Looking for Xbox-playing betatesters for a new project

I am looking to build a contact-list of folks who may be interested in being the first betatesters for a major new Volity Games project.

It is not a game, or a thing for game programmers; it is an entirely new service that our company will run, separate and different from anything it's done previously. It does carry Volity Nature, though, in that it's all about improving the landscape of online, multiplayer games, and helping like-minded game-players find one another.

Specifically, we are looking for current users of the Xbox Live online system. For the most part, this means people who play games on a Xbox 360 console. We're especially interested in folks who have a "gold" XBL membership, permitting them to play multiplayer online games via the Xbox. If you happen to use Xbox Live with an original Xbox console, we'd also be interested in hearing from you.

The first wave of testers should be willing to not just use our service, but to also find ways to break it, and write up critiques about how it could work better. If you think you may be interested, please write me at jmac@jmac.org, or comment on this post. Feel free to share this request with people who you think would be good, smart testers. People who are on my XBL friends list will be getting an email about this from me sometime in the future, regardless of how they respond to this post (but feel free to comment anyway).

We haven't announced the project yet, or released a date when we'll begin testing, but it's near enough to now that it's time to start gauging the size of our initial tester pool. After the first testers have been crawling around a while and we've banged out the biggest lumps in the system, we'll start being less coy about it and commence letting more people on board. Watch this space.