A Simple Way To Go Faster Than Light That Does Not Work

Once again growing skeptical of the participatoryculture.org folks. Their DTV channel guide is moderated, and they don't tell you why or how, though they mumble things about decency standards in the FAQ. I can understand wanting to be wary of porn and spam, but surely there are better ways of attending to this than using human bottlenecks? Over the last three days, one (1) new channel has been added. I submitted The Gameshelf as a channel, and I bet they're getting hammered with similar requests as their software gets more attention.

So what are they filtering against? If it turns out they're making decisions based on subjective notions of content quality, I shall be severely unimpressed. So far I'm willing to believe that they're swamped and unable to dedicate the time to manually picking through submissions. (Which still makes me unimpressed, though in a less severe way.) I have made a post to a forum asking if they need more volunteers, or something. We'll see.

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Interesting that this is not wholly unrelated to Volity. Ideally, lots of game parlors will appear, and we're not planning on introducing any human moderation or "hard" filters to the system. We do have some cool ideas for user-driven moderation, though, which should not just knock out any spam we get but, more importantly, help alleviate Sturgeon's Law.

As much as I will love every game development effort that finds its way to our system, I don't doubt that 90 percent of it will still manage to be crap. Giving users a way to help each other find the good stuff is a special challenge, and one that few providers bother with.

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New, undecorated Gameshelf homepage, including episode guide with links to information about the games we cover: http://gameshelf.jmac.org . Props as alwys to my technical consultant daerr for helping me renoogle jmac.org's namesever setup once again.

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Drove a Hybrid car for the first time... this feller, a Toyota Prius. Passenger Karl noted the LCD touchscreen that's below the LED dashboard display and declared that I was driving a Nintendo DS.

In truth, the UI was pretty awful. All the readouts were in the center again, but the speedometer was numeric-only -- barf -- and the five-position gearshift had only two positions labeled: P and B. (B? So, park, and... "brake", maybe? So my two choices are "stop" and "stop"? What?) I sat there staring at it after starting the engine, not sure how to actually make the car go forward. I actually had to look in the owner's manual to learn that the gearshift's visual feedback is an animated meter up next to the speedometer. Ew.

(B, by the way, was apparently the low-gear setting. Whatever, guys.)

Other than that it was OK. It stopped on a dime but it accelerated more sluggishly than I'm used to... was definitely crankier than my 8-year-old Corolla or any of the other gas-guzzlin Zipcars I've known lately. I don't know if this is endemic to hybrids or not.

The continuously updated cartoon depiction of the energy-flow direction among the battery, engine, motor and alternator on the LCD screen was fun to watch. More fun than watching the road, possibly; screech!! I don't know if that screen had any other purpose, though. I've tried to convince taskboy that it had a Tetris mode where you steered pieces with the steering wheel and hit the brakes to do a quick-drop but I don't think he believed me.

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kyroraz invited me to dinner on Friday and we got a chance to try the new Princess & Dragon expansion to Carcassonne. It is a.k.a. the OM NOM NOM variant, since 12 times per game you get to set a meeple-eating dragon tearing across the board, sound effects optional.

However, it seems lot more dangerous at the start of the game than it is at the end, because of the smaller board and higher meeple density. Then again, there do tend to be more meeples on the board later in the game, and the volcano tiles (which let you effectively teleport the dragon wherever you'd like) may further keep the threat level high. I guess I'd have to play it some more to see for sure... I definitely want to.

You people who have no idea what I'm talking about are probably so jealous of my life right now, eh? snort

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Ate at a Quiznos for the first time. It was good. Why was it good? Because I like toast, that's why.

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I found a certain mostly-ex-goth housemate's dancin'-skeleton dishrag the other day. She turned down my offer to return it so now it's Halloween every day my kitchen, huzzah. I mean, boogity boo!

I finally got a cellular phone today. Mail me if you need the number.

I wanted to get in on the same calling plan that cthulhia scored, but the nice VoiceStream lady told me that my credit rating was in a state of "still being established", which I took to mean as something like calling Afghanistan a "developing nation". So, I had to choose a somewhat more expensive plan or nothing at all, and fork over a two-month security deposit to boot. Shrug... I took it anyway. It took me a long time to build the resolve to march in there and get that phone. (Well... it's more than since I've become more social, and differently busy in general, I several times a week have been finding myself in moments where I wish I had a phone on my person.)

So far I am pretty happy. The phone is wee, charges very quickly, and works when I call myself. It gives me an excuse to get an AIM account, too. (You wouldn't necessarily guess it, but AIM is the IMer of choice among a lot of ORA-centered hackers I know.)

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I remember when I hit the halfway mark of my car's five-year lease; it didn't seem like too long ago. Today, to write my latest payment check, I looked at my account information online, and noticed that it ends in November 2002. Say, that's the year I've started writing on my checks.

You just blink your eyes, and out the door they go, all grown up.

The same site says that, the way things are looking now, I'd have to part with another $10,000 after the lease matured if I wanted to purchase the car. Hmm. I dunno. We'll see what happens.