Categories
Software and Programming

Google Reader vs. Bloglines

I noticed today that Bloglines have improved their RSS reader by stopping it from refreshing the navigation frame every time you click on it. Yawn.
However, I discovered that Google’s RSS Reader has also been overhauled, and that while it seems like most of their changes are aimed at making it more like Bloglines and every other RSS reader out there, which is to say more like an e-mail program, it also has a more obvious “River of News” interface now: like an LJ friends page, you see all the items organized on the page in reverse chronological order, rather than (as Bloglines does) sorted by their sources. The Google reader also has a fancy gimmick of marking items as “read” only once you scroll past them.

Since I uploaded my list of subscribed feeds from Bloglines to Google a while back, when I first tried out the site, reading it is an odd experience, because there’s a great deal of feeds which I’ve since dropped still there. It’s a glimpse into a past where I used to look at (if not read) more stuff. Anyway, maybe I should make the effort and try using it regularly.

Categories
Software and Programming

Slacker vs. Tycoon

Greg Costikyan plays a game called Cinema Tycoon, a resource management game about running a multiplex, and wonders:

I found myself thinking: Man, this so does not play into my fantasies about what it would be like to run a multiplex. Maximizing profit?
Probably the owner cares about that, but…. What I’d really like to be doing is boffing the chickie in the ticket office, and sneaking out back for a joint with the projectionist between reel changes.

Wouldn’t be that hard to do as a game, really; a straightforward resource management game, only you’d be trying to maximize the amount of fun your character is having, rather than profits–without getting fired, of course. In fact, maybe there’s a whole genre of “Slacker” rather than “Tycoon” games here.

Categories
Oddities short

Pork Pedestrian

An hour ago, not far from work, I nearly ran over a wild boar trying to cross the road.
Woah! A Wild Boar!
Big animal!
It… yeah, I guess you had to be there.

Categories
BlogTalk short

one line blog parodies

Lore Sjöberg offers The Ultimate Blog Post(s).

Categories
Science Fiction and Fantasy

Worldcon Scandal

Via Matt Rossi, I learned that there’s some new Harlan Ellison scandal – looking it up in Wikipedia, it turns out that at the Hugo award ceremony, Ellison groped Connie Willis’ breast. Apparently, there is an unsatisfactory public apology and also video.