Jonathan Woodward: Being The Good Guys is probably the most fun American political blog post in a while, tying in the hot ethical issue of the day into a media most suitable for conducting the relevant thought experiments: Superhero comics.
In a thread about adapting Lost to a roleplaying game, someone popped up and mentioned a theory that the scripts of Lost are actually based on a roleplaying game JJ Abrams runs to his friends. Unfortunately, the page he linked to is in Spanish; However, the Google translation is comprehensible enough to get some of the jokes. I assume that what Google translates as “uncle” should probably be “dude!” (and “aunts” – tias – are probably “chicks”)…
The awesome thing though is that the weird, translated speech totally reads like “Heblish”, the deliberately broken English we speak when gaming. Check it out:
A: You what you do, Locke?
L: I am a hunter of milk so I decide to leave to hunt…
A: Ahm… but is that you went in Wheelchair. Recuerdas? You took a major defect stops…
L: Good then… it change! Instead of a that scar in the face…
A: Only with that…
L: And Madness! I begin to say that the island is alive…
A: Good, it is worth, comes, which is…
Other fun stuff is how “they are run by insane players” explains many of the, err, eccentricities and downright illogical behavior that typifies the Lost characters. Locke’s madness as a way of balancing the points for the “bound to a wheelchair” disadvantage he gave up, the ultimate “blame it on the random encounter table” incident with the Polar Bear, Jin not speaking English because his players was too intent during character creation on making him a cool Yakuza Ninja, the useless Shannon is a result of someone saying “can I bring my sister to the game”, the PC-like focus of the characters on getting gear while ignoring the story, Charlie whining about not being able to cast Bard charms… (OK, that last one wasn’t in the series, but it’s funny in context).
Oich, better you read it.
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.
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.
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.