Here’s a superhero you should avoid on White Pants Days, ladies! Its creator, longtime City of Heroes player Scott "Sharkey" Sharkey, tweets: "Who has two thumbs and frontpages Reddit with stupid bullshit he posts while drunk at 1AM?" Good lord, Reddit. I mean, really.
Don’t you think Sharkey should put together a whole City of Heroes Field Guide? He could revisit all his old superheroes, too, like Darth Underpants, Disco Fett, Inside-Out Girl, Ground Chuck, Grannyatrix, and Proofreader. This is a thing we would want to see, right?
Michael Rose on ‘World of Goo’: "It’s a belief that keeps me living purposefully, that makes sense of the world, and that gives me hope for the future. But sometimes I wonder if this belief places me squarely in the midst of a cruel game, wherein I am merely a pawn, used for the sadistic purposes of a cruel God."
"Geek meets craft in this fun collection of 25 kooky projects for geeks of any affiliation, from D&D dice earrings, Star Trek pillows, and Super Mario cross-stitch to Star Wars terrariums, a Morse code quilt, and much more!"
I hope not to alarm you, but plenty of websites employ "power users"—not for actual money, I don’t think, because that would be illegal—to boost articles’ scores on social content sharing networks. But Digg always seemed to ban users just as soon as the site suspected something fishy happening, so it isn’t as if Digg were in on it. So is gaming the system, in the interest of pageviews, really so bad? Because as an ex-community manager, I really struggle to make any judgments here.
I tweaked the link’s title a little bit, but only because I worry I’ll have to trick you readers (??) into clicking on it. Trust me, it’s worthwhile.
Usually cyberdrama is neither hilarious nor uplifting. But some hot Internet girl I’ve never heard of (sorry?) has turned into a one-woman Smoking Gun. I would not dare mess with her.
And this isn’t games-related, no, but since I’m trying to provide more reading material about gender, identity, avatars, and HILARITY, this passes my test.
"Women are difficult to model because they have—they’re sort of put together—well, let me put it this way: male bone structure is mostly made up of ninety-degree angles. Right? Maybe a couple forty-fives here and there. But it’s simple, and that makes it easy. I guess I shouldn’t say ‘easy,’ but I mean more straightforward."
I almost missed linking to one of these! It’s a good thing I caught myself: I recently told Bureau editor Kevin Nguyen by Tweet that if I missed one, he ought to phone the police, because I must be in trouble. I’m okay, guys! I have a free, 6-month subscription to OnStar!
Have you been reading all these? I keep telling you to. Mr. Gourlay’s approach to games is something I have heard called "experiential," which is a descriptive word that I like but barely understand how to pronounce aloud. I think I’m kidding? Maybe.
Even though I am not a mother, I have watched children play and have felt defensive and nurturing only until I got in on the game myself (at which point I will start shouting, "Boo-yah! No mercy! In your face! ...Sorry"). But there is something sharp and moving—so sharp that as a reader I don’t even see it coming until it’s too late for me—about Mr. Gourlay’s relationship with a game (_Minecraft_) as contrasted with his relationship with his 9-year-old daughter.
This is one of those things that make me ehhhhhhhhh, because Will Wright is an inarguable visionary and I know what he is saying and how it makes sense, but I just ehhhhhhhhhh.
Still it’s nice to see some discussion of "Bar Karma," Wright’s crowd-scripted TV serial on Current, and anyway we all should embrace conversations about narrativity versus sandboxing with the goal of eventually furthering the form or whatever.
"Anyone hoping for a level of fence-whitewashing or a trip through the graveyard will be sorely disappointed. Ultimately, Injun Joe appears, riding the neck of a giant green serpent, and Tom finally rescues Becky, who is imagined, as most women are in Nintendo-world, as a blonde princess in pink."
My old pal Adam: "I wanted to see release dates for video games in a less noisy, less hype-filled form so in keeping with my new mantra of ‘less complaining, more problem solving through extremely rapid prototyping’ I made my own video game release calendar thing."
Reading the MetaFilter thread—which took me at least a day, because I needed to read very carefully—clarified a lot of concepts. It was, indeed, the conversation no one expected. Measured and moderated in a neutral court, this dialogue did a lot of work for me that I never could have done on my own in any good time.
I know not everyone will be able to do all the necessary reading, or even make total linear sense of the back-and-forth there, because who has the time, and maybe that really has been the issue from the start.
