You could walk forever
                              and never run out of streets
tripleproofed and wired
               with maps on every corner

The police carried ray guns
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For the next time that your friendly local government starts using your hobby as a weapon in the culture wars… Wired catalogs past “threatening” media.

It’s interesting to me the way in which control of idea flow is truly a nonpartisan concept. If it’s not the right bashing evolution, it’s the left protecting the children. Both motives flow from similar places, of course, but I wonder when the “stay out of my head” political reaction really takes hold — if ever.

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CNet says that the Wall Street Journal says that Microsoft is going to buy Massive, the in-game ad people.

This mere days after we learn that Viacom is buying XFire for $102 million.

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So I settled on a new laptop, and I got the Toshiba M400 convertible Tablet PC. I’ve been wanting a Tablet PC ever since Mark Terrano and Mike Steele showed me theirs, since I frequently design and think while sketching. They both have Motion Computing’s slate models, but I wanted something with a better keyboard since I do a lot of typing on the road, and with an optical drive.

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Just helping spread the meme: take the MMO Survey, improve human knowledge or something.

Over at www.sicher.org there’s a post discussing the “next next gen” issue that ends with a challenge and an interesting speculation.

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It seems that mortality is around me everywhere these days. Relatives left and right are failing, and a few days ago, my sister-in-law’s mother passed away. I have many poems about death and dying, because I have had a lot of people die in my life — most specifically, a lot of peers. Over time, it happens to everyone, of course, but I had three or four deaths like this happen before graduating high school.

Over time, of course, our brains are cruel things: they blur details, they preserve memories of memories, and we lose people twice over: first the loss of the person themselves, and then the loss of the real memory. You could even count that third moment, that instant when the person’s death makes of them something other than what they were: a giant stumbling rock of grief or dismay or shock or horror or even fear, obscuring the person they really were behind our emotional reaction.

This is a poem about memory. Specifically, it is about remembering Ed Schroeder, who was a friend in college — not a close one, but a friend nonetheless. He was a theater geek, specializing in lighting, and he died electrocuted while working on his senior obligation play. Kristen and I were gone from college by then, and we got the typical phone call.

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I guess our hobby is mainstream now. My Virtual Life article, discussion at TerraNova. The article also features an assortment of extra goodies, such as a slideshow of the evolution of online worlds.

Image of the cover:

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So here we are, in the next gen land of 75+ person teams and $30 million dollar budgets. What do I see when I look out across the future landscape?

I see an inflection point.

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Ever since the 360 arrived, I’ve had a problem: one too many devices outputting component signals. But now I have it working in such a way that I don’t have to switch cabling in the back, which is what I’ve been doing for the last month.

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