…today, we noticed that the local high school team is called the Saints, not the Wyld Stallyns. A pity.

In any case, Happy New Year. Be excellent to one another.

Thanks to the Word Stats plugin, I now know that I have written 340,000 words on this blog over the years, 111 a day, an average of 400 words per post.
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I just dug into LibraryThing a little bit. I am sorely tempted to spend the $25 on a lifetime membership. I maxed out the free 200 book entries already by just tossing the first few hundred items in my Amazon “purchased” list at it. (Turns out that I have bought 1209 individual items from Amazon. I had never checked that number before. Hmm. Then again, I have been doing all my Xmas shopping on Amazon for years).

Anyway, here’s my profile, and my catalog is here, based on that very limited sample. Gee, I’m even tempted to buy the CueCat they sell so I can scan the books here.

Furcadia is ten years old this month. It still flies under the radar of most of the MMORPG community, in part because the hardcore gamers aren’t interested in yiffing, and in part because it’s like so many other of the niche MMOs: isometric, low-end graphics, and far deeper design than most want to give it credit for.

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Susan Wu tagged me and I am supposed to come up with 5 things you don’t know about me. The problem is that with all the interviews and whatnot, all sorts of things have already been said. Usually, I can pull out stuff that folks don’t expect, like “I’m fluent in Spanish” or “I have a degree in poetry,” but nowadays, this stuff is stuff all you regular blog readers know.

So this is hard. Um.

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Today we took the kids to the movies to see Happy Feet. It was pretty good, I thought, but also clearly a movie that could not have existed without March of the Penguins. You had to know the other movie to appreciate this one. You knew exactly when the sea lion was going to threaten, you knew precisely how dangerous the birds of prey were, only because you had listened to Morgan Freeman’s voice describing it in great detail before. Only because of the documentary could you really know how the cold might affect the penguin egg that eventually births Elijah Wood — er, I mean, Mumble.

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Stratics has put up a lengthy interview with me that is less about Areae and more about how I got there, if that makes sense. Given that it’s Christmas Day, nobody is here online to read it, but maybe tomorrow, when you’re bored with all your presents.

Speaking of which, I am leaving the computer again.

Before I forget — Happy Holidays, everyone. Feel free to use the comment thread to wish each other good cheer, or argue, whatever.

Allen Varney has a nice article at The Escapist on Boutique MMOGs. In it, he points out that in aggregate, several of the smaller MMOs he lists have populations larger than that of WoW.

But I think it’s valuable to point out that most of WoW’s subs are in Asia. If you compare the market share just in North America and Europe, a lot of these “under the radar” games actually have a larger market share than WoW does.

Just what you need to put you in a Christmas mood, carols as played by a mutilated madman in a cavern at the bottom of an opera house in a nightmare world where Cthulhu rules.

Or, perhaps, just what they sounded like when you hit the mall yesterday.