Month: July 2007

  • The Sunday Poem: Why It Is Hard

    We always write our verses on the green.
    Extolling nature, one dull paean, then
    Another, the savannah evo psych
    So loves a bellwether to our brains.

    We hammer home our thoughts of death, with odes
    And eulogies, our writing full of black,
    Of wistfulness, of melancholy. Sad,
    As if mere โ€œsadโ€ was โ€œdeepโ€ and โ€œdeepโ€ was โ€œgood.โ€

    We speak of love, the thrust, surrender, catch
    Of breath, exchange of fluids, the coy glance
    And longing. Each of us forgets that all
    Of us know all of this. Forever. Now.

    So much of writing tells us what we know.
    So much of culture trades old comforts, myths
    We tell ourselves to keep the strange away.
    Just three great subjects, and our storyโ€™s done.

    This makes it hard to write each Sunday poem.

  • GH3 and strippers?

    From the Joystiq article:

    They fully updated the graphics, including doing motion capture for the avatars, and the NPCs in the background, like the go-go girls in the stage that’s set in a strip club. Neversoft has a full-sized motion capture studio at their facility in California, so why not make good use of it? Especially if you have to mocap some strippers. Tough work, this rock stuff. Based on what we saw, the dancers will be giving Soul Calibur a run for the money. Jiggle factor five, Mr. Sulu.

    Dammit. Wasn’t it obvious already that this was a crossover game of broad appeal? One played widely by families? Sure, it’s rock ‘n’ roll. Well, guess what, ten year old daughters like rock ‘n’ roll too.

    *grumble*

  • Star Wars Galaxies – The Galactic Senate

    So SWG is taking a small step towards player government. This is nice to see, though I note that even though players can nominate, they can’t vote on the Senators. Instead, Senators are picked by the community team.

    One of the powers of a Senator is to vote on legislation. There’s nothing in there about what exactly Senate legislation is or what it can accomplish, though. ๐Ÿ™‚ But they do get some forum mod powers, the ability to sticky posts, and stuff like that. It isn’t a hollow title, basically, though it’s also not true power.

    Long ago, I floated the idea of actually let.ting players vote in Correspondents. Kinda neat to see the meme still around (though who knows to what degree this was inspired by that…)

  • Facebook

    Facebook seems to be Silicon’s Valley’s darling du jour. I was, shall we say, highly reluctant to engage with yet another social networking system. But I figure, I need to see what all the fuss is about. I must say that the ease of adding applications to your profile is really neat.

    However, I am not so eager as to start actually filling the page (or my network) in with stuff (or people). I have already turned down two requests to join a zombie army…

    By the way, there’s a MySpace profile page too, over here. As you can see, I haven’t bothered making that one particularly compelling either. ๐Ÿ™‚

  • Briefly noted