Sunday, March 9, 2008
Another silly diagramme unearthed by the people at BoingBoing and themed on Dungeons and Dragons whose creator Gary Gygax died recently.
When you look at the full version of the diagramme, you’ll see a rectangle about “people blogging about diagrams”. I am such a nerd!
Flowchart: How D&D is a gateway drug to every flavor of nerdiness: “Wired’s Adam Rogers wrote a lovely, sweeping obit for Dungeons and Dragons creator Gary Gygax in this weekend’s New York Times that included this flowchart showing how D&D was a gateway drug into every kind of nerd-dom:
We live in Gary Gygax’s world. The most popular books on earth are fantasy novels about wizards and magic swords. The most popular movies are about characters from superhero comic books. The most popular TV shows look like elaborate role-playing games: intricate, hidden-clue-laden science fiction stories connected to impossibly mathematical games that live both online and in the real world. And you, the viewer, can play only if you’ve sufficiently mastered your home-entertainment command center so that it can download a snippet of audio to your iPhone, process it backward with beluga whale harmonic sequences and then podcast the results to the members of your Yahoo group…
Geeks like algorithms. We like sets of rules that guide future behavior. But people, normal people, consistently act outside rule sets. People are messy and unpredictable, until you have something like the Dungeons & Dragons character sheet. Once you’ve broken down the elements of an invented personality into numbers generated from dice, paper and pencil, you can do the same for your real self.
Link
(Thanks, Ethan!)
“
(Via Boing Boing.)
Thursday, May 17, 2007
This article reported by Slashdot demonstrates that William Gibson’s Cyberspace is less and less sci-fi and more and more reality:
Big corporations creating their own virtual worlds is the first step.
Interconnecting them all through Second Life and Croquet is the next one.
Then the troubles begins when World Of Warcraft, Lineage and Everquest joins the party…
Imagine Distributed Denial Of Service (DDOS) against corporate servers launched by army of orcs controlled by the mob in Lineage or corporate secrets exchanged in the dodgy alleys of NeoCron.
If I remember correctly(8 years since I read it), French author Jean-Marc Ligny explores the gaming aspects of virtual worlds in his sci-fi book “Inner City”.
IBM and Sun Launch Intranet Metaverses: “wjamesau writes ‘Sun and IBM have launched intranet metaverses designed for business and built to work behind their corporate firewalls, so their worldwide employees can use them to collaborate together. Most interesting to game developers, IBM (which also runs a private, no public access Second Life island as a development lab) created their intranet world from the 3D Torque engine from Garage Games. Will the metaverse actually be thousands of gated community metaverses?’
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
“
(Via Slashdot.)
Friday, March 23, 2007
Were they so desperate to sell their stuff?
Sony gives 46″ HDTV to everyone in PlayStation 3 line in London!: “PlayStation 3 launched in Europe just a short while ago but some got a bigger surprise than others. At the console’s official launch event in Virgin Megastores, Oxford Street, London, every console buyer netted a FREE 46′ Sony Bravia LCD HDTV. Some might say Sony are finally showing Europe some love…”
(Via digg.)
Sunday, February 25, 2007
For those of us who are concerned about their energy footprint either for the sake of the planet or just because of the electricity bill at the end of the month (or both), this is an interesting article.
The fact that the Wii easily won is almost incidental to me. When you buy a washing machine, the consumption of water and electricity of models are often detailed and compared in the catalogues. Unfortunately, that seldom happen in consumer electronics. So if this article opens a new era where power consumption is a major criteria in a review of consumer electronics device that’s excellent news.
read more | digg story
Friday, January 26, 2007
It’s amazing what people can do with a wiimote.
Saturday, November 25, 2006
I’ve just found out that my views expressed on earlier posts are shared by at least one web comic author:
xkcd - A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language - By Randall Munroe
Saturday, November 18, 2006
Looks like you’d better stay away from the game system of from the owners for that matter: