Gamespy has a series of over two dozen articles detailing the history of Dungeons & Dragons, the game that, for many a geek, dweeb, and nerd (now better-known by titles like CTO or guru), was both the source and stigma of high school ostracism. The history told in the Gamespy series is pretty fascinating — a lot of stuff I remember as rumour and speculation is put into order in this surprisingly modern tale of market domination, poor business models, and interpersonal rivalries. In the end, though, D&D was always about a kind of social interaction (ironically given it’s reputation as a refuge for social rejects), which might give us just a small insight into why so many ex- or longterm D&D’ers, now fully embedded in the tech industry, are so interested in the social possibilities presented by new technologies.
It’s a scene familiar to many across the world. A small group of people sitting around a table littered with strangely shaped dice, thick books, and pieces of paper filled with arcane statistics. It’s a Dungeons & Dragons game, and while the rules may have changed a bit since it was first published, the social interactions between the players haven’t.
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anil dash Anil Dash is a VP at SixApart, the pleasant folk who brought us Movable Type blogging software and the TypePad hosted blogging service. His site deals mostly with technical stuff in a fairly engaging, often humourous, and sometimes just plain fun way. F’rinstance, when a couple search optimization organizations decided to hold a contest with prizes for whoever could get their site listed first on Google for the keywords “Nigritude Ultramarine”, Dash — though not a search optimization pro — jumped right in, and even won. The whole exercise was not just to show his contempt for the search optimization industry (though there does seem to be a little bit of that) but to show the potential of a strong network built through interpersonal contact — the opposite of the corporate mindset in which “thinking outside the box” means not radically reenvisioning a system but merely learning how to “game” it. When not discussing the ins and outs of web services or the history of failed apps bundled with Office, Dash offers a more personal look into the life of a tech professional. This seems to be a theme among techie blogs — zigzagging back and forth between critiquing the latest XHTML standards or describing object-to-SOAP transformations or some equally obscure thing you had no idea even existed and then a moment later describing the all-too-human heartache of leaving a city one loves and the anticipation of moving into a new home. Maybe because blogging has become a way to not only broadcast but to build and maintain a network of like-minded people, bloggers like Dash feel comfortable detailing the whole spread of their life-spectrum, knowing that their regular readers know and understand boththe arcane and the everyday details. I’ve tended to avoid the personal on my own site, with a handful of exceptions — I mean, I hope I have a very personal and personable “voice”, but I’ve rarely delved into the details of my private life. Which is a bit odd, since the bloggers I like best tend to be the ones who leaven their political or technical commentary with the day-to-days — something for me to think on, I guess. [Continue reading]
AKMA’s Random Thoughts AKMA is, believe it or not, a postmodern priest! OK, I don’t know if he’s a priest or minister or what — the picture of him on his faculty bio shows him in a collar, and Jew that I am, I don’t know which clergy wear collars and which don’t, so to me, he’s a priest. Anyway, a postmodernist, with what looks to be about a half-dozen books of postmodern biblical and theological analysis to his name (where does he find the time?!). Not a hell-fire and damnation kinda clergyman, though — AKMA writes with a sensitivity and compassion I bet you wish your clergy had. On the topic of the “emergent church”, for instance, he writes:
The emergent leaders I’ve met want no part of a rope-’em-in-for-Jesus membership head count game; they’ve stopped cold, asked the basic question of why people who love God and want to follow Jesus should do it in bunches, and are trying to see what answers make sense on the ground. I’m not a part of that endeavor, and I’m probably misconstruing it in various ways, but as far as I understand it, I respect the impulse and the ways it’s being played out around us. Institutional spokespeople (like me) should mostly just quiet down and let the Spirit speak, aye or nay, through the ministries of hard-working, committed leaders such as these.
Given the way that many religious folk, clergy or no, respond to any sign of difference within or without their congregations, AKMA’s openness and willingness to exptend respect even to folks whose take on spiritualism he doesn’t personally agree with is truly a beautiful thing, and for that, I extend the same respect to the man himself. Even if he is a Christian. :-) [Continue reading]
action figures sold separately I first encountered the action figures gang back in April of 2003 when elihu, one of the action figures I suppose, seconded my suggestion that “fleischering” be added to the national vocabulary to describe the act of not only talking around a question but not even pretending one is dealing with the same topic they were asked about. The site’s posting history is spotty (as is mine — no finger-pointing here) and their last post was in February — apparently they got so worked up about the whole gay marriage thing in San Francisco that they quite forgot about the whole blogging phenomenon for 6 months or so. Actually, the site was a part of the movementbuilding.org family of websites, and it may just be that the group blog was forsaken in favor of the various other projects they take part in. Maybe I should link to some of the other parts of the site — but there’s no clear indication that action figures will not, as sometime in the future, again be sold separately… [Continue reading]
Abstract Dynamics || nomadic, intense, not quite daily/ Abstract Dynamics covers pop culture and politics and pop politics and political culture with an especially deft ear. Topics range from Hip-Hop to Big Media to Old School political agitation. Even if the writing weren’t good and on target and kinda fun, even, you’d still like him (the name behind the email address is William Blaze, so I’m thinking “him” is appropriate) because of the great book plugs on the sidebar: Deleuze and Guattari, Luc Sante, Paul Auster, Neal Stephenson, Italo Calvino, Gabriel Garcia Marquez — ain’t no fluffy “summer reading” crap! Plus, he Does the Right Thing by hosting other blogs he thinks are peachy-keen. Lissen:
Ultimately though I suspect that corporate personhood is an effect of the corporate drive for power, not a cause. Is shifting the balance of power back towards another organization with repressive tendencies, the State, an answer to the problems posed by big business? In order for the answer to be “yes” the State must be ready to recode the corporate laws in a constructive manner. A dubious but not impossible prospect, and one that can be furthered greatly if the ideas on how to recode these entities are in existence. And this my friends is our job.
Good writing, good taste, good NYC style — I’m thinking he’s gotta be from Brooklyn. [Continue reading]
Via Joi Ito I’ve found this neat little chat applet. Like Joi, I’ll try it out here for a bit and see if I like it. This little button is supposed to let you know if I’m online or not.
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Very interesting story on the near-cult-like inner workings of Ikea — an empire apparently even bigger than Microsoft!
The Mållen clip doesn’t look like much, and yet it represents, in microcosm, a vital Ikea strategy: the way the company decides what you need before you’ve even realised you might need it. The clip, Vinka explains, is for hanging up magazines in your bathroom: you attach a magazine to the metal clip, then hang the rubber ring over a towel hook. “This is one of the articles that is selling most in the Mållen range today,” she says. “You don’t want your magazines on the floor, do you? They’d get dirty and wet.”
It had never occurred to you, presumably, that you might want to hang up magazines in your bathroom. But Ikea had already decided that you would. And the brilliant but scary part is this: once you’ve seen a row of magazines hanging up in one of Ikea’s showroom bathrooms, each neatly suspended at 45 degrees from a Mållen clip, it takes a will of steel not to find the magazines in your own bathroom, now you come to think of it, almost offensively disorganised. And so you think about purchasing the Mållen clip.
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I read the article below and got the willies. The main criticism seems to be that Bush is in bed with Big Pharma in this initiative, but that’s hardly news — his daddy is tightly linked with Eli Lilly, the biggest beneficiary of this plan, after all. But what remains un-criticised is the thought of a nationwide mental health screening that would, presumably, produce nationwide records on the mental health status of all Americans, and that can’t possibly be good.
Bush plans to screen whole US population for mental illness [Continue reading]
This is just sick: “Kerryopoly” lays out a game board of Kerry properties and invites you to try to enjoy Kerry’s lifestyle on $40,000/year, the national household average. The only conclusion I can draw from it is that Kerry doesn’t deserve our vote becuase he’s rich — unlike George W. Bush, who was born the son of poor black sharecroppers in rural Mississippi and worked his way up through a series of backbreaking, menial jobs until some Republican bigwig, inspired by the young Dubya’s spunk and verve decided that here, finally, was a man fit to governm this mighty country of ours. [Continue reading]
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