I have just finished Twisty Little Passages by Nick Montfort.
I am close to the end of The Milagro Beanfield War by John Nichols.
I just purchased Gun, With Occasional Music by Jonathan Lethem.
Life is good.
Month: May 2005
You Never Have Enough and You Never Run Out
I just regretfully informed Team n3kk1d that I will not be joining them in the MS-150 this year. Too much to do, and not enough time in which to do it.
This Saturday I and many of my classmates will journey to Midland to compete in the Midland Open Martial Arts Tournament. This will be our fifth(?) year competing, I think.
Next Saturday from 1:00 to 2:00 PM our school will perform at the 2005 Grand Rapids Arts Festival. We have been doing this for about as long as I have been a student.
It comes down to this: If I have time to train for a bike rally, then I have time to train for a kung fu performance.
The design for es.o is slowly coming together. At this rate, I should be ready for the 2006 May 1st Re-Boot.
Spore
A couple of days ago I came across the teaser site for Spore, the next game by Will Wright, the fella who brought us Sim City.
In Spore, you are responsible for evolving the life on your planet, from the level of denizen-of-the-primordial-soup all the way up to galactic overlord.
Gamespy has a long article about/interview with Wright about Spore, among other things. One paragraph struck me as particularly intertesting:
Clicking on the egg brought up a creature editor, and allowed the player to “evolve” with a new generation of critters. The editor was amazingly flexible. Wright could give his creature extra vertebrae, he could give it fins or tails to move faster, he could add claws or extra mouths, whatever he wanted. More importantly, all the creature animations weren’t hard-coded; they were dynamic. If he put six tails on his creature, the game would figure out how a six-tailed creature would move. The critter was completely his.
I immediately thought of two artificial life-ish experiments: Sodaplay and Framsticks, both of which involve creating (and with Framsticks evolving) creatures to test for survivability and fitness.
Supposedly the game will be out in 2006.
Overheard in New York
After going almost 40 hours without looking at a computer, I turn this one on and within two minutes of surfing come across Overheard in New York , which immediately sucked up an hour of my life and made me giggle like a fool.
The Status of My Status
I have been too busy spending time with a beautiful woman to post much over the past couple of weeks. Or rather, my creative energy has been directed elsewhere. So now seems a good time to make some changes.
Sometime in the next few days ES.O will go down for a little while as I switch over to a more robust, feature-rich content management system; probably TextPattern. So: New look, new functionality, and new purpose. I freelance now, so the front page will be more professional…whatever that means.
Rather than try to retro-fit all of this old content into the new framework I will probably take all of this stuff and shuffle it over to a subdomain; something like archives.eccesignum.org, or the like. Regardless, it will be linked from the new site.
When, exactly? You will know when you see it.