2003.02.05
Game of the Moment
Been a while since I've posted a fun link, but here's one now: Ranjit's company gamelab has come up with another super clever concept: Crash. (Not to me confused with the kinky Cronenberg movie of the same name and roughly similar concept, except, you know, with a lot of extra sex.) At first I thought it was another variation on the sliding "Rush Hour" (like Traffic for Palm (Thomas Jentzshe even managed to make a modern-day port to the Atari 2600 called Jammed)) but it's a lot more kinetic and dynamic than that. You're an "omnipotent god of traffic" who can click to make cars scoot along (and then again to slow them down) as you try to keep traffic flowing at a double highway intersection. Though I dunno, seems like a pretty limited form of omnipotence to me...still a cool little game.
Insight of the Moment
"[Oprah] is so fundamental to Ameri-think. She's all about self-esteem and perfectibility and viewing yourself as a work in progress. The whole psychology of that is that you must believe that A) improvement is possible and B) that it is actually possible to get it right. You are your own best project. And because we're Americans we somehow think that everyone else in the world thinks that way too, and of course, nothing can be further from the truth. They don't."Interesting piece, I love this kind of analysis. (Worth the Salon rigamarole...and I think everyone should be a Salon member anyway.) I think my attitudes tend to fall sort of in the center; I have the America idea of "I can change myself" and the British wryness that "...but I probably won't".
And, as Dylan pointed out, there's the whole punctuation-outside-the-quotes thing.
Hint of the Moment
If you want a hand with Dylan's latest sidebar, checkout this cryptograms tool.