Netscape, dead for almost a year

Well, the announcement by AOL has a dateline of December 2007, but evidently they stopped writing code for it as of February 2008.

Do I care? Should you? Probably not, since most of you fine folks are using Firefox (or if you're not, Safari or Chrome), except for those of you non-web designers who still for some reason use IE. Netscape survives as a branded portal, and also as a completely non-ironic Firefox extension. There's history, too- I don't think one could overstate the impact Netscape has had on the world of digital communications, the web (insert obligatory blink tag joke), the way millions of people do things on the tubes.

I'm grasping here to say something more of note about Netscape, and perhaps that's the notable thing; Given the current landscape of the web, Netscape itself doesn't matter. True, it forced Microsoft to look at the internet and arguably make IE suck less over time; true, without Netscape we would have no Firefox et al; true, Netscape used to be a household word for "going to look at the Internet." Netscape is a stepping stone, and we've moved on. What will next fall by the wayside?

All that aside, I do miss the ease of modding the Netscape throbber.

Caving in to Twitter

Feh.

http://twitter.com/mischakrilov

On the other hand, I'll have a lower barrier to entry than the old way. I never finished expanding this from last year, so here's what I've got.

Games played at BGG.Con 2007:

• 1001 Karawane
• Army of Frogs
• Axiom
• Ca$h 'n Gun$ : Live
• Chateau Roquefort
• Cheeky Monkey
• Circle, The
• Crokinole
• Die Kutschfahrt zur Teufelsburg
• Fairy Tale
• Felix: The Cat in the Sack
• Fire
• Garden Competition
• Geistertreppe
• Gheos
• Glik
• Jungle Speed
• Kakerlakensalat
• Kapitän Wackelpudding
• Laborigines
• Los Mampfos
• Lumberjack
• Master Thieves
• Metromania
• Passe-trappe
• Piratenbillard
• Piratenhändler
• Quelf
• RattleSnake
• Rukshuk
• Ruse & Bruise
• Santorini
• Saturn
• Säulen von Venedig, Die
• Shocking Roulette
• Spinball
• Time's Up!
• Tumblin-Dice
• Uptown
• Vitrail
• Viva Pamplona
• Was Sticht?
• WeyKick
• Wicked Witches Way

Games acquired at BGG.Con 2007:

• Adam & Eva *
• All-Zeit *
• Atlas & Zeus *
• Buy Word *
• Chains of Fenrir *
• Conquest *
• Corsari *
• Covert Action
• Employee of the Month *
• Feurio *
• Filthy Rich *
• Flickwerk *
• Fraud Squad *
• Halli Galli
• House of Whack *
• Konig Laurin *
• Kreta *
• La Strada
• Laboriginies *
• Martinis & Men
• Neuroshima Hex
• Paris Paris *
• Pick & Pack
• Santiago
• Scream Machine *
• Siena *
• Taktika

* means unplayed


Done is better than perfect, but it's a royal pain to fix and create links for these.

Minor Facebook Rant

Yes, Facebook. I know that more than one person I know knows a new person who knows me. So when Alice joins because Bob said so, please don't send me three different messages from Eve, Carol, and Dave.

Sure, there's a lot of different behavior you could expect here. Maybe the first message got lost, eaten by a spam filter, accidentally deleted, ignored, or overlooked. Maybe you know Bob only slightly, but once Eve vouches for them, you accept her cred instead of his and decide that you want to get to know Alice a little better.

I think I would rather Facebook wait perhaps all of two seconds before instantly sending messages of this nature, perhaps bundling all of the vouch/suggestion messages into one: "Alice just joined Web.20 [sic] Social Networking site. Bob, Eve, and Carol all say she's pretty cool. Do you want to know more?"

To tweet or not to tweet

Twitter.

The idea is that you drop tiny one-line status updates- "I'm walking the dog," "Having lunch with Ford," "Dreaming about Mars," "Failing to learn how to juggle" etc, and anyone on the tubes who care can follow along to see what you're up to. I see the appeal of a real-time human status line.

It reminds me of finger in the Good/Bad Old Days.

Do I want to do it? Sure, maybe. I like the notion of social computing. I might be more inclined to tweet more frequently than to blog. The low hurdle of a few dozen characters coupled with the directed "What are you doing?" approach effectively removes the problem of writer's block.

I don't have a good idea as to how many people really read this blog, but I'd have an exact number as to how many people "followed" me on Twitter. So there's a selfish, egotistical, narcissistic desire to know how many people care about what I'm doing NOW NOW NOW NOW RIGHT NOW.

I keep track of the games I play already; I'm starting to keep track of the books I read, too. I could do something over at NetFlix for movies, but I honestly have watched fewer movies these days. I also don't really like the fact that my first ideas are simply to report on the media I'm consuming. That seems equal parts shallow and needlessly materialistic, plus the elegance-needy part of my brain despises the extra work needed to keep the same data in two places by hand.

I hear some good use-cases for the service, particularly in convention/conference/con settings or other large gatherings of relative strangers. Businesses can use it like a rumor mill, or Rumor Control. Performers can use it for tour dates and bookings and the like.

Do you use Twitter? Why?

Web plus cell phone equals nifty

I've got a 504 area code again for free, plus all kinds of lickable 2.0 phone handling features. Feel free to test one of 'em out- GrandCentral will call you, then call me. Handy if you don't have my number or want to save on long distance calls, or if I finally get off my tail and sell some stuff on eBay/Craigslist.



I wonder if there's Asterisk under the hood here?

Twitter?

Twitter is another one of these newfangled Web 2.0 sites that I only peripherally know about. In a nutshell, Twitter acts like a micromicro blog: You text or IM or email a more-or-less one-line status update. "What are you doing?" asks the site.

Wired has a good article suggesting that the aggregate data of Twitter has value to you- you can know what your people are up to in the gestalt. Go read that article.

If you use Twitter, tell me. I want to know what you're doing.

MyStalk, a place for fiends

Today's title is inspired by this t-shirt, which still makes me grin. (This doesn't really count as shilling, incidentally. It's just context.)

Okay, yes, I broke down and did the MySpace thing. I can't even recall why- I suspect that someone had some content I wanted to look at and Bugmenot wasn't helpful.

While at the Nicks' place doing playtesting, MySpace came up and Nick (not Nick, but Nick) wanted to add me to his friend list. I'm not entirely sure why- I know that I only have an account really as a placeholder to point people to me, not as an active social networking venue. Yes, it would be nice if social networking really worked, but I think right now the notion needs some more evolution in the real world. At least people are used to it these days.

But social networking definitely can be abused, as evidenced by multiple "Candy wants to be your friend!" "Alexis wants to be your friend!" "Siobhan wants to be your friend!" "Heike V. Greenwood wants to be your friend!", and they all have the same cropped camwhore picture and color text to get you to clicky their linky. Nick's hilarious quote: "The porn bots are getting lazy."

I personally don't need MySpace or Friendster or Orkut or whatever. If you need to find me on teh internets, I leave big fat digital footprints as a consequence of my unique name. Joe Bag-of-Donuts or J. Random Coed probably do.

Casual electronic gameplay

I spent a good deal of this last Sunday playing videogames, which is a little unusual for me.

I've found a new-to-me site for those wonderfully addicting Flash games that are so popular these days. On the plus side, the eponymous Jay of "Jay is Games" does a good job of reviewing/overviewing each game, adding tags and such so you know what is Flash and what is downloadable: Windows (usually) Mac (sometimes)... Sorry, Tux, you're vastly underrepresented. On the minus side, prepare to lose track of time.

Here are a few picks; N.B., I take no responsibility for your lost productivity.

• Airport Security, a quick clicky political statement
• Castle Smasher, phun with physics and destruction
• Cyberpunk, a hackerly puzzle adventure with tons of atmosphere
  
• Egg Way, a bizarre Japanese game about frying an eggFeed me, a fun little Venus-flytrap platformer
• Flow, a gorgeous and beautiful microcellular eating game
• The Game of Disorientation, a very trippy and queasy avoidance game
• Gateway, a brief and fun robot puzzle
• Knytt, a Windows-only downloadable platformer
• Line Rider, a physics/racing toy
• The Missile Game, a racing avoidance game, very fluid
• Panic, shooty shooty
• Prototyprally, a very light hovercraft game with interesting steering
• Red, simple shooty game with nerf ammo
• Ringmania, sort of like a bubble-shooting game
• RSVP, a delightfully old-school card game on the web
• Tomb of the Mummy, a semi-frustrating puzzle
• Virtual Villagers, a light island sim, only downloadable for Mac or Windows

There's literally dozens, if not hundreds, more games to choose from. I have at least three or four tabs open with what to play next.

You'll notice a theme here: Casual. This is sort-of-a buzzword for the kind of gaming that things like the Wii or mobile phone games try to achieve: Imagine the person with only drips and drabs of free time: the commuter on the subway with ten or fifteen minutes to kill, or the office worker with a thirty-minute lunch break, the new parent with a napping infant. These people like entertainment, but might not have hours and hours to devote to play. (Somewhere Greg Costikyan has a great essay on the growth of casual gaming, but I can't find it at this point in time.)

At any rate, casual gaming is great stuff. Electronic games don't need to cost $50 plus a subscription fee, run only on the latest hardware, or require you to devote tons of time to squeeze out the fun.

What are you casually playing?