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| Hm, an excellent thought game from Tyrethali, tangenting from
that book-shame-game and my throwaway comment about thoughts you've never thought;
I
Never, a game where you name anything you've never done, and get
a point for each other player that's done it. It'd work quite nicely as
a "tick any you've done" script-based Web thing, actually. I may dabble.
| I suppose it was naïve to expect too much coherence from last night's Top of the Pops webchat
interview with the Divine Comedy ("What's your
favourite song on the new album?", "Are you going to play
Leicester?"), but I was particularly struck by
the sinister, insulting brainlessness of a giggly schoolgirl
cliché using the pseudonym "The_Future_Mrs_Hannon", what with Neil
already being married.
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| "Upgrade to a better Web experience!" is the rallying cry of the Web
Standards Project, a site which MoMorgan.com
savagely redirects me to when I dare to access his blog via IE4. Although
unarguably a good wake-up call to the apathetic masses, flat unavoidable redirection seems
ludicrously extreme - coldly inconsiderate to people who get their Internet
via libraries, Web-enabled phonebooths, friends' computers, or connections
too brief or sluggish to merit a hefty upgrade download.
What's wrong with a simple text warning at the top of the page, or - if
you want to be a bit more militant - a pop-up Javascript scolding? God forbid
anyone should want to read your Web site for its content, eh?
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| Tasked, as I believe they say, with sorting out some forum software for
a couple of our company's Web
sites, I eventually plumped for IkonBoard,
which turns out to be particularly robust and elegant, and laughably easy
to install and configure. And entirely free to use. I'm impressed.
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"'What's the point?' Maybe if you live in a
country that's a monarchy, this book's worth reading, but this is
America, ok? The whole reason we live in a democracy is so that we the
people don't have to worry about things like this."
Proving the point below, the above is a staggeringly wearying comment on Orwell's 1984, from a page of genuine
Amazon customer reviews of classic books. [via Blast!]
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| "Russian
officials are reported to be finalising a $200m insurance policy
against any damage its Mir space station could cause when it plunges to
Earth this month." - alright, most of it should burn up in the atmosphere
and any debris should land safely in the Pacific, but this is
still rather alarming. (And NewScientist's
coverage is even less reassuring.)
| Things to consider but not get around to, number 643:- A T-shirt with
INSECURITY printed on the back.
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| Cheapass
Games have a philosophy so simple and invulnerable that it
inspires a raging urge to launch it crashing through shop windows;
well-designed games where they only sell you what you actually need. Everyone has
their own dice, huge shiny boxes add little to gameplay, and it's barely
armageddon if bottle-tops are used in place of moulded plastic
player tokens. Better to have one nice set of dice and counters that you
can use for twenty different games, than pay for a can-opener packaged
with every tin of beans.
They make some splendid stuff, too. Over the weekend I bought the insanely
amusing Give Me The Brain
and the sprawling
Kill Dr Lucky
for a fiver a throw - although the former is a simple card game,
the board-gaming latter could easily have been sold with a chunky
cardboard map, carven figurines and a huge box of air, for fifteen
quid more. Bravo to them.
And I'm pleased to find that Spirit Games, fuellers
of my gaming habits some ten years back, are going even stronger these
days, stretching so far as to keep a stock-list online for mail-ordering
purposes. The above Cheapass Games, and many of their others, can be
on your doormat, sans airmail, for a little over a fiver apiece.
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