Category: General

As always, one of the most fascinating things about the Internet is all the little subcommunities that spring up here and there. My latest discovery is Pyroto Mountain, which is a fascinating little web game unlike anything else I’ve seen. The framework is an escalating series of trivia questions, but it’s way more complex than that.

You start at level 0. It’s really easy to work up to level 6, but then when you try to answer another question you find out that you have to chat a little on the bulletin boards before you can try and climb any more. OK, so you go and post. Sometimes the game tells you that your posts are good — and sometimes it doesn’t. It has standards of spelling and punctuation. Eventually you get to go up some more.

At level 8 or so, you get access to a new bulletin board, and the conversation there is a little more interesting — it’s not the newbie board. You still have to post to get the OK to go much further. It turns out that there are 512 levels, and you pretty much have to cooperate to get to the top. People talk about completely mysterious stuff. You get more things to do at high levels. The boards are, in fact, player moderated… sufficiently high level players can kick posts off the boards.

Hey, and they can kick people in the teeth and force them back down a bunch of levels! There are politics. The rate at which you regain manna (it takes manna to do anything) slows. Side effect: you want to be more careful about your posts, because that costs manna too, and if you don’t post smart things you won’t get to keep climbing.

The trivia gets harder as you go, of course. I’m betting that towards the top, the questions will be specifically checked for ease of research. I hear that high level wizards get to make up questions, too.

The not very hidden agenda of the game is creating community. It seems to work pretty well. I’m kind of hooked.

Alas, but it’s true: Nick Urfe’s “…inexplicably fancy trash” has shut its doors. Well, not shut, precisely. More that the store at which one found those interesting little intellectually pornographic tidbits has stopped getting in new stock. You can still browse the old stuff, and it’s still entirely worthwhile to do so.

I stumbled across the place early in what I might laughably call my blogging career, and it is still the touchstone I return to when I really badly need to remind myself that there’s more to write about beyond the war and politics. It offered, in cupped hands, the possibility of litrachur in this new mode of expression. Mindbending stuff.

Also, of course, it offered some really impressively good erotica. I still want more of the James Sisters, damn it.

Idle note of no particular relevance except that North Korea has this urgent need to be noticed right now and I want to do my part:

The biggest audience ever for a professional wrestling match was in Pyongyang, North Korea in 1995. The venue was May Day Stadium, and the wrestlers were Antonio Inoki and Ric Flair. Attendance is variously estimated at between 150,000 and 190,000 people.

Whooooooo!

Also, because I stumbled across it while researching this entry, I want to share the unofficial Pyongyang Metro web site. Enjoy.

Michael Everson has submitted two new Unicode characters, combining heart above and combining heart below. (Warning: PDF link.) “One user group has been overlooked during the development of the UCS, namely that of young adolescent women.” Good catch on his part. (Via Typographica.)

As you know, royal jelly are the food of the queen bee. When the old person take it specially, the white hair comes to be black, there is a spirit obstacle, a melancholia and a dementia gadfly effect.

Go, read, and enjoy. I’m not trying any of it, though.

I just added Intel Dump to the War News list. It’s intelligent commentary from an ex-officer, now UCLA law student. Conservative blogger but without much of a conservative slant, which nicely balances the slightly liberal slant of (say) The Agonist. Read and enjoy.

Sometimes people do amazing things.

The Spokesman Review has a warblog with some cool material — there’s a nice piece on archeologist concerns regarding the war, for example. The Agonist is still my choice for up to the minute news, but the Spokesman folks are taking some interesting byroutes. Also, in the spirit of disclosure, I am tickled pink by the fact that they’re linking to me.

Addendum: the Spokesman infographics are nice. Hope they keep up that level of quality.

I probably should have created a War category, but screw it, too late now. Onward.

A couple readers have mentioned that they were intending to donate to Christopher Allbritton but hadn’t gotten around to it. Donate now if you intend to; he’s about to leave on his trip and it turns out — who’d have guessed? — that he won’t be able to get to PayPal once he’s in Iraq.

Some things I’ve been reading lately:

Where is Raed is a blog belonging to a young guy living in Baghdad. “air raid sirens in baghdad but the only sounds you can here are the anti-aircraft machine guns. will go now.”

Kevin Sites is a CNN reporter who’s blogging from Northern Iraq; the blog is not affiliated with CNN.

Christopher Allbritton is on his way to Iraq. Throw him ten bucks if you’ve got it; his series for NPR on his travels in Northern Iraq was very interesting and he needs the cash to get back there. Yay independent journalism.