General

Beyond the cut, the curious will discover a map for the interactive fiction game The Awakening. The map contains spoilers for the puzzles, but not for the story. I found the game to be a moderately effective (if short) piece of horror. There’s essentially one big reveal, and during the course of the game you get closer and closer to it. The scale of the horror remains constant. You’re not constantly discovering that things are worse than you’d imagined; rather, you’re discovering the ways in which they are bad. Which is OK, but it’s no Anchorhead. While it’s based on a Lovecraft story, it’s not really all that Lovecraftian. But it is creepy.

How to help tsunami victims. For general news (and more relief links), try Wikipedia.

The University of California system has put around 1,400 academic books online; several hundred of them are available to the public. Chuck Jones, Mexican counter-culture in the 60s, 17th century French pamphlets, a pirate atlas, an 18th century Indian travel narrative, MacArthur in Japan, phew. Sorry, that got a little heady there.

Some of the links are meaningful, some are tongue in cheek, and some are reaches. It’s my favorite Christmas song (original). Merry Christmas, y’all. _It was Christmas Eve (original), babe _ _In the drunk tank (original) _ _An old man said to me, won’t see another one _ _And then he sang a song (original) The Rare Old Mountain Dew (original) _ _And I turned my face away (original) _ And dreamed about you _Got on a lucky one (original) _ _Came in eighteen to one _ _I’ve got a feeling This year’s (original) for me and you _ _So happy Christmas I love you baby (original) _ _I can see a better time _ When all our dreams come true ...

“What is there to do on a Friday night in LA?” Go to a trendy Thai restaurant somewhere in West Hollywood. Flirt with the waitress, who turns out to be the lead in a new indie film directed by some guy who was discovered three months ago by Stephen Soderberg; she’s waiting to get experience so she can get further into the character. She invites you to an after-hours party thrown by Parker Posey. You get there, with her, but it turns out that Parker Posey lost all her indie cred when she appeared in Blade: Trinity so you and the waitress and a guy you meet at the party who plays bass for the best post-punk melodothrash band in Serbia all take off together in his original VW Beetle and wind up at a permanent floating poker game slash rave run by Wil Wheaton down in Venice Beach. He really digs finding out what you do and you and the waitress and the bass player and a hitchhiking chick who you picked up and who turns out to be an activist poet from Venezula on a speaking tour to raise money for the cause, you all go play some D&D with Wil as the GM. It rocks a lot. You fall asleep in the middle of the game and wake up sometime Saturday in a box at the Staples Center. There’s a cigar on your chest with a note — “You can play a rogue in my game any time, love, Wil!” You smoke the cigar while watching some kind of existential circus preparing for the evening’s show; while wandering out of the building later, you run into Arnold, who is smoking the same kind of cigar. He likes you because of this and offers you a job as an aide, but you turn it down because of moral qualms about the Kennedy family. As you make your way back home, you realize that the cigar was laced with some obscure hallucinogen, or maybe the street really is filled with mimes reenacting the siege of Stalingrad? It’s so hard to tell in LA. Finally you get home, where the waitress is waiting, and she made some soup in a really grounded down home kind of a way and it seems like the beginning of a beautiful friendship that will last at least for the rest of the day. Saturday night? Well, that’ll be a completely different story.

“ This place is not a place of honor. No highly esteemed deed is commemorated here. Nothing valued is here. This place is a message and part of a system of messages. Pay attention to it! Sending this message was important to us. We considered ourselves to be a powerful culture.”

From the auction catalogue (original) for the upcoming auction of Acclaim’s assets: Lot 73: 1 (One) *Sub Zero Side by Side Refrigerator. Lot 74: 1 (One) Lot - Contents of Refrigerator

My friend Rob MacDougall has a nifty new blog, which I cannot recommend strongly enough if you are interested in the history of technology. Share and enjoy.

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 (original), 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. ...

Does anyone (I’m looking at you, Harvard affiliates) happen to have floor plans for San Simeon hanging around? I know I could get a peek at ‘em if I were at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo (original), and I know that Thomas Aidala’s Hearst Castle, San Simeon has some. So I could always just snag a used copy, but I figured I’d plumb the depths of the Lazyweb first.