Meddle not in the affairs of shopping bags

Dear Jedi,

I understand that the Blue Lily bag is evil. I could see its handles trying to eat your butt as you tore around the house desperately trying to escape. And yes, I understand that it was the shopping bag, not you, that knocked over the boxes.

And the candleabra.

And the lamp.

But really -- having finally escaped its nefarious clutches, you might want to think about steering clear of it for a while, rather than jumping right back into its maw...

Meddle not in the affairs of shopping bags

Dear Jedi,

I understand that the Blue Lily bag is evil. I could see its handles trying to eat your butt as you tore around the house desperately trying to escape. And yes, I understand that it was the shopping bag, not you, that knocked over the boxes.

And the candleabra.

And the lamp.

But really -- having finally escaped its nefarious clutches, you might want to think about steering clear of it for a while, rather than jumping right back into its maw...

Okay, let's see how portals work in practice

Thanks to TechCrunch for this pointer to Just Leap In. Hard on the heels of the demise of Lively, this virtual world seems to do a little better: a real physics engine, user-customizable spaces, and what sounds like a simplified version of my ancient Portals proposal -- that you should organize a virtual space in terms of attaching gateways from one place to another, rather than trying to make it all a simple real-world-like 3D space.

Of course, it's still nowhere near the Braid -- centralized servers, not apparently open source or protocols. So I'm still skeptical. But I wish them well, and it'll be interesting to see how people react to their "doors" mechanism...

Okay, let's see how portals work in practice

Thanks to TechCrunch for this pointer to Just Leap In. Hard on the heels of the demise of Lively, this virtual world seems to do a little better: a real physics engine, user-customizable spaces, and what sounds like a simplified version of my ancient Portals proposal -- that you should organize a virtual space in terms of attaching gateways from one place to another, rather than trying to make it all a simple real-world-like 3D space.

Of course, it's still nowhere near the Braid -- centralized servers, not apparently open source or protocols. So I'm still skeptical. But I wish them well, and it'll be interesting to see how people react to their "doors" mechanism...

Different definition of "friend"

It says something that I now have (I just checked) more "friends" on Facebook than I do on LiveJournal, despite the fact that I spend less than 5% as much attention on it. But I've knuckled under and accepted the mantra, "It's just Facebook -- friending doesn't matter", so I'm now accepting pretty much every invitation that comes my way from people I even vaguely know, a far lower standard than I apply to LJ. (Although I'm still tending to toss invitations that garner a completely blank "who?" from me, and I get a surprising number of those as well.)

In practice, "friend" really means "acquaintance" in FB's vocabulary. This *may* prove to be okay as they ramp up their "friend list" mechanism: if apps pick up on this properly and permit fine-grained filtering, it's not necessarily a train wreck. But I'm still fighting my own LJ-trained instincts: since I actively read the majority of the people that I friend on LJ (and rarely unfriend), I'm used to that being a pretty high bar...

Different definition of "friend"

It says something that I now have (I just checked) more "friends" on Facebook than I do on LiveJournal, despite the fact that I spend less than 5% as much attention on it. But I've knuckled under and accepted the mantra, "It's just Facebook -- friending doesn't matter", so I'm now accepting pretty much every invitation that comes my way from people I even vaguely know, a far lower standard than I apply to LJ. (Although I'm still tending to toss invitations that garner a completely blank "who?" from me, and I get a surprising number of those as well.)

In practice, "friend" really means "acquaintance" in FB's vocabulary. This *may* prove to be okay as they ramp up their "friend list" mechanism: if apps pick up on this properly and permit fine-grained filtering, it's not necessarily a train wreck. But I'm still fighting my own LJ-trained instincts: since I actively read the majority of the people that I friend on LJ (and rarely unfriend), I'm used to that being a pretty high bar...