News You Can Bruise for 2004 April 13

Tue Apr 13 2004 09:18: Kevan's latest project is a syndicated weblog of Victorian satire Diary of a Nobody. It uses NewsBruiser, and in doing so exposes all the warts of the portal page that for some reason I never really anticipated being used as the front page of a website. Gotta get busy.

PS: Coming soon: more Kevan mania. Wait til you see the link he sent me! You won't believe the twist! Because it's based on a counterfactual!

PPS: Already here but not actually released: mine and Peter's weblog-ish hypertext versions of Gogol's Diary of a Madman. There's also fifty contemporary weblogs with the same title, most probably named after the Ozzy Osbourne song rather than directly after the story. Find the next trend before it happens!

Tue Apr 13 2004 16:08: Gripping psychological expose (via Sumana) of the fourteen habits of highly effective embezzlers. No need to read the whole thing--I've already read it and I'll tell you the good bits.

6. Volunteers to take care of details that you should handle. Picking up signature cards when you open a new bank account, for example. The more details the bookkeeper handles, the more theft opportunities, and the easier it is to cover things up.

Pretty useful, no?

Uh, I gotta go.

(8) Tue Apr 13 2004 19:55 They're Playing Sports!: OK, I've kept you waiting long enough. Remember that Game Roundup where I speculated that many games could be improved by replacing humans with cars, a la "Soccar"? Well, Kevan has upped the ante with his discovery that you can improve any game even more by replacing the humans with dinosaurs! Witness Football-o-saurus, a shareware Windows game in which dinosaurs play football (they are British dinosaurs). Brilliant execution; only one thing bothers me, Holmes. The spectators seem to be human. Why?

Now that the scales have been lifted from my eyes I see that all those stale game genres can be revitalized by refocusing them on their rightful subject. Imagine a first-person shooter that's actually a first-person mauler--you are a dinosaur biting or clobbering other dinosaurs. A real-time strategy game in which you deploy your herd of dinosaurs against a rival herd. Even, say, a Monopoly clone in which everything has some strained connection to dinosaurs!

Since the pure, eternal "idea" portion of a project is the hard part, and since the implementation work and will to see it through to completion pales in comparison, I expect these games to start coming out next week now that I've done all the heavy lifting. Hey, I'll even help you out. Look--I started a SourceForge page! It's as good as done already!

Update: despite their British origin, Kevan assures me in comments that the dinosaurs are playing American football. I was kind of wondering where the goalie was in that screenshot. This conclusively identifies the dinosaurs as Paralitian stromeri.