News You Can Bruise for 2008 May 8

I'm not really interested right now in writing the kind of weblog entry I usually write. I apologize since I assume you read my weblog for that kind of entry, but this is not some lame "I'm not going to write much for a while because I'm so busy.". I'm no busier than usual and I like writing, but at the moment I want to focus on creating new things and doing research. Most of my writing at the moment is fiction.

So here is the deal. If there's something interesting or helpful you think I could find out or create, tell me about it in a comment. I read a number of weblogs that do something similar (eg. waxy, Request Comics) and the results are always interesting.

Speaking of things I read on Waxy, check out Dino Run, a synthesis of the ludological concepts I've developed through years of Game Roundups. Specifically, 1) "a flexible set of techniques to use towards your goals, and lots of random variation within well-defined parameters"; and more importantly 2) "replace the humans with dinosaurs".

Disclaimer: in the interest of scientific accuracy I should point out that, like many animal-themed games, Dino Run uses as a game mechanic a totally inaccurate model of evolution. It also depicts the K-T event as something you could outrun, which seems about an order of magnitude worse than having an action hero outrun an explosion.

Ryan Ginstrom, who just sent me some Beautiful Soup money, has a cool weblog about Japanese-English translation and Python. From the weblog I found out about maru batsu. Has it reawakened my longstanding love of punctuation‽