Today I sent my dad a quest flowchart I’ve been working on, because it was a perfect mix of snarky dialogue, programming logic, hours spent playing Monkey Island, and some of my other random interests. My dad wrote back with a text-based adventure about quest design. It begins:
>LOOK
>THERE IS A DIPLOMA HERE
>PICK UP DIPLOMA
>IT APPEARS TO DO NOTHING
>LOOK
>THERE IS AN ENGLISH-MANDARIN DICTIONARY HERE
>PICK UP DICTIONARY
>IT IS WRITTEN IN SOME INDECIPHERABLE CODE
It goes on from there, with the player narrowly avoiding the possible pitfalls of slimey guys and waitressing, and it ends with THERE ARE BIG PILES OF GOLD HERE.
I think in normal families, fathers just tell their daughters they’re proud of them.
I’ve got a new piece over on Dialect Magazine, talking about ChinesePod, OpenStudy, education for its own sake, and the most annoying website add-on I’ve seen since autoloading music (No, it’s not ChinesePod or OpenStudy).
Tech-enabled students set their own educational pace, jumping to the lectures that most interest them, without sitting through 100-level prereqs first, and are able to focus on educational content, not passing exams.
With free access, freemium services, or modest pricing, these educational technologies are almost always available on your smartphone, on the way to work, to make self-guided education completely accessible. Learning Chinese, studying physics or just listening to a one-off lecture, is now totally within reach.
Via CyberCulture: OpenStudy | ChinesePod | TwoChop | Dialect Magazine
Caitlin, my college age co-worker, asked me about Tweetdeck, so I showed her some of the ways I sort incoming social information, and what I do with it. I stopped just short of admitting that sometimes, at work, I pretend to be Oracle in the clocktower.
“Whoa. I thought I’d be more tech savvy because I’m younger,” Caitlin said, “but you just do so much of this!”
(I am currently adding spends lots of time on the internet to my resume.)
I have a new piece up on Dialect Magazine, chatting about social media, location-based apps and live-action friendspam, and anticipating future interactions of tech and society.
New location-based social app Sonar.me, though, takes that into account and works as an add-on over your existing social profiles. Sonar’s goal is social telepathy, an app showing your Facebook and Twitter connections to people around you. You might walk into a party or a conference, and check your phone to see if you share any mutual friends with the strangers in the room.
Sonar’s online-offline integration also leads to a fascinating social question: What’s the etiquette around this new connection? Is it socially acceptable now to walk up to a Sonar connection, and introduce yourself?
If so, what about all the dead weight we’ve got clogging our social networks? You know, your buddy’s ex-girlfriend or an old classmate, someone you wouldn’t unfriend, but someone whose social recommendation is pretty light. A tenuous social connection could be at least a starting point in conversation, a connection between glancing friendship spheres and a badge marking a stranger at a party as one of our kind. Or is mutually knowing a former college hallmate just bringing friend-request spam offline?
Via Sonar: Tech-enabled Telepathy | Meg Stivison | Dialect Magazine
Last weekend was Alistair’s pool party, an annual tradition for a growing circle that includes a lot of my high school friends.
When I moved back north last fall, I felt strange picking up with my friends from ten or fifteen years ago. I still feel awkward answering the first questions you’d ask anyone back in town after a long absence, those basic questions about why I moved back or what I’d been doing, because I came back to New Jersey so completely battered from the intersection of relationship and career failures.
But, hey, if you ever need to reboot your life at almost-thirty, these are some of the guys to do it with!
We were still at the grocery store before Alistair’s party when the shenanigans began.
Apologies to other people in the store. In my defense, though, A RAMEN DESSERT COOKBOOK???
No, I didn’t get the cookbook. Mostly because the temptation to try the recipes would be too great, but also because I wanted to spend that money on beer.
Alistair is a tattoo artist (Yes, all my friends are cooler than me. Thanks for noticing!), so most of his friends at the party were inked and decorated, sporting retro-cute bathing suits, wild haircolors, and piercings. I was impressed (and a tiny bit intimidated) by how awesome all the guests looked, and I said as much to my high-school friend Colron.
“Oh,” Colron said, realization dawning after a moment’s reflection. “This conversation is about fashion. Ok, carry on.”
At Casual Connect. (Thanks, Paul!)
For questwriting at work today, I needed a map of the Next Island tropical continent. We don’t have a giant printer, so I printed out pages of map sections. Then, I looked at the unlabeled squares of terrain that I needed to reassemble into a useful game map.
All my years of casual gaming were just preparation for this moment.
(If you ever need someone to unlock a door with a slider puzzle, or arrange things in threes, I’m your girl.)
There’s my article in the summer issue of Kraze magazine! Unconventional Dates, that is. I don’t think we need any further comments on this.
I’m really proud of this one. You can find Kraze in (most) Barnes & Noble stores, and you can find my article on relationships in with great interviews, sex and dating columns, a gorgeous summer fashion spread, and a thoughtful editorial on polyamory.
“Have you noticed that by the time we sit down in a restaurant, you’re always starving?” I asked Harold. “I point this out only because I thought if I didn’t order quickly enough, you might stab me, and also, the waitress ran off after taking your order, and is now cowering in terror.”
“What do you mean?” Harold asked. “You might be exaggerating.”
To prove my point, I scrolled through my recent SCVNGR check-ins. “This is when you were starving so we went to Scopello’s –”
“You mean Restaurante Italiano?”
“You called it that because you said you were too hungry to remember the real name! This is when we went to that sandwich shop because you were starving to death. You starving to death again. Ok, you get a pass, this next check-in is me drinking with Roy. This one is you starving to death. Me eating lunch with Caitlin. You starving to death. Starving to death. Starving to death. Do you see where I’m going here?
“You can either start noticing when you’re a little bit hungry, or I will start carrying Ziploc bags of Goldfish and juiceboxes around in my purse.”
If you follow me on SCVNGR, you might have seen that my next check-in was a stop to buy Goldfish.
