I was browsing for expensive things to buy last night (it all started with wanting an iMac, go figure) when I landed on Prada.com and found myself in Flash/Javascript hell. Why do people do this to web code? Do they think it's neat, or clever? Also, click the icon on the far right - the character means "film" in Japanese - and you get what appears to be a trailer for the anime movie Appleseed: Ex Machina, which opened in Japan a few days ago. Also, a random link to a Myspace page for a band called The Hours pops up.

It's confusing. I just want to see clothes. Without all this crap.

Except, it was real, and it was caused by power fluctuations in San Francisco. The power in my office went out six or seven times. Fun! Gaming sites and high tech sites went down, too.

I should have worked from home today....

Run by a charming duo calling themselves electro and plankton: tranism.com.

Videogames! Legos! Fashion! Cute haircuts!

Love!

Issue 17 of the Escapist looks at the topic of women and gaming. Check it out.

Saralah of Athena's Legacy links to an Evil Avatar post, itself linking to a Gamespot video interview with Spartan designer Sophie Blakemore. Quoth the Evil Avatar post, "In this video, Sophie is wearing a closely fitting 'I heart Mario' shirt and discusses gameplay features with a chipper English accent." Most of the comments on the article by Evil Avatar members focus not at all on the game, but on the hot-or-not-ness of the designer.

Is this an example of male troglodytism, or is it simply human nature that once sex becomes part of a conversation, it dominates the conversation (see: Hot Coffee, Michaelangelo's David, the sex lives of homosexual people)?

DEVELOPING...

More trouble than bubble right now, from the looks of it, but you never know where the next great leap in elegance will come from. If you're on the verge of launching the ultimate gaming blog -- or yet another Halo 2 fansite -- you have another entrant to consider in the more-crowded-by-the-day blog hosting field. From a company called Five Across -- rotfl -- comes Bubbler, designed by a former Apple engineer. Bubbler is both a client application and a hosting service.

Besides the somewhat novel first-party client software (Windows 2000/XP and Mac OS X versions), Bubbler doesn't sport any features that would keep it from being an excellent intro-to-blogging tool for grade schoolers. Granted it's only in public beta, and I'm sure far from finished, but it still lacks a lot of the things I've come to expect in blogware, even in the early stages. There's presently no mechanism for leaving comments; the templates are mostly fixed with minimal editing support; post organization seems rudimentary at best. I can't even figure out how to keep the thing from publishing my email address next to the personal profile section that I don't want on there either.

Still, Bubbler does have a few things to show off. Like the Reporter feature, a posting mode that does near-real-time blogging, publishing each phrase as you finish it. Sort of like Republican blogging -- you know, line-item posting. The included templates aren't bad; at least two of them are attractive. The Mac version of the client software is clean, simple and does the few things it does well. You can tell the guy behind Bubbler got his feet wet in Apple's consumer software.

Bubbler is free for 30 days. After that, Five Across -- choke, cough, guffaw -- is charging five bucks a month. Five years ago this would have been a neat idea and an ultra-accessible starter kit. But these days even brand new bloggers have learned to expect more. Until the product is made quite a bit more robust, I can't imagine paying for it or choosing it over the combination of ecto2 and TypePad.

[Thanks MacMinute.]

Working to finish an article today, I made the mistake of clicking through to SourceForce's list of Turn-Based Strategy projects. Homebrew, freeware cross-platform game projects in progress. Fabulous! Fascinating. Fun!

I tried Tyrant which added some pretty little graphics on top of NetHack-type play.

I looked at MegaMek, an old-school BattleTech hex-gaming clone. But it wasn't as drop-in-and-play friendly as Tyrant, so I could put that off.

Mostly, I'm just delighted to see that there's 814 projects in development there. A lot to check out! And that's just turn-based strategy -

Legendary geek portal Slashdot has launched games.slashdot.org, using the familiar Slash.* format to track game news and articles, with attached commentary. If they keep up the roughly-every-90-minutes updating schedule of the regular Slashdot, it should be another good place to track gaming news. They've just started so their bent is not yet clear, but following in the footsteps of their founders, they appear to lean towards Linux gaming more than usual, and online play as well. Here's the launch statement - it looks like Simon "Simoniker" Carless and Jon "CowboyNeal" Pater will be joining the functioning synapses of the global gaming brain.

Seyed Razavi's Blog Shares is a fantasy stock market for weblogs. By tracking the links between web sites, and doing a little simple math, BlogShares allows people to buy and sell shares based on the economy of attention online. Add a message board, and play money, and you have rich role-playing, the potential for cheating and perhaps influence peddling.

Weblogs are wonderful ways to track new ideas by the links that run between them. "have you seen this? You gotta check it out" - those moments, weblogs seem almost like chatrooms.

GGA posts generally have at least a few sentences, musings on an issue, maybe a vintage URL or two to accompany the hot links. But posts here are not so thorough as those appearing so far on "Got Game?" part of the professional weblog site Corante. For the launch week, Andrew Phelps has posted three medium-length essays incorporating links, meditating on these issues:

1. Emerging Gaming Technologies.
2. Emerging Social Phenomena Surrounding Games.
3. Emergence of Games as a Societal Medium.
4. Emergence of Games in Academia.

Greg Costikyan has worked his way through game design, starting with wargames and pen and paper role-playing, through to mobile phone games and massively multiplayer. He is terrifically articulate, if you can keep up with his brisk diction - his essay, "I Have No Words And I Must Design" is a strong starting framework for modern game analysis.

So I was pleased to get some mail from him announcing that he's started a Games/Design/Art/Culture weblog; tending towards long essays, to be posted once a week or so. The introductory email is pasted here below:

translate your "lame speak" into L33t 5p34K!

found at the inimitable invisible city weblog.