Unquiet Desperation

This was a lot of fun to watch, and I’m not just saying that because I work for Mahalo. I’ve been wanting to learn things like this for some time. I think I’ll be checking out Gary’s show.

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My parents’ generation was informed by great and powerful things. By the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Vietnam War, the deaths of John Kennedy, his brother Robert and Martin Luther King. Before them, my grandparents were raised on dirt, suffering through the Great Depression with a grim determination to do it better for their kids. Me? I grew up making six-inch-tall replicas of Harrison Ford and Carrie Fisher have sex in the backseat of a toy space ship. Now I write about games for a living. Perhaps a little struggling is good for the soul. If I have children, they’ll eat dirt.

from The Escapist : The Force is Strong in This One

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Often called a dead genre, interactive fiction continues to flourish long after reaching the end of its commercial lifespan. In the decades since whiz-bang graphics drew away the attention of the masses, hundreds of games have continued to evolve the genre — to the point where it can be a little intimidating to approach cold. If you’ve never experienced interactive fiction, or haven’t returned to it since its commercial decline, maybe we can offer a little direction. Here are five of our favorite titles from the last decade to ease you into things.

from Top 5 Introductory Interactive Fiction Games from 1UP.com

I’ve been a fan of Interactive Fiction since playing Zork on my Commodore 64. It was the main reason I got into playing on MUSHes, which lead to meeting some incredible folks, many of which I’m still friends with to this day. I’m been having a great time since rediscovering the genre.

Additionally, I’m participating in a project to write a collaborative IF game. Started by the folks at the Guardian UK’s Gamesblog, we’re desigining the game Spaceship! on a wiki. Come in and see how the sausage is being made.

If you enjoy reading, you need to be playing interactive fiction.

If you enjoy writing, you should sit down, play, then try your hand at writing one. It’s a fabulous exercise in dealing with point of view, puzzles, and planning.

Here are some great links to get you started:

• The Interactive Fiction Database - find all sorts of free games here
• Planet-IF - A river view of many of the top blogs/sites on Interactive Fiction.
• The IF Reviews at PlayThisThing.com
• Inform - one of the languages available for creating your own games.
• IF-wiki - A wiki for learning, playing, and improving interactive fiction

And some of my favorite games. You’ll need an interpretor to play these:

• Anchorhead - Anchorhead takes place in a New England town by the same name that bears a resemblance to Innsmouth, Arkham, and other fictional towns created by H.P. Lovecraft.
• Lost Pig
  - Grunk stuck. Grunk must find lost pig. Grunk none too bright. Very funny game.
• Infocom: The Zork Archive - download the original Zork games for free
• Babel - You wake up with amnesia in an abandoned research station in the Arctic. As you explore, psychometric visions give you glimpses of the lives of four scientists and the tragedy that befell them. Before you can escape, you’ll have to learn your own history.
  

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Chris Moody has just posted my interview for his PodioMedia Chat podcast. If you’ve ever wanted to know what goes on under the hood of Podiobooks.com, this is the show for you.

I’ve also put it in my own podcast feed. Listen below, or visit the PodioMedia Chat website for more information.

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A major evolutionary innovation has unfurled right in front of researchers’ eyes. It’s the first time evolution has been caught in the act of making such a rare and complex new trait.

And because the species in question is a bacterium, scientists have been able to replay history to show how this evolutionary novelty grew from the accumulation of unpredictable, chance events.

Twenty years ago, evolutionary biologist Richard Lenski of Michigan State University in East Lansing, US, took a single Escherichia coli bacterium and used its descendants to found 12 laboratory populations.

The 12 have been growing ever since, gradually accumulating mutations and evolving for more than 44,000 generations, while Lenski watches what happens.

read more in Bacteria make major evolutionary shift in the lab - life - 09 June 2008 - New Scientist

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We’re hiring freelance, work-from-home writers at $10 an hour for Mahalo. If you’re interested, send editorial director C.K. Sample an email: ck at mahalo dot com.

Mahalo is looking for $10 an hour freelance, work-from-home writers to help us build excellent search result pages. Candidates must be excellent writers capable of writing perfect copy at a fast pace. Familiarity with online research, journalism, and wiki markup language are all definite pluses.

Mahalo is a human-powered search engine dedicated to delivering carefully curated search results featuring the highest quality, spam-free links available, alongside helpful and informative Guide Notes and Fast Facts about these search terms. Our motto is ”We’re here to help.”

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Because we’re getting rid of a bunch of furniture for the move, my desk has gone away. I’m working in the living room, amidst the chaos. The following snippet is the sound of Getting Ready to Sell the House.

Needless to say, I love my headphones right now.

For more info on the move, check out my previous post on moving to Los Angeles.

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It’s been quiet both here and over at the Secret Lair. You’ve not seen me much on Twitter in the last three weeks. For all you know, I’ve vanished off the face of the planet.

Not so, good reader. There are two reasons for my silence. The first is that I’ve been traveling: went to the Google I/O conference in San Francisco then to Santa Monica for Codejam V at the Mahalo Mothership. For more about my views on how Google I/O went, check out the interview with me over at the Command Line Podcast.

The second is that we’ve decided to move to Los Angeles. This one…well…it’s huge. We’re looking to get the house on the market as soon as humanly possible, which means that we’ve been painting, patching, and handling all the stuff we’ve been putting off for a while. It’s a tough market out there for selling a house, and we’re hoping to have it done soon so that we can be in L.A. by Sept 1. Too optimistic? Maybe. So far, things have fallen into place every step of the way, and we’ve been incredibly lucky to have a our families and friends helping us out as we prepare. The insanity of all of this is the reason I’ve been off the interwebs for a bit. There’s simply not enough time in the day anymore.

For those of you who know the area, we’re looking to settle in Sherman Oaks. My good friend Nicole took me on a tour of the neighborhood while I was out there last week, and I really liked the feel of the place. If you know anyone looking to rent a three-bedroom house out there, hook me up.

Finally, I’m dropping a little something into my podcast feed this week. J.C. Hutchins interviewed me for his Ultracreatives series. We had a great time, and I think it’s my favorite interview to date. I got to talk about a number of things that I rarely touch on in my blog or the shows I produce, so it was a real treat.

More on the move as it develops. Otherwise…it’s good to be back.

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We at Mahalo have had quite a few reports of Firefox 3 crashing when visiting Mahalo.com. (Here’s a video of it happening.) We’d love to get this fixed, but we are unable to duplicate the problem on our own machines.

If this happens to you, here is some information that you could send us to help us out:

1. Your Operating System and Firefox versions. Example: Mac OSX 10.4.11, Firefox 3.0RC1.
2. Whether you’re logged into Mahalo when it happens.
3. prefs.js. This file is found in your Firefox profile directory, and it contains any changes you’ve made to Firefox’s default settings. It doesn’t contain any especially private or personally identifiable information. (Where is my Firefox profile directory?)
4. If you can get Mahalo to crash Firefox in a clean profile (one without any personal information like passwords or an extensive browsing history), then sending us a ZIP of your entire profile directory would be extremely helpful. If the crashing happens in your regular, every-day browsing profile, please don’t send this to us if there’s any chance that it includes information that you don’t want anyone else to know, like usernames, passwords, or browsing history.

So if you’d like to help us fix this problem, send as much of this information as you can to chris@mahalo.com. Just remember: We’re all in this together. We don’t want Firefox to crash any more than you do.

UPDATE: From phuc_head via Twitter: figured why ff3 was crashing on mahalo.com, it was the ms silverlight install i had, uninstalled/reinstalled silverlight and it works now. Does this work for other folks as well?

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