Sandhill Trek

Public Notice...

This site will henceforth be very drafty.  The empty halls will echo with the remembrance of long lost posts.  Well, not really THAT.  I'll do my best to prevent link rot.  But do change your blogrolls to point to Sandhill Trek rel. 3.0 otherwise known as "listics."  Listics is at http://listics.com

The RSS 2.0 feed is simply http://listics.com/feed

Please.  Toss me a link there...

Solitaire

Maria at Alembic shares some drawings, including a pencil sketch of Mount Tamalpais the way she remembers it before the rains of March closed it off from view.

I'm at the Hilton in Silver Spring, Maryland.  The day dawned bright and humid.  It's a musuem day... Hokusai at the Sackler, Degas/Sickert/Lautrec at the Phillips Collection.

In technology news...  a marvelous web 2.0 smash-up at The Register that allows you to customize your own interface. USB tanning unit at ThinkGeek.

I'm off to tweak the listics design a little more.  Actually... today I'm downloading the Qumana 3.0 beta to see how it will play into my strategy to workaround the posting limitations of the native WordPress interface.  (No fooling).

Participation

Mulling the problems of participation, I found myself on a sign-up screen for Second Life.  World of Warcraft doesn't do a thing for me, but the Second Life approach provides a dynamic that could suck me in.

It isn't free.  The Linden Lab people aren't in it for their health.  Or mine.  And there is a huge health issue associated with online games.  If television is an energy drain that vacuums real life out of a room, then the interactivity of online gaming is a black hole.

Jeneane seems to be thinking about wading into Second Life and I've been following her everywhere for years.

Accelerating Change 2004 put the game on my radar, and in 2005 they showed incredible advances in networked interactivity.  Cory Ondrejka was giving the kids free tastes out behind the school...

CurmudgeonZ Rule!

Jeneane and Euan each speak to the distancing effects of syndication and blog subscriptions and reading each other in aggregators.  I'm with them on this.  Jeneane manages to suck a comment out of old InfoGlutz himself.  Shelley adds another dimension to the discussion.

Just a Girl

Melody Ralls, designer of the WordPress "Just a Girl" theme, shares readers' screen-prints in a post she titles "Desktop Dare."

Almost a quarter of a million served

Tomorrow the sitemeter odometer for this blog will click over 250,000.  Way too many of those visitors were here for the blonde joke, or the Jesusland map, or for the kitty wearing the helmet carved out of a lime.  It's doubtful that anybody dropped in looking for my opinion on post-modernism (a sham, designed to draw funding down from legitimate inquiry in history, philosophy, epistemology and literature to a tame set of academicians in order to maintain sweet relations among universities, corporations and conservative government and religious funding sources but I digress).

There are a lot of bloggers who get this kind of traffic in a day and it's taken me two years.

I've averaged over 10,000 visitors a month here on Typepad, but there were several times when sitemeter was whacked out, so who really knows?  The couple of years prior to my 2004 conversion to Typepad I was on Blogger or Blogspot or whatever, and I didn't have a tracker.  Then I shifted to my own domain and tracked about 35,000 hits.  Hit counting is a black art as far as I'm concerned.  Before Typepad, statistics from my domain host always were higher than sitemeter, but I use the free version, so I think I'm getting more than I pay for!

According to sitemeter I get about 1.5 page views per visitor, but Typepad says I get less than that.  Sitemeter says that people are currently hanging around for about 75 seconds when they stop in here.  I don't think this is either good or bad, but I hope when they leave it's because they've clicked out to someone I've linked.

I'll be moving again soon.  My blogging and the toolset that's available have matured enough for me to move back to a domain of my own.  As the blogging community's focus shifts from "attention" to "intention," I want to be out there riding a wave of Web Publishing intentionality.

All-in-all I think more visitors are better, so if I have to publish pretty puppy pics to accomplish that, say goodbye to the political opinions!   JUST KIDDING...

Help! I've fallen and I can't get up...

StumbleUpon

Is this some kinda Web toe-dot-ooo thing?

Mutual Memesterbation

In Shelley's comments, Seth Finkelstein brings us "mutual memesterbation," my nominee for best coinage of the day, week, month...

There's a lot of end-of-an-era/end-of-blogging talk going around.  Some folks like Joi Ito have shifted focus to virtual team pursuits like WoW.  Others, like Dave Winer, are talking about just laying blogging down and taking a well deserved rest (the title of the linked post is Retirement Round-up).  Dave's announced intentions sparked some discussion, but the noise had been in the wind for a while anyway.  Niek was talking about it a few weeks ago.  Many of us go through dry spells when we think we may just lay this blogging thing down.

But fundamentally, what does it matter?  The metablogging thing, blogging about blogging or blogging about not blogging is - as Seth observed - just so much mutual memesterbation.

Many of the best bloggers are not bloggers, and/or they are so much more.  Vist Squarks.  Visit Shutterclog.  Visit Sethf.com.  Visit  the japanese new girl-monkey network.  But bottom-line, most of these people have blogged, are blogging, and/or will blog again.  Just as rock 'n roll will never die, the blog genre will survive even as there is turn-over among the artists.   Those of us who remain interested in web publishing and in writing can only be bemused by the angst of the metablogging around not blogging.

Gamer's End

I love games!  As a kid I was heavy into Monopoly, Risk, and Boom or Bust.  I had a different set of friends for each game, but sometimes there was overlap.  Monopoly was about Bruce Turnbull, his brother Jeff, and anybody else we could dragoon into my cool damp basement on a hot summer afternoon.  Boom or Bust was Dave Rustick's game, played at his place in "Sylvan Estates," a development taht ruined some perfectly fine pasture land, a field that was great for kite flying and model airplanes before they raised all the new houses, paved the streets, put in the lamp poles and a thousand nursery trees that are grown now and make the place look a lot less barren than it looked in those days.  Risk was the purview of the Borrowman kids, Steve and Betty Jo.  Betty Jo was brutal, forming alliances and then turning around and crushing an erstwhile ally.

These games were played face-to-face with snacks, and beverages, and a social context different from the text based, computer mediated, Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games.

I still enjoy chess and backgammon, a friendly game of poker.  Bridge.  I played my share of Adventure in the seventies and early eighties, but it wasn't fun.  About all I learned is that "Real adventurers do not use such language."  But today three bloggers blogged gaming and I find that interesting.  Gary Turner is off to the races.  Jeneane is mulling over the possibilities of Second Life.  And I'm dissing World of Warcraft, which you might expect me to do since I have a firm conviction that warcraft sux.

Raise your hand if you read Orson Scott Card (mine goes up in classic Horshack gesture).  If you raised your hand, you know about Ender's Game.  Well, the aliens have not invaded, and if they had, you aren't as bright as Andrew Wiggin anyway, so whatever fantasies playing MMORPGs feed, you won't save the world that way.  I promise.

WoW

Welcome to World of Warcraft: The Text Adventure.

You are standing at the end of a road before a small brick building. Around you is a forest. A small stream flows out of the building and down a gully. There is an elf with an exclamation point above her head here.

>Talk elf

"Alas," she says. "There is a great darkness upon the land. Fifty years ago the Dwarf Lord Al'ham'bra came upon the Dragon Locket in the Miremuck Caverns. He immediately recognized the ..."

> Click Accept

"Hey," the elf protests. "This is important expository. Azeroth is a rich and storied land, with a tapestry of interwoven ..."

Joi Ito showed me a huge bird that his character was riding across fabled lands to some meet-up with members of his World of Warcraft krewe.  He wondered if I might like to try the game.  "Too much," I thought, and quietly demurred.  MMPORGs have that sweet seductiveness of an illicit drug.  They're a mind space where the "real" world is allowed to disappear and a new reality is implanted.   I am not known for my moderation.  I could see getting down into one of these spaces and not emerging for a year or three.  That wouldn't be good for me.

Jess relays a similar concern.  Coincidentally, Joi turned her on to the game too.  (Well, it's not so much coincidence as community... I know Jess through her interactions on the #joiito channel a few years back, which I think is how she's connected to Joi).  Here's some of what she says....

My first impressions of it weren't that great and I didn't think I'd be playing after the free one-month trial was over.

...over the next couple months. I started playing more hours and would stay up late the next morning trying to learn more about the game. When I was browsing the internet I was looking at WoW websites for more info on the storyline, races, items, and abilities I encountered while playing. I even bought a six-button mouse so I could easily right-click and move my character around better, and got more memory so it wasn't so choppy.

That wasn't enough though. I was advancing in the game and getting to know other players, but real life was changing too. To have more game time I starting cutting out other things I liked to do. My television watching decreased to zero, I stopped watching DVDs that were coming in the mail, updating my blog, visiting websites that weren't in my newsreader, or checking my email. I was addicted to this game and was having fun.

I've heard that the production values on these games are first rate, that production expenses exceed those of the more expensive major motion pictures.  But it's a good investment.  It's like a legal license to sell crack.

Edward Castronova, in a Washington Post interview, says,

i know as a dad that my gaming time is not nearly as much as others'.

but you have to understand how wide the distribution of individual circumstancres is in this country. very wide. there's millions of people with jobs going nowhere, who are bright and sociable, but who are trapped in social environments that are not so good. theyre probably the prime candidates for this. and i dont really blame them. society is letting them down.

Castronova's concern that "gaming time" not cut into "dad time" begs the question.  Is a "gaming dad" like any other "absent dad?"  Does parenting permit compartmentalization of personality attributes?  Would the kid who finds himself having to drag dad away from the wizards and elves in their scanties, be any more or less wounded having to drag dad out of the bar?  It's been observed that these online gaming communities are "the new golf."  Call me a loner.  I wasn't that enamored of "the old golf."