I know this is old news, but whatever. I’ve been looking forward to this going live for months, and I’m very happy that it’s up and running. It’s still technically beta, but the core is there, and that’s what matters to me.

If you don’t know what it is, it’s Quake III Arena plus a lot of extra tweaks (namely, a game that’s actually finished) and it runs directly in your web browser. Best of all, it’s free, and funded by in-game advertising while you frag. I think the model works, and I’m glad to see it being seriously attempted by id software.

See if you can find me, or better yet: add me as a friend.

Hello [carpal tunnel], my old friend,
Ive come to talk with you again,
Because a vision softly creeping,
Left its seeds while I was sleeping,
And the vision that was planted in my brain
Still remains
Within the sound of silence.

I can post again! Well, I always have been able to, but things have settled down considerably at work. I may have mentioned it before, but the call volume has been through the roof for the past 6-7 weeks, and my news queue grew amazingly fast. Everyday and throughout each day I check my RSS feed for Slashdot and add bookmarks for interesting news stories so I can view them on my downtime between calls.  Unfortunately, with little to no downtime, the list only grew. Sure I could knock out a couple on one of my short breaks, but they were comparative drops in the bucket.

But now the list is done, and I don’t know what to do with myself! …almost. Every nerd knows the first thing to do when something happens, no matter how minute, is to alert the Internet! Consider this a klaxon for idle hands, my dear Internets.  Now I can get back to posting regularly, and playing with game design docs!

And to make this post not nearly as content-free as advertised, there was an MPEG Game from eons ago called Silent Steel. You played a submarine captain for a nuclear sub in the mid-Atlantic and provided canned responses in fairly complicated dialogue trees. At some point in the game, you can visit the torpedo loading deck and talk the the chief there (don’t worry this is going somewhere, trust me – and Ame, you’ve heard all about this at least once before).

“Hi Skipper, what brings you down to the Devil’s Workshop?”

At the time I was playing the game, I thought it was a just a really cool name, but it wasn’t until years later I realized it was a pun. Submarines are part of the Navy. In the Navy, the term “all hands on deck” may ring a bell.  Torpedos on a nuclear sub aren’t fired all that often, so the hands manning the station aren’t doing much with their time – idle hands. And we all (should) know “idle hands are the Devil’s workshop.”

*groan*

I know that if you have to explain it, a joke loses its comedy almost instantly, so I’ll leave on another one.

Q: What noise does a human make when he’s crushed by a giant calculator-shaped robot?
A: sqrt

PS: Not one single spelling error! Eat taht that!

The Kindle from Amazon is a super-cool device and I want one simply because it’s a gadget. For now, I’ve got my iPod Touch though and that’s good enough for me (so no, Ame I don’t really want one!). Also, I say Kindle, but I really mean all e-book reader devices. The portability is amazing, and, I know I hate the environment, but the paper-savings are enormous (a quick sidebar though – for all the R&D placed into the Kindle, is there really a net-gain?).

I’ve not used or even seen a Kindle in person, so all I have to go on are reviews and hearsay, but I hear the display technology is what puts it over the top: it looks and receives light like real paper with real ink on it. The only problem is there’s one page and, for all intents and purposes, nailed to the device.

The device I want is very simple to imagine. In short, it is the only book you will ever own. For the purposes of this discussion, I will describe my favorite book and backtrack later – it’ll make more sense this way, I promise.

Imagine a nice-sized hardcover book at about 250 pages – not too thick, not too daunting, but just right. Each of these pages is a double-sided version of the Kindle’s superpaper technology and looks, feels, bends, and even smells exactly like paper (extra credit for bits of pulp thrown in). You can start any book you like on page one, and flip through to the end on page 250 without pushing a single button.

Well, not quite no buttons, but close. You can select which book you want to read, by using the touch interface on the front cover. To keep the aesthetic value of this book high, no touch-screens as we know them like on an iPod, but an optical projection with adequate sensors to detect what choices  are made (very much like those laser projected keyboards out there). Storing text is trivial and flash memory is ridiculously cheap and falling dramatically on top of it, so space for books is effectively unlimited.

Some questions immediately arise though. First, what if the book you want to read is not exactly 250 pages? The weasel answer is of course, “it’s up to you,” but there are some options: Have the book’s software typeset the text for you; shrink or enlarge the text to fit the space; or if there’s more than 250 pages in the book and you reach the end, place a bookmark and simply close and re-open the book to an earlier physical page and resume reading (which leads into the next point, even).

Physical bookmarks are problematic. If the text of the book can fit in those 250 pages and that is the only text you read, then a bookmark will suit you fine. You can place a bookmark, close the book, and resume reading later – just like a low-tech book today. If you change texts, the bookmark will be on the wrong page – or will it? Again, options: Changing texts when a physical bookmark is present will simply move the words to accommodate the bookmark, so when the book is opened, the last page you were on (or even the first page, if you never opened it before) will show; Ignore the bookmark and display the text to whatever page is opened – this seems a more likely and elegant solution. To elaborate on this second point, the book likely doesn’t care where you put a bookmark – it has no way of knowing what a physical bookmark is. What the book does know is on what page you were last. I submit that is all that matters to the reader; picking up where you left off.

That’s just my book though. Yours might be a paperback, or be like an unabridged War and Peace. The number of pages doesn’t even matter – it could be as few as one or as many as 10,000. The important part is there should be pages you can turn and touch. The interface and storage don’t necessarily have to be in the book itself, but certainly helps for portability. One possible scenario is the book has no interface or long-term storage, but simply an antenna with which to receive the appropriate data.

I said it would be the only book you will ever own, but really, where’s the fun in that? Sometimes you want a large hardcover, other times a magazine format. Maybe you want to scatter your house with them so you can pick up and read wherever you are. Portability is a selling point to be sure, but hey, “what if?”

I’ll leave marketing departments and focus groups to the name of this device, and you know it’ll be something stupid like Kindle. Yes, I said it. The name Kindle is terrible. You’re Amazon of all things! You’re named for a rainforest! Pick a tree that grows in the Amazon Rainforest and make sure you pick a cool sounding one! That’s enough rant for now, but I want my damn book!

The Internet’s got some stuff on it, and I’m republishing, here, and without permission, Terry Bisson’s short little essay on intelligent life I originally saw a link from slashdot. I thought it was poignant, so I’m sharing it with you. It’s not super long, so please check it out.

“They’re made out of meat.”

“Meat?”

(more…)