Games for Change has opened early registration.
I’m going to be in New York right at the same time, doing a panel thing for Harper’s, but I haven’t thought about going or not. Hmm.
I was reading this article about aSmallWorld, the country-club-like social networking service, and it sparked some thoughts about exclusivity.
An environment like aSmallWorld is a a private club, but not one like most of the other social networking services, which use exclusivity mostly as a way to seem cool but in fact want to invite in as many folks as possible. No, in aSmallWorld, they mean it when they say they don’t want you as a member. It’s populated by celebrities and the rich.
There aren’t any MMOs like this, but there sure are ones that are private. Exclusivity comes in many flavors.
I was in a mythological mood, at the Caledonian Hotel in Edinburgh, Scotland. Hence the title. And yeah, it’s a poem about sex. Sorry. At least it’s sex in the cosmic, way-the-world-turns sense, the ocean-and-earth sense.
Rainbows End by Vernor Vinge is “a novel of the near future.” It’s also conveniently set in San Diego, in the vicinity of UCSD. It’s ostensibly about an old poet who is cured of Alzheimer’s and has to retake high school, but it’s really about the near future of security in a ubicomp world where everyday life is overlaid with private and shared versions of reality, where kids make use of this to be far far smarter than adults know how to cope with, and where meme imposition (“YGBM” or “you gotta believe me”) is the new WMD. It’s fast moving, and has a bunch of appealing characters; basically, classic cyberpunk brought up to date with the absolute latest.
