Are we mainstreaming?

 Posted by (Visited 12838 times)  Game talk
Oct 262007
 

The short answer is “yes, but not where the hype is.”

So the episode of CSI that featured a crossover to Second Life aired last night. Near as I can tell, the impact on the virtual population of SL was not huge and perhaps disappointing, but the new viewer made by the Electric Sheep guys is getting positive reviews. There’s a good roundup of links at Clickable Culture.

(Particularly priceless is the way in which sex webcams co-opted “csi” as a search term in order to drive in-world traffic. Not exactly the sort of mainstream that was probably intended).

It’s been interesting seeing the discussion surrounding whether or not the industry is actually heading in a mainstream direction. And I think the answer is that there’s definitely a bit of a hype bubble around specifically the social virtual worlds side of things.

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Back home

 Posted by (Visited 7029 times)  Misc, Open thread
Oct 252007
 

And everything looks fine. The filter from the air conditioner was truly horrendous, nearly solid charcoal colored. Here’s some pics from the way back. Click on any of them to get larger versions…

Smoke in Anaheim

This is what the smoke is looking like over the southern LA area. It was like this in Anaheim (where even the mighty big hotel AC systems couldn’t combat the smell of smoke), and pretty much all the way down to San Juan Capistrano.

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Ho-hum in Anaheim

 Posted by (Visited 6505 times)  Misc, Open thread
Oct 242007
 

Woke up this morning to the news that the I5 was closed because of fires in Camp Pendleton, so we couldn’t go back even if we wanted to. But that seems to be under control now, and the highway is open again.

There are some reports here and there that neighborhoods right by us are open — ones that were closer to the fire even — but when I called the county’s hotline, they said that our zip code was still marked as restricted, so we are staying put for now. In a half hour, we’ll miss checkout time for the hotel, and at that point, we may as well stay the night.

I am thinking we may also go shopping for stuff likely to be hard to find down there, like dust masks, HEPA filters, and the like.

Tracking the fire

 Posted by (Visited 6034 times)  Open thread
Oct 232007
 

Good maps:

This one shows that Mira Mesa is now an area of concern, as is Santee and Lakeside. It shows our area in the middle, as “previously burned,” but as you can see it’s kinda surrounded by areas of concern. Notable is that 67 just closed, and that Bonita and Chula Vista seem to be OK now. But really, it all depends on the winds.

They are keeping it updated with the latest set of incident reports, etc.

The councilman walked the area with his staff and noted addresses. he only covered one part of the neighborhood,though. Then someone else made a Google Map of it. Hurray for the Internet!

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