mcpantz.org

After a bit of database corruption sweeped under the rug, I’m back and as ornery as ever.  However, this has brought me to an empasse, as I didn’t know what to do with Wordpress in the event of a disaster.  However, I could manage to hack Movable Type pretty well, as it’s written in a language that doesn’t make me want to choke up bile, and I’d feel more like contributing to that project than anything.

So there’s a minute possiblity that this blog might make some changes in the future–stay tuned.

For the past few months I’ve been working with a friend of mine to establish a hacker space in Chicago.  When we started, ther was ofthen just the two of us attending, and whoever else we managed to unsuspectingly wrangle into attending.

For those of you unfamiliar with the idea of a hacker space, let me give you my vision of the project.  Most of the people involved in this, including myself, are interested in projects that don’t always fall along the traditional lines.  We’re interested in science, technology, crafts, and more often than not the intersection between these areas.  We want to tinker, to create, to share ideas.  To go about this, we’re essentially creating a mad scientist’s clubhouse.  We’re collecting power tools, electronics (both broken and functioning), building supplies, and anything else we think is useful.  I have an old ham radio I plan on jury-rigging up to *something* via serial port.

Since Eric, myself, and a few others started drumming up interest, we’ve come along way.  We drummed up an excellent name from a friend of mine at Verecundia; Pumping Station: One.  We’ve started to visit other similar groups, and look at now defunct groups (Dorkbot Chicago, I’m looking at you), garnishing interest.  Things started to take shape, and here we are.  Our evangelistic efforts have now placed our pledged initial membership  group to over 20 people.  This is not far from the target sustainability level necessary to keep the place afloat by membership fees.  We’ve registered as a non-profit organization in Illinois and gotten our IRS numbers in order.  We’re investigating spaces and soon we’ll have our financials set up, collecting membership dues, and vote on our bylaws.  And most importantly, we’re learning & creating.  In essence, we’re not far from having a grass-roots, non-profit, self-sustaining art & technology collective in the span of six months.

I invite anyone in the Chicago area, or anyone who may be passing through, to follow the progress of  Pumping Station: One.  We’ve got a lot planned, and we’re always looking for new members to contribute ideas.

Why yes, I *would* like to beat up my boss!

Aren’t there much better ways to go about this? Maybe like the USPS 100 Man Kumite? Stock Broker Bumfights? I’m sure they could do better than this.

http://www.hasthelhcdestroyedtheearth.com

I invite all of you to view the source of this site, which is exponentially hilarious.

I’d never been to Hot Doug’s before, but I’m certainly glad I went:

That’s a half-eaten merlot and blueberry venison sausages, and a kangaroo sausage with chili mayonnaise, with duck fat fries lining the top right of the image.  Life is good.

My good friend Karl and I were on our way back from Lollapalooza last week when we happened upon this vehicle carrying two passengers from the Blackstone Hotel.

I apologize for the bad image quality, my Blackberry Pearl has crappy image quality.

Google Labs just released Lively, a supposed contender to Second Life. I played the latter a decent amount to see what it has become, which is mostly a desperate cry for more and more attention. People will wander about looking for someone to talk to, and run into a variety of weirdos. I predict a combination of late 90’s AOL chatrooms, IRC gaming, or any other effort at suspended reality that just feels empty and unfulfilling.

The general cycle will probably engender the following:

• early technology adopters and cool-hunters enter the scene, encountering a vast wasteland; declare it simultaneously the next best thing and a complete waste of time
• tweens, internet-based subcultures, and perverts invade the start inhabiting the wasteland. The first page is already filled with sex rooms.
• the technology languishes on in limbo with Google occasionally trying to inject life into the project, only to be met with general disinterest and all-around frustration.

I should probably note that I haven’t actually tried Lively yet. There are a number of things that Lively does get right, and should probably be adapted by any future virtual worlds:

• Separate rooms. Mind you, they could have called it something else that doesn’t make it feel like IRC, but it’s the right idea. Keeping every area of a persistent world totally active in a distributed environment sucks resources that may *never* be used.it makes much more sense to just enforce a boundary & throw up a skybox on users and make them talk to each other.
• Browser integration. No one wants to boot up a full-screen app to just see what rooms are popular and maybe if your friends are online.
• An offline editor. Rumors persist that Sketchup 7 may very well allow people to design objects in a dedicated atmosphere instead of trying to do so in-game, allowing people to focus instead of deal with a bunch of furries running by in morally repulsive costumes.

However, there are some other areas where it falls flat on its face:

• Lack of user content from the get-go. Google’s Don’t Announce Anything policy does give them the freedom to drop something When It’s Ready, and the lack of user content is just going to result in a bunchor restless users who are tired of seeing the same fucking samuri squirrel run around. On another level, it does give them the ability to establish a look and feel to the program, but users may find that more stifling in the end.
• Platform lock-in. I know, I know, most of the civilized world uses windows, but most of the world who is going to write reviews of the software does not. Especially design professionals; the ones who will actually be the cogs in the virtual market they are so desperately trying to create.

The real problem is that no one’s found a good reason to use virtual world technology in a non-gaming context. Second Life general offensiveness in getting *anything* done in a reasonable time in-world has turned off a number of potential users, including myself.  However, there is a lot of potential markets that a decent implementation could access.  It’s that latter part that really means something.

In the meantime however, I’m just going to curse until someone creates a virtual world that doesn’t completely mock the cyberpunk ideal.

Ever since I was a kid, I wanted a legitimate excuse to use that phrase. Thankfully, it seems that io9 has found a few good ones.

So I don’t know if any of you are familiar with Dr. Fun, but it’s a webcomic that I’ve been reading since i figured out what webcomics were. At some point in my college career I realized that the author was lurking around the basement of the Regenstein, the library at the University of Chicago, but I never went to go ferret him out.

It turns out that he’s directly my friend’s Dean’s boss, who this week gave me some old hardware they were not using. I met Mr. Farley, who was a quiet, enthusiastic geek; pretty much exactly like I envisioned him. he then showed me an original VT100.

A couple ex-coworkers and I have come up with a startup idea and bought some domain names.  I can’t divulge much, but I assure you the idea is very worthwhile and completely hilarious.