With the aid of an anonymous donor, Escape Pod is presenting a contest for the best SF story of 300 words or less. There are no restrictions on theme, plot, or structure. The goal is simply to present a strong idea-based story in the minimum space possible.

Escape Pod » 300 Word Flash Contest!

I should have mentioned this earlier, but I only got around to checking it out recently myself. Escape Pod is running a contest to get some great short "flash fiction". The contest itself closed for entried at the end of January and the first few groups of voting have closed, but there's still a lot of fiction to come, and you can always read the stories that have already been through voting. 300 words is an interesting challenge, and there's some good stuff in here. I have two pieces in but I submitted them at the end so it will be a while before they post. And no, I'm not saying which ones they are. :-) Anyway, check them out here.

technorati tags:fiction, EscapePod, FlashFiction, SciFi

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For some reason I was totally immune to all the hype leading up to the release of The Burning Crusade, but shortly after it came out I starting wanting to play again. And was ultimately weak.

So far I'm enjoying it. I rolled up a blood elf hunter, and the new content is nice. I also rolled another tauren shaman - I decided I think that was my favorite combo. It's interesting to see the game a year after I had quit playing, seeing all the stuff they added or tweaked. There's an auctioneer in every city now, a lot of things that required quasi-wonky addons now are built into the UI, stuff like that. It was particularly interesting playing the early tauren content - either they tweaked the difficulty curves or I'm better at playing the game than I was then. Maybe even both, but there were a few quests that I specifically remember being very difficult to solo the first time through I and sailed through them this time.

I just hit 12 with the shammy and the quests are heading into "Go to the Barrens", and all WoW players will understand my stating that this is the dread part of the game. I hate the Barrens. Once I was trying to convince Josh to play and told him I'd roll a new character and play with him, but we'd have to play Alliance, because I couldn't face the Barrens again. My current plan is actually to run through the Barrens, hit Ogrimmar and basically hook up all the major Horde cities, and then run from the UnderCity up to the new Blood Elf content and do my leveling through 20 in the new Ghostlands. I was saddened to realize that the Shaman's level 10 vision quest (for the fire totem - gotta have FIRE FIRE! TP FOR MY BUNGHOLE!) is partially in the Barrens (sigh). If I recall correctly though he just sends you into Durotar for the real quest.

We'll see how long I last again . . . .

On a separate topic this is sort of a crappy picture. I took two with the flash and two without. The ones without flash aren't as focused (long exposure plus shaky hands), but the flash leaves a huge hot spot on the disc sleeves. I tweaked up the sharpness a bit to lose some of the blur and decided I'd rather have the additional picture detail than the focus. This is a common problem with my camera - the flash blows anything vaguely glossy away, but it wants to use the flash unless I have DIRECT sunlight of a type hard to come by in the winter. Anyone know of a clever trick to mitigate this problem?

technorati tags:WorldofWarcraft, BurningCrusade, gaming, photography

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So today my father sends me this link. (EDIT 1/30/07: The original link broke. Here's a link to Wired's story but if that dies it's about putting caffeine in donuts.) But the thing is, there's this historical link from this very blog.

I think Bwana's "go-nuts" was a better name than the "Buzz Donut".

technorati tags:humor, donut, caffeine

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Over the holiday break Karin, her parents, and I visited Natural Bridges park in Santa Cruz which is a big stop for monarch butterflies as they migrate south to Mexico for the winter. They estimated they had about 300 butterflies there that day, and these are a couple of pictures that don't completely suck. You really need to see them full size to see the butterflies well . . . .

I also took a couple of pictures that don't have butterflies, but were just pretty.

technorati tags:NaturalBridges, monarch, butterfly

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Happy New Year everyone!

Karin and I did manage to blip over to Valley Fair Mall to check out the "Wii Tour" that Tony had mentioned in my previous post complaining about Wii playable kiosks. I'm still unimpressed overall with the demo experience and the final consensus was "Meh."

At Valley Fair they have six kiosks - one running Excite Truck, one running Wii Sports Boxing (and ONLY Boxing), one running Rayman Raving Rabbids (but only one game - a western shootout thing that uses the "nunchuk" attachment), two running Wii Sports (no nunchuks so you can't play Boxing, but you can play Golf, Tennis, or Bowling), and one running Zelda. The Zelda station was monopolized by a couple of pre-teens the whole time I was there, and I didn't feel like arguing with them about it. Karin played some Bowling and the Raving Rabbids game, I played a few frames of Bowling, a match of Tennis, and the same Rabbids game.

The kiosk has tethers on the controllers (naturally enough) but they are far too short. Karin complained about it on both games, and it was visibily screwing up her bowling follow-through. I had a couple of shots on Tennis where it pulled my swing short. That's just poor execution, but I guess it's a relatively minor point. I don't really think that Karin would have enjoyed it MUCH more with a longer tether, but it's difficult to say for certain.

I noticed one thing about Wii Bowling - Karin kept doing something that caused it to stop the game and give her a tutorial screen about how to bowl. (I think she may have been not releasing the trigger in time, but I'm not certain.) Anyway, when it happened the game would stop, pop up an entirely static screen and wait for her to push 'A' to continue. The only clue as to what was needed was a little A button icon in the lower right corner. As a gamer I understood it, but it was a far cry from the whole "everyone loves the Wii" angle that Nintendo is pushing (and the media for the most part regurgitates). The kiosk staff were quick to come over and tell her what to do, which indicates to me it was a fairly regular problem. I watched after that and saw two other people do the exact same thing in just 5-6 minutes of watching. It's a remarkably poor UI decision on Nintendo's part and I think it really hurts in a game that is so focused on an immersive experience.

The end result was that it didn't change my Wii analysis any. Karin enjoyed it, but not enough to play it regularly if we had one. I was underwhelmed by the single-player experience on Wii Sports - it's an interesting novelty, but it wouldn't last a week before I was tired of it. The Raving Rabbids demo was just poor - I didn't find the game demoed that interesting and there was something definitely wrong with the tracking. I don't know if it was bad lighting, or some sort of calibration issue or what but I wasn't pointing the remote where the aiming cursor was. It was playable, but it felt like driving a mouse cursor around, not like I was "really" aiming a reticule. Frankly I'd vastly prefer dual analog sticks (or a mouse and keyboard natch) for FPS controls. Maybe it works better in a home situation, and maybe Raving Rabbids has a bunch of other mini-games that are more entertaining than the one I played. Still, it was a poor showing.

It still comes down to you either feel paying $300 for Zelda is a good deal, or you have enough interest in setting up a party system (in which case the cost drives up pretty quickly as you buy more controllers) to warrant it. Neither describes me. If the WarioWare game gets really good reviews I might reconsider the system (Karin really liked the first WarioWare), but man - after that it's a wasteland. Name the next good Wii title coming out. People will say Mario Galaxy or Metroid - but I'd bet we aren't going to see those until Q4 2007 (say September or later - and I'd be willing to put money on one of those two titles slipping out of 2007 altogether).

At the end of the day, I'm still unconvinced that third parties are going to support it with quality stuff, and frankly Nintendo's first party support for the Cube was so erratic as to call into question whether they still have "the touch" that used to make picking up a Nintendo console a no-brainer.

If Karin had walked out wanting one I would have started looking for one. But she didn't, and it didn't push me any further towards wanting one. If Zelda is the biggest draw than I'll go ahead and just rent the Gamecube version.

technorati tags: gaming, Wii, demo, kiosk, Nintendo

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