Virtual Thought

So I’m lurking around digg (like ya do) and I came across the Most Flirtatious Avatar? story.

So I slouched on over to see this flirtatious avatar:

This fascinates me (it helps that she’s pretty). WTF? I love innovative advertising and I love spotting viral corporate advertising (herding cats anyone?) but this is something else… is this exploitive? Was this on purpose? Did she have a director telling her to mouth words, smile, shift, lean forward, all that? To what purpose?

Am I blowing this out of proportion?

Just looking at the image below makes me tremble with delight.

The article that goes along with the image pretty much sums up my feelings about it. A match made in heaven, methinks.

And, oh yeah, I didn’t make that image, it’s copywronged to someone else, blah blah blah…

What happens when you drop some Mentos into Diet Coke?

Tons:

Check out EepyBird for the whys and hows.

Finally, an AI project to get excited about: A fully computer-generated society with its own culture.

I think this is exciting because, as I was discussing with a friend of mine, I don’t think “brain-in-a-jar”-type research comes close to simulating intelligence. I think dismissing the factor that embodiment, both physically and socially, can have on intelligence is the Wrong Way to Go.

The article doesn’t go into a lot of detail about the startup conditions: has a language been provided? Obviously something like geography already exists… but how much of this artificial physical world is simulated? Are there other animals besides these proto-intelligences? Considering that we multi-cellulars used to be single-cellualrs, and, we think, pieces of our cells used to be other single-cellular creatures (e.g. the mitochondria, power-house of the cell) then it’d be neat to see this artificial society evolve in the face of disease and other physical pressures.

How cool!

GameSpy has a neat article called Will Wright Presents Spore that documents a super-fantastic approach to game creation and gameplay.

Using deterministic, procedural algorithms in response to user-supplied data the game grows the creature and determines behavior based on its form. Awesome! I especially love the “massively single-player” aspect of downloading specifications for other players’ structures and creatures and populating the world with these buildings and beings. I cannot believe that I have to wait a year for this game to come out.

I’m also already thinking about ways I want to do this in my own as-yet-unnamed project… stay tuned. ( =

EDIT: Google video has a fantastic Spore gameplay video. 35 minutes long but so worth it.

Then you might want a cleverly named Bibliochaise.

That is just awesome. It’s produced by Nobody and Co. whose website comes up blank for me, probably because of over-protective ad-blocking software (I’m talking to you Adblock Filterset.G Updater!).

This blog is entirely too filled up with kippleposts. I shall make a more concerted effort to be a better blogger.

Or why my smileys are all backward: ( =

In the Spring of 1997 I dropped out of college for a semester to figure myself out. I was having a rough time of it trying to adjust to several new situations (my parents’ divorce, my newly discovered epilepsy, college life)... basically, a lot of stuff was rattling around in my head and my heart that I hadn’t yet taken the time to fully explore and incorporate into myself. I felt at war with who I used to be and who I was to become and was getting torn apart in the process. A semester without the pressures of college was just what I needed to straighten myself out.

Rather than do any of that I spent a lot of time in AOL “Bornagainonline” chat rooms making fun of fundamentalist Christians.

I’m not proud of this anymore. It’s hard to regret formative experiences since that would be, in effect, regretting the person that you have become… which just seems like a bad policy. I wouldn’t do that now, certainly, since a respect of other people’s beliefs has become a rather core part of my own personality… my personal war against zealotry notwithstanding (and I mean you, Pat Robertson), I can’t attack people just because they do not believe as I believe. That is the utmost hypocrisy for one who champions the freedom of ideas.

The part of this chapter that I don’t regret is the people that I met online that I, at first, only knew by the sobriquets that AOL forced upon us: Daemongrrl (or TalaDrake, or KaliDrake or whichever… ( ; ), Newagegeek, Jokolondo, thefatguy, Hakuin69, Arwen33, wnstnsmth… I was caught up in some larger swirl of events… all of us making the circuit, poking fun, causing mayhem, night after night… getting to know each other, becoming friends in this weird late-night habit.

Naturally, one night, when quizzed by a befuddled “Xian” in one of the chat rooms, “are you guys in some sort of cult or something?” one of us (Joko?) quickly replied, “Yes, we are.” I’m pretty sure it was Newagegeek who elaborated: “The Cult of Squishybear.”

Because Harvey (a.k.a Newagegeek) owns this stuffed bear, see… and he’d written a song about it, and it was Awesome, and, well, gosh darn, a bear is a pretty funny thing to build a cult around… and voila! The Cult of the Graphites, the Worshippers of Squishybear, were born.

Graphites because our holy books were written in pencil for easy revamping.

And lo! The sign of the Bear will fly in the face of reason! And it shall be backwards and written in pencil thusly: ( :

And the Masses shall cry, “Wakka chika” and Be Glad. – The Apocrypha of Squishybear

It goes on, and on, and on.

The reason I’m writing this is because I have this funny habit of Googling the people that I know. And, for no particular reason, today seemed like a good day to fire up the ol’ web browser, go to Google, and type in “jokolondo” and “newagegeek” and “daemongrrl” and, eventually, “graphites cult” and “zeligx”... wait, who? Seems that things have grown since this Saint of the Graphites went on sabbatical.

So I’m posting this as a signpost, an open letter. Hey guys, it’s me… it’d be neat to talk to you again sometime… and I’ll try and get that “Wakka Chika” song up in mp3 form real, real soon.

( =

P.S. By the way: Gil, that comment was me saying hello.
P.P.S If there’s any way I can get in contact with Harvey that would be great, too.
P.P.P.S Not to exclude anyone else on the list… these are just the people I successfully found. ( ;