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> makes it sound like they're having a great time in Kansas City

We are. :-)

Chris Kohler offers some details about the PSP rumors. According to him, the Sony rep who gave away the info he shouldn't have on Sony Connect had this to say: "Don't fuck me. Alright? Please don't fuck me."

Submit this article? No, no, I merely wrote it, while high on cranberry juice and Sunny Delight. How it ended up linked here is a mystery, though I'm certain it had nothing to do with any submission of any kind.

Donkey Kong has the first story that is contained entirely in its game. We see the Giant Ape with the Girl. He jumps to the top of the construction site. The sturdy Hero arrives, just as the Girl yells "HELP!" We know what to do.

In the first stage, we trek to the top of the tower. Why make it to the top of the tower? So as to rescue the girl from the ape. Why press the jump button? To jump. Why jump? To avoid the barrels. Why are there barrels in the first place? Because the Ape is rolling them at you!

In the final level, the Hero needs to pound down rivets. Why pound the rivets? Because doing so will cause the Giant Ape to fall. Why do we want him to fall? Because we want the damned girl back.

Without the Girl, without the Ape, pounding the rivets would be pointless. It'd be like Pac-Man.

I mean, really, what the hell is Pac-Man? He's a little yellow circle with a mouth! What's he doing? He's eating stuff! Why?

BECAUSE!

If he eats a power pill, he can eat the ghosts, too. Why are the ghosts trying to kill him?

. . . Well, I'm sure the notes on the cabinet explain that somewhere.

Old-time text adventures, many of which I have played and enjoyed -- I think Zork is responsible for teaching me how to type -- are stories. Far from being about the stories, they are the stories. Donkey Kong -- and Chris Kohler will back me up on this -- is the first example of a game and a story being both separate and combined.

The first time you play, you're interested in the ending. You're interested in seeing the Hero and the Girl reunited at last. Then the game starts over. We can assume the Ape has kidnapped the Girl again, and the whole wild goose chase starts over again. Our goal now is in the play -- yet the story will always be there. The story will always explain and buffer every element of the game as a play experience.

Chris Kohler has reminded me -- did you know Breakout has a story, too? You're a prison convict, escaping from a prison, by breaking down the wall.

Or so say the box and instruction manual. To me, it still just looks like one-player Pong, with a wall instead of an opponent.

As for Adventure -- shit. I tried to play that game once as a kid. I went back to Grand Prix after a short time.

At any rate, I appreciate the pouncing. It's nice, sometimes, to get pounced on by people of . . . your caliber, as opposed to people who tell me Metroid Prime sucks because it's 3D. You know, one of those people once gave me a copy of some Slayers RPG for Sega Saturn. Holy hell, it was unplayably bad. Flawed, broken, chunky, boring, you name it. Dude told me "I beat it two or three times, yeah." This guy refuses to play anything with Final Fantasy in the title. And he doesn't read a word of Japanese. That, however, is not the topic here.

I tell you, though -- that Slayers RPG's ending sucked ass. And that's more than just my personal opinion -- something I believe I excel in giving, I'd like to think -- it's an objective fact of life.

You forgot about scribble.nu, livejournal.com, pitas.com, opendiary.com, and several others that aren't coming to me at the moment. I should point out that of course I'm not going to link to my competitors, that runs against the idea of promotion.

I did help Avian Chaos with several slashdot-trolling programs, mostly because I thought they were nifty and useful. You can still get them, in fact, from http://awdang.com/slashgame/. There's three different versions of the slashgame, one unfinished version of the game in perl, and a few utilities for googlifying text and finding hidden sids.

The scripts themselves can't take anything down except maybe Google. None of them automatically post anything to slashdot; they only look at slashdot or google, and print text to standard output.

It's been a while since I looked at the number of diaryland users. Oh well.

--
Stephen Deken.

A nice history lesson on weblogs.

If you're interested in starting your own, there's a number of web apps that might help you, including Pitas and Blogger.

I keep my web log as a way of recording what's going on with me for friends, parents, and myself. Sure, it's not particularly in-depth or personal, but looking back on it helps me place when events happened, and is a nice little digital record for me to look back on.

I'm kind of curious as to whether you can link the images in your account from an outside page. Right now, I'm hosting my weblog on Pitas, which is a really cool free service for maintaining and hosting a text weblog, but doesn't (currently) give you the capability of uploading your own files. (My logo is currently served from another system where I have an account.)
--

We just went through this at my company, StockCharts.com, with an established internet venture fund.

Their base valuation was based on the number of page views per month, X 20 to 50 cents.

Then they applied a multiplier from 2x to 10x, based on their view of our future marketability. A concrete list of subscribers or members was a big plus, in their eyes.

But you can see there's a lot of room for play here.

Anita of Anita's BOD and Anita's LOL

Yogurt
Tim Mitchell
Mooselessness at tim.pitas.com

Roll your own portal = weblogs!

weblogs are like little personal portals. You can go and check out what someone is looking at that day and why, just like slashdot. There are tons of them around (search for weblogs on dmoz for examples) and most are very high quality stuff, because theyre done for fun

Check out pitas.com to roll your own, it's a place that hosts them for you and does the backend stuff- that way you can get a collaborative one with a bunch of friends. just give them the password to update it, and basically make an open slashdot! someone should do this !