Internal Monologue

I thought they just had a random Scandinavian-sounding name generating algorithm, but turns out those Ikea product names are actual words in Scandinavian languages .

xkcd via Progressive Gold :

From Timothy McSweeney : Car accidents are a leading cause of death for teenagers. The school board and your elected representatives want to make sure that you and your families are spared from such a tragedy, which is why the money for driver's ed was eliminated from the budget. Whereas last year I was teaching your older siblings how to shift and brake and three-point-turn during a six-week course, it has since been decreed that I actually need just one afternoon to tell you the only piece of safety information I'm permitted by law to share: The ONLY 100 percent effective method for avoiding car accidents is to ABSTAIN from driving until marriage. Read it all. It's pretty funny.

Note that YouTube's practice of showing the middle frame of posted videos makes this look like some Coulter/Nazi propaganda piece. It isn't. Coulter only appears fleetingly, I promise. HT: Feministing

Here's a fascinating essay on the politics of a Lego town built by a group of 5-9 year old kids in an after school program. The town started out dominated by an oligarchy of Lego enthusiasts who excluded other kids and fiercely competed amongst themselves for the precious resource of "cool pieces". After some pretty drastic social intervention from the teachers (including banning the Legos for a time--what a bunch of killjoys), the Lego town was reborn as a radically egalitarian and communitarian enterprise: From this framework, the children made a number of specific proposals for rules about Legos, engaged in some collegial debate about those proposals, and worked through their differing suggestions until they reached consensus about three core agreements: All structures are public structures. Everyone can use all the Lego structures. But only the builder or people who have her or his permission are allowed to change a structure. Lego people can be saved only by

Dude, I'm famous. It's perhaps not the exact type of fame I would have chosen, and if it would pain you to see me mocked horribly, then you probably shouldn't watch this or read the comments. But here's Kotaku's video mash-up of me lifting the rock in our GDC demo . It's had over 13,500 views. Of course I had to post a good-natured response in the comments (as of this posting, my comment hasn't yet appeared, so I can't paste it here). If you can't get enough of watching me in impossibly awkward situations, Joystiq has posted some video of Yours Truly in the now-infamous "Black Tuesday" Demo from Hell (well, infamous to me, anyway). As an aside, we brought the people from Joystiq into our booth today and did a demo with them in the Epoc(TM) headset. Apparently they have been converted to believing it works. I'm sure there's more I could find on Google, but that should be enough for today...

If you wonder why I haven't been posting, it's because of the Game Developers' Conference I've been doing. Tuesday night we had a huge press demo, and it was a colossal disaster, to put it mildly. The wireless headsets that the AV people used ran in the same frequency as our Emotiv Epoc headset. In an empty room, they didn't put out much power, but with the room full they had to boost their output and completely drowned out our stuff. So it looked like our technology didn't work, when in fact our brand new brain-computer interface technology worked fine, it was the old 2.4 GHz wireless stuff that got knocked out. By the time it was my turn to go on, it was clear things were going terribly wrong. I had to go on stage in front of 125 journalists and 100 gaming industry luminaries and talk about our game, knowing that the headset probably wouldn't work (by this time we knew the headset wasn't functioning, but not why). I stalled desperately for time, hop