Finally home from E3. I seem to have picked up the travel crud common to any event where you eat one meal a day and sleep 3 hours a day for a week.

There’s a lot more coming about the MMOG things we saw at the show, so if you haven’t checked out Massively’s E3 coverage, be sure to do so.

For now, I need to get some coffee started and get back to finishing this stuff off. I’ll write more about the experience of E3 sometime later this week after I’ve collected my thoughts a bit. (And they aren’t being heavily influenced by nyquil. heh.)

Oh, and on a completely and utterly unprofessional aside, Matt Wilson is a handsome guy.

See? Told you it was unprofessional.

So Google finally spilled the beans on Project Snowcrash. It came out into public beta on Wednesday and is called Lively. Reviews have been pretty mixed from what I’ve seen and heard. Most people are simply waiting to see what, if anything, they intend to do with the space.

Perhaps it’s just me, but I’m not really feeling it. There’s no real sense of wonder like I get when stepping into any virtual world or MMOG the first time. While the animations are pretty nifty, and the cartoony style is admittedly appealing, it really appears to be nothing more than a virtual chat-room at this stage. Unlike Second Life, Lively doesn’t leave you much room to do much of anything beyond playing virtual doll-house and chatting. User-created content is not an option, and there’s been no definitive answer on whether or not it’s going to be an option down the road. You can run through the existing content fairly rapidly, and if the room list is any indication, it’s already become a haven for cybersex chats.

That said, it is still Google, and like it or no, that name carries gravitas. Many of the Google products are quite wonderful (I am utterly addicted to Google Calendar myself) and I won’t argue that they’ve got vision. However, they’ve backed some barkers before (hello, Orkut) so while the large portion of their ideas are good solid ones, they’re by no means infallible.

I’ll definitely be keeping my eye on Lively to see how it progresses, as will many who watch the metaverse, I’m sure. Until then, I’ll be keeping my little chunk of metaverse “home” in Second Life, where I can enjoy building (and destroying) things as the mood takes me. For me, user-created content is really a very key part I look for when getting into a virtual world scenario, and in that respect Linden Lab is still pretty much king for the moment.

Of course, Linden Lab also has a long way to go, in terms of stability and losing the user-generated content that you pay for straight out of your inventory, but that’s another post for another time.

Desk explody!

GAH!

In no particular order:

• Scrape sites: The sheer amount of time I spend on DMCA takedowns should require an equal amount of time by the perpetrators in a similarly distasteful and frustrating task… like cleaning out a septic tank with a straw.
• My gym’s total lack of basic grammar and spelling in their promotional materials: I pay you people a tidy sum each month to beat the crap out of me physically. I don’t pay you to abuse language.
• Bad coffee: They somehow manage to take all the coffee goodness out and magically transform my beloved nectar into something akin to what licking tires must taste like. The fact that there is so bloody much of it out there tells me that either I’m an extreme coffee snob (entirely possible) or that there are a lot of people who are willing to accept bad coffee. People, wake up! Life is too short for bad coffee!
• Trying to pack carry-on bags so that all of your “must be taken out of the bag” electronics are readily available for airport security check-in: It’s like playing Tetris, only without the fun parts.
• Asinine college pre-requisite decisions: You cannot CLEP out of “Intro to Microcomputers” and/or “Introductory Web Design” but you can take Java programming without any pre-requisites.

  /boggle

Alright, vent out, back to work with me.

For years I’ve used a private blogging service as a method of writing out my thoughts, but to be honest, that method no longer suits. What was a protected circle of real-life friends has slowly grown, and there seems to be no sense in pursuing the “hide on the Internet” train of thought when I work daily in an open writing environment.

So, for good or ill, I’m shifting here permanently. What this essentially means is that you’ll have the benefit of more of my rambly train-of-thought postings, as opposed to just “hey, did this, went here, life is good.” (Not exactly the most engrossing reading, I know.)

The down-side is that you’ll have more of my rambly train-of-thought postings. It can be a double-edged sword.

But it’s time for a change. Pardon the dust on the blog for the next bit, as I’ll be re-working the site. But with luck, the end product will be as enjoyable to read, as I hope it will be to write.

/salute