It’s been awhile, no?
Since my last post, I’ve been on two bird watching walks led by the very friendly and knowledgeable Robert DeCandido and Deborah Allen. I’m already better at identifying some birds, and I’m certainly noticing a lot more birds when I’m out in the parks now than I ever did before. I can’t wait for the Spring migration to start; my brain will get overloaded trying to identify multitudes of warblers, vireos, etc. Oh yes, and the warmer weather will be most welcome. Sure, we’ve had a warm winter so far but still, cold sucks.
Also, I started playing World of Warcraft again, which certainly explains some of my lack of posting in the last month. Yes, it’s been very fun playing again, probably because I took a couple months off. However, it’s starting to loose it’s fun value yet again. I think mostly because it boils down to that same formula of running around and killing things. Don’t get me wrong, killing virtual baddies is fun, but as your character grows stronger, so do the baddies, so sure, it’s fun to be able to stand up to monsters that I ran from when my character was younger, but the game play experience doesn’t change much. The only thing I really really like is exploring the new areas that you get to go to as your character gains strength. Blizzard has done an amazing job with the art direction in WoW, and it’s very cool to explore as much as you can. Unfortunately, I’m not sure I want to keep hacking and slashing just to get the chance to explore more areas.
And then, maybe because I’m on a synthetic worlds kick right now, I tried out Second Life the other day. Sure, it’s definitely not as polished as WoW, not by a long shot, but it’s lack of a unified art direction vision is also part of its greatest strength: all of the content in Second Life, from the architecture of buildings to the design and clothing of the avatars, is user-created. If you’ve read Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash then this will sound a little familar to you; SL is definitely the Metaverse version 0.1a. I’ve been spending my time in SL trying to see if I can get flocking behavior to emerge in objects based on a few simple rules. SL has a not-terrible scripting language available, and it’s been a fun exercise. I promise to post a video capture of my flocking objects if I’m successful in my endeavor. Related: Evolving Nemo. Basically, I’d like to do something similar in SL, but for birds. We’ll see…