Puzzling

I'll tell you what I'm not doing right now, and that's playing Puzzle Quest. Let me explain.

Puzzle Quest is excellent.

Wait, you need more? Puzzle Quest is that special type of excellent that takes somebody who doesn't play a lot of video games, and makes them steal your DS. Maria likes video games fine, but she doesn't have a lot of patience and has never managed to get more than five minutes into an RPG before getting overwhelmed and losing interest.

Puzzle Quest is an RPG, and displays most of the tropes of the RPG genre, but instead of resolving combat through menu items or button mashing, you beat up on opponents by playing Bejeweled. Specifically, matching gems gets you mana that you use to cast your spells. The game has no time limits so you get to play at your own pace. It's super deep, and super fun. And since Friday, Maria and I have been fighting over the DS. If only we could resolve the fights over some Bejeweled...

Content?

So, I was reading somewhere on the Internets that apparently when you have a blog, you need to generate content for it.

Because nobody will read your blog if there's no content.

But if nobody's reading my blog, why should I bother generating content?

It's like a koan. (If you do crossword puzzles, you're going to need that one eventually.)

...

I didn't say it was a good koan.

Anyway, I need some content. Here's the big news recently: Little Stevie Jobs announced that all EMI-published music on the iTunes store will be available in a DRM-free format at a much higher quality, for 30 cents more. You can still buy the DRM-laden songs for 99 cents, and buying entire albums will always give you the premium version at the old price! And for 30 cents a track, you can update any of your previously-purchased songs. I don't think I actually own any iTunes tracks from EMI, but hopefully this will lead to other publishers following suit.

For a good discussion of what DRM is and why you don't want it, I would recommend the website Defective by Design. As Cory Doctorow has been known to put it (and I'll paraphrase here): "Nobody ever wakes up wondering, how can I do less with my music?" If you'd like to truly grok the dangers of DRM and current trends in copyright law, Cory's talk at Olin College gives a really great discussion, starting with a historical overview.

This sounds like it might be a dry subject, but it's fascinating and Cory's talk should be required listening for anybody who's ever listened to an mp3 or, even more relevant today, anybody who's ever enjoyed internet radio, which is now becoming too expensive to be viable for reasons of copyright and royalties - and the only ones hurt are the listeners and the artists.

Grok what now?

I started by trying to grok Twitter. (Don't look that up in the Urban Dictionary, by the way.) Twitter is a service for publishing micro-blogs over an RSS feed - in other words, for allowing others to subscribe to constant updates on the minutiae of your life. Why would anybody want to do that? For that matter, unless you have something specific to say, why would anybody bother to keep a blog? Digg I get, but my Facebook site is sad and unloved, and I don't have any other presence on the Intertubes. Could it be that I'm just not hip enough for the Web 2.0 room?

My last experience with trying to grok the ungrokkable was with Quicksilver for OS X. I couldn't find anybody who could explain to me what it did, but any number of people (okay, mostly just Merlin Mann over at 43 Folders) who could tell me how much it would change my life. All I could do was install it and figure out what I could make it do for me.

So that's my approach to Web 2.0. I'm going to just start using it, and see what I end up using it for. First step: a blog, second step: a Twitter account. I'll install a new hip if I have to - Web 2.0, here I come!