World of Warcraft/Office Space commercial

This is, of course, why I don’t have the admin rights to install my own programs on my work computer.

What to buy me for Christmas, part 2

Fancy-schmancy “travel” clothes from The Territory Ahead. (And yes, the catalog is very J. Peterman, which I find more bemusing than pretentious, but then, I liked the original Banana Republic catalogs when they were like that as well.)

(Less pretentious: T-shirts and Polo-style shirts from Crazy Shirts.)

Happy birthday, Jonah!

It’s true: 35 is the new 25!

Lucky and Hanna: One year anniversary

The cats have been here one year now and, at long last, are calming down and turning into lap cats.

MMORPG gold farmer-turned-author interviewed by NPR

Fresh Air (no “jazz hands” this week: it was a guest host, alas) interviewed a former Ultima Online gold farmer who turned his experiences into a book about the whole selling virtual goods for real life currency industry thingy:

Journalist Julian Dibbell talks about his book Play Money: Or, How I Quit My Day Job and Made Millions Trading Virtual Loot. He explores the world of online role-playing games, where hundreds of thousands of players log on to operate fantasy characters in virtual environments. One of the most popular games, World of Warcraft, has six million subscribers.

(As of this week, WoW is actually at 7.5 million, but why quibble?)

NPR has a lot of folks who apparently haven’t played a videogame since Pac-Man so they’re always flabbergasted at the very notion of MMORPGs and the subculture that surrounds them, so there’s a story like this every year or so.

The amazement of the interviewer — with its implicit message of “all you 10.5 million people are nuts” — was a little tiresome, but it’s otherwise a very good interview.