SNAK is my new favorite ticker symbol. (“Poore Brothers, Inc. and its subsidiaries are engaged in the development, production, marketing and distribution of salty snack food products that are sold primarily through grocery chains, club stores and vend distributors across the United States.”)

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Placeholder for metaphysics/ontology rant.

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Harvard Mouse can't be patented (in Canada). w00! Previously discussed here 18 months ago, the idea of patenting a life form is as bad as ideas get. Good luck, you dumb idea! (See also this Metafilter thread, where Steven Garrity posted an interesting paragraph from the Supreme Court's ruling.)

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Make this a word: Possidifficulty.

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To read later: Python for Massively Multiplayer Virtual Worlds (Python foundation for UO2, which never happened.)

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A while ago I posted a link to I Have No Words & I Must Design (found in a string of amazing interconnected links). Today I ran into Dethe (if Vancouver is small, Yaletown (right half of photo) seems angstroms-wide) who had an actual copy of Interactive Fantasy, issue 2 (1994) with the original article (and more good stuff). Amazing how much higher my comprehension/retention is when reading printed material. Thanks Dethe!

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I got some interesting email regarding the group creation bit below. I think what I should have said (but didn't) was that I wasn't proposing a good method for group creation (the “a maximal set of actors where every actor is a friend of every other actor” defintion was fairly arbitrary) but just riffing on our experience that given a fairly arbitrary definition of what consitutes a group, there will usually be lots of overlapping groups and the inter-relationships of those will be messy: it is much, much messier (and harder to diagram) the larger the groups.

Aside: we are starting on creating a giant, giant, giant world map now. I like the shape of Zeeland (~600KB jpeg).

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