Chinese gold farmers documentary
Boing Boing posts about a Chinese gold farmers documentary in the making. Check out Anda’s Game while you’re at it.
Add comment May 23rd, 2007
Posts filed under 'Articles'
The roundest objects ever built by hand
NASA makes theroundest objects ever built by hand and then puts em to work.
Add comment May 8th, 2007
Food Quantity Perception
New York Times article, Your Plate Is Bigger Than Your Stomach, discusses the interesting study of how our food containers affect how much we eat - large plates make useat more, etc.
Add comment May 8th, 2007
WoW New Races Level Progression
Interesting flash clip showing Level Progression of Blood Elves and Draenai in Jan 2007
Add comment February 15th, 2007
Japanese Snack Characters
PingMag on Japanese Packaging Design
: Snack Characters
Add comment February 12th, 2007
The PEPCON Plant Explosion
Another great article from Damn Interesting about the explosion of a rocket fuel plant - the magnitude of which showed up on seismographs and caused damage to a town more than a mile away. To top it off, the incident was caught on video - massive shockwaves and all!
2 comments February 7th, 2007
Capgras’ Syndrome
I’m always fascinated by diseases that alter a person’s perception so convincingly that they see or hear a world different than the rest of us. Damn Interesting has an article on Capgras’ Syndrome, a mental disease where people believe close friends / family / pets / objects are being replaced by duplicates - and the originals taken away. As if this wasn’t eerie enough, sometimes sufferers even think their own reflection is a copy of themselves.
Add comment February 5th, 2007
The Terrifying Toothpick Fish
Damn Interesting has a disturbing article about The Terrifying Toothpick Fish - a parasitic fish called the candirú that rivals the Piranha in notoriety in the Amazon. Makes you think twice about peeing in the water 
Add comment January 31st, 2007
Incident on Niihau Island
Damn Interesting has a fascinating true tale of an Incident on Niihau Island right after the attack on Pearl Harbor, which lead to the subsequent internment of many US citizens of Japanese origin.
Add comment December 4th, 2006
Advertising in Tokyo Train Stations
Pingmag has a neat article about the Top 10 ad-tricks in Tokyo’s train stations.
Add comment October 16th, 2006
Gold Farming in WOW
Having played World of Warcraft for some time now, I’m curious about the seedy underbelly of the game’s virtual world. One of the shady things that is very interesting is gold farming, where underpaid workers - usually in Asia - spend 10 hours a day playing a WOW character just to make gold for a company - typically by killing the same monsters (mobs) over and over again. These players are pretty obvious when spotted by normal players as they are often killing monsters that are too low for their level, and when approached, don’t respond or speak poor English. A common name for gold farmers is “Chinese Farmer”. Obviously this virtual gold is worthless in terms of dollars so the gold ends up being sold on Ebay and the like. Read more at Anatomy of a Gold Farmer and Times Online.
Add comment October 2nd, 2006
Hand drawn Balinese Typography
Pingmag has yet another interesting article, this time about the hand drawn typography that can be found on signage in Bali. I’ve always found amateur or non-designer representations of type to be quite fascinating.
Add comment September 29th, 2006
Starbucks Nut
Radar has an article on a crazy dude called Winter who has made it his mission to visit every Starbucks and drink coffee at each one. I think he’s wasting his life away, but hey, if that floats his boat, more power to him.
The primary rule is I have to drink at least one four-ounce sample of caffeinated coffee from each store. The store has to have actually opened for business; I can’t get there the day before, when they have friends-and-family day and they’re giving drinks away—in many ways that’s kind of arbitrary. It has to be a company-owned store, not a licensed store. I have to drink the coffee, but there is no time limit on when I have to drink the coffee. But the longer I go without drinking it, the greater the risk that I might lose it. There are two stores I need to go back to in Washington State because I didn’t finish the coffee—I lost it. I took it out of the store, I had it in a cup, and in the middle of the night I forgot I hadn’t drank it all and I used the cup to relieve myself.
Add comment September 29th, 2006
Studying Virtual Life
I have a level 56 Night Elf Hunter on a PVP server in a fairly new, mostly raiding guild. It’s my first ever character in World of Warcraft, and it’s been a challenge, super fun, irritating, and fascinating. The world is so detailed and complex, and the player - player interactions never cease to astound me. So when I came across PlayOn and Terranova - projects that seek to examine the development of virtual worlds - needless to say I was quite fasincated by the accured data and analysis they had done. They cover all sorts of topics from how a new AH in Stormwind & Darnassus affect city population to discussion of avatars & Orcs. One day I need to roll characters on PVE servers and RolePlaying servers to get a feel for how different the game becomes given those fundamental changes in game structure. I’ve tried Second Life but it just didn’t cut it IMHO. Anyone remember The Palace from back in the late 90s?
The PlayOn project at PARC is an investigation into the social dimensions of massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs) and virtual worlds - extensive, persistent 3D environments that are populated by thousands of players at any given moment. We have explored several virtual worlds including Star Wars Galaxies, EverQuest Online Adventures, Second Life, World of Warcraft, and EverQuest II. These and others represent the most successful virtual worlds to date and are laying the foundations for future environments which may be used for more than entertainment and sociability. In our studies, we are generally concerned with three basic issues: community, interaction, and culture.
Add comment September 22nd, 2006
Fly without ID (or, Put on your Tin Foil Hat)
It might be quite appropriate just after the 5th anniversary of 9/11 to link to this interesting article about the right of American citizens to fly without government issued IDs. It might seem that showing your ID at the airport is unavoidable, however this might be one of the lies the government is feeding us, along with the corporations/airlines. I’d really like to learn more about this issue and what the real dirt is. It is scary that in our increasingly controlled society we are fed BS and so many accept it without question. I’m no conspiracy theory nut, but the grip of the government on the masses of deluded seems to be growing stronger.
Add comment September 13th, 2006