Do you remember playing Tetris so much that you’d see the pieces falling when you closed your eyes? Sleep was no escape — I just kept fitting them together in my dreams. That’s when I knew it was time to take a Tetris break for a few days.

I haven’t had the same experience with any other game since then. Until last night. I bought a new Sony PSP the other day (yes, I am occasionally susceptible to hype) and have been playing Lumines ever since.

Lumines (darned if I know how to pronounce it) is a puzzle game in the falling-block tradition of Tetris, but its mechanics are different enough to provide a completely different experience. Every block is a 4×4 square made up of some arrangement of two different colors. Your goal is to arrange the falling blocks into 4×4 squares of the same color, which will then disappear. There are more subtleties that enhance the gameplay, but that’s basically about all there is to it. Pretty simple, but somehow it works, and it works very well. Especially when you add up the exceptional production quality of this game. The music is so tightly integrated with the gameplay it feels like I’m composing it while listening to it at the same time. And it looks stunning on the PSP’s sharp LCD screen.

It works well enough that now I have to take a little Lumines break so that I don’t see these stinking blocks falling every time I close my eyes. I left my PSP at home this morning so I wouldn’t be tempted to play it on the train on my way to work. That’s the only reason you’re getting this entry. Argh, my eyes! Somebody make it stop!

Here’s a screenshot from the Ubisoft website:

In keeping with the theme of this weblog as it seems to be evolving, I have adopted a new blog title: Distracto! It’s literally the story of my life.

There’s a new domain name to go with it, too: distracto.net. All future updates will go there, so be sure to update your bookmarks (yeah, both of you!). I’ll link the RSS/Atom feeds so that existing subscriptions don’t break, but your best bet is to start using the new domain name.

I’d write more, but I just started thinking of something else. Hey, that’s why they call me Distracto!

I’ve been a subscriber of Bruce Holland Rogers’ shortshortshort for slightly more than a year now, and his few emails each month are always some of my most enjoyed.

For a measly five dollars per year, Bruce will email you thirty-six short-short stories, meant to be read in no more than a couple minutes. I can say from experience that they’re well worth the money. You can check out some samples of his work for yourself at his site. I especially like Don Ysidro, his most recent sample story that won a 2004 World Fantasy Award.

If nothing else, it’s a very cool example of an independent artist using the power of the Internet to support his work and reach an audience in a way that would have been impossible in years gone by.

I saw this on boingboing and couldn’t resist joining in with my own iBook. Pretty cool, eh?

What is it about used book stores that makes me love them so much? They’re full of already-read books, which are mostly like new ones, but dirtier and more beat up. So why are they so great? For me, I suppose it’s a combination of two things.

First, I’m a big fan of old sci-fi and fantasy novels, many of which are out of print, and a well-stocked used book store gives me a chance to pick some up that I might not otherwise have access to. And second, not only do I get to enjoy a story, not only do I get transported to another world bounded only by my imagination (am I starting to sound too much like Reading Rainbow here?) but there’s also a bit of mystery around the idea that this same book was in someone else’s hands. Where did they read it? What did it trigger in their imaginations? It’s the same kind of curiosity that fuels ideas like BookCrossing. Keeping these questions in the back of my mind adds something small but satisfying to the act of enjoying a story.

Having recently moved to within walking distance of a used book store, I find myself enjoying previously-read books much more often than I normally would, and I especially enjoyed my latest read: Stephen King’s On Writing. It’s nonfiction, half autobiography and half advice on writing, a fraction of the length of the average Stephen King book, and it might just be his best work yet.

It inspires me to write. Short stories, blog entries, a novel, whatever. Reading that book just made me want to write something. Of course, I have the attention span of a gust of wind, so by next week it might be back to woodworking or wire jewelry making. Who knows? That’s why my life is interesting.

In On Writing, Stephen King describes his working environment and habits, and his process of taking a book from an idea, through editing and rewriting, to publication. The care he takes when refining his work, his methods for working around the second-guessing every writer does. The personal problems he struggled with while writing some of the stories I have since enjoyed reading. To know something about the author’s state of mind sort of extends further the feeling of intimacy with a story that I get from reading previously read books.

If you like to write, or maybe just have enjoyed the occasional Stephen King book and want to understand something about the author’s motivation, you could do much worse than to read this book. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

I was talking to my friend/boss Gever this morning about how often small blogs go through “dry spells” where the only post is an apology for not posting more often. He mentioned that it would be funny to find the google query that would find all of them, and I thought that would make a great post. So here you go: Google for lame bloggers. Or try Technorati to see who hasn’t posted most recently.

I somehow manage to avoid showing up on the list. I’ll chalk it up to my refreshingly original writing style when posting my own lamer apology.

I’ve been pretty lax in posting here lately… but you can’t say you weren’t warned. It does say short-lived obsessions, after all. Still, this blog is something that I would like to continue doing, so I’ll be making a stronger effort to chronicle some of those million mini-obsessions that pass every day through the spot behind my eyes.

In that spirit, here’s one wacky but addictive flash game: Nanaca Crash. The goal is to get the maximum distance possible when you drive your bicycle into a guy and send him flying. The flying guy bounces off the ground, and gets different results depending on the various characters that you land on. Clicking at the right time (when the character you land on shows up in the “special” box) will get you specials, which are really cool.

Most of the instructions are in Japanese, and I don’t speak Japanese, but that doesn’t matter once you’ve played it a few times. Warning: this is (strangely) addictive.

I’ve been a little light with the posting lately (well, more than usual), but I’ve been working on a cool web-based project that will soon be ready for a public pre-alpha release. More details on that later.

For now, my new favorite use of Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/mullet

An interesting series of posts over at Many-to-Many have been discussing Wikipedia and its relative merits as compared to traditional encyclopedias. Acting on the suggestion that the number of times a particular Wikipedia article has been edited is an indiciator of how reliable the information in that article might be, Clay Shirky demonstrated a script that aggregates that metadata and displays it prominently on the article. He also put out a call to convert that script into a bookmarklet. I find the idea intriguing, I have answered the call with this new bookmarklet.

Since the bookmarklet actually makes a behind-the-scenes HTTP call to wikipedia, it can be a little slow depending on the site’s response time. Maybe I’ll add some kind of “waiting…” indicator in the next rev, but for now, just hold on for a few seconds and you should see the information show up near the top of the screen.

It hasn’t yet been hammered in terms of testing, but it works for me in Firefox, Camino, and Safari on a Mac (sorry, no IE), and the numbers agree with those Clay’s script. Let me know via comments if it works for you if you try it out in any other browsers, or if you have any trouble.

To use, drag the link below onto your bookmarks or your bookmark toolbar. Then navigate to any normal Wikipedia article and click on it.

Wikipedia Edit Count

I love interactive fiction, or “IF” for the acronymically inclined. Or “text adventure” games if you’re less familiar with the Infocom of the 1980s. IF as a genre, fundamentally unchanged for more than twenty years, evolved in a world of gaming where graphics were non-existent and words were the sole medium of expression. The game described locations, objects, and actions in text, and the player controlled the story’s protagonist by typing commands in English (or any other natural language in which the story was written). As a player, you had to rely on your imagination to fill in the gaps.

In the time since, technology has allowed designers to create games that realize their visual ideals. And many of these games have captivating stories and excellent puzzles, just like good IF games. And there are entirely different styles of games whose pure entertainment value is graphics-based, like a first-person shooter or even a simple puzzle game like Tetris. And that’s great! But it’s also different, and IF still has something to offer today.

I like to think of the relationship between IF and popular modern games as analogous to the relationship between books and movies. It’s not much of a stretch. It’s words versus pictures. Both words and pictures have their place, both can be entertaining, educational, and otherwise enriching. But I personally prefer words.

If you’re a fan of words like me and you’ve never played interactive fiction, or perhaps if you played Infocom’s Zork back in the 80s and remember it fondly, you might be surprised to learn that the medium is far from extinct. An active hobbyist community continues to produce new titles, and as a result IF has grown tremendously, both technically (in terms of language parser sophistication, availability of IF writing/development tools, etc.) and as an art form. Now there are countless modern IF titles currently available for free, representing an amazing array of genres and story-telling styles. Erstwhile players of old-style text adventure games might, for instance, notice the trend toward emphasis on a game’s plot and story-telling as opposed to disjointed puzzle solving. That’s a severe generalization, as classic puzzle games are also certainly still developed — I just want to emphasize that the diversity of titles now available surpasses anything imagined in IF’s “heyday” of twenty plus years ago.

Playing them allows me to simultaneously experience three of my favorite things: reading, puzzle solving, and playing games (or four if I happen to play IF while eating peanut butter!). If you also enjoy the art of the crafted sentence, do yourself a favor and read this Beginner’s Guide to Interactive Fiction. It may or may not be your cup of tea, but it has to be nice to know that people are telling stories in interesting new ways.