"We play the worst game ever made until people stop giving us money."
~ Graham Stark
If you don't know, Child's Play is a charity established in 2003, to directly support children in hospitals (long-term and short-term). Their figuring, specifically, was to support kids who aren't coming out of the hospital. The founders thought that they might as well talk to their gaming industry contacts, at the least, and see if they could get some videogames and a playable system donated to their local hospital, and from there it became an official charity.
At this point Child's Play is international, supports donations both to local hospitals directly and to the organization generally, and also takes stuff over money--in fact, as much as they want to keep the donations coming in, they've said if you have a pile of coloring books and crayons you want to give to a hospital, by all means, go do that.
In the meantime, here's a little more information on Desert Bus from Shamus Young--it's not really in-depth, but it has TONS of great links with more information on why the LRR cast plays Desert Bus, who made it, and what they're supporting that I haven't already mentioned.
Go. Give them money. Challenge them to wear strange hats. We move on.
I heard this morning that part of the confusion behind JIRA issues, and the whole vote/watch debate, is that concierge support staffers are telling people to vote over watching. I cannot adequately convey just how many brain cells screamed and died, hearing that. I am shocked to the depths of the person next to me, that's how baffled I am.
People. Lindens. Linden people. You CANNOT continue to tell people to do one thing, when YOU CHANGED YOUR OWN RULES so that doing that thing no longer matters. There are so many problems with this, but I just want to toss a few questions for my readers at large:
I'm dead serious, this has to change, guys. This is ridiculous and stupid, people. You're making the gaming industry look bad, stop it.
1. Concierge staffers: who's the one telling you to tell people to vote, not watch, for JIRA issues?
2. Lindens above the concierge support level: who's the one telling you to tell them to vote, not watch, for JIRA issues?
3. Any passing Lindens: how do we get you to STOP telling people to vote, not watch, for JIRA issues? Is there someone I can call? Can I hassle people? Should I respond to Linden tweets?
Random things to round this out 'cos I want to go back to pondering what to donate and when:
Artificial meat has been invented! Yes, it may look like pallid strips of scallops, but they're working on that. The scientific minds behind the process are pretty sure they can get it shelf-ready in a year.
Friend of mine tossed me pictures of the train cemetary in Bolivia. Apparently, the town that hosts this enigmatic thing is best known for vast salt flats, but it's also a major transport hub for the region, hence, the train cemetary, of the trains that came in and never left again. (I'm especially fond of Rebecca, but they're all cool.)
A new study has surfaced on 'hereafter' syndrome, which is the joke that when we enter a new room, we forget what we're "here after". Apparently, it's actually a thing. That thing being, passages into new rooms act in our brains like boundary events. So short-term memory closes off, and new buffer space is emptied, to allow for recognition of, and responses to, new information. In other words, walking through doorways really does make you forget things.
And finally, a new lighter-than-air metal alloy has been invented. There were already lighter-than-air constructed substances--they're called "aerogels"--but their composition makes for random configuration. Because of this lack of internal structure, aerogels are not very strong. This new substrate (a collection of hollow nickel-phosphorus tubes arranged into an organized lattice, with each tube being between 100 and 500 nanometers thick) not only compresses well, and bounces back to its original shape without damage, but is very, very strong.
I see space flight in this material's future. And they can bring along artificial meat! Yay!
2 comments:
On Child's Play - awesome charity, Casual Stroll to Mordor blog does a fellowship walk on LOTRO that collects donations for them each year.
JIRA - LL needs to just look at the damned votes. If they cannot disable the vote button on the tool they use to track this stuff then they need to use the damn tool as the interface was designed. This ongoing happy horseshit of having instructions that tell users to do one thing and then later explaining that this is incorrect has to stop. It is bush league bullshit, and they need to grow the hell up and start acting like a real company.
And on doorways - folks with Parkinsons often have issues with doorways as well. They get "stuck" in the boundary of the doorway and have to be pushed to get their brain with the program of propelling them through.
On the Parkinson's thing--that's fascinating, and I'm wondering if that could be the basis for a whole new study. Because that's the brain writing so deeply into motor skills that a Parkinson's sufferer has their entire forward movement stopped because the buffer got dumped.
I know there's at least one Child's Play tie-in to SL, too, but I can never remember who does it.
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