Waxy.orgAndy Baio lives hereSanta Monica Farmer's Market, a First-Person Narrative- February 29, 2008 It's almost been five years since the Santa Monica Farmer's Market tragedy, when an 86-year-old man accidentally took the lives of ten unsuspecting people with his burgundy Buick LeSabre. I was there, and documented the aftermath in real-time. This morning, at around 2am, I received an anonymous comment on that entry from someone who survived. It's a haunting glimpse into the experience of cheating death. From: vancouverite When it's not your day to die, it's just not your day to die. I...http://waxy.org/2008/02/santa_monica_fa_1/ Greetings from 1993!- February 27, 2008 Excerpt of a letter sent to a grade-school friend in September 1993. I was 16. I got a new computer...an IBM 386. It's a beauty of a computer, but I sunk all of my money into it and my parents still had to help pay it off... It has an 80 meg Hard Drive, a Super VGA card (not a monitor though, still stuck with VGA...), a brand new keyboard and mouse, 4 megs expanded memory, a High Density 3.5" and 5 14" drive. Cost about $800 but it was worth it. I consider it an investment for college. I...http://waxy.org/2008/02/greetings_from/ ForumWarz Postmortem: Interviewing the Game's Creators- February 26, 2008 ForumWarz is my newest obsession, a web-based game like nothing I've ever played. In short, it's a parody of Internet culture in the form of a real-time role-playing game. You play as one of three Internet archetypes -- the camwhore, emo kid, or troll -- and try to disrupt message boards any way you can, using your sexuality, bad poetry, cross-site scripting attacks, or simply banging your head on the keyboard. In the process, you'll meet a large cast of strange characters who will send you...http://waxy.org/2008/02/forumwarz/ Still Alive at the Valve Party- February 21, 2008 At the risk of turning Waxy into a Jonathan Coulton fan site, he performed a short set at the Valve Software's Steam Party capped by a finale of "Still Alive" performed on Rock Band, backed by the Harmonix developers on guitar and drums. I'm pretty sure this is the only published photo of their final score, a 5-star performance: And yes, Coulton sang his own song on "Easy." (Afterwards, he said the Harmonix guys lowered the difficulty because thought the crowd noise would mess it...http://waxy.org/2008/02/still_alive_at/ The Jonathan Coultons of Gaming- February 21, 2008 I'm mostly a casual spectator of the gaming industry, with my experience limited to being a fan, so it's been a delight to meet the people behind the games I love at GDC. At the same time, I've felt a kinship with these indie developers, having worked as a developer (and accidental entrepreneur) in the web industry for the last ten years. One of the most jarring and frustrating differences I've seen between the web and gaming worlds is the dominance of middle-men: publishers and platforms...http://waxy.org/2008/02/the_jonathan_co/ GDC: First Impressions- February 20, 2008 I'm already overwhelmed at my first GDC, and from what I've heard, things don't even really get moving until tomorrow! The first two days are dominated by a number of excellent summits and tutorials, but apparently, the real action doesn't start until tomorrow when the game competitions, expo floor, major announcements, and big keynotes all begin in the morning. I'm very interested in the parallels between gaming and web, and how the lines have blurred between game-like social software and...http://waxy.org/2008/02/gdc_bits_and_pi/ Game Developer's Conference 2008- February 18, 2008 This week, thanks to Simon Carless at GameSetWatch, I'm going to the Game Developer's Conference in San Francisco this week. I'll be writing about the conference daily and guest-publishing over at GSW. If you're going, let me know. I'll be updating my current location on Twitter intermittently if you want to get together. Also, if anyone out there works at Valve or can otherwise get me into the Valve party on Wednesday night, get in touch! You'll be my new best friend. Thank you, kind...http://waxy.org/2008/02/game_developers/ The Online Life of NIU Killer Stephen Kazmierczak- February 15, 2008 It didn't take long for online sleuths to identify the man behind the shootings at Northern Illinois University yesterday. Early this morning, before the police or the Associated Press released his name, online sleuths identified the 27-year-old man as Stephen P. Kazmierczak. Online, he went by "Steve Kaz," "Kazmier," and "StatisticsGrad." Working from there, a few blogs went to work at discovering his online accounts and other trails he's left online. Here's what we know so far, and I'll...http://waxy.org/2008/02/the_online_life/ Geek Valentines- February 14, 2008 Looks like Digg found a copy of the Tetris valentine I've been hosting on my server since February 2006. The original was created by Mitch at the wonderful 4 Color Rebellion gaming blog, but when I tried to redirect the requests to their original entry, the traffic shut down their server in a few minutes. So if you're looking for the valentine, here it is. Click it to see a full-size, print-quality version on 4 Color Rebellion's site, and see their other 2006 Geek Valentines. And if you...http://waxy.org/2008/02/geek_valentines/ WIRED and The WELL- February 13, 2008 Reading Rex Sorgatz's commemoration of Wired Magazine's first issue for its 15th birthday, I was reminded of the very first mentions of Wired online. Not on the web, which was only just getting started with the release of Mosaic 0.5 the month before, but on the uber-hip Northern California BBS, The WELL. I love deep-diving the WELL archives for research. It's an amazing glimpse at the tech and media scene of the late '80s and early '90s, but especially for anyone interested in Wired. Many...http://waxy.org/2008/02/wired_and_the_w/ |