Didn't I tell you before how amazing it is to have someone wander "through the ghost town of past posts" and then "leave a comment behind?" Well, recently, Nic Wolff, hacker, found one such past post where I mention discovering his "clever utility... that allows to strip Salon's homepage from all ads, with an even cleverer comment next to it: 'Salon (hardly worth reading these days).'"

Thanks, Nick, but—uh—you say we'll be your "muckraking heroes" as if I were also a Salon writer. Sadly, I just pay to have my weblog here.

But thanks, anyway.

Keeping up with the continuing degradation of this weblog, here is yet another rejected Plastic submission. This time around, this one was declined as "already covered." As the single piece of feedback it received says, "We did this one a loooooong time ago." Tsk-tsk.

Game Of Life: The Black Man Version - 'It's, Like, Hopeless'

It teaches frustration. It portrays the obstacles and indignities of black life. It has been criticized as simplistic, negative, and rife with stereotypes. It is "Life as a Blackman," a board game developed by California marketer Chuck Sawyer, who claims the inspiration for the game was his own life. After reading a description of this game, one can only fathom Sawyer's experience has been a tough and disheartening one, full of racial frustration. As reported, it's mostly middle-class and working-class people who have taken exception to the game, finding it doesn't reflect the complexities of their lives. Obviously, Sawyer grossly generalizes, but the scenarios he portrays are anyway familiar: lack of opportunity and hope lead to violence and crime; it is a realistic portrayal of racism. Still, is Sawyer exploiting his people for money? Maybe Sawyer is only exploiting himself, wilfully turning himself into a minstrel and selling his own reductive worldview. Take for example the goal of the game: reaching a space marked "Freedom." Players are intrigued by this space: Is it where you go when you die? Is it what you gain when you turn white? Whatever this abstraction was meant to represent, it reveals the game designer's anxiety: the black man is still a slave. "Life as a Blackman" is no doubt an incendiary artifact, an attempt at education and cashing-in that will turn its creator into a target of scorn. Maybe there's only one authentic insight brought forward by the game, as expressed by a mother who pondered buying the game for her teenage daughter: "the line of thinking that you carry is critical to your success or failure."