We just keep getting older.

Another reason to hate process stories.

Yes, yes, I am playing City of Heroes. I am Rhone, of the Freedom server, fighting for... superheroish things. See me fly:

At least I'm not alone. Easily distracted, a fellow MMORPG player with a (stronger, more developed, still active, real) connection to academia, has also been become a superhero:

It's actually fun to play, and even more amazingly, fun to play as a casual player I can drop in for 30 minutes and still find something pleasurable to do. Even the feature that I was certain would suck, which was building your character around archetypes that made more sense in terms of MMOG conventions than the comic book narratives the game borrows from, works pretty well without seriously violating the sense that one is a superhero in a universe of superheroes. Basically, it's one of the few MMOGs that has kept a clear head about fun being the number one objective.

 Ah yes, the ability to play as a casual gamer. The thing that's been neigh impossible in all other MMORPGs.

It's true, City of Heroes does offer much more for the casual player. But I got to level 28 and I haven't logged on in about two weeks. Why? I have a damn hard time being a casual gamer. I'm afraid that silly-looking green flying guy is going to take me over again. Make me read endless discussion groups. Worry every day about "class balance" and what's happening in the next patch.

Blog fiction. (Befliction?)

Originally touted as an online diary for angst-flayed amateurs, Blog Fiction is being celebrated as the hot new literary trend that has revolutionised publishing. Since 1999 when free, automated blogging tools brought publishing into the realm of web-surfers, blogs have become the printing presses of millions. Self-published daily, even hourly entries satiate our yearning for immediacy and resolution while allowing a blog to remain an active, “alive” work of commentary.

In some ways, no:

In a few key areas - electricity, the judicial system and overall security - the Iraq that America handed back to its residents Monday is worse off than before the war began last year, according to calculations in a new General Accounting Office report released Tuesday.

Burningbird:

While applying for a job, I was asked for a list of references and for the life of me, I couldn't remember the first name of the manager of one of my contracts. Lee? Les? Lenny? Lou? I knew it started with an ?L?, and was a common name, but that's it. I drew a complete blank. Pretty embarrassing, really.

Imagine working in the middle of the dot.com boom/bust. Where have I worked? Everywhere. Oracle. Microsoft. Sibel. Tibco. InterTrust. Some other Big Software company whose name is unforgettable that I can't think of right now. Who were my managers? References? Er, everyone. Please look up everyone and ask them. They've scattered four times in the past month alone. 

ActiveRenderer is such a cool tool that I'm starting to get very angry at myself for not having done anything interesting with it yet on my blog.

You know, I think I want to be a comedian, too. I watched the entire run of Star Trek Voyager and I think I'm due. But I fear the injuries that would, without a doubt, be inflicted on me in acts of pure steaming justice.

Just downloaded SmartManila from SocialDynamX, the same company that makes FM Radio. I didn't realize that it worked with Radio Userland as well as Manila. Am very excited to try it.

First though: pretty.

I finally picked up a copy of Bill Clinton's My Life from someone at work who had just ordered it in a fit of Clinton love but, while waiting for it to arrive, had a fit of Clinton hate and sold it off to me.

Hey, I dig the book already; it starts out in a fit of New Orleans love.

But why oh why does the book smell like doughnuts? I just came out of its Amazon packaging. Is it just my copy or?

Making plans to attend the Santa Cruz Shakespeare festival. God, I love the afternoon plays in the glen. They usually do two Shakespeare plays and one non-Shakespeare, but this year they are doing The Taming of the Shrew, and a "reply" play written 20 years later by John Fletcher, The Tamed Tamer.

And, you guess it, a production of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

You'd better not waste good liquor. Not on an associate professor's salary!

That's it. FeedDemon is the best RSS/ATOM newsreader I've seen. The automatically-generated newspaper view of unread news for any feed you've subscribed to -- that alone gives it a high cool factor. (Yes, I know, other aggregators give you a "newspaper" of RSS feeds that you select, but this is different.) Take a look (you can have this view for any feed):

I love the three-panel interface. Despite everything going on there it still feels clean, and makes it very easy to go through the hundreds of RSS feeds that I've convinced myself I can't live without.

One complaint: it does not support the Blogger API (or any other), so there is no way to integrate with Userland Radio. (Integration just gives you the ability to write blog posts from FeedDemon itself, with the news item you're discussing nicely pre-folded in the post -- not a major issue, but still something I'd like to see.) With any luck they will will include support in a point release.

So once again I have to set up all my RSS subscriptions. You can, of course, import your subscription list from other aggregators, but you still have to spend a lot of time sorting them.

Congrats and much whuffie to Cory Doctorow for winning the Locus Award for best first novel. He got the award for Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, which I highly recommend. Hey, in addition to being an excellent first novel, it brought us the word whuffie.

Now I need to get back to his Idiot's book on getting SF published and see what it can do for me. (Yeah, I know, if you buy a book with a title like that...)

God help me, I took the "Which York Times Op-Ed Columnist Are You?" test, and, god help me, it thinks I'm Maureen Dowd. That makes me very angry. It makes me madder than Cheney telling Bush  to [insert popcult reference here] his [insert popcult reference here] on his way to [insert popcult reference here], while my friend said [insert popcult reference here].

What did I do? I said I like to read The Economist (and I do). Was it because I selected "Because George Bush is a #&&$#*(! moron" to the question about why I wanted him out of office.

Now who do I sue about this? Momma, I don't wanna be Maureen Dowd.

Now I'm thinking about Holoscan for comments. With a paid account, you get email notification and a lot of other features -- but no XML feed.

Told you I tend to obsess over tools.

Does anyone who has tried any of these comment hosts have any advice?

More news coming at 22 minutes past the hour...

The multi-author blogging tool reads the rss feed for the co-author's blog and then posts the new entries. Radio's built-in news aggregator runs once an hour. (You can't change the frequency.) Mine is set to poll at 22 minutes after the hour, which is probably the default setting. So on any day that I'm using this system to make frequent posts, they will appear at 22 minutes after the hour. It feels so broadcasty.

Oh, great. I've found an RSS/Atom newsreader than I like even more than the ones I've been using (and have bought). I've been playing FeedDemon; like it a lot and will probably buy it. I get so obsessed with finding exactly the right tool.

Remote blogging using Radio's Multi-Author Web Tool seems to be working well enough. If you edit and repost after something has already been forwarded to your main blog, it does not pick up the changes. But this is not really surprising. Also can't use titles. (You can, however, edit posts from your "main blog" when you get back home...)

You can now reach this blog at alldaypermanentred.com and at permanentred.com. Whoo hooo! (If you can't now, you will be able to soon, as the domain name propagates out. It's working for me now.)

(But please don't change your bookmarks. I haven't set it up yet so that the blog watching systems recognize the new domains associated with the blog.)

Not having a lot of luck with remote blogging in Radio. I've turned remote access on, checked all the right buttons (including the one that allows posting of forms), but even though I can access all of Radio's pages remotely, when I try to post I get a 500 error.

So I'm trying the multi-author weblog tool with a second copy of radio running. Writing a few test posts to see what will happen.

Scripting News writes about Fahrenheit 9/11, based on an NPR audio clip (he's not going to see the movie):

Yesterday on NPR they played an excerpt where he confronts members of Congress and asks if they would send their children to fight in Iraq. What a ridiculous question. No parent will say yes to that question. You could have asked that question on the Capitol steps during World War II and they still wouldn't say yes. See how this cheapens the question of whether we should be in Iraq?

What a ridiculous assertion. No parent? Many parents wanted their sons to go to Vietnam. Even moor wanted their children to fight in World War II.

It's a perfectly valid question, especially in the age of a "voluneteer" army that's becoming volunteer in name only, and