Random thoughts for the evening–
The more realistic the 'net gets, the worse it gets. Habbo Hotel is a case in point. It takes the chatter-and-banter flavor of IRC, the spatial sense of a MOO or MUSH, and the avatar-based world that snow crash foretold. then it wraps it up in a slick, slick flash-based front end. it’s the bomb.
of course, it ultimately boils down to making smalltalk with 32-pixel tall strangers whose custom avatars can look bored cast longing glances at more interesting people across the room when your banter isn’t up to snuff. Forget the subtleties of body language. When the habbo you’re talking to turns 90 degrees to look at the hot avatar across the room, you know you’ve struck out.
Still, there is the ability to build your own room off the Hotel’s lobby and decorate it as you please. Host international pixel-based house parties with all your Brazilian friends! It’s the wave of the future, or something like that…
In other news, the team of six developers at work has been pared down to three by emergency projects and other work. I have the feeling that losing 50% of our manpower will affect the schedule… sigh. On a positive note, Adam and I managed to do wicked, evil, debauched things with DHTML. We created modal popup windows using nothing but client script and the IE 5.0 DOM. Woo! I’m the king of the world!
Hung out again with Jeff Benson from work, which is cool. We traded notes about assorted personal projects and tech-obsessions, as All True Geeks Do, then hit the midweek service at Willow. Good stuff, dat.