Occasional Rants from the Fearless Leader

I learned through BoingBoing recently about The Internet Mapping Project, a project Kevin Kelly is running to collect people's drawn maps of what the Internet looks like or means to them, with their home indicated on the map. This looks like a fun way of finding out about what people think of their relationship to the Internet.

The U.S. Forest Service operates a Mount St. Helens Observatory that has two web cams. Although they are located under a roof overhang 20 feet in the air, both have been at least partially blocked by snow for many weeks. I checked the cams today, and found this image, to my astonishment:

The caption on the disc (paper plate?) to the right reads: I WILL GET THE SNOW.
Also, is that a snowboard in the gnome's hand, or what?

I saw this illustration and immediately thought of Atomic Sock Monkey's well-reviewed Monkey, Ninja, Pirate, Robot: the Roleplaying Game.

The illustration is for the band New Rock Church of Fire, who are playing the Velvet Lounge at 8 PM on August 23 , 2007.

Ralph Koster's A Theory Of Fun For Game Design offers many insights on game design and how people interact with games. Although the core audience for the book is video game designers, a much wider circle of people could benefit from reading this, including educators, parents, software developers, and artists.

The author makes an abbreviated version of the illustrations in the book available for free.