Bioshock the First

Started Bioshock at the behest of a friend online. shaterri bought it the week it came out, pretty much, since it was supposed to be so good, then neither of us popped it in. Weird.

Downloaded Chime, a music game similar to Lumines, on the advice of aprivatefox. I've yet to cover 100% of any board in 3-minute challenge mode.

Bored with D&D Online already. Glad I only spent about six dollars on it. The whole needs-a-full-team-of-skilled-and-dedicated-players-used-to-working-together style of MMORPG doesn't appeal as much as it used to. I've never once, in any game like this, been in a serious raid — a longer-than-normal mission against unusually tough opponents, designed to require multiple teams of players to defeat . By definition, raids are not something that an ad hoc bunch of strangers who grouped together at random can accomplish, and I've never been in a guild that pursued raids as a primary activity.

Teamwork games in general frustrate me, actually. It's too hard to tell if I'm contributing. If the team is good, it's rare to be able to point to some key situation and say "See right there? I made a big difference," which leaves me feeling like I mooched my way to victory on other people's efforts even if  I know I was exerting myself.

Intelligent Design

In the epilogue of Contact (the book, not the movie), mathematicians discover a curious thing. They notice that if π is calculated in base eleven — a base extremely unlikely to be used natively by any naturally-evolving sentient species, making it an excellent format in which to hide something you don't want found by accident — and drawn out to a sufficient number of "decimal" places, one encounters a span of 121 consecutive digits that are all either 0 or 1. And if you rearrange these digits into an 11x11 square, which is the only non-degenerate rectangular arrangement that fits that total, the 1s form a crude circle of pixels on a background of 0s. This is taken as serious evidence of someone dropping the hint, "Math? Yeah. I made that."

Contact is fiction, though. What isn't fiction are the animations at www.hd-fractals.com showing incomprehensibly minute zoom-ins on pieces of the famous Mandelbrot Set fractal. Go there, right now, and check out any of the "Trip to eNNN" videos. Don't be too embarrassed to skip to the end; some are long. It's not quite a surprise if you know anything about fractals, but...