feeding change

“Everything will go swimmingly at first – they’ll laugh at your jokes, and be totally cool with it when you admit that you’ve got a party planned for the weekend after they move in. But a few weeks in and the picture starts to look a lot less rosy. See that thing surrounded by a pile of dirty dishes, half-read magazines, video cases and tissues at the end of your sofa? That’s your flatmate. And they’ve finished off the milk. Again.”
– Guardian’s Find-A-Flatmate Quiz

If you’ve ever shared an apartment or looked for a flatmate, then the Guardian’s Find-A-Flatmate quiz is for you.

Hauntingly familiar, scaringly true and milk-stealingly funny. Take the quiz here.

And remember: if it doesn’t work out, you can always move.

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“You care about nature, so you recycle, buy organic food and have even taken David Suzuki’s Nature Challenge. But now you’re faced with a dilemma: you need a car.” – David Suzuki Foundation

Last year, I was living in a medium sized city ruled by cars. Buying one was a looming reality and I knew that the only automobile I could afford would be a beat-up, gas-guzzling, carbon-emitting nightmare. It was one of the reasons why I moved back to a big city with a decent transit city that gave me the freedom to travel without being chained down to four wheels.

The people at the David Suzuki Foundation realise this and have released a Green Guide to Car Buying. The guide gives you the good, the bad and the dirty on new and used cars. It also gives you the tools to talk to car manufacturers and them the to clean up their act.

If you’re not familar with David Suzuki and his organisation, then check this out.

If you’re in Canada and you’re concerned about the environment, then think about taking the Nature Challenge. The Challenge is a commitment to apply 3 environmentally friendly habits to your life. If you’re even remotely environmentally conscious, chances are you’re already doing at least 2 of the challenges.

The thing I like about Suzuki is that he knows we must live in the real world. Not everyone can afford organic vegetables or live in complete harmony with nature. The suggestions from the Foundation are realistic, easy to apply and often require little adjustment to your life. He makes living green a whole lot easier.

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Because of my move, I’ve been away from my trusty game console for over two weeks and the callouses on my thumbs are getting soft. It may only be a Playstation 1 but I love my classic games and I’m going through some serious gaming withdrawal.

But, today I got my gaming fix and it’s all thanks to Tony Walsh and his newly redesigned site, SecretLair.com. Tony surprises me each time I visit his site. In addition to being a sharp writer, he’s a great illustrator, a top blogger and the creator of the weekly comic strip, He Is Just a Rat.

And now I discover that he’s a great game designer as well. Ratboy gives the classic game asteroids an icy twist with IceBreaker. It’s fun, it’s free and it’s addictive. What more do you want in a webgame?

Check out the whole list of Tony and Ratboy’s games and get those thumb callouses back into shape.

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10 rolls of packing tape, over 40 boxes of books, 3000 kms, 3 articles, 1 comic strip and far too many dollars later, I’m finally re-entering the blogosphere.

Thanks to everyone who dropped by and wished me well on my travels (and those who just dropped by.) I am now on the other side of the country, homeless, computerless, but thankfully not blogless.

Things move fast around here. My bloglines subscriptions were bursting, and I was eventually forced to click the “Mark as All Read”. So, only you know what I missed.

I knew I was out of the loop when I was getting my tech news from CNN. No doubt Clickable Culture had probably broadcast the tech-tidbit days before.

While I was toiling away in meatspace, I had many out-of-blogging thoughts but unfortunately (or fortunately for you) they have gone the way of the “all read” button. One I can remember is this:

Linkless writing can be frustrating.

For the last few weeks, I’ve been writing for several print publications and many times I was tempted to just drop in an tag when a particularly tricky concept or word came up. In every case, I was working with a very small word count and some very big ideas (augmented reality, digital literacy in kids and graphic novels in bookstores.) I cringed with every word spent explaining a term or giving more detail on a concept. I longed for clickable text. For me, writing for print had become a form of constrained writing.

On his blog, Writing for the Web, Crawford Killian gives a very accurate description of reading for paper versus the web:

“Reading text on paper is like traveling a road. We can see what?s growing along the roadside, but the impetus is to go straight ahead. Hypertext may not get us from point A to point B in the quickest possible time, but now we?re traveling in a helicopter instead of a car. We can see the road, but we also have a much better view of the surrounding landscape. And we can land anywhere we choose.”

Writing for paper feels the same way. Many times the ideas I wanted to express or define weren’t growing along the roadside. They had to be hauled across the landscape and posted on the edge of the road like a billboard advertising the next gas stop. That took words and when you’ve only got 800 to describe cognitive workings and literacy potential of Age of Mythology on the 10 year old brain, every word is precious.

Despite my longing for links, I’m not tired of writing for print (it keeps me fed and watered!) I think I’ve just been spoiled by hypertext. But aren’t we all?

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Who needs Mel Gibson when you’ve got The Brick Testament? Thanks once again to Demian at Guild of Ghostwriters for showing me the legoed light and letting me stretch out my own passion of the Lego to one more post.

Brought to you by the Reverend Brendan Powell Smith, the Brick documents some of the most thrilling stories from the Bible through the magic of nobby plastic bricks.



From Adam and Eve getting booted out of the garden of Eden:

To Mel Gibson, I mean Jesus getting nailed to the cross:

It’s all here and it’s all Lego. Check it out . You’ll never be satisfied with just building square houses again.

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