The New Yorker has a very in-depth article on Will Wright and the game industry as a whole. It’s written for people who don’t know much about the history or state of the industry. I found it fascinating.

Hurra Torpedo.

Seriously. It’s pretty awesome.

Google recently bought YouTube for 1.65 billion dollars. What else might Google have spent that money on?

• 4.14 million copies of Windows Vista Ultimate Edition. That’s one copy for every person in New Zealand.
• 13 billion packets of Ramen noodles.
• 50 thousand BMW 328i Sedans. Conservatively, that’s about five per Google employee.
• 55 Flickrs
• 717.4 million gallons of gas. That would take my car to the moon and back over 45 thousand times (at 30mpg).
• 100 thousand of Paul Graham’s startups.
• 16.5 million laptops for kids around the world.
• Over a month of work from NASA.
• 1 B2 Stealth Bomber.
• 196 billion Japanese yen.
• 455 of Robert Scoble’s blog
• YouTube’s bandwidth bill for the next 50+ years.

• Bungie’s Epic Achievement
  A classics professor compares the Aeneid to Halo.
• 50 Books For Everyone In the Game Industry
  No technical manuals here. I’ve read some of these and would love to read the rest.

I did something dumb.

Last night I was having weird nightmares all night. This is very unusual for me. There was one where people were setting off an EMP in a neighborhood and then breaking into houses. I knew they were coming, but I couldn’t do anything about it. There was another one where I dreamed I was watching a horror movie. It involved an island in the middle of a lake.

This morning I woke up early because I have a midterm at 10:30 and an important project milestone this afternoon. So I was still half asleep, and I was thinking about why my nightmares always seem to involve lakes in the mountains, and I backed into the garbage can at the end of the driveway. Luckily, it was a glancing blow. Unluckily, it tore the mirror off the driver’s side of the car.

So… my mirror is being held on with duct tape right now. I need to get it fixed ASAP. I wonder what it’s going to cost me. Is this the kind of thing I could or should report to my insurance company? I’m thinking probably not.

I like free good stuff. If you do too, you should check out the free webisodes for The Office and Battlestar Galactica. If you’ve never seen Battlestar Galactica before, I recommend starting with the miniseries, but if you absolutely must start watching now without renting the episodes that came before, there’s a free ~45 min. catch-up video that’s worth watching. It’s also available for free on iTunes.

• F*cks per programing language and license.
  Google code tells us which programmers swear the most in their code.

Don’t you think they could have phrased this better?
“Police to probe Barton’s backside“