Stress Fracture

Which is to say, it’s social mudding. Or more specifically, DinoMUSH. (And possibly others, but that’s the one I know the most about.)

Okay, I realize some number of you don’t know from social mudding, or any other mudding, so here’s a brief description before I list out my points. Muds were and are, in general, text-based multi-user games where people can both interact and, sometimes, do other things. What things vary. Think of them as the grandparents of MMORPGs and you’re not entirely far off; social muds, of course, didn’t really have the roleplaying much less the combat and so are, I guess, the grandparents of Second Life. That’s something of an ugly thought. Which doesn’t make it inaccurate.

Anyway, the analogy will, I hope, become clear as I describe DinoMUSH, which is what essentially replaced the last of my own muds many years ago. It has evolved a certain way of doing things, and I’m going to ignore the trivia (like humorous abuse of your friends and acquaintances) that don’t relate to what I’m getting at, and focus on the routine that does.

When I log into DinoMUSH and enter the “hangout” I have done the equivalent of pulled up a social networking site: Facebook, Livejournal, Twitter, whatever. I’ve gone where the communication is. I’m now in the thick of it and as people say things I will see each new item. Clear enough so far, hopefully.

Now, the first thing I do is check the private message system (a “robot” named Xandra, but never mind that) for new messages. And indeed, ideally this should be the first thing I see on a social networking site. And yet it almost never is; I’ve entirely overlooked the little number count for new messages on Facebook, Twitter likewise shunts it off to the side, and Livejournal doesn’t bloody tell you at all if you go straight to your Friends page as many do (and this is why I don’t.) All three rely on email to notify you of the private messages, which may or may not make sense and I’m willing to hear arguments either way. On the one hand, I don’t want these sites in my email, but on the other hand, it does seem reasonable to notify me ASAP about private messages. Still, if someone wants to get to me before I check the social site, why not just email me in the first place?

Next thing, I check the MRD, which stands for something like Magic Recording Device. It’s basically just a logger; I check it and it shows me the last several lines (10, by default, I think) and I know what’s generally going on right now. Notice that I don’t have it show me, say, all the lines since the last time I was logged in. And yet that’s often how we use social networking, I think — try to follow it all, going back page after page after page. If I need something farther back for context, I’ll search for in the MRD. Searching for specific content on many social networking sites is terrible, and frankly, they should be embarrassed about it. It needs to be fixed.

If I stay idle for too long, perhaps while eating lunch, a lot of output may stack up waiting for me to read it. (My client I use to mud has a built in paging function so it doesn’t all scroll by.) Frankly, I don’t want to read it. I use the client’s ability to skip past it all, and start with just what’s still on my screen. Once again, why would I do differently with social networking — say, Twitter, for example? No need to feel obliged to catch up the 38 tweets that went by while I was busy. Just check the current list and let it flow from there.

This analogy feels liberating, at least if I choose to apply it. In addition the above, there are ideas like “gagging” content I don’t want to see, “highlighting” content I particularly want to see, and so on. One theme that runs throughout is not sweating it if I don’t see everything. It’s okay. No lives depend on seeing every tweet, every facebook status update, every livejournal post. They’re just there for some communication — but not too much communication.

Mudding. It’s the way of the future, I tell you.

R

I have no real point tonight except to vent a bit about my frustrations with technology.

You see, I am one of the earliest adopters of TiVo. I won one of their first model in a sort of essay contest promotion they did and I’ve had one ever since — probably on my fifth or sixth now, I honestly forget. (Not all broken down, there were various reasons, upgrades, that sort of thing.) But really, TiVo seems to me to be about done, at least for the tech edge folks. Charging $13 per month after charging hundreds of dollars for the box and then you want to find new ways to stuff ads in? Never mind the way they treat the Series 2 folks deliberately poorly to encourage springing for yet another model. Nah. It was one thing when I was a 500 channels sort, but nowadays I don’t even have extended cable — just the local channels via an inexpensive analog cable package because I haven’t gotten around to getting a huge whacking OTA antenna that I’d need to get TV stations from 60 miles away. Yet.

So I spent part of the evening contemplating (again) building my own using MythTV or something like that. I have a spare machine right now, even, not anything very new to be sure but probably up to the job under the right circumstances and with the right hardware. But it just started to look like more and more hassle and uncertainty and honestly, given how inclined I am to just watch something on Hulu or Netflix it later or whatever, I lost interest. But that reminded me of Boxee.

In brief, Boxee’s sort of the opposite thing — it’s for showing streaming video on your TV. It can do Hulu, Comedy Central, CBS, YouTube, a bazillion other things I’m not thinking of, stuff from your shared drives, and so on. Boxee’s in alpha, sure, but plenty of people using it, and this month they started letting anyone in on it, not just the private signed up folks. So I figured it was time to give it a shot. All I’d need for the machine in question is a wifi card (I had to swipe the one it used to have for something else) and a hard drive as the one that’s in it is dead, which is why it’s unused right now. Then I realized I also need a monitor. (And a keyboard and mouse, but I probably can scare those up, plus they’re dirt cheap.) I started looking at solutions for hooking it to the TV in the bedroom, which seemed nice, but that started seeming kind of awful, too. (It becomes easy when we shell out $500 for an HDTV, which I guess we eventually will, but you know, this is just an experiment, for crying out loud.)

Now, at this point I should mention Boxee runs on really two platforms: Ubuntu Linux and Apple’s OS X. (The latter includes the AppleTV unit, which is interesting indeed, although it’s missing a few things like the Netflix streaming, as it’s not powerful enough. Of course, the Linux port is also missing the Netflix streaming for other reasons, so…) While they’re working on a Windows version, you, well, can’t have it right now. So I remember that I was thinking of trying Ubuntu on my laptop anyway, although with my move to Chrome as a browser I’m losing enthusiasm for that. Still, there are several ways to run Ubuntu without wiping out Windows, so why not? Well, the answer to that turns out to be: because the chipset my Dell Inspiron B130’s wireless uses is a known troublemaker where Ubuntu is concerned, so it doesn’t work out of the box. This can be sorted out if you use a wired connection for a while; if only I had one available…

So, it’s basically that kind of night. Lots of ideas. None of them panned out. I’m still keen to give Boxee a twirl and see if it matches up with my idea of the future of watching television. I’m just not sure what’s going to be the soft approach to trying it out right now.

Maybe I should just read a book instead.

R