v-s.net v0.6

Wednesday, 3:40 pm in Geeking

I seem to have a lot of conversations that go something like this:

Them:  Oh, you play Warcraft/DnD/Magic?
Me:  Yup.
Them:  I used to play, but I stopped.  It totally ruins your social life.
Me:  [shrug] All my friends play.
Them:  But think of all the stuff you’re missing out on!
Me:  Like what?  Going to bars and getting smashed in public?
Them:  Well, yeah.  And other things like, like… go-karting!  And BBQs!
Me:  I don’t really like any of those things.
Them: [derisively]  Pfft, nerd.

I don’t get it.  The thing is, I don’t like going to bars.  I don’t like go-karting, or bowling, or golf or pretty much any other sporting activity (I have a fondness for laser tag, but not paintball), and I’m not such a big fan of BBQs that I’d have one at the expense of something I’d rather be doing, like (say) playing WoW.  I mean, quite frankly I think revheads and booners are pretty lame, but I know that they enjoy doing some things (getting smashed) and likely do not enjoy doing other things (playing DnD).  I’m not going to attempt to force a revhead to enjoy playing Magic, or think he’s somehow defective because he doesn’t.

The really ironic thing is that most nerding activities are extremely social, despite the stereotype.  DnD is social; you can’t play it by yourself.  Magic is social (you can play it alone, but like chess it’s usually more fun against someone else).  Online gaming is social.  The fucking internet is social.  Sure, I don’t see a lot of my friends face-to-face (usually because they live thousands of miles away) but I’m betting that I know some of them a lot better than the people who hassle me know some of their ‘real [life]’ friends.

But nevertheless I’m somehow ‘allowed’ to be derided because I don’t like getting smashed in public and revving around in tiny cars.  Go figure.

Last night I was showing ~Mat [h] 4chan (fair warning: Do Not Click If You Are At Work Or Your Parents/Children/Spouse Are Present), and he found a picture on /b/ he liked of monkeys sword fighting.  Anyway, I was trying to find it at work today, and instead I found this website.  I was about to leave when I noticed the guy had a post about integrating a Flash RSS weblog feed into a MySpace profile.

Oh.  My.  God.  Why didn’t I think of that!

For those of you who don’t notice these things, sk.log has (almost) always had an XML-RPC class in it which mirrors the content to my LiveJournal (and, in fact, any LJ-based website account I want it to).  I always thought the LJ API was really neat in this fashion, but none of the new, dumbed-down social networking sites (MySpace, Facebook¹, whatever) have an XML API² since none of them are supposed to be updated remotely.  Since I could never be arsed updating my MySpace weblog manually (I mean, why bother?) it just sits there, bein’ all useless and empty.

But now… a-hah!  Now I can embed a Flash RSS feed of my real weblog content.  For those of you who think that you too might like to do this awesome thing, there’s a better tutorial on it here.  Oh-ho ho so ingenious!

Or something.

1. Also, what the fuck is a ‘facebook’?  It sounds like something you do to your head with a textbook when you’re about to fail an exam. ^
2. Okay, Facebook has released an API but it’s more geared towards using the site’s login credential and friends lists in external applications, like chat protocols.  Which is a good move on the part of Facebook, if you ask me, since it opens their network up in a way MySpace isn’t and if there’s one thing that Trillian taught us is that when people don’t have to use your official client, they won’t.  Happly. ^

• Tags » flash, geeking, its hard to be me my life is full of pain, myspace, rss
• Mood » geeky