Diamonds for monogamy

From this entertaining and cutting blog post:

Virtual dinner at 6:00pm...my time

I wish I could eat a virtual dinner with friends and family around the country. I would pay $300 I think, for a specialized flat panel monitor with a built in quality webcam and speakers that could be put on the dinner table. Good videochat software to manage the webcam views would be critical. And you could have dinner with folks you met on Facebook from around the world, and dating with this system would be interesting as hell.

Working alone

Working alone is emotionally exhausting. It's a constant battle of motivation and fear that what I'm working on will fail. I have successes that propel me forward a little, but by far it's dominated by the battle, and when it's not a battle, it's still a grind. This will be the third venture I've attempted and the most ambitious. (First was my doctor4computers.com website in college which failed in like a week. Next was our little gaming krew, Insane Fuel, which showed me that you can make something successful (relatively) if you push through when things feel like they're fucked.)

As of midnight, I am the proud uncle...

of a boy I haven't met yet, Landon Lavon Bigelow. Congratulations Eric and Alisha! :D It's good to know that someone in our family is the responsible family man...

Pyramid scheme legality

Pyramid schemes are only legal when you can't tell who's going to get screwed at the end. Stocks and money are both pyramid schemes (think about it, who would accept cash today unless they expected to be able to spend it tomorrow), but the end of an individual company or the U.S. stock exchange or the end of the United States is unpredictable, so it's OK.

Driving through the Valley of the Gods, Utah

Utah probably beats out Idaho for most beautiful state in the union (that I've been to ;)

Funding games in the future

Why not let gamers contribute funding directly to game developers? One idea is to have them donate a certain amount and get a copy of the game, if and when it gets finished. Their donation would buy them no rights in the company. This is an ok idea, but it's going to be hard to keep that gamers' interest over 4 years while the game gets made. A better idea would be to sell shares in the game developer, because now that gamer has a stake and is more likely to ensure the developer has enough funding over the 4 years it takes. The problems with this are that SEC regulations are going to be burdensome, so it should have minimal regulation (let the market decide who's a fraud and who's good) and also you don't want the game developer lost in the mix as a penny stock somewhere, you want them listed on a market of only game developers. Maybe something like GSTrUE, but for people who are well suited to evaluate games (gamers).