..I just feel like it. Somehow things crept up on me and made me very busy. Insanely busy. Wishing-I-would-break-my-leg-so-I-could-get-some-rest-at-the-hospital-busy.

It's better now, but still it seems I don't really have the time to write much here. Heck, I don't even have the time for one of the essentials in life - idle surfing. What's going on in the outside world? I have no idea.
Hopefully it will slow down a bit soon, or I'll break my leg. See you then!

It seems to be a law of nature - everything is cuter in Japan. And It's strange but somehow it makes life just a little bit better to be surrounded by that cuteness. You can just tell that the cuteness wants no harm in the world to anyone. (Yeah I know it's a biological thing - cute things look like babies and so on.)

Just look at the fiery Firefox fox who on his travels to Japan transformed from a stylistic logo into a huggable fluffy ball of cuteness. With some mandatory cherry flower petals on the top.

If you like him as much as I do you can even build your very own version of him:

Someone I care about deeply has become obsessed with this web game. He plays it for hours at a time and says it's all the fun of building towers in an rts condensed into one little game. To see the enemy approach and getting annihilated by your mighty defenses, brilliantly placed at strategic key locations. He can't stop staring at the hi-score list and mumbles that it's brilliant that you can compete with people you know by entering a group name. He's been playing it for hours, a web game! Surely that can't be normal. Whatever shall I do?

Yeah, I should try it myself and beat his hi-score. That'll teach him.

I have played what the makers claim to be "the world's most inaccessible game" - Game Over!. I think it was the second game in six months time that I could actually play on my Linux platform which is a bit ironic. Anyway - the game was made by "Universally Accessible Games" a research project in Greece and it's a space invaders clone designed to illustrate several guidelines and principles one should follow to make a game as accessible as possible. As you might have imagined it does this by violating these guidelines. It is fun to play in it's own way. Even though starting the game is probably the very best part of it:

Press the following shortcut to start:
Ctrl + Shift + Enter +Page Up +F3 + F12 + Right Arrow

The thing is that most of the principles presented should already be pretty obvious to anyone making a game. No - you shouldn't write the instructions in Swahili if your players don't speak it . You should write them in a form that's clear and easily understandable for everyone. Everyone gets that, the difficulty lies in the next step - how to achieve just that.

Other principles are hard or almost impossible to implement in every game, like this one: "provide control over game speed". There are lots of games where the speed of the game are such a big part of the core design that you can't have the player adjusting it without major impact on the design. Not even mentioning online games where the speed necessarily have to be the same for everyone playing it.

I've been reading Paul Graham again. This time an essay on his website entitled "Why to not not start a startup?". Now I am dead certain I should start a startup - I wonder what it's like to have a way with words like that. In this essay Graham demolishes the most common reasons you may have to not start a startup.

You can't be too young - as long as you're adult enough to face a challenge without flaking out or acting rebellious. There might be a possibility of being too old though, since that usually means you'll have a family to provide for. Better start as soon as possible.

You can't be too inexperienced - since starting a startup is the best experience you can get, no matter the outcome. You can even expect to fail, only dream of success and it's still the better thing to do (you might have to read the article yourself to be convinced of that one). If you later want to get a job it impresses the boss more if you have started a company, worked really hard on it and failed than if you spent the same amount of time working at a big company.

You don't need a great idea of what to make - that idea will change over time anyway. Start - and you will figure it out along the way

And I'll end with one of my favorites - the fear of being smart enough to start a startup. Graham says that if you are smart enough to think about whether your smart enough then you are probably smart enough. Aaah.