In 1998, it wasn't Sametime yet, it was still "VP Buddy" and Lotus had only barely begun absorbing Ubique's work. That was right around the time that AOL launched AIM as a separate product, functional on the broader internet. It was the IM boom!

Interesting. You seem to believe geek is now a culture dependent upon product selection. Is this related to the purchased hipster culture? Do you enjoy the labels you bought? Are you sure they are the right ones? You like forming cliques, and belonging to one when it's gaining popularity, don't you?

Minecraft is sort-of-fun on its own, but the game really blossoms when you do something like run a Bukkit-based server and get a world or two going, get some of the important plugins going, and invite friends into your world. If it weren't for the Bukkit project I would have been done with Minecraft by the time Beta came out.

My greatest hope is that one day someone will bridge the gap between second-life and Minecraft and will create a game that has the flexibility and user-generated content from second-life with the simplicity and procedural block-based terrain of Minecraft. I want more blocks! I want scripted NPCs! I want Minecraft to be a MUCK!

• http://bukkit.org/ Bukkit project
• http://tumblr.preoccupied.net/ Tumblr for our minecraft server

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fsn

FSN (File System Navigator), was a real application made by SGI for 3D viewing of file systems. That really is a real gui layer, and you can get a clone of it for linux called FSV at http://fsv.sourceforge.net/

This has nothing to do with net neutrality. Customers can already (typically) purchase different bandwidth tiers from their ISP depending on needs.

I'm close with you on this. I have believed for a while now that the American Dream is revenge. We love revenge as a society.

Maybe humans love revenge as a species. I don't know, I'm not travelled enough to really speak about other cultures.

But from winning the lotto and quitting your job with a big "fuck you guys" to postal workers going postal, to columbine, to "nuke the entire middle east" and how we treat criminals (we want punishment a lot more than we seem to want rehabilitation), we have a guttural response to everything. We have been hurt, and thus we will seek to hurt. Perhaps we aren't strong enough (money, influence, physical strength, etc) to take our revenge, but some day... some day we'll be the badass who will lay the smack-down.

I'm going to go back to lurking for another year or so now.

Yogscast covered it pretty darn well on their youtube channel.

http://www.youtube.com/user/BlueXephos#p/c/561514793F6CB99F/0/aF7vrQ04_q4

Lots of play time and commentary, showing just how amazingly boring this game is. Also: cutscene. Cutscene. CUTSCENE.