Brian Kerr

It’d been a long time since I’d played Animal Crossing.

Last night I stopped by Eudoxia — my hometown, there — to see what was going on. Entropy was going on: time passes in Animal Crossing whether you pay attention to it or not.

I found everything you’d want from a (simulated) early summer evening, a bright night under clear skies, starred with constellations: some I’d drawn myself, others created by friends. Moths flittered around the lamps at the town’s gate, and fireflies blinked indistinct, diffuse, apparently weightless. From certain spots, I could hear some kind of cricket thing chirping.

Weeds had sprouted everywhere. The town was overrun with wild grass, clover, dandelions matured into fluffy clocks. Most of the flowers had died, their brown husks crumbling as I passed by.

Letters waiting in the mail: birthday parties missed, farewells unacknowledged, special events announced but now past.

Some of the town’s animal residents had moved in during the interval, and didn’t know who I was. Others greeted me by name, but wondered where I’d been. A few of my favorites were gone.

My character’s house was the same as I left it, after I squished the roaches that had moved in.

Then, I went back outside, and pulled all the weeds, wild grass, clover, and dandelions; found a four-leaf clover, and blew apart the dandelion heads. I cleaned up the dead flowers and chatted with some of the villagers. I sent a few letters. It was good.

Then, I shut down the game, went back outside, and took a walk. I’ll probably return to Animal Crossing in a few more months, and have the same kind of melancholic experience. It’ll be there, waiting, changing a little bit each day, even if I don’t notice.

(tags: animalcrossing)

Dung beetles only come out on winter evenings — and the Animal Crossing winter ends soon. (If you look, the tree leaves are turning green again, underneath all that snow.) Walk around until you see a snowball rolling around of its own accord. You will observe a tiny dung beetle pushing the snowball. Get out a bug net, nudge the snowball, and catch the dung beetle as it makes its pathetically slow escape. You have one chance, so aim true. Dung beetles sell for 800 bells at the store.

If you really, really want to catch a dung beetle today, there’s a cheap trick. You will always find exactly two snowballs on the ground in your town, and if you destroy a snowball by pushing it into the water or smashing it into a tree or wall or something, it will magically regenerate when you go inside a building and then come back out. So if you had the patience, you could probably do this over and over until you spot a beetle.

Actual dung beetles live on all continents of the globe, minus Antarctica. Here is a fun page for Queensland, Australia farmers on how to attract dung beetles to your cattle ranch, where they earn their keep by eating what they eat.

(tags: animalcrossing feedback-loop)

It’s winter, worst season for fishing in Animal Crossing. If it’s after 4PM and snowing, you may be able to catch a coelecanth in the ocean; it has a huge fish shadow, looks pretty sweet, and nets a cool 15,000 bells at sale. If your huge fish shadow is not a coelacanth, it’s going to be a tuna, which is not a bad deal either.

This may be a placebo effect, but Nathan and I had decided that there seems to be better fish when you’re visiting over wifi.

Update 2007 1 30: one Flickr’d coelecanth for your pleasure (via acww Flickr tag).

(tags: animalcrossing feedback-loop)

Graduate student Brian

Working on a4a, which is a bunch of things all at once. It’s an art gizmo, a rehabilitation tool, and an inviting space. Conceptually we’re still in the tag cloud stage, but will serialize that down to an elevator pitch soon enough.

Reading old science fiction, it’s good fodder for wordie.

Other stuff too boring to write about.

Human being Brian

Ostensibly heading out to RecentChangesCamp 2007 next week for a few quality days of sitting in a big empty room with a bunch of people talking about open culture + open technology, for some values of “open,” “culture,” and “technology.”

Winter in Animal Crossing, snow on the ground every day, and falling sometimes. There are snowballs; you can roll a couple snowballs up and make a snowman. (Once in a while you can see a tiny dung beetle (!) industriously pushing around a snowball.) If you do a good job and roll a correctly-proportioned snowman, it’ll say thanks, and then mail you a gift. If you roll a grossly disproportionate snowman — whose head is too big for its body — it’ll tell you that it’s happy to be alive, or that it’s enjoying its birthday, and that it’s glad you made it, even if it wishes you had paid more attention. Regardless, your snowman will melt over the next few days, and disappear. There’s a melancholy here, but that’s how Animal Crossing works. It’s kind of how life works too.

Working on a project which I need to figure out how to decloak. It’s something kind of embarrassing, but also the kind of thing that everybody should try at least once.

Enjoying Slicehost: slowly consolidating web sites, defunct project repositories, etc. into the same place. LightTPD with mod_evhost is pretty cool. Maybe the closest we’ll get to Xanadude Ted Nelson’s infotopia is, I dunno, running a jabber server and asking it how early we are for the bus. The nice thing about riding the bus is that you’re always early for the next bus.

Getting ready for a sea change, not sure what I’m looking for but I’ll know it when I see it.

(tags: animalcrossing public-transportation self slicehost umsi)

Following are some recent searches that brought people to this blog, with some answers and pointers from me. Thanks Ed for the format. Games are always a popular topic in the search logs, even though I post about them sparingly.

animal crossing music

Good luck finding it online. The music is pretty good, better than you’ll appreciate through the Nintendo DS’s tiny speakers. I really like the guitar work on the title song — it’s worth plugging into your normal sound system at least once. I don’t play Animal Crossing so much any more, but I really enjoy traveling over wifi: here’s where to find me if you’d like to visit or entertain a visitor.

ann arbor warhammer

Warhammer 40,000 is a tabletop wargame. (I’ve never played it.) If you want to play this in Ann Arbor, you’re probably out of luck. For several years, there were play groups at The Underworld, a comics and gaming shop on South University. After The Underworld closed, Phoenix Games set up tables, but it opened and closed in less than a year; they were on Fourth Street, in the spot just north of Eastern Accents, now occupied by the Washtenaw Democrats. The Vault of Midnight is going strong on Main Street, but they focus on comics — good for me, bad for persons seeking Warhammer.

“perhaps the same could be said of all religions”

Dracula’s erudite retort in the opening sequence of Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, a 1997 Playstation game. Although Symphony of the Night was an excellent, instant-classic video game, it had a pretty lousy/nonsensical English translation, made even worse by half-baked voice acting. Here’s an MP3 of the opening dialogue, if you want to assess the damage.

rich text wiki

You probably want a wiki without the ugly wiki markup. I have some notes on installing a rich text wiki using Oddmuse. Fancy wiki vendors have low-cost or open-source versions to look into as well.

umich si logo

You can get the SI logo in a couple of formats at the School of Information intranet. Here a direct link. The SI logo is a galaxy/sphincter image (tastefully called the “swirl”) plus the name of the department in uppercase Bembo.

weirdest interactive fiction

It’s a pretty crowded field. I am biased towards games that are (a) short (b) intense and (c) more focused on storytelling than puzzles. A few candidates, ordered roughly from weirdness of content to weirdness of format:

• 9:05 — short, elegant slice-of-life story which you will definitely enjoy the second time around;
• Book and Volume — the less you know about this before you play it, the better; if you must know something about it, here’s my Book and Volume post from about a year ago;
• The Gostak — internally consistent text adventure written in its own language (here’s one player’s attempt at a dictionary);
• Aisle — a very short game: in fact, it’s exactly one move long, and you’ll be surprised at how much breadth and character development you can unpack in a single turn.

(tags: animalcrossing annarbor feedback-loop games narratives umsi wiki)

This weekend was the beginning of the fall season in Animal Crossing. The grass and trees are beginning to turn; the weather is cool and rainy, good for fishing and bug hunting, or talking with friends.

I have this pattern of visiting with people, most frequently Nathan, in Animal Crossing while talking with them on the phone. This is not so different from other channel combinations — basically, take one of [phone, Skype. voice chat] and one of [Second Life, Animal Crossing, irc, Urban Dead, etc. persistent world] for a conversation that engages you fully and provides the right amount of shared situation or context. That conversational element is behind a bunch of our slouching towards Multiverse media, and I’m eager for the technosocial smoke-n-mirrors which will further obscure the seams between these channels.

(tags: animalcrossing games media web)

In case anyone else is playing Animal Crossing: Wild World, I am Brian in Eudoxia, and my friend code is 3651-3819-3888. Two players must be mutually whitelisted in order to visit one another in this game, so I’d need to add your code etc. ahead of time, as well.

(tags: animalcrossing games invitations)