DS Spotting

I’ve decided to collect sightings of Nintendo DS units in the wild. I always see them in airports, but every once in a while they turn up somewhere surprising.

Today’s entry is a record of the pink unit I saw in a restaurant on the Fourth of July, wielded by a burly man wearing a “Beretta” cap.

The Daily KoL

Right, where was I?

I finally finished the massive Quest for the Holy MacGuffin and am now obsessed with unlocking tattoos and new areas previously overlooked. Yesterday I finally got my black armaments tattoo, and bought all the components for Glad Bag Glad Rags, which I can’t obtain normally due to my class.

I think it suits me.

Lost sport videos

A couple of recent videos of people playing the Lost Sport of Olympia, around the world.

FooCamp

Shanghai

The saga of the Third Ring

I haven’t written about the collection of the other two rings – one in Wellington, New Zealand, and one in Japan – because they happened largely without my involvement, but the third ring that appeared last week, and the messages leading up to it, were right up my alley.

Last Thursday, a message in Hindi appeared on TheO’s voicemail, which my PMOG friend’s co-workers helped me translate (thanks Stephen, Kavita and Ritu! You were great).

The message directed the agonothetai to an area of Manchester, England; I have a bunch of UK friends from a different “save the world!” mission, so I tried to rally them to action, but without more specific maps they were reasonably hesitant. Finally, after a bit of language clarification, Mancunian cubicgarden (who helps direct some technology division for the BBC) volunteered, and headed out from the Night and Day cafe to investigate local galleries.

After a few days of the gallery being closed, he arrived at Richard Goodman and found the ring on display.

That’s where things got a bit sticky, though… The person collecting each ring sculpture has to produce a password, and Cubic’s laptop died just before the pickup, so he had to ring a friend to look it up for him. The gallery owner was not impressed, and emailed TheO to see what proper procedure was – and in the end, she refused to hand it over! Another person was dispatched, and denied as well, presumably for being “dodgy.”

We were all fretting because James has suggested TheO already suspects we know more than we should, and this was sure to raise the alarm over at Baddie HQ… but James and Eli Hunt reassured us via email, and said that the next person to attempt a pickup should “show full confidence in their task”.

Chippy (with whom I did the London omphalabyrinth), who’d met cubicgarden at an industry event (small world), headed from Leeds to Manchester the next day, dressed like a spy and prepared to roleplay. After a bit of hard questioning, the gallery packed up the ring and sent him on his way, as the rest of the agonothetai watching online breathed a sigh of relief.

The newest voicemail came out today, and it’s in Russian, so we’re already moving on the translation for it. It looks like it’ll be somewhere in South America, but as the translation is pending, we’re left to guess and speculate.

The latest email from James warns us that future ring collections will be videotaped for verification with TheO; this isn’t a problem for me, as I’ve already submitted myself as a counter-agonothetai, despite being labyrinth loyal, though I do need to complete the second half of my task over this weekend, which is to blindfold public statues.

Incidentally, I had an interesting internal debate about joining TheO, even as a double agent. I wondered, if I were willing to do whatever it took to help the six agono, including risk my reputation and trust, doesn’t that make me just like TheO, the group whose principles and methods I supposedly oppose? But in the end, they needed the numbers, and it helps James move up in the bad guy ranks, which helps our six. But nothing is ever black or white, in this quest.

All photos by cubicgarden, except the last one, which is by chippy. See more here.

Say, I could use $200 about now

Apartment Therapy Chicago gives us this excellent giant Luxury Tax square:

I would love to see a life-sized Monopoly game played out on the city streets.

On a lighter note – grannies!

It’s easy to feel down after reading the daily news headlines, but the story, “
Nursing home grannies take up Wii Boxing” is definitely a happymaker.

There are some who call her…Steward?

I’m super pleased to reveal that I’ve been asked to be a Steward on PMOG. Mostly I’ll just keep an eye on the forum, help direct people to the right areas, that sort of thing. But I love PMOG and its community and am honored to have been invited.

Also, I have it on good authority that each of the five of us were chosen, at least in part, to represent archetypes, just like the Planeteers.

One type is professional, one is conservative, one is a naysayer…mine is “kindness”.

Which makes me Ma-Ti.

“By your powers combined, I am Captain PMOG!”

B-a-n-a-n-a-s

The London Banana Project is an “ongoing documentation of banana skins in the urban London landscape”. I’m fascinated with this type of project because I also like to take note of strange, funny and mundane details, especially in big cities.

In London, for example, I am obsessed with remnants of history that people pass by every day without noticing; recently I visited the last remaining sewer gas lamp in the city, found by turning down an alley, passing through a busy pub avenue and theatre stage doors, and loitering by some parking lot exits. There are other funny elements in the city that I could perhaps document…like the habit of pressing chewed gum onto the eyes of celebrities and models on posters in the Tube and in bus shelters.

Anyway, I couldn’t help but think of this strange story from 2006, “Falling banana kills woman.” I’m sure that reporter is still chuckling over including terrible produce-related puns: “Friends said it was seen as an appropriate end to a unique and fruitful life.”

The adventurer is me!

Last week I finally collected 80 of the 100 dusty animal bones I needed to get my skeletal familiar, so I decided to treat myself and just buy the remaining pieces. So now I have Georg, who is deliciously creepy and likes to claw people in the face!

I’d been spending all of my daily adventures in the Haunted Conservatory, though, so now I hardly know what to do with myself. I guess it’s back to questing for me, which also means upping my Moxiousness so I can access all the necessary areas without dying every fifth turn.

Tubenauts, parts three and four

While preparing for this week’s podcast recording, I realized I didn’t post about last week’s! D’oh. The shame is on me.

Last week’s discussion was a review of The Week of Order, a comparatively calm stretch of donating crates and donning armor as people burned through the mines left behind in the aftermath of Chaos Week. It’s just like the moments after the last, huge blast of Fourth of July fireworks have gone off, and the wind changes, bringing the scent of burnt powder and smoldering paper remnants, which drift down to where you sit cringing on the grass, hoping they don’t land on your blanket and leave burn marks.

This week we talked about missions – specifically, “what’s their deal?” There were some hilarious moments, including a movie announcer intro and a Miss Teen South Carolina acceptance speech, and, uh, the Iraq, everywhere like such as.

Give it a listen.