Toluu : rizzn's personal blog

rizzn's personal blog

So for some reason thirteen days ago, I decided that I wasn’t going to dilly dally any longer and got around to planning a podcast of my own. I’ve been playing with the idea for a while, but for some reason, the creative puzzle pieces just didn’t come together in my mind while I attempted to conceptualize it.

But then suddenly, they just sorta fell into place in my mind, and I set about getting folks to join up.

It’s Called TENtech

For the last week, I’ve been furiously designing sets, ordering replacement pieces for my home studio, and tapping out emails to my friends to get them to join in my endeavor.

Here’s who said yes, in no particular order: Art Lindsey, Steven Hodson of WinExtra, Mona, Saha, Doriano “Paisano” Carta, Julia Roy, Alana Taylor and,

Virtual Peace: Really Cool or Really Stupid?Yesterday

I was cruising through SlashDot this evening before I nodded off to sleep, and caught this story on SlashDot Games about a new game in the vein of “America’s Army” called “Virtual Peace.”

The game, from one of the demos, looks like it’s a decent first attempt, though certainly nothing close to the calibre that was America’s Army. The graphics are a bit weak, and it looks like it’s both fairly limited to only an educational setting and highly charged with an ideology.

Take a look for yourself.

It’s just the sort of geeky game I’d love to play, but it’s the sort of game that’d likely end up pissing me off before I got too far into it. The logistics of how intense international negotiations work and are carried out are certainly very interesting to me, but the economic mechanics the system is likely teaching are way off base, at least according to my own personal ideology.

Back to the SlashDot article, though, as usual, the most interesting stuff took place down in the comments area. This particular comment from K1e0x struck a chord with me:

America's Army was known to be a "recruiting tool" intended to show kids how "cool" being a grunt in the infantry is.

In light of current politics, there is something on the

An Actual -Mechanical- TurkNovember 30

I just had a completely random thought. This requires a bit of set up for most of my readers.

Mechanical Turk, farming and robotics, right? That's the concept.

Ethics and New MediaNovember 25

I think, sometimes, I'm ethical to a fault.

Take, for instance, this project I started working on putting together last night. It's collaborative, and if it prospers and succeeds, I stand to profit from it. I can't make money with this without the help of others.

The first four people I asked to help all unconditionally said "yes, they're on board" via IM. Their reply hit the screen almost as soon as my IM saying "I plan on sharing revenue" hit the screen.

In all four cases, that little devil that sits on my shoulder said "Now Mark, you're leaving money on the table. These people would've helped you for free."

Of course that's probably not altogether true. I believe in offering payment, even when none is asked for, because when it's clear that it's not just a friendly arrangement, but a business one, there is a greater expectation of mutual performance. Of course, as the guy paying the money, it always puts more pressure on me to come up with a supportive business plan and a solid cashflow.

I think it's the ethical thing, though.

I'm guessing, though, that even though these people are my friends and want to see me succeed, part of why they say yes is that they know I'm ethical 'to a fault,' and that I want to bring others u

Updates: Rizzn’s Link BlogNovember 24

I spent the morning making significant updates to rizzn.com today. It started out as a slight problem I had with the ReadBurner widget (I had to take it down – there were some uncharacteristic issues with the load time, and I expect to have it back up once they’re addressed). But what started out as a minor update to the templates ended up with me working for five hours on the graphics, layout, and mechanics of the site.

Most of the changes were cosmetic:

Sub-header graphics for all the sections. Link blog, blog posts, Mashable posts, community posts.
Created a masthead style graphic. I decided to resurrect the “studio.rizzn” name. I thought about getting silly and resurrecting my “rizzo’s e-zine” name from this site in 1996, but I just couldn’t do it with a straight face.
Created a Contact Me graphic. This site has been lacking information on ways to contact me for over a year. Since just about everyone and their mother’s PR agent now has my info, I don’t figure there’s any harm in adding it back to the site. I am, however, leaving my street address off for now.
RSS Subscribe banner. I found these tight little grunge RSS icons, and figured I should use them.
Minor table and CSS rendering issues. Things will generally look more balance now.

Some of the changes were behind the scenes:

Enhanced Community Features. I made VERY prominent on the front page the last comments sect