Whilst perusing the lists of bots indexing this blog, I noticed an unfamiliar name, GigaBlast. They search through blogs with a natural language interface, similar to what Jeeves claimed to do but never quite managed.
My mission: Ask it something that would refer back to RP & RL!
what is roleplaying and real life?
Many of the interesting responses pointed to a game called “My Life With Master“, a link I was hesitant to follow at work… but it’s actually a pencil-and-paper roleplaying game about a minion who struggles with self-loathing and weariness as he obeys the commands of a capricious master. From the errata for the game:
On page 41, near the five Epilogue constraints write, “But what of the minion whose Self-loathing plus Weariness is equal to their Love plus Reason? Such a one satisfies none of the five constraints. Surely this by Czege is an unforgivable omission! I submit that their Epilogue should be characterized by finding themself a new Master.”
Google takes this same query and points to something indexed by its book search, “Horror Rules, the Simply Horrible Roleplaying Game“. Sounds like search engine bots have a pretty dim view of real life. All I get are horror responses…
I’ve known for a long time that no search engine ranks this blog high enough to display unless I plop lines and lines of verbatim text into it. Maybe I should narrow my focus; or just HAVE a focus, since at the moment it is very “whatever I happen to be into today”.
OH MY GOD!
I just typed “Betraying Qeynos” into Google – and this was the NUMBER ONE SITE! Quick, everyone type that into Google… this is the first time I’ve even been on the first page…!
Running over to Yahoo! — WOOHOO! Number three! And MSN?
Number one in MSN!
Wow, I am inflated with a puffy sense of self-importance….!
Gigablast… nope, not there yet… but they’re trashy anyway. Ask.com – nope, but I already knew they didn’t index this site. They index EZBoards though? People still use EZBoard? Wow… crammed with ads and popups, and they lose your forums, too.
Anyway. I can rest easy knowing that if I suddenly died, the fictional adventures of my fictional characters will live on without me.
One last thought: Is googling for your character’s names more, or less, pathetic than googling for your own? Googling for my own is pointless, as I share my real name with a celebrity, and it’s all about HER.
Courtesy of Boing Boing, a website that selects random identities for you, perfect for typing into forms that ask too much personal information.
From now on, you can contact me as:
Mary S. Collins
332 Park Lane
Soso, MS 39480
Email Address: Mary.S.Collins@pookmail.com
(More information at PookMail.com)
Phone: 601-729-9702
Mother’s maiden name: Nelson
Birthday: March 22, 1944
Visa: 4485 6120 4866 8543
Expires: 5/2007
I’m apparently 62 years old, so speak really loud when you call. And type big.
and one last thing before I return to work… when this site relaunches under WordPress, it will be called West Karana. 2 out of 3 blogs that link here call it that, and it IS the URL after all, so… that means I should probably abandon that “Secret of NIMH”-style theme I was working on and do something West Karana-ish.
Ping! I was kinda hurt that Google didn’t include me in their list of Blogs; this blog only comes up in their normal web search. Turns out I wasn’t pinging Weblogs.com, only Technorati.com. Am now pinging Weblogs, so maybe the blog crawlers will begin to read this site… I wanna be there when Umbria starts demographizing the hundred-year-old hobbit constituency.
really on a blog roll today
The thing that got me started on the whole “why is my blog not counted as a blog?” thing is the little note on The Huffington Post (a great political read with a liberal bent) where they do smarmy buzz graphs (on the left there) to see what people are talking about on blogs.
I typed in the names of some MMORPGs to see how the buzz was doing. Everything was about where I expected it to be (and somehow, by some wild coincidence, I typed in the game names in the exact high-to-low order they would be placed!)
Honestly, I expected Warhammer to be lower in the buzz, and DAoC to be higher. It’s sad, but I think it’s clear DAoC will die before the game it borrowed so much from, EverQuest 1. EQ1 kept reinventing itself in ways DAoC did not; whereas the current EQ1 is a very different game from the one that launched in 1999, DAoC, at least the last time I played it last winter, is very much the same as it has always been.
Another oddity; how come people aren’t talking more about WoW? It has 30 times the subscribers of EQ, yet only twice the buzz? You’d expect it to be proportionately more, but Warhammer, a game not even out yet, has all the buzz, while WoW, with its new 1.11 patch, barely beats it.
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