Readers of this blog know one of my main internet hangouts is Quarter to Three.  In the past year or two I've started more actively reading NeoGAF as well.  Very different places with extremely different tones.  In a comparative discussion of them today I dug up a few of the crazy photoshopped-up GIFs that are frequently posted there.  This is probably my favorite, celebrating the Wii's great momentum of late:

Ah, such entertainment value... every time I look at that I just bust out laughing.

My older son, Xavier, re-discovered Wario Ware: Smooth Moves for the Wii.  This sort of game is really perfect for the Wii, and it pushes all his hyperactive 6-yr-old buttons to jump around acting crazy with the controller.  He was basically giggling continuously for several hours while we played multiplayer and then he tried to make some progress in single player. 

I certainly have my nits to pick with the game -- the fundamentals are inferior to previous entries in the series, and the multiplayer mode is one-at-a-time instead of letting people do all the goofy games in parallel.  The original Warioware is still the best game of the lot, IMO.  But Smooth Moves is a pretty good, if minimal, conversion of it to the Wii motion & pointing mechanics.

Poking around on the new(-ish) Steam Community site, I was overall positively impressed with ease of use and features.  Good stuff, and I think the kind of "background socialization" that things like that and Xbox Live provide are going to be a primary source of online presence in the future.

But the feature that impressed me the most?  You can instantly make a "homepage" for your Steam ID that has a URL of your own choosing.  So voila, http://steamcommunity.com/id/xemu.  I imagine they'll have to police various offensive names there, of course, but you can't beat the ease of use.

Much like editing a wiki, you don't make a new page, you just assert the existence of a page by referencing it and -- voila -- there it is.  This sort of philosophy of cutting the steps down in any process to the minimum possible is really useful with the kind of tools and code architecture systems we build all the time.   Need a new configuration variable?  Just try to use it from code and the system is robust enough to create it if it didn't already exist.

This kind of meta-level ease of use is going to be one of the strongest underlying philosophy shifts as we slowly, slowly, progress towards truly robust software platforms (for users and developers).

GTA Delayed.

I think a moment of silence is in order.

We've been in crunch this week, trying to really nail down some core features of the game in advance of some important internal milestones coming up later in the year.  It is a bit tiring (especially as I have to admit I'm getting older), but really satisfying too.  Of course, crunch at Ensemble is pretty tame compared to other places... official hours that are long, but not grueling... no coming in on weekends... catered food.  While the extra hours help, I find the "lets get to work" mentality is just as important.  Reduced meetings, lots of focus on measurable, tangible progress.

It certainly doesn't hurt that I'm a bit of a night owl either.  8 PM to Midnight is some of my easily most productive coding time.