The Butt Ugly Weblog

Guilty pleasures and good service

Pocky Marble

The way that flights to Japan go (and jet lag) I usually end up spending the Sunday morning and early afternoon in my hotel room, indulging in two guilty pleasures: trying out the new flavors of Pocky, the ubiquitous Japanese candy, and watching the Sunday morning professional go game on television, trying to guess the next move.

This time, I ended up trying Pocky Marble, which despite it's name is actually green and tastes vaguely like green tea. But it does not have the strong, bitter taste of 抹茶, so it's pretty good. The exchange rate is very good for us Europeans right now, but so far I haven't seen too much "must-have" items. I did buy a new Yukata, though...

I'm trying to post as much as I can to my Jaiku stream, and the more I use it the more I like it. Much like with blogs, restricting the format allows you to innovate. SMS is one of the most popular communication forms on this planet, and still it's extremely restricted. Plain text was perfectly good for Shakespeare, and I'm not sure if Hamlet would be any better with hyperlinks.

I know a lot of people value user freedom, and building a playground where anything is possible, but I would argue that in many cases, it's a lot better to put people in a box. Because boxes are good for imagination. I think that's why Second Life is so boring for me - it's too open. In order to really get the value out of it, you have to invest a lot of time upfront. With something simple like SMS the value is almost immediate, and easily reachable.

Power inside the box!

Some people scoff World of Warcraft because you can't do as many things in it as you would in a role playing game. Some people are trying to build games where the GM cannot restrict the players from doing what they want. But to me, these arguments sound like the geek approach to building software: try to make it as generic as possible so that anything could conceivably be accomplished. It's true these are restricted - and because of that they are so interesting to me. If you have complete freedom to do anything you want, then it quickly becomes boring. I need something to kick my imagination with, so to say. Maybe that's why I'm an engineer instead of an artist :-)

By the way, my hotel has an innovation I would really hope other hotels would copy: the room safe has a power-strip inside, so you can charge your laptop while you're walking out in town. I would like to call that inside-the-box -thinking. Brilliant!

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