Oh, I love this! Very scary, actually, but wonderful: Worth1000.com: Photoshop Contest: Modern Ruins 2. Link from Boing Boing.

See also: Modern Ruins--these don't appeal to me as much, they're mostly visions of cities that appear to be bombed out, rather than "naturally" ruined by age.

Worth reading: Top 10 Reasons the Apple Dock Sucks

The Dock adds a whole new behavior: Object annihilation. Drag an object off the dock and it disappears in a virtual puff of smoke.  This is the single scariest idea introduced to the Macintosh since the original bomb icon.  How would you feel if you spent eight hours working on your first Macintosh document, only to have it disappear entirely when you try to move it from the dock to the desktop?  Pretty disorienting, no?  This is a completely unnecessary concept for the user to have to learn, particularly in such a painful way. Makes for a "hot demo" though, doesn't it?

This isn't a new article, but I thought it was interesting: MacDevCenter.com: What's on Your Dock?. I can't even remember now what I was looking for when I found it. Anyway, here's what's on my dock:

From the left: Finder, Safari, Entourage, iChat, iTunes, Norton Antivirus, Palm Desktop, Photoshop CS, BBEdit, Transmit, PGP, System Preferences, a shortcut to The Sims Makin' Magic, my Home folder, my "Favorite Applications" folder, a link to the Apple .Mac site, and Trash.

(Click image for full size.) The only icon I keep on the desktop itself is the hard drive. I keep the dock exposed all the time; I don't like the effect when it comes up after being hidden. I don't mind the animated icons when a program starts, though, and I have a rule set in Entourage to bounce the icon when I get new mail. iChat also bounces when I get an instant message.

The wonderful wallpaper is from VladStudio.

An old interview with Neil Gaiman on CNN that I just ran across: CNN.com - Neil Gaiman: 'I enjoy not being famous' - July 29, 2001

But he is also -- don't let his rollicking Net-headedness fool you -- an incisive creation of his own making, rakish wearer of downtown-black and tribal shaman to 'a handful of beautiful goths and a handful of boys in dresses and a handful of sci-fi fans and a handful of nervous young girls with multicolored hair and the people who look normal and the people who look like somebody's mom. I exist at the intersection of a dozen Venn diagrams.'

A blog reader, Brice, sent me this great interview with Will Wright, the creator of The Sims and The Sims 2: USATODAY.com - 'The Sims 2' gives players a lesson in omnipotence.

There's a kind of epiphany that a lot of players go through, when in the game, you can buy a computer for your Sim, and on the computer you can have your Sim actually play little games. A lot of players get to the point where it's 2 in the morning for the Sim and the Sim is up playing computer games, and the player is trying to get him to stop playing because the Sim has to get up in the morning. Then they step back and realize it's actually 2 in the morning and that they actually need to go to work. It's almost a creepy model of the real world.

There was also an interview with Wright at the BBC News site last week: Simulating life, love and the Universe:

Building and managing the complex social, emotional and economic well-being of people in real life is hard enough.

But, said Wright, doing it with your own computerised world can teach people some profound lessons in life.

I've purposely not been reading a lot about The Sims2, since I'm almost exclusively a Mac user now (I have both a Mac and a PC at work, but only use the PC for testing purposes, and only use a Mac at home, although Bob has a PC) and there hasn't been any official word on how long it might be before a Mac version is available (or even if there will be one).

It does look beautiful, though, and very interesting.

My friend Mike Duffy is writing a weblog now: Smarter Stuff.

A great article about how cartoonist Lynn Johnston, who writes the strip For Better or For Worse, created an imaginary Ojibway village in Northern Ontario as a setting for one of her plotlines: Mtigwaki (Land of Trees). Link from Pop Culture Junk Mail.

A nice article by Neil Gaiman, specifically interesting to me because of the lengthy description of his process in writing American Gods: Books have sexes; or to be more precise, books have genders. Link from a Strange Horizons article, Divining Neil Gaiman: An Exegesis of American Gods, which was, in turn, from Neil Gaiman's Journal.

Lots of archived short science fiction stories from the Strange Horizons Archives. I'm always in favor of free fiction!

This entry made me laugh until tears came to my eyes, which doesn't happen very often, you know?

Anyway, the cat food is down there in the cabinet, amongst many many bottles of vodka and bourbon and other assorted delights, and Nora opens the cabinet door, squats like an Olympic powerlifter, and bear-hugs the huge Rubbermaid thing, and then she takes off the lid and says, 'Cat! Cat! Food! Bowl! Eat! Cat! Eat! Food!' about eight million times. Then she takes the cat-food scoop and digs around, usually managing to snag about four lonely pieces of kibble, and says "Food! Food! Cat! Eat!" Then she walks with such careful slowness to the cat food bowl that you would think she was carrying an unstable explosive compound, and pours in the cat's meager meal. more

I guess I should follow up on the free iPod thing -- fifteen people signed up through my link so far, but so far, only one has completed the requirements. It seems to take awhile for the credits to be received, so some of these people may actually have completed an offer, but it just hasn't shown up yet. I'm still holding out hope for my free iPod. :)