I have been very busy in the last couple of days, but there’s a new slideshow up in the pictures section of the abandoned river house in Ellicott City.

There is a new blog up on the subject of computer games; it’s run by the good folks at Corante, whose newsfeed I subscribed to daily until the backlog got hopelessly past twenty days. But what I did read was very thorough and insightful. Andrew Phelps notes here that the online community in Everquest was estimated to be the 77th richest world economy by a Cal State professor who guaged the numbers on current Ebay auctions. Those are some pretty powerful numbers when you stop to think about them. It’s fascinating to see people begin to look at gaming in a different light (myself included.) The issue of trust in a virtual community is fascinating. What happens when there’s rampant cheating on a particular server or throughout a certain game? Easy—people stop playing it. Therefore it becomes mandatory for the creators to either prevent this, or make it so cheating is hard, expensive, or unfeasible.

Music of the day: the ParaDynamic Roadhouse streaming feed on iTunes. (Warning: the webpage is sucktastic, but the feed is great. Look for it under the “Blues” category.)