What is a third place? The first place is your home, where you can relax and be comfortable. The second place is where you usually are when not at home — work; work provides social interaction and sense of community. Howard Schultz, founder of Starbucks introduced third places as somewhere besides home or work where people can socialize and feel comfortable. Think Cheers.

Online games are thus third places as defined by the eight characteristics of third places.

Neutral Ground: Individuals are free to come and go as they please. In online games, players are not obligated to play; joins and quits are not significant events

Accessibility & Accommodation: Third places are easy to access and accommodating to individuals. Online games allow players to log on and off at will and there are always players online. Activity occurs throughout all hours of the day.

The Regulars: Regulars are those who give the place its character, and attract new individuals. Guild members, who form a clan to play the online game together, and squatters, who stay within an area of the game, are the regulars of the online world.

H/T Slashdot.

Posted by: Ace at 07:10 AM | Comments (44)
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With great power comes great responsibility.

Words to live by, even in, and perhaps because of, these ever changing times.

Of course, I always thought "Excelsior!" and "Make Mine Marvel, True Believers!" were words to live by too. They just never seemed to catch on.

Why am I writing about perennial Stan Lee catchphrases?

Because he died, and this is a tribute post.

Psyche!!! Stan the Man isn't dead! Boy, for a minute I bet all of you were running to your closets to set up your X-Men shrines and don your Spiderman underoos.

Anyway...I mention Mr. Lee because it appears that one of his greatest villians

Dr. Otto Octavius (better known to you morons as Dr. Octopus) has been put in charge of the world's most powerful supercollider. The supercollider is scheduled to come on-line in 2007.

Now then, what could possibly go wrong with Dr. Octopus running a supercollider, you ask?

Find out after the jump.

more...

Posted by: Ace at 12:20 AM | Comments (25)
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Still crazy after all these years

All your Coca-Cola are belong to us.

Gaddafi claimed that the US-drink was African as "its essences come from our plants and so multinationals must pay compensation to us."

You just have to love a defanged lunatic dictator. Really. Its the law there.

Posted by: LauraW. at 07:57 PM | Comments (110)
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"A Man Writes to a Part of Himself"

What cave are you in, hiding, rained on?
Like a wife, starving, without care,
Water dripping from your head, bent
Over ground corn...

Guys, to get in touch with your feminine side, see the video below the jump.

Thanks to skinbad, a typically weird comment thread on this subject is beginning at Innocent Bystanders. more...

Posted by: Ace at 05:56 PM | Comments (27)
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Apparently it was carrying pesticides, which of course are plenty toxic in bulk.

Posted by: Ace at 05:53 PM | Comments (9)
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It's changed now, but here's what the post, written by FDL flunkie/blogmoll Trex, once said:

So, Liza, dear, before you go assailing your betters and making Jane stand in for every blond white woman who ever pissed you off, maybe you should head back to eighth grade English and, you know, learn to spell and to write in a linear fashion. Although judging from your other posts that I read, mediocrity may be a chronic condition for you.

But remember, they're the party of "racial sensitivity."

So long as the darkies don't get uppity.

When they do, all bets are off.

Incidentally, Kos and Firedoglake have both de-linked the black blogger that rant was directed at.

more...

Posted by: Ace at 05:36 PM | Comments (134)
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Start with Publius Pundit.

If you want more, check out Bangkok Pundit, blogging from the eye of the storm.

Reading Bangkok Pundit, this wasn't about "corruption," either. It's about the fact that the military doesn't like the current elected government, which was likely to be re-elected in November or so. They call this situation -- with a party they don't like retaining power -- a "political gridlock" and a "lack of democracy."

The military coup'ists also seem to be going on and on about protecting the king from usurpations by the elected government.

Also, they toss in "fragmented" social order for good measure. Three vague reasons for a coup do not add up to one decent reason.

Odd: the political party formerly in control is named "Thais Love Thais."

Posted by: Ace at 01:43 PM | Comments (47)
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Cribbed together from readers' suggestions, regarding the coup in Thailand and general political thuggery. more...

Posted by: Ace at 01:00 PM | Comments (12)
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He actually makes a good point.

White liberal bloggers defend the all-white lunch by noting that the tried to be inclusive (by inviting Oliver Willis, who, for reasons unfathomable, did not show up for free food), but black liberal bloggers sort of insist on holding them to the same standard they apply to Republicans: It's results, not purity of intentions, that count.

This particular blogger, "Amptoons" or "Ampersand," is also less than satisfied that the white liberal outreach program consisted entirely of an invite to one (1) black blogger.

Somehow another blogger, Markos of the DailyKos, is counted as one of the "diverse" bloggers also invited but not showing up. But being weird-looking does not make one an ethnic minority.

Isn't he Greek? Aren't Greeks white? Even if he's nominally Hispanic or something (I really have no idea), he's as white as I am.

Maybe they can count some of the other white bloggers there as "minorities," too. I hear one was even a "Quane," or "Quarter Dane," as old anti-Danish racists used to classify them. (Although, it must be said, this particular blogger can easily "pass" as a Norwegian.)

The silliness of Titgate has really obscured this larger point. I don't believe in quotas, but I do believe in inclusion, and trying to recruit minority applicants for college and jobs, or inviting minority bloggers to a fairly Big Deal meeting with a former President.

And yet the Party of Endless Racial Condescension only thought to invite one (1!) black blogger to the shindig. One! Jeeze Louise, even the GOP is smart enough to have a back-up token waiting in the wings.

There aren't a whole heap of black bloggers, either on the right or left, but surely there are enough that one or, dare to dream, even two might have gotten the chance to have lunch with the nation's First Black President.

Thanks to JackStraw.

Update: It's still not too late. Jane Hamsher can photoshop blackface on to several bloggers' faces in order to get the requisite level of racial inclusiveness.

Heck, she can photoshop nunchucks into one blogger's hands to get that Chinaman in the shot, too.

(I think a commenter suggested this joke. You know who you are.)

Posted by: Ace at 12:39 PM | Comments (52)
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I don't buy that 1 in 10 figure. I didn't buy it when Kinsey trotted it out and I don't buy it here, either. 2-3% is more like it. (30-40% if you count women making out of each other at parties, but that's a whole different situational-type deal.)

Still. Self-definitions are kind of stupid, aren't they?

Nearly one in 10 men who say they're straight have sex only with other men, a New York City survey finds.

And 70% of those straight-identified men having sex with men are married.

In fact, 10% of all married men in this survey report same-sex behavior during the past year.

...

In 2003, Pathela's team performed telephone interviews with nearly 4,200 New York City men. They conducted the interviews in English, Spanish, Chinese, and Russian; a translation service helped with interviews in Greek, Korean, Yiddish, Polish, and Haitian Creole.

In nearly every study of sexual behavior, the percentage of men who report sex with men is higher than the percentage of men who report being gay.

Newsflash: If you're having sex with a guy, you're not straight.

By definition.

I guess the fact that this poll was taken in NYC might make the 1 in 10 figure more plausible.

But there's also a self-selection bias here. Not to be Biggy McBigotton, but, hey, who do you think are teaching all those gender and sexuality courses in college? By and large, it's gays and lesbians.

And for a good reason: They're more interested in the topic than most. Most take their sexuality as a given, and as not particularly interesting or worth studying.

Just guessing, but these sex-polls might skew heavily gay as far as respondants. I saw a Boston Phoenix survey a month or two ago that showed a high rate of homosexuality. That was a reader survey, not a poll, skewed twice (once by only going out to the very liberal, gay-lovin' Boston Phoenix readership, second by being entirely self-selecting), but still, the principle is the same: those who have a default, standard sort of sexual orientation simply aren't as interested in these things as those who are gay or gender confused.

It's baffling, though kind of amusing, that a guy who has sex only with men would define himself as "straight."

I guess that's what he has to say when there's no answer choice C, "Straight, but not dead."

Thanks to Roy.

Posted by: Ace at 12:02 PM | Comments (44)
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