Yzabel / July 5, 2005

I Am A Statistic

Take the MIT Weblog SurveyAlright, alright, I’ve given in and taken the survey. I know everybody and their dog is taking it currently, but it helps them with their stats, after all, so I don’t feel too guilty.In other statistics, snatched from The Blog Herald: Business Week Online reports that 5% of French people are keeping a blog, which makes it about 3 millions of people in our nice country (and more than 2 millions of them using Skyblog, according to Loïc LeMeur’s Wiki, probably because it supports French characters and is easily available, I suppose).Oui oui, 3 millions de bloggers français. Certes, le pays est bien plus petit que les States, ce qui fait que les pourcentages grimpent vite en flèche… mais quand même!

Yzabel / July 4, 2005

Games, Choices, Morality?

Reading the news at lunch today, I spotted what seemed to me like an interesting article in the Toronto Star, raising quite an amount of questions regarding moral choices in games:

Her husband notices you watching his tryst. He begs you not to tell his wife, and offers you cash to keep his secret. So, what do you do? More than that, what is the right thing to do in this situation? The “good” thing to do? Do you tell the wife, destroy the marriage, and leave just as broke as you were before? Or do you take the money in exchange for your silence? Is that right? 

Yup, it’s a scene from Fable, and it’s a choice that indeed is to be taken in the game. What would a player do? What is the right choice? The wrong one? Sure, it’s “only a game”, yet it still calls at some sense of morality that everyone is supposed to have. People want less linear games, games in which we’d really be able to change the course of events through our own choices, and not by simply following the directions set by the developers; when they get it – or as close to it as technically possible – they’re faced with the fact that doing whatever they want necessarily implies that our choices can also be the wrong ones (not as in making them fail to solve game puzzles or quests – “wrong” as in “morally questionable”, sort of).Read More

Yzabel / July 3, 2005

WordPress Theme Love

A few hours of digging, uploading and activating later, I think I’m almost done with the choice of a theme for this blog. The competition was tough, among the many templates listed at Alexking.org, Blogging Pro and the WordPress Reference Centre (even though lots of them can be found on these three websites, thus not taking me that much more time to check them all). I must admit that in spite of the time I needed at first to grasp how the themes system in WP was working, I now like it a lot; it can be a hassle when not having much time to tweak them, of course, but when knowing what to aim for, it allows for much customization.Finally, the winner is Boredom from Aamukaste (I know, I know… what a name for something that I don’t intend to make boring!), with some alterations in its colors and files. I realize that once again, I’ve settled for lots of violet and purple… It looks like these may be some kind of favorite colors for me when it comes to websites. All in all, the basic theme was nice enough, the dominant green just wasn’t my cup of tea at the moment. I’ll make sure to design a fully personal template when I have more time and ideas, though.

Yzabel / July 3, 2005

Mandatory First

Since there is one for every blog, here is my first entry.This blog will be, for a time, experimental more than anything else. There are often many articles or thoughts I find myself wanting to post *somewhere*, yet don’t really have any place to do it; my other blogs are either devoted to a specific topic, or just aren’t really suitable in my opinion. Thus the Y Logs were born, as a page where I could express myself on (almost) everything. I’m able to blab about a lot of things.I may also write in it in French, which is only logical, after all, given that it’s my first language. What is less logical is that most of the time, I feel more at ease writing in English, yet this is another story. Just don’t be surprised to find entries in French only or in both languages when the mood strikes (or when I decide to write about something that is really relevant for French people only).Now to toy with the templates some more, until I find one that I like enough…