This time I typed in "LARP" in the Google image search. Sorry if you're looking for heavier content, wait untill I'm not on holiday. "LARP" is an acronym for "Live Action Role Play" which I like to make fun of every once in a while. It's essentially Dungeons and Dragons but instead of being played huddling around a dark table with dice and the imagination, it's played live. You dress up in your favourite character costume and run around throwing pencils at each other shouting "lightning bolt!". (See the soundseeing tour at the end of Chub Creek episode 40 revisited for more on this) The fellow here in the bird suit is a good example. I especially like the magic marker feathers.

Really I shouldn't make fun. It has occured to me before that all of this blogging stuff, and even more so, podcasting hold many parallels to this type of fantasy where a whole world is created and each player holds a certain heirarchy within it. For example, you may think of Adam Curry as the Aragorn of the land of Pod. Or maybe you might paint him as Sauron. Depends on your point of view. (Adam Curry helped create the podcasting phenomenon as well as much of the culture that ensued). Gary and Myself are something like Hobbits, trying to find our way through a dark world where it's difficult to get any attention. Brenda Dayne of Cast-On is Galadriel. Powerful, yet humble, with thousands of knitting wood-eleves at her command. P.W. Fenton is TreeBeard the Ent, while Michael Butler is Tom Bombadill, loveable, timeless, ever prancing through the forest, oblivious to the current comings and goings of the world, but never tiring of the music playing in his own mind. Gandalf would have to be Ted Reicken of Island Podcasting, with the less stable Sauruman being played by Scarborough Dude from the Dicks n Janes Podcast.

Okay I got off base there, and I didn't mention many of my favourite shows, but podcasts do have a sort of heirarchy, and when you first get into it you have this illusion that the world you have entered cares about you or even loves you. What you soon find out is that the podosphere is populated mostly with orcs, always mewling in their basements with inferior microphones, bad jokes, and worse music, suffering from delusions of grandeur. There isn't much separating the Hobbits from the Orcs.

Why is my optical mouse shining with a faint blue glow?