Place the 50 states on a map, without outlines.

I scored 92% (46 of 50 placed perfectly), with an average error of 25 miles. I really expected to do much worse.

Someone here at work turned me on to Yahoo!'s Text Twist game (requires Java, and despite the disclaimer it does work under Linux at least). I was prepared to say that I only play it occassionally, you know, to clear my head once in a while. That's all.

I had to leave it up in a browser window Friday, because I had to be somewhere else, and I wasn't going to lose potential high-scoring game. I've now stayed nearly an hour past work-time, just to finish the game. But hey, I ended up with a score of 167,830.

I'm not even pretending that I'm not an addict on this one.

My dearth of writing here lately is due to a lot of factors, but one big factor has been an upsurge in the amount of time I've been playing games. In particular, CivIII and my MAME installation (MAME is on my Linux laptop).

I play a lot more than I'd like to be, just because it feels like wasted time afterwards. I enjoy it at the time, but it's kind of an empty feeling when the game is shut down.

Still, I did just win the Space Race at Regent level in CivIII, playing the new Ottoman tribe from the CivIII expansion pack. That must surely count for something.

I have come to realize and accept that I am pretty much powerless to resist the lure of a well-written game. In fact, my Windows machine on my home network pretty much exists to be a game platform. I told myself that I was going to use it to cross-develop web pages and test them on Internet Explorer (which I do), and that I would make it dual-boot into BeOS (which I did). But to be honest, about all it's done is play games. Diablo II, Civilization III, and now Warcraft III.

There are other games that I play from time to time. But the truth is, I like the simulations, and Blizzard has a good grip on that market. Thanks to Blizzard (the makers of Diablo, Warcraft, and other forms of PC-game-crack that I dare not bring into my home), I have a $500 game console, and I often find myself up until all hours.

Like tonight.