Well, it’s been a couple of weeks since my last post. What have I missed?

• Bulwer-Lytton 2004 is out. Get it while it’s hot.

• Anne van Kesteren is back from vacation, and he is on fire. What’s the deal with XHTML? Does XHTML really save bandwidth over HTML? Day by day, bit by little bit, we all edge closer to markup sanity.

• Meanwhile, Jacques is back too, and he seems rather underwhelmed by all the hype over the Stephen Hawking’s now famous black hole information loss wager. After all, as Jacques reminds us, “Anyone who hasn’t been asleep for the past 6 years knows that quantum gravity in asymptotically anti-de Sitter space has unitary time evolution.” Actually, what I find even more interesting is the fact that Jacques’s post is titled, “No Information Lost Here!”, and is sitting at the URL http://golem.ph.utexas.edu/~distler/blog/archives/000404.html. Coincidence?? I think no– oh, heck, it’s probably a coincidence.

• The World of Warcraft Beta developers are hard at work, furiously redesigning the in-game auction houses. Seems like they’re spending a lot of time on this, particularly since someone else has already done most of the design grunt work for them.

• In other MMORPG news, City of Heroes has implemented capes. What I really like about this is that they tried to fold this into the story. It’s not that the developers didn’t quite get capes working in time for the release — no, no, no, it’s because all the heroes had been in mourning over one of their fallen comrades. Nicely done! Although come to think of it, why didn’t Sony ever try this with Everquest? For example, rangers sucked for the first three-and-a-half years of the game not because of a development problem, but because they were all in mourning. They were all holding back, see?

• Well, forget all these fancy-schmantzy MMORPGs. I’m holding out for Peasant’s Quest.

• Finally, via Russ, I found out that fellow ’97 HMC alum Joe Beda is a development lead on Microsoft’s Avalon team. Right on, Joe! For the record, I’m not even a little bit jealous of Joe’s incredibly important and prestigious job. Although that’s probably because I can take comfort in the fact that I still have all my hair.