Maybe that’s an obvious statement, or maybe not. I get the impression from the Joystiq readership that they feel being a professional blogger is easy as pie.

Truth is, even I’m a little surprised as to how hard it is to do the full-time blogging thing. For anyone out of the loop, I started as a full-time blogger for Joystiq a few weeks ago, and it’s been, well, hard! I’ll get into the swing of it soon, I’m sure. But it’s no cakewalk, I’ll tell you that.

On top of all my new coverage, I’m still doing the Off the Grid thing. This past week was Diceland, a very clever strategy game from James Ernest which uses paper dice. I like it, but even after reviewing it I know I need to go back and play more of it to build a solid, game-design-y opinion. We’ll have to revisit it later.

Scottypedia is going well so far. I’m not ready to hand out the link (although you can probably guess the URL); I’m still trying to get a certain number of starter articles set up before going public. In the longer term, I’d love to get random article excerpts appearing in the sidebar here. As if I’m starved for things to do.

At least, this is the conclusion I reach in my review of McKenzie Wark’s Gamer Theory, published as part of my Off the Grid column on Joystiq. Wark developed the hypertext version of Gamer Theory first, later including the first round’s comments and criticisms into a print-based version published by Harvard University Press. In tandem with the dead-tree issuing, he also introduced Gamer Theory Version 2.0, which re-opens the commenting system for the digital text.

The result of this dual-publication is the inevitable comparison between the two mediums. In my opinion, hypertext clearly comes out on top. The text is made stronger by its original format, and the accompanying commentary serves the text better when offered simultaneously, rather than being pushed to an endnotes section.

Arguably, however, the hypertext version is stronger because the content was originally conceived as hypertext. And Wark has already commented on my review, stating that “are supposed to be different reading experiences. The former stresses the role of the comments more while the later ‘hides’ them a bit to produce a more linear reading feel.”

Still, I do wish that Wark experimented more with the print medium, rather than intentionally working within convention. His decision though. Wark’s (hopefully) coming to Bard toward the end of the month for a small conference on games and conflict. I look forward to meeting him.

Also, the senior project is done. I plan on posting some of the material on my site in due time. I’ve already looked into installing MediaWiki, and my host doesn’t support it (yet).

In a haze of clicking around, I stumbled across Khoi Vinh’s web site, and his post on a talk given recently at SXSW in Texas. The focus of the talk was the use of grids in visual design. I started reading it without realizing that Khoi’s the guy responsible for this recent redesign. That just made me read closer.

His post (which was so good I’m linking to it twice) talks about a theoretical redesign of yahoo.com using grids, and he includes the slides from his SXSW presentation on the topic. A lot of what he talks about is working within certain constraints, such as an average display resolution, and the various ad units which have to be taken into consideration in the design. He says the following:

Ad units complicate things, but they’re actually very helpful because they serve as fixed constraints.

Constraints are the mother of design invention.

How awesome is that?! His slides were awe-inspiring, and have already taken root in my brain. I love when stuff does that.

Apple’s site has been pissing me off lately. It’s a silly little thing, but it’s frustrating to me. They’re advertising the iPhone on the front page of apple.com. It’s shiny, it’s pretty, it’s the bleeding edge, but the site is instructing me to do something that I can’t do.

I can’t “slide to unlock,” because the phone is just a quicktime video. And the second I click it, before I have a chance to slide, it sends me to the iPhone page.

It’s stupid, right? But I doubt that I’m the only person who tries to “slide to unlock.” And this isn’t just an annoyance. I want to slide to unlock. I want to be able to have a playful relationship with that image, and by extension with Apple, their website, and the iPhone.

Let me slide to unlock. If nothing else, give me the satisfaction of having that tiny interaction. At worst, it will give people a half-second of enjoyment. At best, it’ll make them feel a connection to the phone; a direct causal relationship to its interface. It might even make them want to play with it more.

You’d think that Mensa, being an organization comprised solely of intelligent people, would have at least one able web designer in their group. Oh well.

In lieu of working on my senior project, I gave numberless a new look, taking inspiration from Daring Fireball and (picnic, LIGHTNING). James tells me that John Gruber gets angry at people who steal his design, so let me emphasize that this site is inspired by his site, and is not necessarily copying its format. I admit I worry about such trivial things as angering Mr. Gruber, but I suppose it’s difficult to offend people when you have no readership. So I’m safe for now.

I’m still not 100% in love with the look. It’s less conventional, but still blog-like; the large logo is at times eye-catching, and at times an eyesore; the background color looks better on some screens than others; and the content looks pinched to me, compressed into the space between the sidebar and the main section, leaving the rest of the site seeming bare.

On the plus side, I managed to make a table-less page design that looks identical in IE, Firefox, and Safari. And on my first try, too! Regardless, I still might end up tweaking a few things, namely the color scheme and size of the header.