Peter's guide to FUN stuff
As the world's leading authority on fun, I feel compelled to put everything that could ever possibly be considered fun here, but not right now. So far I've just had time to throw together a few essential fun pointers; hopefully one of these days I'll get around to completing this authoritative guide to all things fun. In the meantime please enjoy this lively placeholder paragraph and amusing photo at the top of the page.
Go ahead and cue the jokes about how I don't even have a first life. Second Life is an online "virtual community" that can be a lot of different things to different people, but for me it's a giant 3-D chat room. Much of my social life has involved typing messages to people since 1985, and this is just more of the same. Not only is it how I met my wife of nearly 25 years, it's also how she and I go on "dates" where we can dance all we want without physical handicaps getting in the way. But mostly these days I go into SL to indulge in being an oldies DJ. Three nights a week I rez into a club where other imaginary friends show up and listen while I make them listen to two hours of Buddy Holly, Al Jolson, and William Shatner.
I ended up writing so much about music I had to put My comments on music elsewhere.
Remember the computer games we played when the computer was a big honkin' keyboard and a teletype? Text adventures, or interactive fiction was always more fun to me than the latest first person shooter. I played Crowther and Woods' "Colossal Cave" game when it was written in FORTRAN on mainframes, and kept playing it when it was repackaged as Zork I under Infocom, the greatest game publisher ever. I never won a single Infocom game without getting hints, but I loved every one of them and I still do.
Speaking of interactive, this is a form of humor that requires audience participation. You write a goofy question to the Internet Oracle, and some randomly selected participant writes a funny reply, and you are assigned to write a funny reply to the next question that comes along. The best are occasionally published online as "Oracularities", and I'm proud to say that I have been selected a few times including the all-important 1000th digest. The Oracle originally started out on the NNTP news, or "Usenet" servers, so it was the Usenet Oracle back when I had time to play; now it's the Internet Oracle and my daughter took the family legacy this week to join in the fun. Go ahead, ask a few questions and write a few replies (but read a bunch first to get the idea of what the style is like).
is for any kind of math or science or computer geek, or if you can read "Pie are round, cornbread are square" and laugh. You will love XKCD --- I guarantee it or double your money back.
Ever want to see the original sheet music for "Sweet Adeline" or "My Wild Irish Rose"? This online sheet music collection has all your tin pan alley favorites.
is THE place to go if you want to learn the basics for conversing in another language. I'm too stupid to learn a whole other language (English gives me enough trouble) but whenever I'm going to meet people from another country, I can at least learn to say "Howdy" and "Thank you" in their language.
is your one-stop guide to making sure you take over the world without making any of the mistakes other Evil Overlords are prone to do, such as explaining the details of your plan to the hero after you have captured him (or her), deciding that "killing is too good for you" (it's not!), etc.