While I've picked up a rather eclectic design skillset over the course of my career, including (but not limited to), web design, copywriting, packaging, animation, and front-end development, there's a single passion that unites all these things.

Improving people's lives by giving them kinder, saner tools.

Yup. Cliched. Corny as Hell. Still true.

I'm not talking world-shaking, changing-the-course-of-history improvements.

I'm talking small, everyday improvements. Improvements that make someone's day just a little bit better, preferably over an extended period of time. An easy, concrete example? Search with autocomplete. And there are so many, many more.

I believe that the tools we use should give us feelings of delight or mastery - or at very least, not make us feel like idiots. Kinder, saner software (because software is a product and a tool, as well as a service) isn't just good for customers, it's good for software companies too.

These kinder, saner tools are the ones that

...we vote for with our wallets.

...help us do things more quickly, more easily, more painlessly, and sometimes, even more enjoyably.

...allow us to go home after a hard day's work with the satisfaction of a job well done - and not the frustration of having spent a day fighting the very software that's supposed to help us.

And if, at the end of the day, I get to make these tools look sexy - that's a bonus. ;)

It doesn't bug me at all that my slip of a girl Lancer somehow fights on foot with a lance twice her height and with a haft that is about the width of her waist.

It doesn't bug me that she has stiletto heels on her solleret, to go with her lingerie platemail.

But DAMN, it really freaking bothers me that she rides sidesaddle! LOL!

...drive-bys where someone with a semiautomatic fires all-out at a kindergarten kid.

I really like AoW, I think the justice system is one of the nicest I've ever seen (including MUDs), and they've done many, many things right. The above still holds true though. ;)

Not quite the screenshots I intended to post, but this was so silly that I had to share it. ;)

Yes, AoW is full, open-world PvP. Yes, carebear nugget likes it. It feels more like a PK MUD + sandbox than any other MMO I've played, and the world feels like a ... world!

I think one of the reasons the silliness of this dialogue works so well is that (pesky players aside), in other places almost all of AoW is totally IC (in character), and even this one is subtly done.

"I was part of the WELL almost from the very beginning. The Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link was founded in the spring of 1985 - before Mark Zuckerberg's first birthday. I joined in August of that first year.

I can't remember how many WELL parties, chili cook-offs, trips to the circus, and other events - somewhat repellingy called "fleshmeets" at the time - I attended. My baby daughter and my 80-year-old mother joined me on many of those occasions. I danced at three weddings of WELLbeings, as we called ourselves, attended four funerals, brought food and companionship to the bedside of a dying WELLbeing on one occasion. WELL people babysat for my daughter, and I watched their children.

Don't tell me that "real communities" can't happen online."

What the WELL's Rise and Fall Tell Us About Online Community

A wonderful, highly illegal map of the Interwebs, and here is the full mad scientist paper, aaaand some of the awesome images generated (available via the paper too).

He's almost as sexy as my cute little boy dorf!