The first time I played through Facade, I was thorougly unimpressed. The characters didn't seem to respond to the things I said, and when they did respond to me, they often completely misinterpreted what I was saying. At first, I attributed these things to poor programming. However, as I played through the game again, I realized that the moods of the characters varied significantly between runthroughs. The underlying tensions were always there, but in some runthroughs they were much more reactive than others, even when little in my behavior changed. There were some events that, as far as I can tell, were entirely determined by random chance. This dynamic is, in my mind, what separates Facade from other games or interactive stories. In Facade, you have some degree of influence over the events, but there are still major plot points that change from version to version for reasons entirely outside of your control.

During our first class meetings and the intervening time,I was unable to recall a time when I had actually read a blog regularly or for its own sake. Sure, I had had them linked for me .

Friend on AIM: "u have to check this out!!...link" or sometimes just "link"
Me: "...haha...that's kind of funny I guess." (Dear god, this sucks. Why are they linking it for me?).

Or sometimes I had run into them when googling for something that might actually be useful. However, I usually found the format of the blog itself to be repellant. Without fail, the information I was actually seeking would be buried deep within the back-entries, and I would realize that I really didn't give enough of a damn to sift through the blogger's breathless attempts to make their life seem interesting to perfect strangers. After all, there were about 200,000 other google results that would probably be more helpful and less painful to navigate.