For this week’s Friday Five, the increasingly well-organized transitus asks: Philip Gulley writes: “Sometimes we lose things before we??re done needing them. ” What are five things you lost before you were done needing them? Oh, there have been so many things. Let’s see: My desire to really, truly learn French. Something stupid happened, and working at the company I was at, I kind of lost the desire to really, truly learn French. Maybe if I’d needed it to navigate a relationship with a woman, I might have tried harder, but I never had a French-Canadian girlfriend and nearly all …

This week Laura asks the Friday Fivers: Sharing an office with one or more people can be a bit of a strain sometimes. Humour me, name five annoying habits of co-workers you’ve had to put up with. Or are YOU the one who chews with his mouth open or types aloud? No fair, Laura. I need to be careful because at least half of the people I work with know about this webpage and could (and probably would) take offense if I said something nasty about someone… and just enough people check it that it would happen if I was …

Um, something seems to be up with the F5 Questionlog, since this week it put out another question by me: I was rereading a short story by Orson Scott Card, called “Angles” (in the Silverberg/Haber Best of SF 2002 collection), when I ran into a machine that’s familiar to all of us, I’m sure. The trope is all too common in SF: the machine that can capture others’ experiences and let you experience them for yourself. Imagine if such a machine were built to capture the experiences of others, as they were happening, and store them for later re-experiencing by …

It’s mine! It’s mine this week! And boy is it long-winded: You’ve been approached by VR-Box, a new home entertainment system startup, for the creation of five new videogames for their home system. They’re reviewing submissions from several different people, and their offer is that, whoever submits the most 5 ideas deemed most interesting and most profitable, gets a position with them simply hanging around thinking up ideas for video games for some collossal amount of money. The system is an immersive, virtual reality game. People playing will know they’re playing, they won’t be at any special risk physically or …

Marvin, who I am pretty sure is not a psycho, asked use F5ers the following question this week: What are the five signs that you, yes you, might be a serial-killing psychopath? Now, here’s the thing. I am pretty sure I’m not a serial-killing psychopath. If I were one, I think I would have cracked by now, and gone and done the thing. But imagine I were one. What would I look back on afterwards, and kick myself, mumbling, “I shoulda known…”? Well, here’s one thing. I find Flash games like this and this (depicted below, in order) funny. I …