Wonderchicken Industries™

Eudaimoneers

Strap on your happiness pants!

Socrates and his buddies and students spent an awful lot of time drinking wine and thinking about The Good Life, about activity in accordance with virtue, and about right action that results in happiness. Eudaimonia is a Greek word commonly translated as happiness or welfare or 'human flourishing'. Our goal is to be Eudaimoneers -- we're keen to engineer as much eudaimonia as we can in the intersection of some stuff we understand -- gaming, advertising and independent web publishers.

Eudaimoneers is an invitation-only network of independent gaming websites who want to make money with a single, tasteful ad laser-targeted to their audiences. Lasers! We want to strip away the cruft, keep it simple and rebuild trust. Our ads are only for gamer-pleasing stuff that we've personally used and liked. Gaming fans and web publishers get faster-loading sites with great ads they'd actually want to see.

No tracking, no shenanigans, and 10% goes to to charity.

badvertising

We're gonna make us some big dumb money.

It's a little horrifying the lengths that web advertising will go to, er... punch the last few coins out of our... web bricks.

badvertising is a Bad Web Ad Strategy generator I made that felt a little off-message for the Eudaimoneers site, but it makes me laugh, so: a single serving site, just for fun (and maybe a little cross-promotion).

MefightClub

Per Rotato Ad Astra

Mefight Club is my proudest web achievement. A busy community of really great people who like to play games together, online and off. It's closing in on 4000 members, we've had meetups all around the world, and we've donated nearly $20,000 to Child's Play Charity over the past couple of years. It continues to grow, and I continue to love running it.

I’ve been immensely proud to host a place where, as much as I’ve been able, with the happy co-operation of our membership, people who had come to expect that their interactions with other gamers were doomed to be unpleasant because of their gender or race or sexual orientation or for other reasons were welcome and could feel welcomed. It’s been enormous fun.

Emptybottle.org

Wonderchickensian. Ornithogonal.

Emptybottle.org is my web home from back in the misty depths of the Beginning -- my first website, my first weblog, and the place where I did most of my writing for the better part of a decade. Some of my best (and worst) writing is enshrined there for the ages. Writing as a creative outlet hasn't thrilled me as much as it used to, but I still occasionally get a wild hair up my ass and post something.

The best of the bottle can be found here, and there's some uncrappy stuff there that I'm still pretty proud of writing.

Gamefilter

Like Metafilter, but, you know, for games.

Gamefilter is Metafilter, but you know: for games. It's modelled explicitly on the great work done by Matt Haughey and company at MeFi, and (hopefully) fills a gap not only in gaming websites in general, but in the growing MefightClub network of sites in particular.

It's not the busy, going concern I'd hoped it would be, but if there's one thing I've learned over the years of making web stuff, it's that if you build it, that doesn't necessarily mean They Will Come. So it goes.

Levels Of Detail

Words. About games.

Levels of Detail is the public face of Mefight Club, the Metafilter-offshoot gaming community I've been running since 2007. It's a group blog (and podcast) created by any members of the 4000-strong community (as of 2015) who want to contribute.

There's some pretty great writing there from MefightClub members, but like Gamefilter, it's not nearly as busy as the MefightClub mothership itself.

It's A Mad Mad Mad Mad World

Chasing the Big W.

My favorite movie of all time is It's A Mad Mad Mad Mad World, released all the way back in 1963, before I was even born. I find it hard to explain why, exactly, but my love for it remains undiminished. I put together this site as a wee tribute.

It is probably far too slow for the Youth of Today, but I think the movie still holds up, and I still watch it with a bunch of beers every couple of months, even after all these years.

We Lead Not Follow

No, you shut up.

We Lead Not Follow is a single-serving website I created because the rise of Twitter (and what I think, when I'm feeling cranky, that it represents culturally), well, it annoys me a bit, probably because I am overprotective of my lawn. When Kevin Rose of Digg fame created a Twitter-connected site called WeFollow, I got all exercized and blurted a classic wonderchickensian rant out onto a new domain rather than just posting it to Emptybottle. Ah well.

I'm not sure why I keep renewing the domain after all these years -- long after being skeptical about Twitter and Facebook became the domain of cranky weirdos. I guess I am a bit of a cranky weirdo, when it comes down to it, and the photoshops make me laugh.

Ludic Research Labs

Those bastards.

LRL is something. Or maybe it's not. It's going to be something, though. Or maybe it won't.

Waeguk.in

It ain't easy being a waeguk-in.

Waeguk.in is my third or fourth attempt at a Koreablog. This one might stick. Go there, see neat Korea-related stuff (and, if you must, trawl the archives for a few of the essays I wrote, long ago). Waeguk-in means foreign person in Korean. In case you were wondering.

Christopher Kovacs dot net

The alter ego.

A simple business-card kind of site, mostly just to be a place that people who are searching for me can find me, since I'm not overly keen on the social media platforms.

To put it mildly.