Spent the last couple of evenings playing games in the sun and the rain with Interesting Games Lab: snakes and ladders with a pantone twist in a multistorey car park, searching for lovers and dancers and hiding behind pillars around Harbourside, training human dolphins to do tricks using only applause, playing werewolf and standing in the square playing Geometry Wars on the side of a building. Fun fun fun.

The Comfort of Strangers game is playing at the Come Out and Play festival in NYC in a couple of weeks: I’m hoping they’ll bring it along to Hide and Seek in London at the end of June. There was something kind of magical about weaving a team together from nothing more than proximity, and playing a game outside gives you new eyes for a familiar landscape: in the end, though, I think I just like running around and hiding.

Countries that are in my µtorrent peers list

• USA
• Singapore
• Italy
• Finland
• Canada
• USA again (there’s lots of them)
• Germany
• Japan
• Malaysia
• Belgium
• Ireland

I feel like a CB radio ham in the early days of radio, looking for faint signs of people from far away and wanting to contact them just to say “hey you’re there! I’m here!”. I can’t talk to them — the only way I can signal them is to disconnect, and that goes to all of them at once, which is a bit blunt. But I feel like we’re connected. Well, we are. I mean obviously we are. I was thinking of the kind of connection I was taken taken to the Commonwealth Centre as a schoolchild to experience, the kind of connection that sounds cheesy and Hallmarkish, too utopian even for early Rheingold.

I guess we’ve all got at least two things in common, which is that we like Heroes, and we’d like there to be more of us. I wanted to be able to right-click on the Singapore IP and send them a message about having a singtel address and how slow their broadband is. Social objects again.

In the lift lobby on the way to the office, and in fact anywhere people have eyes in Singapore, there are lots of screens playing an endless loop of adverts, in between adverts for the screens themselves, promising to reach “business executives in a captive audience”. The ads normally don’t leave any sort of impression individually, beyond a sort of sadness that jungle music is used to sell tights now.

This morning, though, there was a great one for Yahoo answers. European executive walks into hawker centre, sees lots of empty seats, smiles, prepares to sit – but wait! Every seat has a small packet of tissues placed on it – all the seats in the hawker centre have been reserved. The next day, he’s back, with an armful of toilet roll in Yahoo corporate purple: two seconds later, every seat is wrapped. Success.

Using packets of tissues to reserve (“chope“) a place is something that my Singaporean friends here joke about, the way I might mock my countrymen for queueing without a fuss: still, every lunchtime it confuses me, thinking that a seat is free before realising the tiny coloured plastic square means it’s been taken. An expat friend of mine told me over the weekend that she’d tried to save a place using something else once, and been told off by an uncle – “must be tissues!”. No point something being a norm if it isn’t normative.

These tissues look like they’d be best at saving a place.

The latest xkcd proposes an alternative to the captcha anti-bot test: Matt Webb notices that it’s the Voight-Kampff test applied to the web (I have no idea how Harrison Ford managed to sound the second “f”, but apparently other people know it and have used it). I love it: focussing on what makes a human a human to weed out the bots, beyond our image-processing and language skills, concentrating on accepting interaction with entities that are capable of empathy and value judgements and can recognise the answer we’re most likely to be after.

But it doesn’t work. For one, a yes/no answer just means that a bot has to try twice instead of once, which reduces it to a problem of bandwith. But even if there was a greater choice of answers, any replicant capable of landing a job interview would surely have wifi. My phone has wifi. Even cameras have wifi now, and they would not pass many job interviews (“how do you get on with other people?”, “I click well”). The combination of connectivity and Amazon’s HIT service means that given enough time, any net-enabled replicant could just ask an army of skint humans to come up with the statistically probable answer.

Of course, the crucial element is time. For the HIT strategy to work, replicants would have to be questioned in an environment that would allow them to pause for a while before answering: this implies that they’d be best off applying for jobs in the civil service or the media, where a dilatory approach to qualifying their suitability for a role would be acceptable. Soon, Goldsmiths and Millbank would be staffed with replicants dedicated to working against all that true humans stand for, while the private sector looked on aghast and tried to concoct ways of avoiding working with either for as long as possible. So far, the story checks out: maybe wiser heads than mine are already working on a solution.

One way of avoiding the HIT approach might be to ask for responses that could only be answered through a deep knowledge of the milieu of the author: the purpose of the captcha then progresses from just weeding out bots, to weeding out people who aren’t cool enough to understand the question. In this way blogs can manage their appeal in a far more fine-grained way than at present. Serious tech blogs could bar Mac fanboys through judicious probing of their command-line fluency; political blogs could make sure that comments only come from those that articulate their allegiance in an acceptable fashion. No-one need ever hear from live-action roleplayers ever again.

But more elegant than this crude reification of web cliques would be the inclusion of a “dude this is so a trick question” button, perhaps placed elsewhere in the comments form (“was the question above totally manipulative or a fair chance to express your views?”). Perhaps in addition to the “yes” or “no” options in the two examples above, we might add a po or mu option, giving humans a chance to do what a robot can’t, at present: recognise an absurdity and claim the right to not answer.

There seem to be quite a few things about living in a different country that I find cognitively taxing in a small way – not enough to stop me doing anything, but enough that I keep finding simple tasks a bit more difficult.

I’m emailing a list of people who attended an event I ran last week, and I have no idea who’s who. Everyone I met that day introduced themselves to me with an English name: every email I have on my list uses a Chinese name. I’ve got the hang of patronymic followed by personal names, but relating that to English names chosen arbitrarily is a little trickier.

I guess that might be one more reason why using handphone numbers as personal identifiers might be appealing.