A ni sogoma!

Well, two weeks of no blog writing. That means I’ve either been working hard, or I’ve been having a lot of fun... Or... it simply means both! I’ve been having a great time here in Bamako. And I’ve gotten some work done as well.

Some morning last week, Slashdot: prostoalex wrote "MSNBC points to the court cases spawned by virtual worlds. Recently, Tom Loftus notes, a virtual island in one of the MMORPGs sold for $30,000, enough to attract commercial attention. Apparently, some businesses create third-world sweatshops, where low-wage laborers are being paid to play and accumulate enough virtual merchandise, so that an eBay sale of it makes the operation profitable. ’One such business, Blacksnow Interactive, actually sued a virtual world’s creator in 2002 for attempting to crack down on the practice.

It is interesting to be in a country with 11 national languages besides the official language, and these are only the biggest language groups. So many languages makes French actually much more neutral than one would think at first regard. I haven’t been studying Bambara as much as I wanted. Bambara is, surprise suprise, the language of the Bambara, comprising 30% of the population, and Mali’s lingua franca spoken by about 80%. Many think learning languages is difficult. I think it isn’t.