These are the Days of the Week I’ve been playing around with new names for the days of the week for a few months now. I don’t understand why we have to honor the Norse pantheon in this way, or the arbitrary homage to the Sun and the Moon. When I was taking Japanese, I was struck by how similar our day names were to theirs. 日曜日 – nichiyoubi – Sun Day. 月曜日 – getsuyoubi – Moon Day. It wasn’t a coincidence. Japan adopted its version of the Western calendar during the Meiji Restoration, as it adopted so many Western customs. Thankfully, they discarded the Norse pantheon for the other days in favor of elemental names, with gold (or money) reserved for Friday. ...

Maybe it’s just as well that Pete Smith has never been infected by Blink 182’s infectious blend of pop and punk… Until now!blink-182 - All The Small Things Music video by blink-182 performing All The Small Things. (C) 2000 Geffen Records This was posted on Google+

Yes, Uber has set up shop in Eorzea. I'm just out to make some extra gil with my chocobo between adventures. With our free month of FFXIV about to end, Kasul and I had to make a difficult decision. Not about whether or not to continue playing the game – we’re both having a lot of fun with – but just who was going to recruit who for the recruit-a-friend program. See, in FFXIV, if you recruit someone, you get a bunch of cool rewards, like that two-seater chocobo in the picture. If you’re recruited, you get some lesser rewards. ...

Am I lost? I can't even tell anymore. Totally the trip from Hell. It was supposed to be a 900km or so trip from Salzburg to Luxembourg. Things were going pretty well to begin. Swiftly passed into Germany, flew past München and Strasbourg, and had crossed over into Switzerland on the way to Zurich when my cat decided the computer mouse was now fair game. I was driving using an XBox controller, so the mouse was, I guess, just sitting there. ...

Just you and me, kid. You and me and no three other people not in this picture. On our last story day, Kasul and I had thought we were just minutes away from meeting Titan, the Lord of the Crags, based on the urgency of the NPCs. We finished the night thinking that next time, we would be meeting the primal of the kobolds in our second Trial. No! That turned out not to be the case! Instead, we spent pretty much the entire night proving our worthiness by doing trivial jobs. Only by gladly crossing the planet doing fetch jobs, could we show the sort of spunk and willingness to follow orders given by strangers required to break through the rock-hard skin of Titan. ...

h/t to +Pete Smith … my profile is pretty one-sided…My Gaming Style: Calm, Spontaneous, Relaxed, and Deeply Immersed Want to know your profile? Take the survey! This was posted on Google+

Confronting Thaos... Well, until the expansion, anyway. One side benefit of an internet outage (I was without internet for most of the weekend) is that all those single player games I never get around to finishing are suddenly totally available! I was pretty close to the ending of Pillars of Eternity last time I played, working on the god appeasement quests before heading to the final confrontation in the Sun in Shadow. During those, you start thinking about how you see the world continuing after the big evil is defeated, and just how that defeat will be accomplished. But then again, as the ending draws nearer, it’s clear that pretty much everything you know about the world (and knew back in your past life as well), was wrong. ...

Check out the airbrush! Love mah TRUCK!!! Thanks for the rad paint, +Michael Birke ! I’ve hired two drivers. My first one started out with a 0.8 rating. As soon as I had money, and paid off a high interest 100K loan with a cheaper 400K load and expanded my garage and bought new trucks with the balance, I hired a second driver with a 2.5 rating. (I had to go out of country; I think I got him in France or Italy). I thought he was going to be awesome, but my first guy improved to 2.5 and is really bringing in the Euros, while guy #2 seems to be slacking. ...

On the road to Frankfurt. Not really been a fan of all the recent simulator offerings – Train Simulator, Farming Simulator… Goat Simulator… but something about Euro Truck Simulator 2 caught my eye when it popped up in Steam’s summer sale. I guess I just wanted to see Europe’s highways from two meters above the road, or something. Certainly, you don’t get to experience very much of the cities, which is probably just as well, because traffic. ...

Inn of the Trolls We’re adding two new members to our weekly D&D campaign, so our DM wrote this “what has happened until now” to catch them up. Since I’ve been pretty inconsistent with chronicling our adventures, I got permission to repost it here :) The party came together as hired guards for a merchant caravan that was heading through a town called Greenest. Upon reaching Greenest, the party found that the town was in the process of being sacked. The merchant wanted nothing to do with this, turned around, and left the players to either follow or to assist the town. Being good adventurers (and otherwise ending the game before it began), the party opted to sneak around the periphery to recon the area. ...