David Cook. Randy needs to shut up. David C brings down the house. Syesha. I love her. She’s totally got a career. David Archuletta. He ruins whatever he touches. David C. and Syesha for final 2 – my dream matchup. Gawd, they’re doing the recap right now and every time Archie sings it’s sleep-inducing (though his second song was good). I love, er, hate how he ruined the Dan Fogelberg song. ...
I can’t be a full time raider, perform my day job competently, be a professional blogger, play the wide variety of MMOs I need to play to do my job, participate in the two betas I am in (don’t ask), and also sleep. The past couple of weeks, sleep-debt has been killing me. Simple fact is, I need to be in bed 11PM each night. Staying up until 1, 2 or 3AM writing after raids is killing me. ...
Bet you’re saying, “OMG! She’s back in WoW!” Well, no. Not yet, anyway. I’ve been looking at Asus’ Eee super-portable computer for awhile, and have caught my son and sister admiring it at BJ’s. The Eee is a very, very small computer with a solid-state drive and amazing portability, and is really cute :) The screen size is a little small, but they are about to release the new Eee 900 series, which has a larger screen, multi-touch touch pad, and Linux or Windows XP. ...
You know that Chinese restaurant fortune cookie game – where you open up your fortune cookie, but have to read it aloud and whatever it is, say “in bed!” afterward? Like, “Tomorrow will be your lucky day – IN BED!” Hilarious! So anyway, I have a little variation. Find a newspaper headline, and put it in the middle of “If —, the terrorists win.” Let’s try it with today’s Slashdot stories. ...
Wired has probably the best, most balanced article on LARP-ing – Live Action Role Playing – I have ever seen. I’ve known LARPers, though not done any myself, and to a person, they describe as an incredibly fun activity they look forward to throughout the year. However, media coverage has always taken the kook/geek/deviant/possible terrorist angle. Likely it’s easier to make fun of people than to have fun with them? ...
Came across this Python sprite package, Rabbyt while looking for Python gaming development sites with searchme. The current game I’m writing (when time permits) doesn’t use sprites, but some tech demos I wrote do, and this looks like a pretty darn amazing package, able to do rotation and scaling and handle thousands of moving objects and collisions at incredible speed. My PyGame-based tech demos were struggling to get 60fps out of just forty or so sprites – and I wasn’t even testing collisions (well, they were supposed to be avoiding each other anyway). So I may have to revisit those demos and maybe there will be a game in there, after all. ...
There’s something supremely, unapologetically geeky about going to a science fiction convention or comic convention. I went to San Diego Comicon back in 2006 and you know, it’s just our kind of folk there. Before that, when I was employed anyway (and living in the greater Bay Area), I would hit up Baycon, SiliCon and Fanime every year up in San Jose. Problem since I’ve moved to Connecticut is that I had no idea how to find out if similar things went on around here. I found out about Boskone way too late, but then, that’s in Boston, two hours away. ...
Click this and sign up for the beta – It’s a signup for a closed beta for a search engine with a “coverflow” display, looks really cool, goes on the theory that if you could shuffle through the websites returned from a search, you could find the one you’re looking for fast. They only have < 300 beta invites left, and it was a lot higher when I got mine, so I am not going to write a lot about it. Just go get in the beta and let me know how it works for ya.
You might have noticed the new “Now Reading” section at the top of the sidebar. These are simply the books I’m reading right now. Some of them are new, some old, some are free, some are eBooks. As i finish them, I’ll take a moment to talk about them here. It’s hard to overstate just how popular Steve Martin was when I was a teenager in the 70s. Everyone knew all his routines by heart. Everyone watched his every appearance on Saturday Night Live. For a few years, his anti-joke brand of comedy perfectly matched the times. ...
Thanks for the heads up from MMORPG.com; I’d have missed this gem from CNN. It’s partly old news about SOE’s “G.I.R.L.” (Gonna Insult Roleplaying Ladies) program. I don’t know what it really stands for, but from what I understand, SOE feels women don’t play games or work on games, so they want to encourage more of them. Well, before I get into THAT rant, here’s the first para of that CNN story: ...