December 2003 Archives
Well, i'm still hacking up a lung, but i think we've weathered the worst bits of the cold/flu. Poor Conor has had the toughest time of it, but he is also made it over the sickness-hump.
I hope all of you out there have had a relaxing and pleasent holidays!
Been under the weather since last Thursday. Conor got it too, the poor little bugger - his fever didn't break till Sunday night. Anyway, that's why its been a bit quite here. As its the holidays, i don't expect a whole lot of posts in the near future either, so try to hang in, and have a good time with you and yours!
I shaved off the scraggly hair on my chin today. I was depressed to see that i'm oh-so-slightly developing a second chin. The dreaded "double-chin-of-death"! Ok, maybe not death, but still depressing.
Now that i've complained about it on my blog, i can safely go back to doing nothing constructive about it. Thank you, thank you very much.
Here is a negitive review of Return of the King.
The reviewer asks why "...Frodo (Elijah Wood) often so wan and floppy, as if in need of smelling salts? Why is he so slow to notice that creepy mini-nudist Gollum is no friend"? (there are lots of other questions and comments, this is just the easiest to take apart)
Ummm, because the Ring is affecting him? You know, one of the points of the films, that the Ring has a pretty significant influence on those that bear it, as you can see from what it did to Gollum. Did the reviewer miss this bit from the first two films?
But i don't want to be petty. Lets just say that i disagree with this review. Tho i'd love to hear the rest of you think of the 3rd film, and how you'd contrast it with this review. (Thanks to Todd for the link)
All i can say is, if you didn't make it out to the Lord of the Rings marathon, you missed a pretty excellent way to see the trilogy. I'm going to bed.
Tony points to an interesting study about how our personal sense of space can extend to include our shadows. He then questions our ability to become immersed in virtual spaces, especially FPS style games.
Very interesting goings-on in the Virtual World World. The Sims Online owner, Maxis, is using heavy handed practices to silence a vocal critic of the game, Urizenus, who runs the Alphaville Herald, a news blog which reports about things in The Sims Online that Maxis would, apparently, not like you to know about.
Seems to be another wave of comment spamers hitting the blog. Weathering the storm, deleting as fast as i can go...
I just added my 100th rss feed to my aggregator. Holy cow, that's a lot of sites. If you want to see the list, click below...
Update Gaa, i had to remove 2 of the sites as they are de-funked (they got no funk). Damn. Well, 98 is still a pretty good number, no?
I just changed my RSS 1.0 and 2.0 feeds to include the entire text of my posts. I realized that i didn't like it when i can't read the whole story in my aggregator. So, now if you sub to my feed, you will get the whole goodness. I hope. I'm still doing some tweaking, 'specially with including XML/HTML in the posts. If you notice something is broken in your aggregator, please let me know, thanks!
Update: Ok, i've removed the HTML from the RSS 2.0 feed. It wasn't working out like i'd hoped. But everything else seems fine, so thats good!
So, Ciara just coined a new term - "Parental Debt". It was used to describe what i was going to incur to her for getting to go see the 12 hour Lord of the Rings-a-thon next tuesday. Fortuitously, with all this Cavalia talk, i was able to remind her of the trip to go see Cavalia, sans Conor or myself. Admittedly, it does not pay off the whole debt incurred by the Rings outing, but does reduce it a bit. I think that its a pretty damn funny term - made me laugh when we talked about it.
Holy crap. I'm the second item on google if you do a search for Cavalia. I'm number one on MSN's search. All from my one post about it. Who'd a thunk it. Perhaps the folks running the show's official website should take note that their site doesn't have enough community tools available. Say something as simple as a forum? Or a News page, so folks could find out about the music CD (thanks Stanzie for the CD update)...
B9 d+ t+ k- s- u- f- i- o x-- e+ l- c--
Get yer own, or decode the above. Ya, this is pretty geeky. Yes, i am bored.
Some further thoughts about the game, and where i'd like it to go...
Believe it. Who'd a thunk that many folks would be that interested in the new Apple store? (link - Todd)
Bits and pieces of rules and thoughts...
Ok ok, less of the rambling, i promise! After taking some time to think through some of the craziness that was going on in my head about the mix of ChatSpaces and GameSpaces, i decided that, as usual, i was making things way to complicated! So, this is what i'm going to do. ChatSpaces will remain a project that i keep thinking about, but with out worrying about game issues - it is simply (!) chat/distributed virtual space project (which is complex enough, thank you very much!). For the game stuff, there was/is a game that Tony, Alex H., Scott S., and myself (plus many other play testers) created back in high-school. It was a giant monster fighting game, called, imaginatively, "The Monster Game". Anyway, it was quite fun, and i've had thoughts of getting all the rules together again and updating it, possibly making it into an online game, for quite some time now. This is the start of making that a reality. While still allowing me to ramble on about ChatSpaces!
That bastard Lypowy has left us all on a cliff-hanger of an ending with his last post. Will he go to cooking school? What is holding him back? People want to know!
This would make a great gift for me. Perhaps a bit expensive...
