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When…did this happen?  I knew about the handful of recent Lego computer games, which have gone a loooong way since the old (and pretty terrible) lego computer game I had, but an MMO?  That could be…interesting and the trailer is amazing.

I took this recipe and modified it.  I couldn’t find any sliced Gouda (and the gouda for sale was in triangular wedges) so I got Munster instead.  Munster is usually sliced thicker so I only used 1 or 2 slices per roll.  I also didn’t have a panini maker, but a simple pan fry with plenty of butter worked out just fine.  I thought the mustard + honey combination might be have turned out badly, but it’s excellent.  For the future I’d probably make more honey and do the insides of both halves.  Also, I found the roasted tomato a bit distracting so I pulled that off the sandwich and at it later.  The whole thing would go well with some kettle chips or potato salad.  Excellent recipe.

(Also thanks for the Christmas gift cookbook.  That’s where I originally found the recipe.  It was used in Top Chef a few seasons ago)

Someone sent me these:  mash-ups of Star Wars and 80s Television Show Intros.

That’s the picture that hangs above my laptop.  I stare into it as a I write.  I am not quite sure what made me decide to write about it, but I suppose it’s only natural.  I’ve had it for maybe six months now.  Most people know of Gérôme (if they know of Gérôme) from his depiction of gladiators, which is most famous for the thumbs down symbol.

I actually came to learn of Gérôme from some random bit of historical reading I was doing at the time.  Gérôme did a depiction of the Grand Conde, who was a famous French general during the Thirty-Years war (and one of the great generals in history.)

Sometime later I searched out the artist and found Gerome.  His historical works are my favorite, but history seems to have preferred his orientalist undertakings.  In researching this article I found this gallery, which is rather extensive.   Or this one, which has everything (but with more annoying pagination).  Enjoy!

System Rescue CD

Link to a program I use to recover files off of hard drives with ‘issues’.  The directions are sufficient for a techy and hopelessly muddled for anyone else, but I’m not sure I could do any better.  Use at your own discretion.

Lions.  (Just a great article I found.)

I am amused.

I like Bond films (usually). I also like the music. I found these on youtube a few days. Enjoy!

The Sims 3 released some time ago a Create a World builder tool for their game.  It’s a fun enough game, but I’ve actually been using the world builder as an outlining tool.  While plenty of things that come up in a story are based on real location and some are just flat made up, I’ve managed to find a certain utility to plotting everything in my mind.  Sure, I can have the restaurant in my mind, but where is it in relation to the main character’s house?  How is the antagonist supposed to drive by dramatically if the road is a dead end?  I’ve had a lot of fun actually plotting these things out.

The Sims franchise has taken digital story telling into a new world.  It’s built around the idea of telling stories and sharing them.  The video recordings and album photo arrangements were created with story-telling in mind.  So far the product has not always been especially high quality, but there are some genuinely stirring examples out there, like the blog Alice and Kev that I posted about a few months ago.

At current,  full made games are still more common and profitable, but the price and difficulty of designing worlds is increasingly by the year.  Already, multiple games are produced using the same platform, and games like Neverwinter Nights were almosted released primarily as tool sets that happened to include a story.  I suspect this trend will continue.  A company will produce a framework (such as Second Life), and periodically update the overall capability of the universe, but the user base, which may include secondary companies, will be responsible for content generation.  Again, Second Life is basically an example of this already, but it’s yet to take any sort of real Mainstream acceptance.

I envision a sort of hierarchy of virtual creations with an overall base partitioned by various content providers, either persons or companies, to which individuals join.  Think a cross between Steam, Second Life, and World of Warcraft.  One can navigate throughout a larger virtual multi-verse  to ‘log in’ to World of Warcraft like experiences.  Once the overall technical capability is at this level, one suspects it’ll be substantially easier to create meaningful content thus opening the userbase even more.  The economic and information sharing potential of this sort of creation, would seem to propel the world to greater levels of interactivity in an organic fashion.

I suppose this is all very ‘Snowcrash’ like, but, as small a step as it is, I’ve found a lot of utility from using one, limited tool to create a world and I’m only using it to plot out a written world.  Surely, this niche has room to grow.  If our internet access ever stops being terrible some of the ideas might actually take off…but that’s enough from me for one day.

A few months ago I went on some rant about scam charities.  Recent news is reporting that some of the Haiti charities are less than admirable.

Allow me to post about GuideStar, a website that lets you review the publicly released documents of nonprofit companies. It requires registration, but it’s free and worth the time if you’re out to throw some money around.  My paranoia toward everything lends me to wonder what GuideStar gets out of the deal and I find the testimonial data beyond useless, but I enjoy reading the financial statements.  It seems to be a damn good deal: now why can’t everything be regulated similarly?  If we put a tenth of what we put into any given project making sure the other 90% was spent correctly, I’m convinced the country, the world, the everything, would come out of the deal twice as well as they do now.  Alas, I wax depressive, but keep GuideStar in mind the next time you’ve got a nagging urge to donate…

Final rant: GuideStar has a short list of reasons why they might not have the 990 Form from a particular nonprofit.  The last one refers to religious organizations that aren’t required to file.  I can be convinced sometimes that there is a valid and compelling reason for religious organizations to not be taxed (freedom of religious and that bag), but what exactly frees them from reporting standards?  What makes a religion different in the world of honest financial governship?  History, I suppose.  Phooey.