This blog is largely just for me, and a few folks who stop by because they know me, or they’re searching for information on Jackie Manuel or the Google Teahouse Fox. So, I’m pretty used to low traffic numbers. However, I was floored when I suddenly received ten times the usual number of incoming visits over a couple of days, and was curious as to why. Ah, Jeremy Zawodny’s linkblog. Wow, it’s amazing what can happen when you get linked off a popular site. I know I read it most days. ...
I got nothing, so how about some Wikipedia? Cat, a domestic feline, Felis silvestris catus .cat, a top-level domain cat (Unix), the concatenate program in the Unix operating system Cat (Red Dwarf), a character in the TV show Red Dwarf Cat (role-playing game), an indie role-playing game about cats Cat (kingdom), a Dark Ages Pictish kingdom Note the Coat, Legs, Claws, Face, Fangs and Tail attribute system in the role-playing game. Nice. “I have a strong, healthy coat!” :) ...
There is an interesting article by Steven Pinker at Edge about the declining instinct towards violence. In the decade of Darfur and Iraq, and shortly after the century of Stalin, Hitler, and Mao, the claim that violence has been diminishing may seem somewhere between hallucinatory and obscene. Yet recent studies that seek to quantify the historical ebb and flow of violence point to exactly that conclusion. - A History of Violence I’d say we aren’t as violent. I haven’t killed anything since last night (a bug), and this very morning I drove to a building, obeying traffic laws along the way, and handed someone some green paper with a mutually agreed-upon value in exchange for food. Right now I’m in another building, using my skills in exchange for more tokens of value, which I can convert into green paper when I’d like. It’s hard to create that sort of framework without a declining instinct towards violence. ...
There are creeps everywhere, man! They don’t even attack…they just keep taking punishment, and they just keep moving, like they don’t even feel it! :) For me, the sign of a good game is that hours after I play it, I’m sitting there thinking about better ways to play it. By that measure, Desktop Tower Defense is a good game. It looks easy at first, but then you start to realize the enemy (creeps) is getting a little farther each time, and those backup towers are starting to come into action, and you realize you aren’t going to make it another ten levels, and another hour has passed in defeat. ...
…you probably don’t really want to know. Courtesy of What Were They Thinking?
…hit it with a tiger. Courtesy of The Absorbascon.
The Buck Rogers pilot was released in theaters before its TV debut, and X-Ray Spex has the movie’s far different take on the opening credits. While it would be hard to complain about Erin Gray in a silver suit, I wonder why Buck appears to be making out with Tootsie? (Those are some huge glasses/goggles/whatever.) :)
Yes, it has come to this. I have reached the conclusion that Marvel’s last two big events – House of M and Civil War -- have actually served their purpose, despite less-than-stellar plotting and shaky characterizations. Their purpose was to get me excited about this summer’s event, World War Hulk, by making me hate the Marvel Universe so much I’ll enjoy seeing Hulk taking his revenge on it. I also find it interesting that after the eight-issue House of M, and the delays in shipping the seven-issue Civil War, World War Hulk is only set for five issues. C’mon, there’s more smashing to do than that. Hulk Smash Earth-616!!! :) ...
Wow. I was surprised when I flipped to CBS, expecting to see a Division I game, and saw Barton College playing in the Division II Men’s Basketball Championship. Even though they were five points down to Winona State, the defending national champion, with a couple of minutes left, it’s not every day you get to see a small school down the road – Wilson, NC – playing on national TV. I’m glad I caught it. Barton fell to seven points behind with 50 seconds left, and then senior point guard Anthony Atkinson, who grew up in Wilson, commenced the best clutch performance that anyone is likely to see at any level this month. Atkinson scored 10 points and made almost every defensive play during those final seconds, including a breakaway layup as time expired to win the game for Barton. That kind of effort was fairly common during the tournament for Atkinson, who apparently just wanted to keep playing. ...
Despite the popularity of personalized homepages, I hadn’t been using one. At home my homepage was the normal Google search page; at work it’s a wiki I use for taking notes. Well, my tab order has now changed. I’m using my personalized Google homepage, with my Google Calendar, Gmail, quotes of the day, a NASA picture, and weather. All of this was available before, so what made me change? Google started offering visual themes for what had been a boring page. I tried it out, and was mildly impressed with the results. Still not that interested, until I realized the themes change depending on the time of day. So now I have the Tea House theme, with pleasant green accents across the page, and what appears to be a hat-wearing fox that lives in a house in an orange grove. The fox does different things depending on the time of day, such as having lunch in the grove right now. (It looks like sushi, not squirrel.) ...