Category: General

It’s pretty belated, but I didn’t particularly want to just post the Declaration of Independence. Or even the Declaration of Independence with snide comments about the current Administration. Yeah, but it’s too easy, you know?

I came at last to Mencken’s translation, which pleases me no end.

WHEN THINGS get so balled up that the people of a country got to cut loose from some other country, and go it on their own hook, without asking no permission from nobody, excepting maybe God Almighty, then they ought to let everybody know why they done it, so that everybody can see they are not trying to put nothing over on nobody.

Yeah.

I try not to run out my weak Photoshop skills too often, but now and again I can’t resist. I’ve sent this into gbaMOD so I can buy it as a real skin, but rumor has it they’re running kind of slow so we’ll see.

Mamet does 2001, via Amygdala.

The Game Boy Advance SP is the best computer gaming device I’ve bought in two years and it’s a close second to my Windows PC as the best gaming device I’ve ever bought. It blows my Playstation and Playstation 2 away. Man, what a cool little device.

I had an old Game Boy Color, and it was OK, but it did not have the superslick form factor of the Advance SP. This thing is small enough to carry around comfortably in one hand. Plus it’s got a backlit screen. Plus the CPU is powerful enough to do interesting games.

I am basically a casual gamer, and having a reasonable powerful game system that I can honestly carry in my pocket is perfect for me. Advance Wars is a great turn-based strategy title, and Crash Bandicoot is a decent platformer. Wario Ware, Inc is bizarre and fast paced and I can dump half an hour into it at a time. Which is really the key factor. The Game Boy Advance SP is powerful enough to give me good gaming experiences, but not so powerful that all the games are complex 100 hour extravaganzas of challenge. It rules.

I always wanted to know which states had lots of people with my last name. I just didn’t know it till I found this link. There are few of my kind anywhere, except there’s a cluster in Maine, which is completely expected. There’s also a cluster in Oregon, which doesn’t surprise me in the least cause I already knew about that branch.

French names cluster in New England and Louisana. Scandanavian names cluster up in the Dakotas and Wisconsin and Minnesota. Cool stuff. (Via gtexts.)

Heartworm is a funny one-panel Web comic. And I mean it’s both funny and well-drawn; we’re not talking the usual Web comic fodder. (And by “the usual Web comic fodder,” I explicitly don’t mean Joey Manley’s sites, but let’s face it — Sturgeon’s Law applies to Keenspace. In spades.)

Six comics, go read ‘em, it won’t take but a moment.

A while back, Julian Dibbell wrote one of those articles about MMORPG economies. You know the kind, all breathless and interested. He’s the guy who wrote that article on LambdaMOO, too. I don’t know if we owe him a debt of thanks for that or not.

In the interests of putting his, well, money where his mouth is, he’s now keeping a blog (via Kottke) chronicling his attempts to make money in UO. Solid stuff, particularly his reporting on the recent UO “gold farm” scandal. Read it from the beginning.

3leaf is hiring. I have no idea what they do, but their job listing is enough to make me wish I was a deep Windows geek.

13. Stealth plane are nice.  You give one orders, and it disappears.  When it reappears, it always says “Mission accomplished. I hit the target”, but sometimes it really hit Lichtenstein’s embassy.  You are NOT a stealth plane, you are a big, noisy, C130, that we can hear, see, and talk to for the whole project.

Speaking of privacy violations, Caltrans is expanding the use of Fastrak, their automatic toll collection system. They’re adding antennae along the highways, to collect realtime traffic info. This makes tracking individual drivers that much easier — another step down the slippery slope.

“According to Square Enix, Bakusou Yankee Damashii will be the first online MMORPG that will let players enjoy the world of Japanese motorcycle delinquents.”

Via Dispatches From Revland, which has a link to the trailer. It seems to be 2D isometric and I want to play it very badly.