Snow!

I don't know whether to be annoyed or happy about this.

California Fallout

Via sonia-leong

This photo leapt out at me from a series of beautiful, yet tragic shots of the Californian wildfires. This one just took my breath away - I don't want to sound flippant but it looks unreal, pretty much exactly like a screenshot from Fallout 3. Which is supposed to be set in apocalyptic wastelands 200 years after a nuclear holocaust. Life imitating art. Very scary.

New Xbox Experience

On Friday evening (the night before I headed to Glasgow for two days to attend Auchinawa), I got into the preview program for the New Xbox Experience. I basically just had time to create my avatar (see below) and install a couple of games to the HDD before we had to leave, so I've not had much chance to get into the nitty-gritty details of the "experience", but it seems like an improvement in a lot of ways.

I'm not sure the new placement of some options is as intuitive - changing your theme is now located under your Xbox profile rather than the system settings - but it kind of makes sense since it's not a global setting for the entire machine.

Still, I'm sure after a couple of weeks using it this second iteration of the dashboard will be as easy to get around as the old one was.

I was pretty impressed at how well I was able to create myself with the avatar system though - compared to any other character creator I've ever used, none of which has ever been able to create even an approximate likeness of myself, my Avatar is frighteningly close to how I actually look. I don't know if everyone else will be as fortunate, though - my girlfriend wasn't able to make one that's as accurate.

Almost done moving in

We've now been in our new house for nearly two weeks, and it's still getting more messy rather than less. There's still a few things in the self-storage box that we've got to transfer out before the account runs out at the weekend, but I don't know if the living room can take much more.

For instance, here's the change over the course of a few hours of yesterday:



The box is nearly cleared out though; we should be able to fit the rest of it into the car for the trip home tonight, or if not then we'll definitely be clearing it out tomorrow.

One slight problem is that the back bedroom, which we'd been planning to use as a storage area for a while, is going to be out of commission for at least another week while we repaint it a colour a little more muted than its current bright pink.

This is important

I was pretty close to using "I'm gay for Keith Olbermann" as the title for this post, but it seemed a little too flippant for the seriousness of this issue.

Internet Social

I'm fascinated by "social networking tools" (which I think is a stupid name for them, but whatever) and blogging stuff in general. Which is really weird, when I think about how highly I regard my own opinion (that being, not at all), and how frankly pointless I think putting it online at all is (which, now that I think about it, might be a major contributor to the demise of my anime blog/news site).

But still, I get drawn into Twitter (and Twitpic), upload occasional YouTube videos and had to stop myself from requesting a 12seconds account; as cool as the idea is, I can't see myself vblogging, really - not when I blog "properly" so infrequently. And that's without having to really identify myself to the wider internet. I was still more excited than I probably should have been when I discovered that I could post (and watch) YouTube videos from my phone, though.

I still enjoy seeing how The Internet (by which I mean, the people and entities connected to and via it) finds new ways to communicate with itself. On their own, individual Twitter posts are just pointless minutae (and in a lot of cases, seem rather narcissistic), but there's something interesting about how they form a single cohesive narrative over days and weeks and months in a way that self-contained blog and journal entries don't. There's a lot to be said for the minute-by-minute reactionary nature of Twitter too; it made watching the second Presidential debate much more interesting, for instance, to see hundreds of other people's reaction in real time as it progressed.

That sort of thing isn't maybe what the creators of Twitter had in mind when they started it, but I find it fascinating to see how The Internet has adapted to the application and how they've adapted the application itself for their own way of communication.

[/ramble]

Little Big Drama

The most recent Penny Arcade strip is spot on.

I don't think I've posted my response to the LBP/Qur'an thing here, and I don't want to get into it here after the horrible clusterfuck argument it spawned on a forum that's full of normally reasonable people. Short version: Sony made the right call, and this isn't really comparable to the Manchester Cathedral thing last year.

On the mortgage crisis

This whole "default swaps" situation has us all fucked into a cocked hat to a much worse degree than I ever thought possible...

Q. What are the risks posed by credit-default swaps?

A. The first risk is their sheer size. Writing in Sunday's New York Times, Christopher Cox, chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, estimated there were $55 trillion in credit-default swaps outstanding, which is larger than the combined gross domestic product of every country on Earth.

(Emphasis mine)

How does this shit happen? Did nobody think they were maybe going too far?

The quote is taken from this Seattle Times article.

Zero?

During his furious post-"Zero" blinking session, I can almost hear the old Amiga disk drive churning away.

Rolling Stone profiles McCain

On the off-chance anybody hasn't seen this already, I strongly suggest you give it a read.

Make-Believe Maverick

I've been going through it slowly the last couple of days (it's ten pages long), and while RS are undoubtedly more left-leaning than centrist, if even half this stuff is on the mark I just got a lot more worried about the prospect of a John McCain presidency.

Little Big Calculator

[S]imply from an engineering standpoint, I think this is by far and away the best [LBP level] yet. A user created a real-time working calculator that accurately adds and subtracts numbers. The level is said to use 610 magnetic swtiches, 500 wires, and 430 pistons. I didn't see what the big deal was until the camera panned up. That's when my mouth hit the floor.

Via Kotaku.

Steampunk Star Wars

Drawn by Björn Hurri at Gorilla Artfare.

Li'l O'Reilly

Blister packaging: as pleasant as it sounds

I bought a wireless headset for my Xbox 360 and it just got delivered to work; I'd very much like to plug it in so it's charged for getting home, but I can't get the damn thing open.

I really hate the space devil packaging they use to store videogame accessories these days. I realise it's possibly helpful as an anti-theft device - you can't pop the container open and steal the goodies, and there's a tag in the box itself - but I'd like to be able to get the thing I paid for without shredding my fingers trying to get into the box.

Jon Stewart reacts to the $700bn bill failure

I don't know if his outburst at the end of this (~6.45 in) is scripted or ad-libbed, but he certainly seems genuinely angry.