I found a really interesting article talking about the human mind and likening our thought/emotional processes to the inner workings of a computer OS. Small world note: he links (though the link doesn’t work anymore) to a program that cruinh and patterson will probably recognize. 
Finally,another Age of Empires game! Check out the screenshots - this thing looks faboo. 
For some reason, I couldn’t get into Rise of Nations; hopefully this one will be more akin to the old AoE games.
Do we really need to arguing over the definition of refugee
at this point in time? Are these people going to care if they’re called refugees, displaced citizens, or snarfelbloxes, so long as they get the help they need? The pettiness of people never ceases to floor me..
Conqueror in a War of Virtual Worlds - New York Times
“It may continue to grow in China,” Mr. Pachter added, “but not in Europe or the U.S. We don’t need the imaginary outlet to feel a sense of accomplishment here. It just doesn’t work in the U.S. It just doesn’t make any sense.”
The above quote comes from an article speculating whether World of Warcraft is helping or hurting the game industry and refers to the sheer number of gamers who play WoW. My big beef with the quote is the idea that Americans are somehow so successful as a people that they don’t need games anymore. We’ll ignore the trend towards more work for less money, fewer promotions, fewer jobs at all.. We’ll ignore the concept that many jobs are little more than data entry or monotonous factory work, where little sense of accomplishment can be found - no matter how hard you work to diminsh the pile of forms to enter or pieces to sew, the pile magically grows back overnight. Americas are amongst the most stressed people in the world, yet they have no need for an imaginary outlet where they can actually accomplish something in an evening? Am I just missing something here?
Turns out someone’s already working on the basic “catalog” app that me and Jon were thinking about. Hopefully the project doesn’t stall (like ours would have, no doubt ).
I haven’t posted regarding the devastation in the Gulf states because I just haven’t been able to find the words. Every time I think about what’s happened down there, and what may happen in the next few days or weeks, I just find myself dumbfounded. Even now, I’m having trouble figuring out what to say. I tend to have an overactive imagination, and I can just see in my mind how it might have been to be stuck there, or what it might feel like to know that my home, my school, or my job are under 20 feet of water that will likely not be going away for a month or more. And I know that what I imagine can only be a shadow of the reality for these people.
Something like this really makes you think. We pretend that we’re lords of the world, with our technology, our guns, our sheer numbers, but then a storm like this comes along, or a wall of water like the tsunami in December, and we have to realize that we aren’t lords. We don’t control “Mother Nature”; we live and work and do all of the trivial mundanities that comprise modern life only by her sufferance. We can’t always predict her rage, and many times, even when we do have the foresight, the premonitions and predictions are ignored until too late or dismissed by the very people poised under her wrath. It’s an awesome and awful thing.
At a time like this, many seem to fall back on faith. I read an interesting story from the Times-Picayune blog about a rumor of divine intervention in the storm:
In the garden behind St. Louis Cathedral on Royal Street lies an incredible tangle of zig-zagging broken tree trunks and branches, mixed with smashed wrought iron fences. But right in the middle, a statue of Jesus is still standing, unscathed by the storm, save for the left thumb and index finger, which are missing. . . .Many in the Quarter are now saying it was the hand of Jesus, the missing digits to be precise, that flicked the hurricane east just a little to keep the city from suffering a direct blow.
It’s a curious occurance, one that will, no doubt, become another little piece of the crazy story that is New Orleans. The less skeptical part of me wonders if it might be true - if that statue is evidence of a modern miracle. The rest of me thinks it just got lucky, and that there are probably places throughout the city where there was minimal destruction amidst the chaos, but they aren’t mentioned because they have no religious statues to latch on to.
Anyway, if I had prayers that were more than empty words to offer to the survivors of the storm, I would. As it stands, I can only say that I feel for everyone affected by the storm, and that I plan to help out in the best way that I know, with a donation to the Red Cross.
Edit: and I’m not even going to talk about the various human responses to the whole thing, I’d be here for weeks.