Step up to the

Heh... the creator of the memetically charged VW animation is none other than Michael Smith, whom I last knew as the person who drew the comic strip that replaced the long-running Lunch in the Maine Campus 10 years ago. (My own comic replaced his after a year, and it in turn was replaced by the infamous Mr. Gnu.) He's apparently grown to become quite a sophisticated 3D animator, which I didn't think he was at all into, back in the day. Neat.

Thanks to poetgeek for the link.

Media Log

My resurrected media log site, media.jmac.org, is looking good enough to start sharing. Three new entries and a new About page, plus all the stuff from my old 2000 log (not all of which I agree with today, which is of course rather interesting).

Most of the new features are ones you can't see, like the editing page that, given an ISBN, is capable of using Amazon's XML backend to fetch lots of information about a book, and allows me to build Amazon-referrer link$, yummy yum. There are still bugs to fix and, uh, it might be nice if I actually applied some actual Web design to the thing. (You'll note that it no longer visually differentiates between different types of media, though they're all filed properly in the database... hrm.) But I am happy that it's come far enough to start plugging new content into. As the about page notes, I really did spend the last three years feeling annoyed whenever I read a book or saw a movie and then didn't note it. No more!

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When I mentioned this idea at a recent HoRGN, colorwheel or rikchik or maybe both or neither suggested expanding the media log to support several distinct loggers. I kind of like the idea of limiting the write-permissions to people who already know one another outside of the site, thus making it a reading circle's media log, and not YA general-public book-discussion site. I'd be interested in kicking this idea around some more if y'all are.

Yes, end this nightmare.

To celebrate my "completion", at last, of a post-book personal project, I popped in the ol' Civ III CD for the first time in weeks. OK: I am clearly not yet ready to play at Monarch level, just because I got lucky and won my first attempt at Regent several weeks ago. Fooey.

Played as Persia, retired after I lost a city to the Aztecs circa 100 B.C., with no culture to speak of, scientifically backward, poor, etc. Not sure what happened. Maybe I expanded too quickly; I had six or seven cities, I think. Maybe I ought to cap Ancient-era expansion to four or five cities, next time.

The Persians are interesting because they are Scientific (half-price libraries & universities) and Industrious (Worker units have double productivity). The Greeks are also interesting if only because their special unit, Hoplites, provides nigh-invulnerable city defense throughout the Ancient era, suggesting that Greeks is a good choice for playing a game's prologue without bad guys pestering you too much. Hmm hmm hmm.

A general Civ thought: I wonder how often any civ manages to develop the most advanced technologies, the ones on the far right of the tech tree. In every game I've played that's gotten all the way to the Modern era, the game ended before any Civ could make it more than halfway through that era's tech, since each would immediately start building its spaceship and someone would finish before a dozen more turns could pass. Maybe the most advanced techs are only possible if there's so much espionage going on that nobody can get their ships off the ground because those pesky spies keep blowing 'em up... no game I've played so far has been very spy-heavy, though.