It’s once again time for my latest Photojojo post. For those of you who haven’t been following my blog for a long time, Photojojo is a digital time capsule service. Every two weeks they send me an email that has my most interesting photos posted to flickr from one year ago.

Once again a focus on Scarlett. Looking back on these photos I realize how easy it was to get to smile back then. It sounds ridiculous to say she’s gotten more jaded - she’s not even two, for Pete’s sake. But she does spend more time brooding and is a bit more specific about what makes her smile. Perhaps this is part of the reason why some couples decide to have more children - to get back that ultra-innocence of baby-hood before the slightly less innocent toddler-hood what with its tantrums and such.

Civ V (<1hr): Continued to play with Dan and Dave. Again, hopefully there’ll be some updates soon.

[caption id=“attachment_7512” align=“aligncenter” width=“500”] Skullgirls[/caption]

Skullgirls (<1hr): This game is a ridiculous fighting game that doesn’t take itself too seriously when it comes to the story. It’s a return to the fun of fighting games of the 1990s. At the same time, the mechanics of gameplay are no joke - we’ve been in a fighting game renaissance for the past five years or so and this game does not ignore that. I played it during a Steam free weekend and thoroughly enjoyed it. If I had the time to dedicate to a fighting game, I’d buy it in an instant. If you enjoy games like Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat, but think they’re a bit too self-serious, this game should definitely be checked out. Also, if you’re into anime (and I think there’s a lot of overlap between these groups), there’s a lot of poking fun at tropes of both fighting games an anime.

[caption id=“attachment_7503” align=“aligncenter” width=“480”] Back to the Future: The Video Game - The Pseudonym Fun of the series continues[/caption]

Back to the Future: The Video Games (5 hrs) - As is the usual situation with these types of games, I figured out I had to get to the 1920s about 2 hours before I had triggered the right series of events that would allow me to get there. Got to see the sense of humor of the writers as I ended up meeting the high school principle’s sister who’s just as crotchety as he is. Apparently Doc is in trouble for starting a fire. Other than that I don’t know much as I wasn’t able to play very much of the game beyond the first 1920s scene with the principle’s sister.

When I was in middle school in Oregon I was introduced to the concept of non-worship Christian music for the first time. Up until that time the only English music we listened to was Oldies and 70s music. I’d catch a pop or rap song here or there - mostly because the public school buses I rode would listen to the pop or rap stations - but that was it. I think it was like 10% shielding us from the “bad messages in pop music” and 90% my parents just listening to what they enjoyed - which was the music they grew up with. And since those stations were always on when we were growing up, that’s what we grew to like. It’s why I’m the only person in the circle of friends in my age group that knows all the Doo-Wop standards.

I’ve been on flickr nearly since it first started. It’s been a great community to learn about photography and hook up with others who are really into photography as well. I have 10 700 photos on flickr so I’ve looked on various flickr developments with fear because of how invested I am in the site. I was scared when Microsoft was going to buy them because they haven’t always been as open a company as Yahoo. Frankly, I wasn’t too happy when Yahoo bought flickr because they’ve been so stagnant and development did stall for many years there. I used to listen to a lot of photography podcasts and they were constantly talking about the fall of flickr because the largest photo repository online was now Facebook. There were two reasons I never put photos on Facebook. At first it’s because I wanted to aggregate all the comments and views in one place. Later it was because posting photos to Facebook was a bad deal copyright-wise.

I’m writing this in late August - by the time this post appears I should have received all of my Kickstarter goods or they should be in the mail. Interestingly, even though the Kickstarter backer cycles were spread over about a three month period, they’re all supposed to be delivering the product at around the same time - 4th quarter of this year. As of the time of this writing, this is the status of my Kickstarters:

[caption id=“attachment_7361” align=“aligncenter” width=“604”] NPR All Music Considered works correctly now[/caption]

It’s not a surprise that I love Amarok. Take a look at the related posts below. I think nothing beats it as a music program. If the KDE4 for Windows libraries were more robust I’d recommend it for everyone. As is, I think it’s the best on Linux. But, until the most recent updates there was something lacking that really bothered me. On a stream like NPR’s All Music Considered it wouldn’t update the Now Playing track to the song that was on. And that made it really hard to use that stream in the best possible way - to discover new music! It’s fixed now and that’s awesome! Woohoo!

Scarlett first did this about three weeks ago before she started watching Disney’s The Little Mermaid non-stop. I was playing with her in the living room and she was making her various stuffed animals dance to the music. Then she took two animals - a dog and a cat or something and put their faces together and said “kissing”. This was baffling to me because Danielle and I don’t really have lots of PDA. It’s not a conscious decision, it’s just that we’re usually trying to juggle about three things at once when Scarlett’s around. And she pretty much only watches PBS and I doubt there’s much lip-on-lip kissing on there. So I wonder where she picked it up? It may be like the other things that people blame on daycare (biting, hitting, etc), kids just pick it up from the ether or they see it once - that one time you had some TV show on or that one time the wife and I kissed in front of her - and it just gets ingrained in their heads. Not sure, but definitely fascinated that it happened.

Yet, despite his non-existent range, Schwarzenegger has continually taken on projects that either cast him as a character with multiple identities ( Raw Deal, Total Recall, True Lies, Escape Plan) or require him to play multiple characters ( The 6th Day, the Terminator franchise). This results in a Hollywood hall of mirrors: Schwarzeneggers interacting with other Schwarzeneggers; Schwarzenegger pretending to be Schwarzenegger; Schwarzenegger discovering that he’s not the Schwarzenegger he believed himself to be, but a different, identical Schwarzenegger.