[caption id=“attachment_6300” align=“aligncenter” width=“640”] Aida at the Park back before digital[/caption]

I have mentioned many times before how much I was into photography back before digital existed. Despite film and developing costs subsuming all my allowance money, I still took tons of photos. Three years ago, I decided to check out the film photography renaissance. In April I got my first batch of film and a Holga. And soon I had shot some photos. And a few weeks later I had my Holga and Yashica film back.  And since then I’ve … not shot very many more rolls of film. There are a few reasons for this; some of them don’t even have to do directly with film. For example, I’m just taking less photos in general. A lot of that has to do with Scarlett. I have lots of photos of other kids in the family because you can hang back when it’s not your kid. You don’t have to worry about anything- someone else is taking care of him or her. But children, at least at the toddler and below stage, require a lot of attention. Also, I want to be present in her life. In order to photograph you have to withdraw a bit. And that’s fine when they’re five or six and off playing on the playground on their own. But Scarlett needs our assistance and attention to be able to use pretty much any part of the playground. Indirectly, because I have a desire to play with her in a way that my father couldn’t (his 9-5 rarely ended at 5), I have to be a better manager of my time. And I have committed to writing more this year. And there are some games I want to play. And there’s TV and time with the wife. Also, I am traveling less and I don’t happen to find Baltimore anywhere near as photogenic as New York city or Oahu.

[caption id=“attachment_6344” align=“alignleft” width=“478”] Chell from Portal[/caption]

Gender is a pretty interesting concept when it comes to video games. Putting aside “Choose Your Own Adventure” books, video games are unique in that the players are active in constructing the narrative. Some games, like puzzle games don’t REALLY have a narrative (but that doesn’t mean my brothers and I didn’t come up with the “story” behind what was going on in Tetris - paragraph seven) But the rest have stories and put the play on a spectrum from games like Mario to games like Mass Effect and all the way to the The Sims franchise in which you have complete control of the narrative through player agency over all the characters in the house.  (See here, here, and here) As the player plays, the player takes the character’s story onto him or herself. This is at least partially the rational for the dearth of female protagonists. Everyone “knows” that not only are all the gamers male, but they also couldn’t stand the idea of playing as a female. Off the top of my head the only top tier female protagonists I can think of are Laura Croft and the girl from Heavenly Sword. There’s also Samus Aran, but that’s also a bit of a cheat since she’s nearly always armored and the reveal that she was a woman was one of video games’ first huge reveals.  But I know this is untrue - at least among the video game aficionados I know. Dan, members of the Giant Bomb Squad, and others who write about games online played Mass Effect as a female Shepard. Ryan or Jeff (or both, I can’t remember) of Giant Bomb plays as a female every time a video game gives him the option.

On 6 May Ars published a story about some Chinese scientists who were trying to see if they could make avian flu better transmit to mammals. They claimed the point was to better study how it is that these viruses mutate to become infectious to mammals. However, the scientists used guinea pigs for some reason. For some reason left unexplained in the article, guinea pigs have both mammalian and avian receptors so they’re susceptible to avian viruses anyway! But the biggest problem, as pointed out by Robert May, is that this is China. You know…the country that has lead in toothpaste. He posited that we can’t really trust them to keep the virus contained if they do create a mammalian supervirus. A bit of an elitist attitude from the West? Maybe, but China doesn’t exactly have the best track record on doing stuff up to Western standards. Just one mistake and we have all those crazy infection movies coming true. It’s especially not worth it since other experts quoted in the article also say that you can’t really learn a lot about how to prevent or limit the spread of the mutated flu in the wild with the kind of study they were doing. They almost come across looking like a real life version of Aperture Science.

I forgot what the term was called, but you know how it goes: you learn a new concept and suddenly see examples everywhere. (Or look into buying a new car only to discover that “everyone” is driving it) Once I jumped into the rabbit hole of Disney Princess Culture and our daughters, it seemed to be never-ending. I happened to come across a post in my feed reader in which a photographer was trying to figure out how to photograph her daughter for her 5 year old portraits:

The Executive Pranch of government is a complex place; way more piecemeal than it seems when it’s described/depicted in media. It’s like a bunch of separate companies in which the President’s office has a controlling share. Still, given the ridiculous nature of the conspiracy theories which Right Wing News Organizations irresponsibly do nothing to counter: REALLY?!? You thought it was a good idea to let the IRS give special audit consideration to Right Wing Groups?!? REALLY?!?

It’s once again time for my biweekly 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.

More Scarlett photos. The one of her sleeping on me, melts me. The one of me talking to her with her eyes open like “WTF IS GOING ON?” is hilarious. (the last image)

My first ever Kickstarter! I just backed Project Atma - @IFightDragons Creates An Epic New Album on @Kickstarter http://t.co/Bo5XglkChl

— Eric (@djotaku) May 5, 2013

Back on 4 May I backed a Kickstarter project for the first time ever - I Fight Dragon’s Project Atma. Anyone who’s been following my last.fm posts knows that I really like the Chicago-based band. I first discovered I Fight Dragons when listening to a web comics podcast that featured “No One Likes Superman Anymore” from 2009’s Cool is Just a Number EP as the closing song. I have no idea if they had permission from I Fight Dragons, but it was quite fortuitous for the band as it led to me buying Welcome to the Breakdown and Kaboom! (and participating in this Kickstarter) As I’ve said before, the band is the inverse of Anamanaguchi. They are a rock band that uses Nintendos and Gameboys to create extra background instruments (whereas Anamanaguchi tends to have the instruments take the background to the chiptunes). Here’s one of the songs of their new album, Kaboom!

[caption id=“attachment_6182” align=“aligncenter” width=“500”] Best Selling Jeryk - weird Amazon Typo[/caption]

Especially because I would expect this to just be automated. Someone at Amazon decides to put jerky on sale, it should auto-generate the email title. It should NOT be written by a human that could end up with a weird typo like this!

[caption id=“attachment_6241” align=“aligncenter” width=“683”] Scarlett’s Natural Curls[/caption]

I don’t think any father ever sets out to spoil his daughters. After all, not only does that lead to a mal-adjusted human, it makes her more likely to make bad decisions. But when she’s capable of looking this cute (at least to me, but all parents get like +100 cuteness points on their own kids over strangers’ kids), it’s so hard to be cross with her for long. In fact, I don’t know if this theory has ever been discredited, but some scientists think that kids look cute exactly for this reason - so we don’t lose our cool with them as much as otherwise would - at least until their brains have developed to the point where they can be liable for their actions.

Happy 10 years of the software that allowed me to free myself of the shackles of other corporations and take blogging into my own hands.  I started this blog almost around the same time as Wordpress (WP was only 1.5 years old) Here’s to another ten years! And, here’s my version of what Dougal suggested:

When I first started using Wordpress in 2005:

• I was in my 20s
• I was in college
• I was running the blog on Fedora Core
• I was engaged
• I was using Facebook heavily as it was still highly focused on college students
• I’d never been to any country outside the USA other than Canada
• President George W Bush was in his second term
• The USA was at war with Iraq and Afghanistan

Now, when Wordpress turns 10 in 2013: