[caption id=“attachment_5858” align=“aligncenter” width=“480”] Saint’s Row: The Third - Playing with Dan - the only way I could beat this mission[/caption]

Saint’s Row: The Third (15 hrs) - I played a lot of fun missions, including Deckers.die, but in order to get there I had to get Dan’s help on this helicopter escort mission.  It was fun having him join in.  I might need him in March as I finish up the game.

Alright, time to cover Scarlett’s birth.  I imagine her photos will be the most interesting ones for the next year.  But I guess we’ll see.

I’ve cut back a lot because I have less time to listen to podcasts. Here are the ones I have now:

Video Games

Giant Bombcast – This is a HILARIOUS podcast that is mostly about video games.  I say it’s mostly about video games because these guys often will go off on random tangents about what energy drinks they have, what they ate, what they did between video gaming, and other topics.  However, they always get back to video games and provide a really fun podcast.  Segments include What You’ve Been Playing, News of the World, New Releases and EMAILS!  My favorite parts are “What You’ve Been Playing” and “Emails”.  It can be a bit geeky in the same way that some of the tech podcasts I listen to are geeky, (Approx 2.5 hours long)

So…..apparently the most interesting photo has nothing to do with Scarlett being born? It must be based on when I uploaded it, not when the photo was taken.

Time once again for Photojojo to send me the most interesting (as determined by flickr photos from 1 year ago)

The thing I like the most about Twitter is the ability to interact with creatives in real time.  In the past you had to write a letter to a writer, artist, musician, etc and hope that, maybe, they’d actually read it and that, maybe, they’d feel compelled to reply with something more than boilerplate.  I started following Paolo Rivera after meeting him at Baltimore Comic-Con.  (Related topic: meeting a bunch of creators in person at Baltimore Comic-Con helped make them more “real” to me.  I’m not a jerky person, but it really does give me pause when I post a criticism to someone on twitter.  Unlike these guys.)  So when Paolo tweeted something from his blog that I wanted to comment on, I kept failing the captcha he had on the comments.  I tweeted and (to my surprise) was retweeted by Paolo:

Apparently, I only had one interesting photo last January.  (Makes sense - we were probably spending all our free time getting ready for Scarlett’s arrival.  I expect she’ll be a huge chunk of the photojojo in the coming year)

Interestingly, this year we had some snow in Dec, but if my title is correct here, the first snow of last year was in January.

Mostly just playing with my new (at the time) camera.

Nearly a year ago I did a comparison of Virtualbox and Red Hat’s virt-manager.  Although I was pretty happy with virt-manager, I’ve had to continue using Virtualbox because so far virt-manager isn’t able to do a bridged ethernet connection without having to ditch NetworkManager and/or do some weird stuff.  I’d given up on VMWare a long time ago because it used to be very cumbersome to install on Linux.  However, I recently found out that I might be able to one day run Windows inside VMWare on my Linux computer and have 3D accelerated graphics work well enough to allow me to play games.  It’s already made huge strides in that direction.  So I figured I’d check it out and see how it compares to using the other two programs.  I’ll be installing Fedora 18 XFCE beta (which I’m currently using on my netbook).  Here’s the first dialog I got:

First of all, a quick reminder that my Game of the Year doesn’t necessarily have to come out in 2012.  Because I don’t have the time to dedicate to video games, the price premium of buying it new rarely makes sense to me.  So my Game of the Year will be my favorite game that I played in 2012.

As I compiled my list I realized that I played a lot less games in 2012.  I may not have played a lot less hours (I haven’t bothered comparing the totals with 2011), but I definitely had a lot less variety.  A lot of that has to do with the birth of my daughter this year.  Only as the year has gone on have I been able to carve out some time here and there to play story-based games.  In addition, I resumed pursuing my master’s degree in the fall, right around the time I was able to have a bit more time to myself.  I didn’t have any gameplay at all in March, September or October.