The best thing about getting this now is comparing how tiny this Christmas tree is versus the one I have this year.

Yesterday we took a look at the most interesting, now let’s look at the most viewed!  Two photos of Nam that I took with my holga have really been taking off.

The last time I could quickly find where I did this was last January. While there are some photos that are similar, there’s been quick a shake-up on the Most Interesting Photos (as determined by flickr’s algorithms).

[caption id=“attachment_5763” align=“aligncenter” width=“400”] Civ 5 - Gods and Kings - Otakuism[/caption]

Civilization V (17 hrs) - I took advantage of the Steam Fall Sale to finally pick up the Gods and Kings expansion to Civ V.  I have enjoyed founding my own religion, Otakuism.  Religion plays a much more key role than they did in Civ IV.  In the previous game, I would pretty much just found a religion because each city would pay me gold (with certain buildings or government choices) and I’d get a window into cities.  In Civ V the religion plays like another level of policies.  You get to choose a series of attributes for your religion such as temples giving you gold or faster territory expansion.  It tends to make the expansion of religion to other cities and civs a much more important task than before.  I’m still a little unsure of how cities pressure other cities to adopt religion because I seemed to have one city flipping even though I couldn’t see any reason for it.  (Could have been another civ sending prophets my way)  Spies are also added.  The spy missions remind me of Assassin’s Creed:Brotherhood  assassin missions.  Unlike previous iterations of Civ, the spies aren’t on the map.  You assign them to a city or city-state and then they either steal you tech (which may not be useful if you’re super advanced and/or playing normal or easier), rig elections in city states (gaining you influence), or protect your cities from being screwed over by other spies.  I must admit that I haven’t done much investigating in the civclopedia, but I can’t really see how to generate more spies and so the whole system seems like a mini-game diversion.  I continued my strategy of non-aggression unless another civ attacks me or denounces me.  Then I drop my hammer on them and take over their capital city and, sometimes, eliminate them entirely.  I like that the requirements on resources for building some units has been reconfigured.  I usually ended up not using a lot of early-game siege weapons because iron tended to be too scarce.  I think it’s a lot more balanced on which units need resources like oil, iron, and horses than before the expansion pack.

Recently I was listening to a Talk of the Nation interview with Jerry Brotton about his new book A History of the World in Twelve Maps.  He mentions how the maps have a political reason for existing as well as having an effect on the viewer.  He also mentioned how the map creator always puts him or herself in the center.  Interestingly, I learned that for most of human history it has not been governments who have created maps, but corporations (such as the Dutch East India Company) who needed maps for commerce.  The last map he mentions in his book, which he worked on for seven years, is Google Earth.  I haven’t read the book yet, but during the interview he mentioned that it was one of the first times we have a union between a globe and a map.  Also, that through the “magic” of computer technology it’s an infinite map as you can always keep scrolling in any direction.

[caption id=“attachment_5709” align=“aligncenter” width=“400”] Final Fantasy VII on pcsx-r[/caption]

Recently I was putting away my old video game systems into deep storage.  The Playstation 2 hadn’t been played in a year and I didn’t want to clutter up my entertainment console with unused systems.  So I started exploring the emulation landscape on last generation’s systems.  Would I be able to play last generation’s games on my computer if it tickled my fancy?  It turns out that, at least for Playstation 1 and 2, they work just as well as on the system for all the games I own.  When I first discovered emulators, I used them to play Chrono Trigger in the high school library when I was bored.  When I went back to them in college, it was to play arcade games from my childhood on MAME.

Recently I was looking at this old post and the screenshots of Amarok 1.4 reminded me of something I loved about that version of Amarok - the stats that would display when you were playing a song - like if you were playing a Five Iron Frenzy song it would tell you your three favorite (or most played) Five Iron Frenzy songs.  That functionality never made it back into the Amarok 2 series.  So when I was looking through the Amarok scripts in the script installer I came across Rating Statistics.  It basically gave me everything I wanted other than being linked to the currently playing song.  It allows you to search your favorite songs based on all kinds of criteria like number of plays, user-assigned rating, or auto-score.  You can also assign some weights to it and get your best songs based on that weighting.  Here are the stats about my library:

[caption id=“attachment_5677” align=“aligncenter” width=“480”] The Walking Dead video game[/caption]

The Walking Dead (14 hours) - I played the latest episode of The Walking Dead.  Because you can’t just save wherever you want, I ended up with 14 hours of playtime.  I still haven’t finished episode 4.

Earlier this year I wrote about using xbmc to create your own private Netflix.  I thought I’d update my readers on how I like it.  Here’s what the current version looks like with the default skin:

[caption id=“attachment_5672” align=“aligncenter” width=“500”] xbmc - default skin as of 20121031[/caption]

I have linked it up with trakt.tv to track my tv and movie watching (just like music scrobbling with last.fm) Using it has allowed me to catch up on shows that I might not have otherwise had the time to watch.  It was easy to start going through all the Buffy episodes while waiting to feed Scarlett at night since they were sitting on my computer and I didn’t have to go find the DVDs.

One always wonders if and when those classes you take in high school will be important.  For me, as an engineer, most of my high school classes were laying the foundation for the classes I’d take in college.  I’ve used plenty of those classes in my work and personal life.  One of the classes that has served me well all these years was Speech and Debate.  You don’t realize how long a minute is until you have to talk for a minute in front of class.  It has helped me with college presentation and work presentations.  Most recently, the following two video reviews were completely ad-libbed.  I didn’t even have any notes to go off of.  (In the AvX video I did take the comic with me to remember the name of the penciller)