In my Top 200 most viewed photos,

Photo #198 is:

When people find out that I’m from Florida ask me how I’m dealing with winters in Maryland, I just smile and tell them that I went to university in Ithaca, so no Maryland winter can compare with what I’ve seen. Cornell tends to be in perpetual winter from December until March. I think the lack of sun is part of what contributes to the low spirits of so many students. I didn’t mind the snow in January and February so much - after all, that’s winter. But when it snowed in March or April, it just made me feel as though this would be the year where winter never ended.

Continuing through my Top 200 Photos on flickr,

photo #199 is:

I love dramatic sunsets and it was complete luck that I was able to capture this one. I had been carrying around my Fujifilm Finepix S7000 all over campus everywhere I went, but I usually didn’t take it with me in my car. I just so happened to have it in my car when we went out to eat at Chilis in Ithaca, NY. By chance, we looked out the window and saw the sunset. I ran out to my car to capture it. Afterall, sunsets can go from amazing to ho-hum in an instant. The luck involved helps this photo to be one of my favorite sunset photos.

One thing I really love about the Photojojo photo time capsule service is that I get to rediscover my photos from a year ago. Although this year is off to a slow start, I usually take so many photos throughout the year that it’s really hard to remember all the photos I’ve taken. Sometimes getting the time capsule reminds me of a place I really enjoyed visiting or a good time with friends of family.

Once again I have received my Photojojo time capsule. Unfortunately (or fortunately depending on your point of view) , it’s all 365 Project photos as that’s the most interesting thing that was going on at the time photographically.

It’s the year of the cat for the Vietnamese Zodiac.  Here’s wishing you happiness, prosperity, and health.  If you want to find out your animal, just visit my Vietnamese Zodiac web app.

This is just a mini blog post I’m going to try and remember to do monthly to keep track of the games I played to make it easier to tally up for the end of the year “Games of 2011” blog post.

Assassin’s Creed II - 27 hours Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood - 25 hrs blogged about them here and here.

The Secret of Monkey Island - 4.5 hrs blogged about it here.

Greed Corp - 8 hrs An awesome little game I bought on Steam on a whim during a mid-week sale. More to appear about this game in the future.

[caption id=“attachment_4108” align=“aligncenter” width=“400” caption=“Assassin’s Creed II (photo by SingleBuilder)”] [/caption]

Back at the beginning of January, I compared the first and second installments in the Assassin’s Creed main line of games. A couple weeks ago I finished up Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood, a continuation of Desmond and Ezio’s stories. I don’t have too much more to add to what I wrote about the second game before. For the most part, I feel the same about it as before. The ending was pretty awesome. It took what you learned about the pieces of Eden from the first game and turned it to 11. Reading through TVtropes, I learned that I missed out on a bit of backstory in the first game by not getting on the Abstergo computer. The same could easily happen if you don’t do the optional Subject 16 puzzles in Assassin’s Creed II. As someone who LOVE getting into a game’s universe/backstory I’m a bit miffed that these bits are so optional. On the one hand, it’s great for those who don’t give a crap about the backstory and just want to assassinate some dudes. But it’s really easy to miss how epic the game really is. If it weren’t for the backstory, I wouldn’t be as anxious as I am for the next installment to come out. Unfortunately for my pocketbook, the smart money is on Ubisoft annualizing the Assassins’ Creed series. This may mean we don’t get a good, conclusive ending. Of course, they could go in the super-creative route and give a satisfactory ending and then have new games just fill in story in the past or with other assassin groups.

As with my discussion of Recettear, playing The Secret of Monkey Island involved revisiting a gaming genre from my past.  Unlike Recettear, TSoMI is not a parodic look back at an old genre, it is an original game from that time period.  TSoMI is an adventure game, a genre that is pretty much only kept alive through the LucasArts Telltale Games ( edit: thanks for the fix, Dan) who is re-releasing old games like the Monkey Island series, publishing new takes on old games like Monkey Island, Sam and Max, and publishing completely new games like Back to the Future.

Here’s the background for February.  A little shoutout to my alma mater.  Click on the image and then right click to set as your desktop or save to your computer to manually set to the desktop.

[caption id=“attachment_4050” align=“aligncenter” width=“400” caption=“Feb 2011 desktop for more square monitors (1024x768)”] [/caption]

[caption id=“attachment_4051” align=“aligncenter” width=“480” caption=“Feb 2011 desktop for widescreen monitors (1680x1050)”] [/caption]