A male Florida Senator was recently arrested attempting to solicit sex from a male prostitute. His excuse, “I was in a bad neighborhood and I saw all these black guys and I got scared.” I don’t understand how that excuse works well. John Oliver from The Daily Show had a better excuse, “I’m bulimic and I have putting my finger down my throat.”

The reason behind the lack of my news or politics-related material recently is due to a very simple fact - the world has become boring. I haven’t seen anything new happening in months. The war in Iraq continues, stagnating at the pace of a glacier. Has anything new happened there? No. US soldiers continue to die every day. Sunni and Shi’a continue their slaughter. Iraqi politicians resign and rejoin, but no legislation of any consequence is passed.

Actually, it’s Warcraft cosplay. Why not? They do it with anime. I’m not sure how long the video will remain up, but enjoy it while it’s there. But, can someone who knows the game tell me wtf is the checkered cube?

I am a huge opponent of repeated attempts to extend copyright so that new works never fall into the public domain. I’ve explained this many times and, while Creative Commons is not public domain, per se, it tends to give the same benefits. Namely, someone can take the content of someone else and make something new with it. This new work doesn’t diminish the original at all and enriches the public space with something new and creative. Witness yet another such great video by Remyyy:

Remember before when I had my Tampa pictures included in Schmaps? Well, looks like they’ve chosen one for Baltimore. I hope they choose it for the final version. Here it is:

I’m pretty excited at the prospect of people seeing my pictures when they look at the map for Baltimore.

Available in 1280x1024 and 2560x1024

edit: I was going to write something to go with this and I was talking with my wife and forgot to do so.

I noticed that the previous large image was a bit blurry as well as having bad lighting. So I fixed the lighting, added a wall, and it looks a lot less blurry now. So this is now my desktop background on my Windows computer.

Here are some more test renders I’ve done for Sugar. First I created an advertisement for the beer similar to the ones you see in a typical restaurant. I used the GIMP and the fact that backgrounds in blender are transparent.

Not bad, eh? I did later fix the light color of the ads. It had to do with the materials settings I was using. By the way, do you notice that the ad is encased in plastic as in the restaurants? In some of these shots you’ll see how it distorts the image behind it.

(Title is reference to my favorite Megatokyo tshirt)

In addition to the label for the Ketchup bottle, Pete also provided me with a label for a beer brand. Some people expressed confusion - I was the one who created the bottles and Pete created the labels I’ve applied. As before, click on the image for a larger size.

Power outage last night that lasted longer than the UPS could keep the computer up. Sorry if this prevented you from visiting. As far as I know, everything is now back to normal.