Civ4 has not shipped to any maryland best buys or EBs!

While browsing Andrew’s page this post of funny news stories. The one I thought was the best was the one about Chairman Mao doing weddings. I went ahead and checked out the yahoo news story he linked to and I thought it was quite an interesting story. Apparently, there is a guy who looks exactly like the late Chairman and he performs at weddings for 500 yuan. I guess that’s the key difference between the way a communist/despotic country is run when compared to a democracy. Apparently people there idolize this guy enough that they would love to have him speak at their wedding. Could you imagine someone dressing up as George Washinton and performing at your wedding?

Rosa Parks died yesterday of natural causes. As everyone knows, she was one of the most influential and accidental icons of the United States Civil Rights movement in the 1960s. As she herself has told others, she never meant to actually stand up for civil rights. She had just finished a very long and tiring day of work and simply took a seat near the front of the bus in order to just sit down. As nearly all American school children know, in those days if a white person asked a black person to get out of a seat near the front, they were required to do so. Just like you or I don’t think straight when we’re tired, she actually refused to move on account of being tired. There were, after all, other seats the white person could have taken. The end result? She was arrested and Martin Luther King Jr began the bus strike. Since so many blacks used the busses, their strike was devastating to the bus’ source of income. They caved and eventually blacks and whites could sit anywhere on the bus. Her actions contributed in a large way to the fame of MLK Jr and gave a large boost to the Civil Rights movement.

If you want to play Civ4 in the most unique way I’ve ever seen, then head on over to Demogame.civfanatics.net. What do they do? They play a civ game where a group of people act as a president and cabinet controlling what goes on in the game. In other words, I play for a few turns and do stuff based on what we decided to do as a group. I’m guessing that they paint the broad picture and I get to do whatever in the details that gets us in that direction. It is certainly much more involved than the way my brothers and I used to play. It’s very neat and I suggest you check out their page to at least get a feel for how involved their rules are.

Reading on the Civilization IV developer’s blogs, I gleaned the following great tidbits!

On Great People:

“Great People are created at the city level, as each city can generate “great people points” based on conditions and structures in the city. You can affect the amount of people points generated in several ways. One very dramatic way is through the creation of a great wonder. For instance, building the Pyramids will make it more likely the city will generate a Great Engineer, while building Stonehenge will make the city more likely to generate a Great Prophet. You can also generate more great people points by taking city population away from working the land and turning them into specialists. Certain Civics choices can work to make your specialists more productive and that can also have a positive effect on your great people point production.

Just reserved my copy of Civilization IV Special Edition at EB. You can bet I’ll be all over that sucker tomorrow after work. Hope to have a more substantial blog post later. q;o)

Oh yeah, people are coming back to my blog! About four hundred unique visitors have come in the last couple of weeks.

As some of you know from having been to my drop the bomb productions site you can see some of the stuff I’ve done. Of course, I haven’t done much serious stuff yet, but have mostly just done work for others to showcase my editing abilities. However, I am constantly making videos for different reasons. For example, I just completed making a two DVD set video of my own wedding. I also made a graduation video for my brother, Dan, a couple of years ago. So I love to keep up to date with the latest in video software. Other than photography (and lite gaming), it’s my biggest reason for using a computer.

I finally had an awesome enough computer to run Gnome and KDE! I was so excited and downloaded Super Karamber, gdesklets, and all the other eye candy I could never enjoy on my old Linux box. (which is now serving as a debian print server) However, having used Fluxbox so long on the old computer caused me to long for fluxbox. There was something I just liked about it. Perhaps it was the inobtrusivness which comes from a lack a large program menu or maybe it was right-clicking for programs or the way I did almost everything in a term window. So I was getting a little tired of having Gnome in Spanish, as I had switched it to about a month ago for fun so I decided it was time to end my session and start a new one. I always wanted to take advantage of having a GUI with a low memory profile since I wanted to begin working on Cinelerra (see my tutorial tomorrow), which takes up quite a bit of RAM.

Linux Uptime: 21:46:52 up 25 days

“Save often and Save Well” that was the motto of one of the best pioneering games of the 80s and 90s, King’s Quest. They spouted that advice because it was easy to make the wrong move and have your character die. If you hadn’t saved, you could lose hours and hours of game play. As anyone knows, it’s just too frustrating in those circumstances to play the game over. The same shoud go when writing a blog post. I had about two paragraphs I had been writing about how I kept forgetting what I had wanted to write so badly while I wasn’t home. One click too many in Firefox killed that sucker. Just like the video games, I don’t feel like writing it again. I’ve always felt that way about writing - unless it’s ridiculously important to me, I just will let it go. On to some of the other things I wanted to write about.

In our recent move, my wife and mother were on a mission to get rid of as much junk as possible as I’ve been labeled by them as a pack rat. I saved this poem from destruction. I don’t remember anything about it, not even the circumstances in which I wrote it. But here it is for you.

Life It’s no longer yours. You can’t do what you want with it. That’s like coming back to live in/remodel a house you’ve sold. You see, the owner dictates what happens to his property, as demostrated in Merchant of Venice. But what do you do if you’re caught in the moment? Especially with the other being so tempting, so manipulative. To give in is a breach of contract. At the same time, you know the judge is forgiving. As far as you know, there is no limit to the forgiveness. Do you push it? Test the limit? Is one moment worth eternity? Especially one quickly forgotten. But…that IS the main question…. the one up for debate. We have access to law books, but they are written in confusing jargon. If only the judge would answer you directly. Yet, he is a witty man. His favorite means of communication is through metaphors and analogies. So I stumble through the books looking for the answer. How do you confront the other without risking it all? It almost seems like one or the other. There must be a compromise… somewhere… But right now… right now somewhere is as good as nowhere. Patience is not my strength. If it is wrong to do it directly, then can it be done indirectly? Is it now right? Half as wrong? Still fully wrong? I really need to know for I fear jail almost as much as the side effects/penalties. In such a “now” world, it’s hard to consider eternity. So now I continue to wonder… I hope that I will somehow find the answer in the books. Until that time I simply dreak making the decision. Which will it be - the moment or eternity?