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?

Here is my photo-documentation on the project.

While talking to my mom last night she asked me to do her a favor. For today, her mother’s birthday, she asked me to write a message on a balloon and let it go into the air, metaphorically going to my grandmother in Heaven. I did it, taking pictures to document the act because that is a symbolic thing to me as a visual person and photographer. I was fine while I did it but when I came inside and looked at the weight which had kept the balloon down while in the supermarket, I was instantly depressed. I was having one of the most amazing days of my life, propped up by the fact that my blog was back and this was just like jumping into one of Ithaca’s gorges. I didn’t even feel like having dinner anymore. Eventually, I got it out of my system and I feel better. I am still a little down, but nowhere near as bad as before. Stay tuned for the next part, where I put up some pictures of the event.

Today would have been my grandmother’s birthday. She died this past March during my Spring Break and I loved her very much. I know that she’s up in Heaven now having a heckuva time with her husband who was taken from her more than twenty years ago. She remained faithful to him to the last day and never remarried. I miss her so much whenever I open up my phone and think of someone to call. I would always call her when I had a free minute. I always get so mad that she didn’t get to see the wedding or my graduation. I mean, I’d like to believe that she was able to see it from Heaven, but she didn’t get to hug me that day. I didn’t get to see the smile on her face. The best way I know to remember her is to use my talents and remember her through my photography. Here is a tribute to her on her bithday: