Just finished reading:

• The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe
• Myst: The Book of Ti’ana (reread)

Currently reading:

• Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone

Planning to read:

• Ender’s Game (reread)
• Lots of forum posts at the DRC web site

What books have you been reading?

(Sidenote: If you’re reading this via RSS, you haven’t seen the new site design for 2006.)

On Sunday, I ventured over to the Christmas Party hosted on the Tapestry Event Shard in Until Uru. I was quite impressed with the event.

• My rough count included 40 people in Ae’gura and 10 people in the Neighborhoods. Because I turned down my graphics settings, there was virtually no lag.
• Despite no new content being released, the Tapestry folks were able to do some festive things in Cavern. Although a white sky and shiny floors would not be fitting in a in-character setting, I thought it was a neat trick for the party.
• Lots of people were very festively dressed.
• I heard that Cyanist and D’ni Historian Richard Watson stopped by, but I wasn’t able to visit with him.

For more on recent Until Uru events, listen to The Cavern Today podcasts and browse the recent DRC activity.

It’s amazing how polar my workload usually is. I’m either doing nothing and can’t find work, or I’ve got a few billion projects going on at once. Here’s what’s on the table now:

• There’s some awesome new functionality coming to the Ahrotahntee Web Site with a nice graphics redesign as well. I should be finishing this up and launching it soon, so stay tuned. (Ahrotahntee is a guild of Myst fans and their friends in World of Warcraft.)
• For a few months I’ve been working on some ways to make the Abstract Penguin layout more unique. I’ve come up with a new design that I’m mostly happy with, but I’ve still got to iron out some kinks with implementation.
• Recent murmurs at the DRC Forums may spark renovation and growth at the D’ni Explorers Guild as well.
• This doesn’t even include another web/graphics design project or two, plus lots of frolicking in the snow.

This is one of my busiest holiday vacations on record. The best part is that I’m motivated and productive. Bring on more work and fun! Happy Holidays!

Orson Scott Card, the writer of Ender’s Game, discusses why movie translations of video games “hasn’t worked so far — and never will work, until somebody gets a clue.”

Yours, Mine, and Aeon Flux; Videogames - Uncle Orson Reviews Everything: “Movies are, if anything, the opposite of videogames. You spend your time on radically different aspects of the story. The game is all action, with as few scenes as possible; movies are all scenes, with action only there for the climactic moments, when the audience cares desperately about the outcome.”

It’s finals week next week, but I found a great new Real or CG quiz online this week. It’s Fake or Foto 2: Take the challenge now. Fun stuff. 8 for 10 on first try for me. Amazing how graphics are these days… but are XBOX 360 graphics in the Uncanny Valley? How did you score on the quiz?

Here’s a neat story passed on to me from my Dad. I’ll usually pass NASA-related posts along to him from wohba, but this time he sent me something that hasn’t been posted there. CTV.ca | McCartney beams concert to space station crew. Ah, the power of technology!

Explorer-created Ages: New tools released by the Alcugs project have enabled explorers to dabble in the Art of Writing. Although no major Ages have been written, the potential is now being tapped. I’m very excited at the possibility of what is to come, but I would like to advise explorers to use extreme caution when linking to new Ages. Perhaps we should get some of the Maintainer’s suits from Gahreesen.
The Cavern Today Podcast: The Cavern Communications Network has been hard at work recording news and stories from Uru and the Myst community. I enjoyed being interviewed for their second podcast, but it can’t compare to the interview, coming in the sixth podcast, with Ryan Miller.
New Eder Kemo Screensaver: Almak, the creative technology specialist for the D’ni Explorers Guild, has assembled our collection of Eder Kemo photographs in a great new screensaver availbale for download from the D’ni Explorers Guild. Check it out if you like watching the rain, following the glow bugs, and reminiscing about Phil Henderson. As I mentioned at Mysterium 2005, Almak’s almost preparing the DRC Screensaver for upload onto the site as well. Stay tuned.

I haven’t been that impressed with gaming lately. Then something came along to rope me right back in: Half-Life 2: Lost Coast.

Developer Commentary: Lost Coast features small audio clips from the developers scattered throughout the level. Not only can I see how wonderful Valve’s work is, I can start to understand how and why they did the work. This game has better developer commentary than any DVD movie I’ve seen.

High Dynamic Range Lighting: This game is beautiful. Amazingly beautiful. Even turning down the graphics options (my system specs are just below the required) produced wonderful results. I know graphics aren’t everything in a game, but you’ve got to smile when the sun blinds your eyes as enemies rappel down the cliffside to attack you.

Closed Captioning: I never realized how important Closed Captioning (subtitles) was until the topic filled the Myst IV message boards. I don’t use them myself, but I know adding the option into Valve’s engine has pleased quite a few.

Gameplay: This game has logic. This game is innovative. I’m climbing the level vertically. I’m getting attacked by squads of Combine patrols. Helicopters are crashing in front of me. This is fun.

Half-Life 2: Aftermath is going to be awesome. Why? Valve stretches the boundaries.
What games have exceeded your expectations?

Earlier I posted about my blog not meeting my technical wants. I’ve also been thinking about the content I want in my blog. What is the purpose of writing here? Some blogs contain great posts on daily life, interesting (and wacky) ideas that make you think, insightful commentary on industries and societies, or beautiful photos that make you reflect. This blog has a little of each. Maybe what I need is more focus. But if I focus, then I’ve got even less content then I already have.

Looking over some of the (approx.) 400 posts in this blog, I’m quite proud I’ve been able to maintain it for so long. I’m also a little ashamed of some of the earlier posts. It’s great to see change (and growth) over the years. But if the purpose of this site is to represent myself, should I delete some of these “high school” ideas from earlier posts? Do I want only quality posts or a quantity of posts? Should I take this site and make it into a more serious eportfolio or a more fun playground?

Either way, I am trying to come up with a design that’s a little less standard than the current one. What content do you want to see here? What content do you focus on for your site?

I’ve been thinking about switching to WordPress from Blogger, but neither service can do what I want:

• I want to have Home, Blog, Cam, and Contact as top level pages.
• I want Home and Contact to be static pages I update once in a while.
• I want be able to post to Blog and Cam since I update them frequently.
• I want Myst and Life to be subcategories of Blog.
• I do not want Cam to appear as a subcategory of Blog.

Basically, it’s two seperate blogs (one for Blog and one for Cam). The only ways I can think of making it work are:

• Using a lot of else/if statements
• Using different templates for each category (which WordPress doesn’t do)
• Setting up two WordPress blogs (which I would like to avoid)

I would greatly enjoy it if the nice folks at WordPress could enable different templates for each category.

P.S. Has anyone else get strange results when implementing Blogger’s new Backlinks feature?