Welcome to Sonoma. We’ll Steal Your Identity!

Victoria and I didn’t get a lot of mail when we first moved to Sonoma. After a while we started to think that somebody must be stealing or mail, too much stuff went missing. We finally found out that the post office was holding our mail – without telling us about it, of course – and got a huge backlog of 10 days or so. So everything turned out to be fine, right? Yeah right. We just got notification from the USPS that somebody did break into the neighbourhood mailboxes, and that’s why they started holding mail in the first place while they were “busy” replacing the box.
We already put fraud alerts on our credit accounts, I don’t think anything bad will come of this. One of the prices you pay for living in what Wolfi and Roland described as “Wisteria Lane”.

Woohoo!

Woohoo! E3 coming up! Are you excited? I’m excited, and I hope you will be, too! See you in LA.

House!

I took some pictures this morning! I’ll have to arrange them into an album first, but here’s a teaser. Obviously that’s the front. Seen from the street. The blue stuff on top is the sky, the green thing is called a tree. You’ll notice that the car parked in front the garage has a flat tire…

Jeremy

I still haven’t found a way to read out pictures straight from my camera (something about the drivers went horribly wrong), but my shiny new Dell 2405FPW at work has various built-in card readers, including one for my CompactFlash cards. So while I haven’t taken any pictures of the house yet, I did get my backlog of pictures from the last few months. To start things off, here’s a picture of Jeremy, the budgie we bought for Victoria a while ago.

Picture didn’t turn out as clear as they could have (stupid auto focus), but it’ll have to do for now.

Car Trouble

Generally I love my car. It’s fast, fun to drive and perfect for this area. But a cargo giant it is not. You can fit about one suitcase into the trunk and that’s that, when buying some small furniture a few years ago I had to rent a uHaul truck to transport the stuff home.
Case in point: this morning I had a flat tire, and after installing my spare the old tire did did not fit in the trunk. I had to transport it on the passenger’s seat instead. I guess lifestyle has its price or something…

A Postcard from GDC

As mentioned earlier there won’t be any online material from the GDC talk about Lair, but Victoria just got some pictures developed that she took during that time. Here’s one of me setting up before the talk. See, it’s almost like you’re there! No? Not really you say? Ah well…

Page Updates Resuming Soon!

Been busy! In the meantime, if you want to know what I’ve been working on: a screenshot of Lair made it to the web after GDC (click for 720p version).

Video Games Will End It All!

As you all know I am very busy corrupting America’s youth by creating video games. Of course that begs the question what I would have done if I hadn’t been born during this technological age? We all know that Rock’n Roll turned the youth into rabid Satan worshippers, and comic books have been breeding little criminals for several decades. But maybe I could have made my evil contribution to society’s downfall even earlier?
Wired has an article with choice quotes about various forms of entertainment that were introduced during the ages. According to those people, society should have crumbled by now…so excuse if I don’t take all the current video game nay-sayers too seriously. I mean, just look at what the Waltz did to us:

“The indecent foreign dance called the Waltz was introduced … at the English Court on Friday last … It is quite sufficient to cast one’s eyes on the voluptuous inter­twining of the limbs, and close com­pressure of the bodies … to see that it is far indeed removed from the modest reserve which has hitherto been considered distinctive of English females. So long as this obscene display was con­fined to prostitutes and adulteresses, we did not think it deserving of notice; but now that it is … forced on the respectable classes of society by the evil example of their superiors, we feel it a duty to warn every parent against exposing his daughter to so fatal a contagion.”
- The Times of London, 1816

Ach So

Immer noch eine meiner liebsten Spiegel Unterschriften. Von einer Selbstverstaendlichkeit gepraegt, die man sich oefter wuenscht. Und irgendwie inherently funny…

About Religion

With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.

I was thinking about this quote by Steven Weinberg* the other day. I have a few friends that are themselves as religious while I am not, so discussions about various aspects of religion come up ever so often and I find myself tryig to express why I don’t subscribe to a popular faith anymore.

I guess I’d amend the above quote with the word “organized”. Because organized religion is where this whole belief thing falls apart for me. I don’t have any beef with spirituality, I’m quite down with that. Spirituality lets people think about their role in the universe, formulate answers to the eternal “What does it all mean?” question and generally come to terms with their life. I doesn’t matter how they do it, but they do it – and gain peace of mind. But everybody gets to do it on their own terms, arriving at their own conclusions. Organized religion dictates the terms. It has little tolerance for disagreement and is generally exclusionist. I’m sorry, but the “We got it all figured out, and if you don’t believe us you’ll end up in hell!” rap just doesn’t work for me. I don’t want you to figure it out for me! I guess I simply consider myself way too much of a free thinker to have other people tell me what my role in life (and death) is all about.

*1979 Nobel Price Recipient for Physics