If you ever played any game that had the word “Sim” in it (I know that me and another guy were way into SimCity 2000 back in the day), you may or may not know that those games were all made by the same person. His name is Will Wright, and he has been the mastermind behind Maxis, the developer of everything Sim related, since he founded it in 1989. Wright and Maxis have been known for a long time to put out games that are consistently fun, reach an almost spectacularly wide audience, and are for the most part, family friendly. Their latest venture seems poised to do much of the same thing, but also takes the concept of controlling and managing a virtual world further beyond any territory that the company has touched on before.

is the name of it.

It has been in development since 2004, and while development videos like the one below have been shown a lot over the course of the game’s development, it was not until yesterday that Electronic Arts — which aquired Maxis in 1997 — announced the release date, which is September 7th of this year. Supposedly it was originally called “SimEverything”, and with good reason. The basic premise is that you, the player, go from controlling a single-celled organism in a 2D gene pool, to moving around the evolved creature in the ocean, finding food and whatnot, to bringing him out of the ocean, establishing a tribe, building cities, defending yourself against enemies that you may encounter over time, building an empire, and eventually exploring space, and encountering other civilizations built up by other players of the game. While there’s a lot that is yet unrevealed about the different game mechanics, management of resources and universe overlap, to name a couple examples, it sounds great, not to mention quite innovative for a video game, but I suppose that’s what Will Wright has made his career on.

Here’s a video from GDC (Game Developers’ Conference) 2005 in which Will Wright narrates as he takes the audience through the different stages of the game. It’s 36 minutes long, so don’t watch it if you aren’t interested, but I thought it was really cool.

Huh….that’s weird. Looks like it froze up.

*Click* *Beep*

Maybe that’ll work better now.

Pretty much sums up what this site has been to me since last summer. Don’t worry if you don’t get it, just know that I’m gonna try to start posting some things semi-regularly, usually about totally random stuff that some, but not always everyone, will find interesting.

For the last month and a half, I’ve been working as a security guard at the new Trinity building/Servant Branch headquarters on Wednesday afternoons. At the suggestion of a couple of people, and because the webcam showing the building’s progress is stuck on a shot of what it looked like right around when I started doing security, I decided to take some pictures of the progress of the building. You can find them on my Flickr page.

A couple of posts ago: I mentioned that pie was better than cake, and that I would expound upon that later. Here it is.

– First of all, pie is easier to make. You make a crust, and put something in it. With cakes, you need to worry about baking them so that they don’t fall, frosting them so there are no crumbs in the frosting, and all the hassle that comes with decorating them. While there is some hassle associated with making pie, it is to a far lesser extent; with pie, the finished product is what it is, there isn’t generally any decorating to be done after it comes out of the oven (there are obviously exceptions to this, such as with some creme pies).

–Pie is more versatile. As I mentioned above, a pie consists of a crust with something in it. This could be anything from apples, peaches or blueberries to lemon creme, chocolate creme or candy. You can experiment too, by mix-and-matching different parts of it. For example: a traditional apple pie could have a second crust, a lattice top, a crumbly top, or for an old-fashoned twist, you can make it into a cream pie, and make a kind of pudding/whipped cream mixture to top it.

So there it is. Don’t get me wrong now, I’m not here to “talk mess” about cake. Cake is awesome…..but dude….pie. That’s where it’s at.

Yeah, I got a camera recently. Here are some pictures I’ve taken.

A couple days ago, Business 2.0 released their second annual list (see the first one here) of 50 people who matter most right now in the world of business and technology. A couple of things I noticed:

1. Mark Zuckerberg is actually on the list after being named as one of the top 10 people who don’t matter last year. Perhaps it was all the ridicule he received after declining a supposed $750 million dollar buyout offer last year. This year however, he is back on the list. From the article:

In September, Facebook opened its doors to anyone with an e-mail address, and in May it announced plans to add free classified ads. It also gave outside developers access to Facebook’s underlying code. In a matter of days, one application, iLike, had attracted nearly half a million users.

Perhaps things are looking up for him, and in terms of the business side of Facebook, all of these recent changes make a lot of sense (Read: sense = money). Personally though, I could do without all the applications and stuff cluttering up people’s user pages, but at least they haven’t made it so that a user’s favorite song starts blaring at you when you go to their page.

2. There’s a generous focus on businessmen who have started to make efforts to be more eco-friendly in their business (Examples: Richard Branson, of Virgin; Kevin Walsh of G.E. Financial Services; and Arnold Schwarzenegger, who is apparently a higher-up in some government somewhere). Umm, all right, I guess…

3. “You” has been bumped down from #1 to #45. Apparently the collective “you” that was so highly touted last year as being “…continually creat[ing] and filter[ing] new forms of content, anointing the useful, the relevant, and the amusing and rejecting the rest…” has gotten lazy, according to the article released last week.

All those YouTube videos of cats dancing, playing the piano, and drunkenly running into walls? So derivative. Then there was all the fawning over Snakes on a Plane. What was up with that? And don’t even get us started on Sanjaya. Look, we still think You have lots of potential. But if You’re really going to change the media landscape, it’s time to step up Your game.

No surprises there. Especially because the portion of “You” that they are referring to seems to actually be a very loud, but small portion of the collective “You”, primarily made up of bored high school and college students with a webcam, time, and an intense focus on trivial things.

4. Philip Rosedale of Linden Labs is on here. For those of you who don’t know, Linden Labs is the company responsible for Second Life. I can’t figure out what’s so great about this guy, because for him to “matter” enough to be on this list, that would have to mean that Second Life matters, and it doesn’t. In fact, I’m just gonna come out and say it: this is stupid. Stupid!

Second Life is boring, clunky, and ugly, and doesn’t deserve the attention it’s getting. It’s not the wave of the future, internet or otherwise. First of all the graphics are terrible, and painful to look at. Second, it barely works. The program runs as though your system isn’t advanced enough to run it optimally — no matter what kind of system you have. It’s as though the developers worked on it until it sort of functioned and then Linden Labs got rid of them all and started working on managing the economy of their world instead. In my opinion, while the concept of a virtual world filled entirely with user-generated content may be personified in Second Life, and there is something to say about it being a “new thing” that Linden is pioneering, it still has a long way to go before there’s any real use for it. Honestly, spending real money so you can make your avatar’s pants go from brown to blue is totally bananas and just shouldn’t happen. That’s right, totally bananas.

From the article:

Second Life is no longer just a game; it may also be the precursor of a more visual, three-dimensional Internet. Instead of looking at a flat e-commerce webpage, imagine dropping by a 3-D virtual store. Sound far-fetched? In Second Life, it’s already routine.

Whatever dude! WhatEVER! This kind of terrible thinking totally reminds me of the early days of the internet, when companies would design graphical site interfaces that looked like brick corridors with signs like “Chat Room” and “Home”. At the time it made it easier to navigate the site, but only because people were just getting used to navigating the internet at all. Do we really want to go back to that?

That’s about it for now.

Yeah, haven’t posted in a while; whatever whatever. I am, at this moment, staying up far too late in order to finish a project that is due tomorrow morning, and have temporarily succumbed to the random distractions that tend to pop up in these situations (thoughts like “hey, you should update your blog sometime.”) It is due to this temporary loss of reason that I present to you this list of what I’ve been up to recently, in no particular order.

–I quit using digg.com about a month ago. The user community is loud, obnoxious, and childish, and because the site revolves around user-generated content, the stories that appear on the site’s front page tend to be loud, obnoxious, and childish. Things like this don’t help either.

–I got a camera recently. It looks like this. Expect some picture posts in the future.

–For those who don’t know, I’ve been in culinary school at MCTC for this last semestor. I just realized that there are still people that I haven’t told about that. Sorry.

–These last few weeks in class have been devoted to baking — cakes, pies, pastries and such, which means I now have the means to make those things the right way instead of trying to figure it out by testing stuff on my household every week. Last week I made two apple pies with lattice tops, which I’ve never done before, and gave one to the girls at the parsonage. It tasted good.

–Pie is better than cake. More on that later.

–Genevieve asked me if I would be able to help come up with a food plan at her and Nathan’s wedding reception. At this point, it looks as though I will be meeting with Amy DeCelles and the others that Genevieve has asked to help to plan other aspects of the wedding over the course of the summer.

–I am looking for a job. There are rumors of a painting crew being put together by Dave Beskar for the summer, and something like that would be ideal for my current situation, but nothing is for sure yet. More on that later.

–I watched Citizen Kane again recently. It is still a brilliant film. I also watched Spiderman 3 recently, which was not a brilliant film.

That’s all I can think of right now. I am done with spring semester on Tuesday, so I may have time to write more then.

With yesterday being my 21st birthday and all that, I decided that it was time to experience Town Hall for the first time. I had heard about the place many times, from many people, and I needed to see for myself if it lived up to all the word-of-mouth hype that’s been built up about it. So Dan Ficker and I went over there after having dinner at Chipotle (if you went and got a burrito yesterday or the day before, you could go today and get one for free!) and some other division members joined us later. Dan went ahead and recommended what he liked, and I ended up starting with an Oatmeal Stout (for those of you not familiar with the home-brewed selection at Town Hall, it’s kinda like a Guinness).

Friends, that was some good beer.

We ended up staying for about three hours, cause some people couldn’t make it right away, and that gave me time to also try their Scotch Ale, which was fantastic as well. To top it all off (pun intended) our server gave me one for free, and a couple of the guys chipped in for the other one.

This Easter weekend, John and I went back to our parents’ house in Hastings (or “The ‘Stings” as I like to call it). On Friday night, we played around with MythTV, which is a linux-based — and thus free — home media convergence service that my Dad has been working to get running to the point where it can replace the DVD player, as well as act as a TiVo-like service for recording old movies off of TCM. We spent the rest of the weekend relaxing, and on Sunday night, went to the community meeting at River Ridge. I was very pleased to realize that this is how we do Easter in the People of Praise; we spend most of the day with our individual families, and then at night, we all come together as a big extended family, and celebrate our savior’s resurrection. Bill Wacker gave a remarkable talk on the story of Jesus’ resurrection, and why it would have been very difficult for anyone to believe at the time, given the circumstances. Praise the Lord!

I was perusing tech articles a couple days ago when I came upon this one about Google and the perks they offer to their employees. The section entitled “Integrators and Segmentors” is particularly interesting, as it talks about how in some workplaces, namely Google, the line between one’s home life and work life is blurring. I was reminded of a conversation I had with Nick Holovaty back in January about the same thing. It’s a good read.