Another Pokemon for the Pokedex.

I’m all for good political humor… but this image that my son showed me earlier today, while cheesy, made my whole day. I’m posting it in an external link because I don’t believe in hotlinking and I’ve been too lazy to fix the flickr plug-in on my blog.

Why Left Coast Pizza Sucks.

Amen to this guy, who explains the science behind why it is that pizza on the west coast cannot ever approach the goodness that is true New York pizza. Apparently the secret is in 90 year old brick ovens, and the tap water. Amazing, no?

I’ve always wondered about that pizza thing. I mean, I like pizza enough to eat it, regardless of its origins, but there still is very little that competes with slices of New York style pies. Personally, I preferred my uncle’s rendition of pizza to everything else. My uncle is Sicilian and learned to make this wicked amazing pizza, which he then passed down to my father, who also makes this wicked amazing pizza, but it’s not quite as good as my uncle’s for some reason. Perhaps this exercise in scientific explanation makes sense, and can help humanity truly understand what goes in to making the best pizza in the world.

Whacko Cults

And the final digg find of the day is this really neat photo essay that describes the cults that went whacko.

It’s particularly topical because of all the news stories that have been surrounding the FLDS ranch in Texas, and all of the comparisons that I have seen made to this facility and Waco, with the most interesting quotes being from the Texas officials who desperately wish to avoid a repeat of the Waco tragedy. Of course, I do not mean to imply that those living on the FLDS ranch are cult members and personally, as far as that whole scene goes, I just want them to get through the evaluations of those children and let those kids go home. I am sure that maybe 5% of the families on that ranch have not been as responsible toward their children as they should have been, but the other 95% deserve to return to their loving homes. But the whole situation does bring Waco back to my mind, and thankfully, this time no children have died… at least, not so far.

I’m totally gonna have to buy this book.

Today I was digging through digg. This rarely turns up anything useful, but there is the occasional link to an article on kotaku that doesn’t completely suck. Of course, the primary reason why this article doesn’t completely suck is because it’s not an article at all, it’s a video clip. The video clip isn’t even produced by kotaku, but was, in fact, aired on G4. News that comes from G4 is often interesting because it paints a picture on the video gaming industry and market that you do not see in the mainstream media. This clip is precisely one of these.

In this clip, Adam Sessler of XPlay interviews the authors of this book called “Grand Theft Childhood” in which they posit the theory that children who do not play video games are at a greater risk of being socially ostracized and of becoming more physically violent than their gamer peers.

Food for thought.

Who didn’t know this?

12% of consumers are leeching wireless from unsecured wireless networks.

Hello!? How can you possibly hop on the internet and not realize that people do this? There’s a very simple solution to this problem. It’s called “Network Filtering”. I’m not the huge network geek that my husband and friends are, but Network Filtering is really easy to do and from what I’ve seen, any wireless router has this feature available in its setup.

What you do is tell the wireless router to only accept connections from the mac addresses that belong to individual machines in your house (or your Nintendo DS, or your PSP… or your iPhone.) You do have to enter in new mac addresses when you replace old machines or devices, but it takes maybe ten minutes and is a great precaution against unwanted intruders on your home network. Not to mention, it’s just plain smart. Who knows what leechers are doing while pretending to look like you?

Network filtering. Learn it. Know it. Use it.

The First Baptist Strip Club of Spokane?

So this morning, I’m reading the news and I stumble upon this little tidbit. Yes ladies and gentlemen, that is right! A club known for exotic dancing hosted church services on Easter Sunday!

The only reason this is relevant is because Tim Wilson predicted it many moons ago.

Jobs Says No to Flash on iPhone.

And while all the flash nerds can gripe and cry about this all they want… they should probably talk to someone who actually owns an iphone. I dunno about you, but me and my iPhone toting friends want NOTHING to do with something as insecure and unstable as flash on our cell phones, which are capable of making phone calls from telephone numbers printed on the web.

That’s just asking for some jackass hacker to come up with some way to exploit my phone and while I trust Adobe for photoshop, I don’t trust Adobe for anything else and certainly don’t want to have to mess with a resource hungry Adobe app on my iPhone. It takes 2 gig worth of RAM on my PC to make anything Adobe run smoothly, iPhones just don’t have that kind of real estate.

Speak up in the comments, fellow iPhone owners!

Gary Gygax, Father of D&D, Dies.

I wasn’t sure. Early reports on this came from Troll Lord Games’ forums, where people were posting that Gygax had passed, but nothing official had come out just yet. Then I came upon the story at a Wisconsin TV station, where Gygax lived with his wife. His wife confirmed his passing to the associated press… and there it is…

Gary Gygax, the man who co-designed Dungeons and Dragons, believed to be the very first roleplaying game, is dead. He was 69 years old, and at the time of his death was still writing adventures for D&D, even though he was no longer working on the core rules for D&D itself. Gygax and Arneson’s creation changed the world. It certainly changed my world. Gygax was certainly not one of my favorite characters in the gaming industry. It had been rumored for years that Gygax was a misogynist, among other major character flaws. In spite of these things, I can’t deny his contribution to my life. This man and his game certainly changed the way I see the world and the way I spend time with my friends.

He’s gone now and I am grateful that he was here. I’m grateful for what he gave us because life would never be the same without D&D. Rest in peace.

Heath Ledger Dies at 28.

How sad is this?

The suspected cause is a possible drug overdose, other than that no news. They found him today.

Apparently filming on The Dark Knight is already over and the film is in post-production right now according to IMDB, so we will still get to see Ledger’s performance as the Joker, but I was really hoping we would get to see more of him in this new Batman series. What I’ve seen so far of the new Joker is impressive and downright cool.

My heart goes out to Ledger’s family, particularly his 2 year old daughter, who barely even got the chance to know her dad.

Movie rentals via itunes?

This would be fantastic… if it could beat Netflix at what Netflix does.

I mean, I know that I get a physical DVD, but there’s no reason why the 3 out at a time policy could not work for digital rentals. When you’re ready to watch the next thing, delete one of the previous rentals in your library. It also doesn’t beat Netflix on price. For 17$ a month I get to rent approximately 14 movies a month from Netflix. That same 17$ through iTunes rentals nets me 4 new releases or 5 old releases.

In addition, Netflix just opened up the ability for me to download stuff and watch it on my laptop, through my web browser, whenever I feel like it and as often as I want. My laptop is not as portable as an iPod, but that’s not the point. Netflix is already doing video on demand for its customers and they’re giving it to them gratis, as part of their packages if they have more than the most basic of plans through Netflix.

Apple, you’ve got a long way to go to beat Netflix at this game.