Snap Club has improved greatly. It auto resizes, looks better, and has tighter controls now. (No more manual work, just upload, and it takes care of the rest...I like that.)

Much, much laundry to do. I should get hopping on that... I don't know if the 'mat will be open on Easter, and I don't have much left to wear. Plus, there's no good breakfast food in the house... some grocery shopping is in order, too. Ah, the talk of a tasty breakfast has motivated me into showering and gathering my clothes together... I'm off!

okie doke... chores done, now I can officially relax now that I've made the obligatory telephone calls, re-tagging those that missed me.

Dragonball Z is still in the blah arena-fight area...I liked it better when Goku was a little boy, tooling around on nimbus. I'd prefer the story move past that, and get back to the better plots. (at least goten still has nimbus) That sissy purple guy is a whiner, too.

update regarding the troll... unsatisfactory results thus far.

http://www.livejournal.com/support/see_request.bml?id=43926&auth=d5t2

they closed it, without really reading my complaint, told me to do what I'd already done. No discipline has been issued yet. I'm considering having the hut members all comment on this one and complain directly to abuse.

Here, make a sugarpaste hatching chick for Easter.

Stuff to look at - odd advertisements, packaging, cookbook covers, and (definitely my favorite) the Spanish board game "El Juego de la Oca". Olé!

The Romanian tourism board is actually planning a Dracula-based theme park in Transylvania, set to open later this year. Is nothing sacred, or, um, the evil opposite of sacred, anymore?

A gallery of beautiful panoramic photography by members of the International Association of Panoramic Photographs, including one of Lolowai Bay, Vanautu that I wanted to point out as Vanautu is the island James Michener wrote about in Tales of the South Pacific. However, this particular shot of an old car is my favorite. It's yellowish tint and flat, dry land remind me of something out of a Steinbeck novel.

Darkstar is a multimedia CD-ROM "game" that is more like a movie than anything else. At all times, the resolution will be ultra-hirez with special effects that better most film projects, not to mention other computer "games". The environment is completely interactive as the player encounters strange rooms, and a few time-hole generated "ghosts", remnants of the past. There is none of the "bitmapped" looking play, and it is NOT a shoot-em-up game. It's an explorable world with a complex story that you are thrust into stone-cold. It's like Myst or Riven, but less puzzle, more story. And more action... from the MST3k guys... , why didn't I hear about this from you?

Ever since I was a little bear, I've had a major jones on for the cliffhanger pulps of the '30s & '40s, featuring characters like Doc Savage & The Shadow. Something about them... the stories, the characters, the aesthetic pushes my gee-whiz buttons in a big, big way.

It's full of pulp goodness & pseudo-science weirdness. And it has a lot of similar qualities with another geeky love of mine, the comics written by Warren Ellis & others, published by Wildstorm Comics, all set in the same universe. The writers of these comics... The Authority, The Monarchy, The Establishment, & especially Planetary... have a great sense of the history of comics, as well as what makes superhero comics good.

It's a fun genre to work with... dreaming up ideas about a secret history of the world, in which daredevils, adventurers, explorers, mentalists, and people with inexplicable super powers all work secretly to influence the development of humanity. A world of shadowy conspiracies, weird science, alien incursions, & evolution. A world of mystery, wonder, & strangeness. Not so unlike our own, if you believe that sort of thing.