Well, after a foot of snow has been dumped on central Ohio, we’re on our way home for the holidays. Just wanted to wish all the Button Mashers a Merry Christmas!
Asides
Happy Thanksgiving
Holiday Weekend
This week blogging will be sporadic as we are away visiting family this holiday weekend. (Man, Thanksgiving weekend is great). I brought along the Gamecube to play with the younger cousins and hopefully get a game or two of NCAA in, but we’ll see. I don’t see a bunch of gaming playing much but no biggie, I need a break.
While at my parents house, I’ve finally experienced G4/Tech TV. I’ve wanted to see some of the stuff on there for a while but we don’t get it from Time Warner. I must say, after watching a few shows, I don’t feel like I’m missing much. It’s great to see these hosts passionate about gaming, but sometimes it feels a little forced and almost like pandering. But at the same time, it was good entertainment. It could be much worse. But I don’t mind not getting it at home.
Since Santa will be shopping soon, I’ve got to get him my list. I think I’ll be asking for Metroid Prime 2, Mario Tennis, and a racing game, either NFSU 2, Burnout 3 or Outrun 2. Any suggestions? Either way, it is going to be a great Christmas.
Linkage!
I’ve been fascinated by the blogging phenomenon. It has definitely garnered a lot of attention with all the political blogging going on. I’ve been doing it for a while with my personal blog but that became more of a place to post pictures of my daughter for our extended family to see. I don’t update there as much as I used to. On the otherhand, I’m committed to updating here as often as I can. I’m also keenly aware of the value of getting links to your blog. When someone links to your blog it’s like blogger crack. It’s the life-blood that keeps bloggers blogging. It gives a huge ego boost (I believe the correct term is ego-boo). So when I noticed I’ve been mentioned in a blog post at Gamer’s Adventure and I’ve been added to the links over at SmashBot.net I was pretty pumped. I appreciate the props. Makes me feel good.
Update 11/2 – render has also linked me up. Thanks for the link, 4tomsm4sher!
The Sect of Homokaasu – The Rasterbator
The Sect of Homokaasu – The Rasterbator: “The Rasterbator is a web service which creates huge rasterized pictures out of relatively small image files. The pictures can be assembled into extremely cool looking posters up to 20 meters in size!”
Not game related, but extremely cool. I’m going to try this out with a picture of my daughter. What will they think of next?
Blogshares
ButtonMashing.com is now listed on the Fantasy Blog Stock Market at BlogShares.com. Go sign up and buy some shares of ButtonMashing while it’s cheap! This site will be going through the roof, as will its share price! You’ll want to get in on the ground floor. When you sign up you’ll get 500$, invest some of it in this site!
Video games aren’t all bad!
For a while there, video games only received bad press. GTA-inspired shootings and murders involving an Xbox were the headlines. Now stories of what good can come of video games are starting to come out. There have been stories of surgeons who play video games have more success. Now, Wired News has this story about a “Games for Health” conference where game makers and health educators are getting together to talk about games. There are games that can be used for training –
Rosser, who heads the Advanced Medical Technology Institute at Beth Israel Medical Center in New York City, knows how he’d like to see games used. Since 2001, he’s worked with games like Super Monkey Ball, for Nintendo’s GameCube console, to train doctors in laparoscopic surgery. What Rosser found was that students who had played video games for more than three hours in one week — even once — had 37 percent fewer errors during the procedure, and got the operation done 27 percent more quickly.
And for treatment –
… which has used video games and digital worlds to treat more than 400 people with anxiety disorders. Patients there use the games to face their phobias. People afraid to drive play Midtown Madness, a racing game; those with fear of heights use a custom-crafted level from the Unreal Tournament shooter game, which features pixelated skyscrapers 50 stories tall.
Back from vacation
I took a week off last week from the internet and blogging (but not from video games!) while we vacationed with my wife’s family in Utah. A good time was had by all. Luckily my brother-in-law is a big NCAA 200* fan, so we played two seasons of my team on the big screen projector. Many good plays, celebrations and awards were won.
Now that I’m back I am super stoked about Fable coming out this week. I can already see myself punting chickens in my underwear, farting all the while! Can things get better?
Video game-free weekend
I didn’t play any games this weekend, including the ritual FF:TA battle before bed. It was actually kind of nice, we were actually outdoors, camping and picnicking and what not. I didn’t miss the games as much as I thought I would. It has been a nice break.
Now that the work week is upon us I hopefully will get a game of NCAA 2005 in and finally give ESPN NFL 2K5 a whirl. Should be fun.
Outlook 2003
This has nothing to do with games, but I recently upgraded to Office 2003 at home and I use Outlook for my email account and I must say the new anti-spam features are top-notch. I have the level set as “high” and I rarely get an unwanted email in my inbox while my junk email folder is filling up more and more. I got about 200 emails last week, 150 of which were junk email and all but 3 or 4 made it to my inbox. Pretty good work there. And adding senders to a “safe” or “blocked” list improves its efficiency even more.
I often don’t toot MS’s horn, but I’ll give them props for this one. It also finally has some security features for HTML emails, as well. At least it seems like they’re trying to get better.