Apparently Plants v. Zombies is available on Steam for only $10 rather than the $20 that it costs on Pop-Cap. Having played the demo I really enjoy the game, but I don't want to pay $20. I'd go for $10, but then I am reminded that Steam doesn't have an OSX client, so outside of running bootcamp or something, I will have to pay more to play games. This should be part of a windows commercial.

PS. I've also realized that spell check is destroying America and the only way to reverse the destruction is to spell things correctly, without spell check.

PPS. Why hasnt Fortress of Chocolatude been 'Monetized' yet? I think it would be cool if you got a 10 dollar bill back in change and got to read Martin's latest rant, or classic rants from blogs past.

OOOOOOHHHHHHH Fortress Blog. How do I love thee. Let me count the ways.
Ok.

So now that we actually have some dispersia, disappearia, etc whatever going on, now the blog is cool again. I actually thought for a while that something had died inside fortress blog, because apparently its not hosted on sammich anymore. Or something like that. The internet is a very wierd and scary and strange place, and no place for any one with a rating of 3 or less on the Rubenburg-Goldschwagger Vector Personality Quotient Ratio Inquisition Test. Or R-GVPQRIT, naturally. Now, I can hear you people out there, the ones that say "But what about the Melkenschatz-Hurkel-Schwazwurski Quantifier for Mental Capacity To Not Be Dumb? Hasnt that been clinicly proven to be 8.3% more accurrate in cases involving severe stage fright and hypothermia?" Of course, of course. But we're talking about cases where the subject has severe dandruff.

Has anyone else noticed that Yahoo Answers is just a giant rumor mill, but people just use a bunch of technial words to make their answers sound like they have some kind of merit? My favorite answer to "Is it true? If they smoke, they poke?" starts off like "As a man I cannot speak for all women, but generally, ..."

I've been grappling with learning Japanese for some time now. And I've come to, not a conclusion, but the momentary resting place where it seems to me that I never learned how to speak English. I just kind of did it because thats what everyone else was doing at the time, and I guess that seemed appropriate. But now, if I want to say something in English, I just start working my mouth and making noise with my throat, and people generally appear to understand WTF I'm talking about.

But it doesnt work that way with Japanese. I have to remember what order to put words in, and usually if I dont think about it for a minute it comes out more or less inconceivable. Sometimes I basically say something in English using Japanese words. which is quite a trick, let me tell you.

It doesnt stop there. I have no idea how I understand what people are telling me in English. Why do I know this or that without sitting and thinking about word order and grammar and tense etc? Beats the hell out of me. And reading. What I've decided, true or not, is that I actually have some kind of preprocessing on Japanese text that converts it to English before concious comprehension gets a hold of it. If that were true, that might be helpful in some respects, but would I actually be learning Japanese? Is learning Japanese just learning how to interpret meaning, or do I need a larger awareness of the context of the language? I mean, is it enough to understand what people are saying, or should I also understand why they're saying it, even though those reasons are not explicitly stated?

Phew.

Our former leader Mark Honeycutt will be marrying Katherine Giddens in roughly 26 hours. Everyone is already in the loop about this shit, but it seemed like the kind of important thing that should be blogged about. The wedding will be somewhere North of the city in the woods, where the service will be administered by a grizzly bear. I personally like Katie a lot, so I'm very happy for them both.

Also, I have been beating my head against a wall trying to install Maya on some Macs. That program is stupid difficult to get running, and then to do anything with. Apparently one of the previous teachers used to teach a class about it. I told the school I'd be happy to pick up the class now that Steve (the old teacher) has moved/passed on (RIP). They didn't tell me that it wasn't installed on anything, or that they would be giving me a classroom full of non-tech savvy freshmen to teach this program to. It is difficult enough for me to understand, and I have 2 degrees and prior experience with basic 3D modeling. These kids are fucked.

To find another way around the problem I looked into using Google's Sketch up as a very basic 3D modeling tool. I works alright and teaches some basics that we can move on to more difficult things from. I made a searching game (find 7 red rectangles in this virtual building) to teach the kids how to use pan/zoom/rotate, and I thought that I would e clever and use a google doc/group to deliver the file. Little did I know that GOOGLE DOCS DON'T FUCKING SUPPORT GOOGLE SKETCH UP FILES. So far my best analogy for this is like Coke making a can that wouldn't fit in its own vending machines. Sure, maybe that happens in real life, but it is fucking dumb.