Saturday!

Jaybird

Jaybird is Birdmojo on Xbox Live and Jaybirdmojo on Playstation's network. He's been playing consoles since the Atari 2600 and it was Zork that taught him how to touch-type. If you've got a song for Wednesday, a commercial for Saturday, a recommendation for Tuesday, an essay for Monday, or, heck, just a handful a questions, fire off an email to AskJaybird-at-gmail.com

Related Post Roulette

20 Responses

  1. zic says:

    I don’t play video games (migraine trigger, plus I’m a person prone to bingeing.) Lately, I’ve been bingeing on Neil Stephenson; in the last two weeks, I’ve read Reamed, Cryptonomicom, and I’m about 1/3 of the way through Quicksilver. (This is why I haven’t been commenting much, I’m now having trouble keeping up with reading, posts, something that rarely happens in my life.)

    Reading Reamed, I wondered if someone has used google earth as game world — and yes, I found Planet in Action. Fascinating.Report

    • Burt Likko in reply to zic says:

      @zic if you look through my archives, perhaps on my old sub-blog, you’ll find my fantasy casting of the theoretical HBO series based on the Baroque. I’d love your thoughts reacting to it, and any updates.Report

      • zic in reply to Burt Likko says:

        I’ll look when I need to come up for air and breath, Burt. I’m sort of overwhelmed. Totally reveling in being a nerd.

        A few nights ago, I braved the cold, walked along the sidewalk under some mature pines at the corner of my yard, and noticed the moon up through the pine boughs, through a layer of thin cloud cover. I could see the expected circle of light in the clouds about the moon, it had an odd egg shape because the moon’s not full yet. Around the edges of the ring, I could a spectral rainbow, indigo on the inside through a narrow band of green, then a wider band of yellow fading through orange to red that was frizzed at it’s outer edge into the cloud, lit from underneath by light pollution from my village. I scurried to get out from the white pines for an unobstructed view, light changes incredibly quickly, equations involving the movements of earth, moon, sun, as well as the formation of cloud in the atmosphere. Unobstructed, the rainbow at the edges of the moon ring were gone, just silvery light in the thin cloud layer, I could see stars through. I stepped back under the pines, and the rainbow at the edges of the moonlight ring in the cloud reappeared. I did’t understand why, and I stepped back and fourth from under the pine for a few minutes, observing the phenomena, until it became too cold to stand so still.

        Yesterday, I looked up out the window to focus my eyes distantly after a long bout of reading about Newton’s experiments with optics. From my chair next to the wood stove in my kitchen, I have a view across the village to the Androscoggin River valley, screened by the fringe of trees growing in the village, to the Mahoosuc Mountains at the horizon where the mountains meet the sky. Where the view was unobstructed by trees, the air above the river looked clear. But through the fringe of trees, I could see a faint mist hanging over the river, and where my view of the mist was interrupted by branches of giant maple and oak trees , I could see the thinnest band of rainbows it it. It was like the moon before; the obstruction revealed the refraction.

        I’m still puzzling out light moving through moisture fringed by the branches of trees and the resulting rainbows. I think a similar phenomena happens when the afternoon sun shines through the wire mesh of my screen porch; but the hot bands of sunlight it scatters is far too bright directly observe rainbows at it’s edges, perhaps my camera will probably be able to observe it, so that’s an experiment in the works. I’ve been exploring light in atmosphere in lightroom, mostly using the luminosity settings to filter out the other colors of light that blend back toward white, You can see some of my early work in this G+ album..

        Reading Quicksilver makes me feel glad to be a nerd. It’s often annoying to people, I love that my husband is that he’s rarely annoyed to be around as I figuring things out. He’s a Waterhouse through and through, and we’re both grateful that the need to each conduct our own research frees the time of the other for research, that’s one of the richest blessings in our marriage, and we spend a lot of time sharing our discoveries with each other.

        I’ll dig into the archives when I take my next break, @burt-likko , and report back to the Ordinary Society (OS) with a brief comment or blog post, as the response warrants. Thank you for pointing it out, I’m grateful for the opportunity of conversation. Now there’s a wood fire and book in the other room I must return to.Report

  2. Morat20 says:

    Hmm. Dragon Age 2. And probably Minecraft, as soon as my nephew clears out. He’s currently playing Lego Star Wars and enjoying himself immensely.

    OTOH, my wife is currently stranded in Dallas due to weather.Report

  3. Alan Scott says:

    As far as internet games that take your money by bits and pieces, I find Fallen London to be much more entertaining, and a much better value in terms of what throwing a few bucks at the game will get you.Report

  4. Fish says:

    “Those Facebook games are just a wasteful time sink,” he said as he prepared to play his 1,000th hour on Civilization V.Report

    • Damon in reply to Fish says:

      I know a guy who develops those FB games. Originally he was a computer game designer..and owner of his own company. At one time, he was partially owned by Microsoft, so he knew what he was doing. He said the profit profile of FB games was amazing and that’s why he sold his company and got hired on to make these games. I should have stayed with coding…Report

      • Kim in reply to Damon says:

        “At one time, he was partially owned by Microsoft, so he knew what he was doing”
        … this doesn’t terribly seem indicative of knowing what he was doing, imnsho.
        What did he publish?Report

  5. Brandon Berg says:

    I played Candy Crush for a while just to see what all the fuss was about, but I uninstalled it when I realized that there were certain levels that were very heavily luck-dependent, put there to goad people into paying to get through them.

    Actually, I wouldn’t be surprised if it were on some kind of timer, where the game decides to give you the candies you need to win only after failing a certain number of times.Report

  6. James K says:

    I’ve just defeated the Queen of Scales in Hand of Fate.Report