Musical Interlude from a fun band outta Balla'more

The Brick Testament

This is an obsessive and somewhat baffling retelling of the Bible in Lego vignette form. It's kind of awesome. (Link.)Pictured above: Deuteronomy 28:53 'You will eat the flesh of your own sons and daughters.'

Spore Micro Review

What Spore is Not (disappointingly):

Spore is not the ultra deep "EVO-on-Meth" evolution simulator I thought it would be after seeing this video back in 2005.

What Spore is (surprisingly):

Spore is Escape Velocity on acid.

Alex's Rating: 8 out of 10
Edit: Revised down to 6.5 out of 10 due to Escape Velocity being a much better game & the painful frustration of not really ever being able to interact in interesting ways with all that you create. What were they thinking?

"FREEBASE!!!"

"The federal government, in what will be its most far-reaching attempt yet to contain the financial crisis, is poised to establish a program to let banks get rid of mortgage-related assets that have been hard to value and harder to trade.

Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson announced the framework of the plan on Friday morning. "The federal government must implement a program to remove these illiquid assets that are weighing down our financial institutions and threatening our economy," said Paulson."

Wall Street: "Man, I have this horrible problem with cocaine ."

Uncle Sam: "Well, just have more cocaine! Problem solved!"

The Spring Engine

I'm not a big proponent of real-time strategy games, but I think I could play Spring until my eyeballs shrivel up like raisins. Spring started as a port of the late-90s game Total Annihilation (didn't play it) and has moved on in exciting new directions. It is free and open source.
There is a Tron-style mod I haven't tried, yet, as well as upcoming Star Wars and WW2 mods.
Link to the Spring Project.

The Sims was/is Dumb. Spore was/is Dumb.

did i not say this? months ago?

Amazon reviewers clobber Spore DRM

Buyer Beware.