First solid news I've heard about Joss's new show starring Eliza Dushku- Dollhouse. Looks like Amy Acker will also be in it! Awesome!

http://blog.wired.com/underwire/2008/05/whedons-killer.html

Totally worth it, just to see them singing Bon Jovi... too funny.

But now I have to wait until October for next season! AAAAAARGH! Why is life so cruel!?!??!

As we were putting away dinner leftovers tonight it came to our attention that somehow we had gathered a large variety of bread in our house this week and that we wouldn't be able to finish it all before it went bad. I decided to devise a brilliant recipe to take advantage of all this bready goodness!

( 4 Bread Casserole )

Or I could just make croutons or bread pudding perhaps...

It is imaginative, impressive, disturbing and fascinating all at the same time. Be warned at points the audio gets a bit loud.

MUTO

OK, thanks to the last poll and guild member votes I named Nitesong's pet bat Drusilla. I tamed a boar and named it Spike, but even with it's great utility in the BG's the boar just didn't click. So in the tradition of running deep into enemy territory to tame... I went to Mulgore and tamed Mazzranache the rare pink tallstrider. Since the bat is named Drusilla I thought I'd go in the tradition of naming the pet after a character from Buffy. So here's the list, vote for as many of them as you like and Friday evening around 8pm I'll close the poll and name the bird! Thanks!



Poll #1188296 Who's that pink flamingo?
This poll is closed.
Open to: All, results viewable to: All

What shall we call this pink flamingo?

Shout out to xanthos32!

So a week or so ago schneenet posted about how she picked up a Webkinz so she could play online with her niece and nephew.

I looked into the Webkinz (www.webkinz.com) and found that they were pretty much a cross between Beanie Babies and Neopets. You buy a little collectible stuffed animal (between $10 and $15 MSRP) and it comes with a code. You enter the code on a website and you get that stuffed animal as a virtual pet. It has it's own room and needs to be fed and played with.

In addition you can answer trivia questions and play games to earn Kinzcash which you can use to buy virtual stuff for you pet like furniture and food. Essentially, like Neopets, it's largely a timesink game.

Unlike Neopets there are many "multiplayer" minigames. You can have a friends list and if your friends are online you can challenge them to games of checkers and "Battleship" type games, pool and more.

They've made efforts to make it kidsafe as well, the online chat isn't typed, but your comments are selected from pulldown menus and are fairly generic in nature, so that kids can't give out personal information.

One of the fastest ways to earn Kinzcash is by taking quizzes many of which contain math questions, history/science questions and logic problems. So it's educational but provides good motivations for kids to do them.

The one aspect that I like is an in-game collectible dice game. Each die has a pet's face on one side and then various icons on the other sides that represent attacks, defenses and moves. There's a racetrack on the board and each turn you roll the dice and use the attacks and defenses to try and remove your opponent's move dice. Once both players pass on "attacks" then the remaining move dice are resolved and the pets move that many spaces on the track. First one to 20 wins. It's an addictive little game. If they'd release a non-virtual version of this game I think they'd do pretty well with it. Some interested game mechanics in it.

So if you're looking for a good kidsafe Internet activity this is worth looking into. Likewise if you're into the virtual pet scene with lots of cuteness, this may be worth investigating. Just a caveat. When you register your pet it says you get a year of playtime. Now whether at the end of the year you'll have to pay some subscription fee or just adopt another pet (you can have multiple pets- you won't lose your first pet) I don't know. I haven't really looked into it that far.

So for any fellow Scrubs fan, YAY! They will get their final season proper, just on a different network.

And for any of you BBC fans (I'm thinking slashspouse and cereta here because they told me about this show...) looks like a US adaptation of Life on Mars is coming.

From Imdb news:

Frustrated by a writers' strike which forced it to postpone many of its development plans for the fall season, ABC announced that it will only air one new drama in the fall, David E. Kelley's Life on Mars, a time-travel tale about a police officer who is plunged into 1970 America from the current time. ABC will also air the final season of Scrubs, which was dropped by NBC. It is produced by ABC Studios, formerly Touchstone TV, a corporate sibling of ABC. Also making the lineup for the fall is the new Ashton Kutcher reality series Opportunity Knocks.

Recently it has come to my attention that there is a book club in our office. Now, anyone who watches The Office knows that if there is a club in your office that reads books or otherwise celebrates the "finer things" in life, that these people are the movers and shakers and the real core "power" of the office hierarchy. So of course I wanted in on this...

The month I joined they had just decided to read "Delicious Conversation" by Jennifer Stewart Griffith.

Now at first glance, this may not look like a great piece of literature. In fact you may, just by reading the summary of the book, pre-judge it as a piece of fluff fiction, one that isn't even well written as far as fluff fiction goes, and believe that it's likely a steaming pile of crap. And you'd be right.

Well a couple of the members were reading Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen even though it wasn't a selection of the book club. They thought I'd be interested in reading it and one of them loaned me the book. They wanted to just have the three of us get together and discuss it. Now this, is more like it as far as book club reading material goes. An entertaining read, if a bit predictable in places (and unpredictable in others), it is very good storytelling and actually gives the readers some interesting topics to discuss. Of particular interest to me was the fact that many of the circus behind the scenes stuff in the book was inspired by anecdotes the author found while researching what circus/carny life was like.
I recommend this book for anyone looking for an enjoyable read with a bit of meat to it.

A couple of weeks ago I attended the first meeting where we selected the next book to read. Attendance for that meeting was a bit light as many people had other stuff to do, errands to run and the like. But the people who did attend were the more "literary" minded folks. The end result? The books to read for the May meeting are "1984" and "Animal Farm" by George Orwell. It was thought that since Animal Farm was relatively short it would be fun to read it to compare and contrast the two. Perhaps not coincidentally a few of the book club members dropped out of the book club for the summer...

jegie was kind enough to pick up both of the books for me this past Saturday while she was running errands for C's birthday party and heading into work for an hour or so. So I've started reading 1984 for the first time since I read it in high school. Perhaps I'm just a more mature and experienced reader... or perhaps "Delicious Conversation" has given me a baseline definition of "utter crap" but at any rate I find myself REALLY appreciating Orwell's writing style. I've always been into the Dystopian future concept which helped me thoroughly enjoy 1984 when I first read it. But now I'm really getting hit by some of Orwell's writing style. Very good stuff.

June's selection is Marley & Me by John Grogan. I plan to pick that up after the 22nd which is when we discuss 1984 and Animal Farm.

It's nice to be reading again. This is the first serious reading I've done since the last Harry Potter book came out.

Well C's Bday party is over, now we have to get ready for Z's Bday party this summer... I've just found a great party game idea:

http://iesb.net/filmgeekz/content/view/600/

I'm sure xanthos32 and iloose2 will appreciate that I found this cartoon...

http://www.crispygamer.com/comics/ding/page0021.aspx

Just a quick update on jegie's World of Warcraft guild Fights Like a Girl. The guild is now up to 65 members, which is reasonably rapid growth considering the guild has only been around a few weeks, only allows female characters (though there are some male players in the guild) and doesn't "blanket" advertise over the open chat channels but instead contacts individuals one on one for recruiting.

( An amusing anecdote regarding the guild )

So this morning at breakfast C decided to wish jegie a Happy Mother's Day. She did so by saying:

"Happy Mother's Day Mommy! RAAAAWRR!"

We have a winning name for Nitesong's pet bat and the winner is:




I tallied votes from guild members that were on last night and I got 3 votes for Drusilla and 2 votes for Fourthmeal and no votes for Deflator.

Of course now this means I have to go tame a boar and name it "Spike".

Happy Mother's Day!

I hope C and Z behave today...

Well I closed the poll a little later than I expected thanks to a virus scare on my PC's (and having to run Spybot and install AVG and run scans of both...)

The result is a three way tie between Drusilla, Deflator and Fourthmeal.

The guild is supposed to be running some Warsong Gulch PvP action tonight, so hopefully there will be a good number of guild members on. I'll take the results of the three way tie to the guild members who are on tonight and see what they vote for as the tie-breaker.

I'll post the results tomorrow. Thanks everyone who recommended names and voted!

OK, here's your chance to vote on a name for Nitesong's pet bat. Since I don't have a massive list of LJ readers I'm going to allow people to vote on as many of the names as they like. The name with the most votes by 8pm Friday night will be the winning name! In the event of a tie I'll take the vote online in the game to whatever guild members are online at the time for the tie-breaker.

So without further ado...

Poll #1184907 It's time to play NAME THAT BAT!!!
This poll is closed.
Open to: All, results viewable to: All

What should I name Nitesong's pet bat???

For those of you who are into Science and also into World of Warcraft... winweiquaker posted about a Science conference regarding virtual worlds such as World of Warcraft... and this conference will be held - IN - the World of Warcraft, specifically on the Earthen Ring server. That's right, a virtual conference IN a virtual world. They have even created their own guild named SCIENCE in the game. All you have to do to attend is create a Horde character on that server and contact one of the guild officers. You can get more details here:

http://convergentsystems.pbwiki.com/

I have a Draenei hunter named Nitesong that I created to level up and play in jegie's guild Fights Like a Girl (female characters only).

I decided I wanted an interesting pet and settled on a bat from Tirisfal Glade, the undead starting zone. With Inger's help I was able to make the trek and tame the bat last night. I love it! But I just can't think of a name.

Here's a pic:



Here's info on that particular type of pet:
http://petopia.brashendeavors.net/html/mobs/mob_vampiricduskbat.php

So I've decided to ask my LJ peeps for help in coming up with a name. I'm going to list the potential names that I've come up with so far. If you have another idea for a name just post it in a reply. Then tomorrow about this same time I'll gather the complete list of potential names and post it in the form of a poll. By this time Friday evening I'll look at the results and name my lovely pet accordingly!

I'm also planning to get a second pet, but haven't decided yet on whether to get a boar (for level 19 PvP purposes) or a tallstrider, namely Mazzranache ( http://petopia.brashendeavors.net/html/mobs/mob_mazzranache.php ) or Strider Clutchmother ( http://petopia.brashendeavors.net/html/mobs/mob_striderclutchmother.php )
In case there's an idea to name them as a pair of sorts.


Here's my potential list so far:

1. Eris
2. Merlot
3. Phobos (and name the other pet Deimos)
4. Drusilla (and name the other pet Spike)
5. Batitude

Again, if you have another idea for a name please submit it here.

THANKS EVERYONE!

Lifted from cereta

If you would be so kind, ask me the seven questions below. Just copy and paste them into a comment, replace the blanks with anything you want--personal, silly, surreal (e.g. 3. Donkeys or sandcastles and why?), or deep--and I'll answer honestly as I can! Then post this in your own LJ and see what kind of things people want to ask you!

1. What do you think of _____________ ?

2. When did you last ____________?

3. __________ or ___________ and why?

4. What did you ______________?

5. What's your favorite ______________?

6. How would you ______________?

7. Who would you most like to ________ ?