I reviewed it when I got around to it, and put out an honest article. I did leave it there last week instead of posting the new reviews yet though. Because the next thing I knew the Rhode Island TV stations that we get locally in Southern Mass were all talking about this former baseball player whose new video game company was going bust, and bankrupting the state of RI. The next day brought the news of the over a million dollar check that former Red Sox pitcher Curt Schilling passed, which bounced. Holy crap dude, I would not want to be you right now.

Sadly the bottom line caught up with him. But like new restauranteurs that came from a different industry and “buy” a restaurant, being able to purchase a company does not make one able to run it. Career changes suck. Kingdoms of Amular sucked, not because it wasn’t pretty, or lacked a story, it sucked because it lacked the substance beyond the surface. They did not spend enough time in development, and most likely never hired enough coders.

It was a mistake to market Kingdoms of Amular Reckoning to compete with Skyrim. It lead to the game being dissected by gamers the same way it was. And Amular can not stand up to the comparison in any way shape or form. I thought that it’s major flaw was with the basic level design.

You can look at a masterpiece like Skyrim, and see that each area is designed from top to bottom. From the levels below the ground that might be where chests are stored, there are then layers for earth, rocks, plants and trees. Above it are your roads and buildings, and inside the building is the blacksmith or barkeep that is standing above that chest. Over his head are the upper floors of the building with items, rooms and characters. The items themselves are all interactive, and books can even be taken off the shelves and read. Even the sky is populated with birds, real time weather and sunshine. That is how you make a game. “Room” by room, layer by layer.

Didn’t anyone at 38 Studios ever play a table top version of Dungeons and Dragons? That should be in game design 101, because the analog mapping done in it, is the foundation of video gaming. At least the good ones.

Schilling’s game, as I said in the review was all glitter and had no guts. Jocks traditionally don’t have time for nerds. It is always a mistake to underestimate the gaming community. Hence a shovelware product. I can just imagine the meetings they had, geeks vs jocks about the game, which had potential, but needed another year in development.

I think it is also a mistake to think that if one is a big name in one industry, that it will carry over to another. A big baseball star may have name recognition for a large fandom, even in the millions. Though that might not be the same crowd that will go out and get a glitzy hack and slash RPG game because his name was attached to it. In fact the nerdy gamers that go for RPG’s like Skyrim most likely never heard of Schilling, or would care. I never heard of him and I live in Mass. Not everybody in Mass cares about the sporting events of local teams.

It’s the hardcore gamers of each genre that drive the industry. Whether it is Halo players, or WoW player types, it is the word of mouth online in the long run that makes or breaks a game. Especially RPG’s which take a long time to play and have a much longer review time.

Live and learn I guess. From what I have observed in the news, it seems as though some large karma is playing out over 38 Studios and this game. I am also curious why some sites gave Amular such inflated high scores. Since there are no coincidences.

so easy to use which was my main interest. With four animals running around and the mess I make while cooking, I hoped for something that would be convenient enough to use frequently. It has two small tanks on kit that are very simple to fill up. One for water and one for the cleaning solution. Which is expensive, but worth it. I thought that the tanks would make it heavy, but it isn’t much different in weight from a stick vac.

You need to wear shoes while using it, because of the steam heat. You can easily burn your feet with it. I know many people mop in their socks or with bare feet to avoid the foot prints, but you are going to need to work with something substantial on your feet. The floor does get warm, so I recommend sending your dogs to their room while you are using the steam mop.

It makes quick heated steam that they say kills 99% of bacteria and germs. It was such a pleasant and rewarding feeling going over spots that had ground in dirt, and even rust. It took up things that were stuck to the floor as well. What a terrific little bot.

They claim that the Hoover® SteamPlus™ Cleaning is 100% biodegradable and non-toxic, so it’s safe to use to kill germs and bacteria while still insuring a non-toxic environment for your children and pets.

The mop seems like a steam iron and a vac hooked up. Ok Hoover, when do I get my cleaning robot that will vacuum the rugs, and steam the floors all by itself?

Fricking basket ball was on TV all day and night yesterday. I tuned into the Revolution instead of The Talk, which I won’t do again. The Revolution had on a supposed expert in saving money which sounded interesting. However as usual on women’s talk shows, the so called tips were disgusting and completely un-relateable.

“Buy your make up at the drug store instead of at high end beauty counters.”
“Go to the hair and nail salon when it is not a busy day or when they are having a sale.”

Those tips were absolutely ridiculous and completely out of touch with real women. Who can afford fancy make up or going to a salon? Certainly not anyone I know or anyone who actually lives a life off television.

And just now on Nate Berkus as I flipped channels. “Oh those jeans are only sixty-nine dollars.”

Only! Seventy bucks for a pair of pants? That is insane. The best deals on clothes are at the second hand store. TV people need to get real when they pretend to give advice instead of giving these depressing and condescending “money saving ideas.”

I’ve been interested in physics since I was a kid, and interested in Quantum Mechanics since the 1990′s. Big Bang was a true inspiration for me. I went online and found the OCW, which is a network that provides free college courses for no credit online. I am very excitedly consuming everything that I can read from MIT’s Physics department. So far, I have whisked through Exploring Black Holes, and Quantum Mechanics 1. I am slowly going through Electricity and Magnetism with Professor Walter Lewin who is an exceptional educator. When I was college age it was before the internet, and I would never have been able to get the education that I can now, for no charge, without leaving the house, and best of all without taking exams. It is perfect for a “third act” at my age.

Now there is a whole new area of science and technology to explore and discuss. As well as cross over. I’ve spent half of my life wearing two hats, doing non technological pursuits such as working with Reiki, psychic development, phenomenon and Tarot. As a geeky kid with an older brother who was a physics professor, I always felt that personal energy would one day find explanations in science.

It wasn’t until the free spirited ’90′s that science and the psychic began to merge and spiritual people like myself began talking about Quantum Mechanics and phenomenon. In fact someone actually went ahead and built the Tarot of Physics by Dan Horn & Corrine Kenner. It isn’t as pretty as The Quantum Tarot, which seems superficial, the clean looking graphics look like real physics notes. Each theory or application from physics has been made into to Tarot with the suits being Energy, Space, Time, and Matter.

From time to time my Phenomenon topic is going to have articles that I have been writing in my Physics notebook. The theories on the geometry of the universe always seem to be food metaphors. Pizza, meatballs, spaghetti, donuts – they have all served their purpose as models. I’ve begun to ask my own physics and cosmology questions and started in with my own novice theories such as my Big Flush Theory, or Big Fart Theory, these both suggest that the evolution of the universe was more natural than mathematical.

Back in January after I finished the Exploring Black Holes course, I began thinking about the Inflation Theory and the inadequacies of the Big Bang Theory itself. My impression is that there is still much conjecture and uncertainty among those who know more than I do. But in spite of science fiction that goes off on tangents suggesting that travel through wormholes, and stable wormholes, could be possible I’ve never seen any of those conjectures as being feasible. Firstly no one has in reality seen a Black Hole, only its effects on the surrounding space. Recent photos of a black hole taken by the Hubble telescope have to be rendered to show up. I don’t think anyone has actually found a worm hole either.

What is known about Black Holes is that they crush and crush all the matter it comes in contact with down into something less in size than a pinhead, and with more density and gravity than we can imagine.

And then yes, there is that “other side” of the Black Holes. Again theoretical. I see a match up though. I was reading Scientific American April 2011, on the cover of the mag was a picture of the funnel shaped model of the known geometry of the universe. It just doesn’t look complete to me.

What they have discovered so far is that in order for the microwave background that can be seen to have come out so homogenous and even, what ever began the Big Bang had to be uniform, tiny and dense to begin with. On the other side of a Black Hole is another Big Bang. That quintessential particle which began our known universe that they are looking for sounds to me like it was created by a Black Hole or something unimaginable which is similar to it. A flat shaped evenly distributed “explosion” just seems so unlikely. More likely is that something farted the universe out, like so much waste products. I envision a Big Flush Theory, where a cyclone like hot soup of plasma was ignited by a sparking particle of some kind. A Dark Anti-particle….

I mean, even the math and the Baryon equations seem like fantasy to me. Trying to impose math on the infinite seems futile. Sure the mathematical models have predicted a few things. But they have not been able to impose any mathematical predictions on the a priori Big Flush, because the laws of conservation of matter and energy do not apply before the beginning of our known universe. If we are to get anyplace with understanding the universe, then sooner or later we have to get to where we are finding that our “laws” of known physics no longer apply, or we aren’t doing a good enough job of looking.

Perhaps the only way to truly figure out our cosmology is to build a fleet of star ships and get out there and take a look around.

What does interest me is quantum mechanics. Recently they are finding that all bets are off on the quantum scale. Particles and their attendant waves share information with each other somehow. Even over distances on the quantum scale they appear to communicate about how to orbit and where to land. Like nothing so much as the migration patterns of birds.

When I think about the universe I think of it as a collection of ordinary things, but we are the ones who are too small to understand them. A mouse who lives in my basement, and even its ancestors and children, may live here all their lives, and may never form a complete picture in their mind of this entire building.

I am tall enough to see the house. I can walk across the street for a better view. I can take a picture that will capture the whole house. I can even look at it from a satellite view above. The mouse can not. Can she imagine her universe? What is my collection of ordinary things to someone who cannot see the whole picture? What does she make of the kitchen sink, the refrigerator? And what would the mouse think of me if she saw me?

My theories tend to be more about compost than astrophysics. The Big Fart Theory, could be either an anthropomorphized universe with a primordial host. Or a chemical universe with non-sentient explosions, and interactions of random electromagnetic properties.

The cosmic background radiation and the models of the geometry of the universe look like poop at the bottom of a toilet bowl. Circular and with a cyclonic function at the center.

From the mundane to the sacred.

O Isis, the point within the Circle,
without which life would not be.
O Isis, Ea, Binah, Ge. – Golden Dawn

Quantum theories are what is left in the attempt to understand the entropy paradox of the Big Bang and prior to it. What they do know has to do with the inflation and acceleration of the universe expanding. They think that only a very cohesive homogenous and infinitely dense particle caused the Big Bang and expansion was the result.

What if in the void of space out of the chaos two subatomic particles were created. Maybe the one and only anti-particle had sex… The point within the circle. Resembling not the genesis of a bible, but the old Golden Dawn’s esoteric tradition of the Quabalah. Maybe even a retired Tarot Master can propose a theory of the origin of the universe. LOL

The buckle of Isis, is the ancient description of the cauldron of life.

Space is not really a truly empty vacuum. There are particles which appear, cancel each other out and disappear. What if that is a natural process the same way that microbes will eventually populate sterilized garden soil. Perhaps the Big Bang was the first and only time in our universe when a capricious neutrino got freaky. I could never attempt to do math for something like that. Or develop experiments to prove what happened. But I think that the funnel shape of the buckle of Isis, which opens once makes a good metaphor for the Big Bang as a conception rather than an explosion.

“To say that the Maya civilization disappeared is not only an inaccuracy, but a great disservice to more than the estimated 8 million Maya living today in Guatemala, Mexico and El Salvador.”

I find it shameful of Matt Damon to do a voice over mindlessly parroting such racist remarks.

I’ve been Tweeting it out, but it may take more than one person complaining to stop them. Please pass this along if you can.

The writer seems baffled by the trend of wearing lounge wear outside of the home to school. Here in Mass where lounge wear is worn practically everyplace, GQ magazine dubbed the capital of the Commonwealth as the country’s worst dressed. I’ve been working online since 1993 and I don’t do it wearing heels and makeup. Even denim is binding when you need to be seated and typing for long hours.

I would argue that young people are dressing for success. PJ’s all day is a status symbol. Sitting around on the couch with a tablet or laptop, is the board room of today. In the present culture a successful internet entrepreneur, or someone unemployed and surfing for jobs online looks identical.

Are the pajama people slackers and just sloppy as the WSJ writer contends? Or are they dressing for the career that they want to have? Perhaps those attending school in their pj’s envision themselves as future content creators coding, making art, videos and articles and getting paid for it. Those of us who do that sort of thing know just how many hours it takes to geek out and produce something quality, and often the collateral damage is that our appearance suffers.

The very popular show Big Bang Theory shows intelligent and employed role models who hold advanced degrees, wearing tee shirts, and hoodies. The female main characters wear stylish lounge pants, tanks, hoodies and sweats. The characters seldom “dress up”, and there are several episodes where these geeky internet savvy characters are totally at sea when it comes time to dress for social functions.

Not that lounge wear is cheap either. As with any fashion, you could spend $20 or $200 to buy pre ripped jeans or stretchy leggings that look like pajama denims for couch wear. Designers may not be getting many bucks from the trend. Licensed clothiers are though, those Hello Kitty pj’s are going to set you back a pretty penny.

Kids do grow up, and will learn when it is important to look pulled together. But that image of the suit wearing job applicant going for an interview is becoming more antediluvian. Many interviews take place on Skype. People may even work together for years, and never actually “meet” in “real-life”.

For women working from home has become more than just a dream in some cases. Having a child and staying home to be a Mom does not necessarily mean being unemployed anymore, like it did before the internet. More women are doing work online or going to school online while they raise kids.

Cutting edge technology means warm fuzzies are needed. Everything is better when done in fleece. Let’s get our slippers and go out on the town. Ok maybe a town in Skyrim.

Steve Jobs The Crazy Ones

I hate you Death! Fuck you hard Death! The place where my writing mojo comes from is deep down at soul level. It exists right next to the depression section in my psyche. I’ve been in mourning.

I haven’t written a word in two weeks. Almost two years ago my older brother, an expert hiker “fell” off a cliff and died in a freak hiking accident. That uber-nerd older brother was my geek mentor. I’ve mentioned him in several places in this blog. Apple’s soap opera story, and inventions were something that my brother and I bonded over throughout the years. So Death got him. And then George Carlin, and now of course Steve Jobs. This trinity of brainiacs keeps forming into a visual of a black and white tattoo of the three of them.

“Oh where, oh where have all the smart people gone?” I can’t get the line from Pink’s Bush era lament, Stupid Girls, out of my brain. Yes, I know that the new smart people are out there, but you are half my age and one of my boobs is probably the size of your head. It isn’t always about what’s good, as you will one day find, it’s what you grew up with. Maybe all this pain is good for song writing, and there’s an App for that… Ah, see what I mean?

I grew up along with Apple. Steve Jobs has always been inside my computer. Not just the code, but the covenant of understanding between a person that you know and trust, which was what made Apple different from IBM and Microsoft. Steve, and his belief system permeated what I have always felt from my Macs is a rudimentary artificial intelligence. The “ghost” if you will, in the machine. Job’s computer liberalism as perhaps a real world precursor that might lead to a philosophy something like Azimov’s Three Laws. From iMac to iPad to Wall-e, benevolent, cheerful hoppy icon-ed little friends came from Apple, not just cold devices.

There is Woz. He still lives. I will make sure that I have him on my Twitter and look up whatever else he is doing. I’m slowly picking up my geek pieces. As disheartened as I may feel in that empty mojo place next to my soul, there are fun PS3 games to review. There’s a brand new iPad 2, that has become very sentimental suddenly, to explore the world with. I’ll go on, continuing to look for that spark of true genius in the next computer Lama whomever he or she may be. Yep, I will geek on. I, robot?