In case you haven't noticed, I've emerged from my web-site slumber of several months and begun making posts again. This should become more frequent in the coming weeks.

The reason I've been ignoring the world of the blorg and the twits is because I've been ass-deep in development of my first commercial game, Duologue. The total development time has been roughly 9 months from start to finish (although, that's me including previous starts and stops of other projects that led to Duologue :-) It's been a long and arduous task but I am very close to being done (in fact, I should have a final beta and possible RC drop sometime this weekend). There's only one minor thing to wrap up (the "Buy me! Buy me!" annoyance screen for the trial mode, which is mostly finished at this point but which may need some revision) and then it's feature-complete and basically done aside from any further bugs we may find in it.

This means you can expect to start hearing more and more about the game in the coming week(s). I'll get the game's page done soonish which and upload some screenshots and videos of the game in action. Then, at some point in the future which I can't predict, the game will go Gold on Xbox LIVE Indie Games. When that happens you can be damned sure I'll post, tweet, and post again about it.

Anyway, stay tuned...

So I guess I'm messed up enough to qualify for some program at The Christian Sarkine Autism Treatment Center due to my Asperger's. The program is kind of cool and operates off of some grant which means my insurance isn't billed.

The funny thing is, every correspondance I get from these guys starts with:

To the parents of Sam Hart

I guess they don't get that many adults going into the program :-)

Just read a rather appalling thing at MSNBC:

Seven employees of a state-run home for the mentally disabled in Texas have been suspended for staging fights between residents

Wow... just... wow. Of course, if there was one state where I could imagine this happening, it would be Texas.

Anyway, there was apparently video of the entire thing, and I imagine it looked something like this:

I'm going to hell now, aren't I?

No words, just watch:

From here.

My ex-wife hated my beard. This was unfortunate for her because I had a beard for many years while we were married. I had a beard partly because shaving bothered my skin, and partly because I was at the U of A Physics Dept. and everyone had beards.

My current wife, Jessica, likes my beard. She likes me with long hair and a beard... has something to do with her attraction to hippies, I'm sure. However, now I've actually discovered a shaving method that doesn't aggravate my skin (I use a Merkur with shaving soap and a brush which only sometimes results in accidents), so I find I'm actually shaving more often than I used to (much to my wife's chagrin). I primarily stick to a Van Dyke (often incorrectly labeled a "goatee"), so I usually still have some facial hair. But every once in a while I get sick of it and shave it all off and start with a clean slate.

Well, today, I decided to play a little trick on my wife and see if I can find a facial hair type that even she wouldn't like. In the last few months I remember reading something about a "neckbeard", which is a beard so odious that it seems universally disliked.

Naturally, I had to have one.

(Read on for more)

Submitted for your approval, a completely incomprehensible series of websites which Google bombs fairly useless phrases, mixes strange allusions to Christianity with claims that the US Government is somehow criminalizing immortality, and plays bizarre music overlapping with other bizarre music.

I present to you Taking Over The Internet, in all its hideous glory!

This is actually a collection of equally crazily themed websites including Most Important Search Term: Your Immortality, The Most Important Search Term (which must be from the department of redundancy department), Jesus is taking over the internet to create your immortality (complete with a high-res close-up of an actual asshole), Search Engines Manipulation Strategies 4 Children's (that's a great big WTF), All Children's Respectful Synchronous Legal Search Engine Manipulation University (wow, I got nothing for that one), Sedona Psychic Readings Physical-Immortality, and, of course, the one, the only Everything you believed is on fire.

Now, I'll be honest, I'm not certain that this is legitimate crazy, or faux crazy. But in my mind, it doesn't really matter because whether it's real or not because this is some Grade-A insanity.

There's something I've heard a lot over the years. It's a common complaint that Win32 developers express when they first come to an Open Source development environment (such as Linux with its myriad of Free Software/Open Source development tools). This common complaint is that the development documentation is somehow lacking compared to the Win32 development documentation. Generally, they point to MSDN as the gold standard and bemoan Linux's lack of something similar. This complaint is even one of the motivating factors for the LSB project (which, I used to be a part of).

Whenever I have heard this complaint in the past, it has always made me laugh. I've laughed because the development documentation for Linux and its Free Software/Open Source ilk tends to be very good... you just have to know where to look for it. You have to be comfortable reading man pages, browsing info documents, snooping through /usr/doc, etcetera, etcetera. True, it's not all available in one web site, but more often than not it's more convenient to get at in the end (much of it can be accessed quickly from the command line).

Well, after an ordeal I've had today trying to solve a simple, and common, problem with my XNA-based video game using MSDN, I will laugh even harder when I encounter Win32-weenies with this complaint in the future...

Not like the Rush comments should be that shocking. I give you Top 10 Racist Limbaugh Quotes.

Watched the Inauguration (what's the standard on that, do we capitalize it? Just realized I really don't know) on CNN and MSNBC. Recorded it as well. Before, during, and after it, I have found myself in debate with a friend of mine over it. This friend considers himself "numb" about the entire affair, such that he has no positive or negative feelings about it. He didn't seem to understand the significance of this day, not from a political standpoint, but from a human one.

As I was trying to figure out how best to explain the significance, I realized that I really couldn't do the explanation justice. There simply have been too many before who have so eloquently laid down the foundation as to why this was important. I will admit that amid the political grandstanding that inadvertently takes place in any governmental sea change the meaning may become lost if you don't look for it, but that does not mean we shouldn't look for it.

I keep hearing about this note Bush will be leaving for Obama in the White House.

Yes, I'm aware this is some time honored tradition. Yes, I realize that it's likely a very nice and respectful note and I'm sure this whole process is somehow beautiful and deserving of respect.

However, every time I hear it, for some reason I think of this: