...And it turned out pretty well, I think. I started work on it roughly twenty-four hours ago, and have spent a large portion said past twenty-four hours working on it. I think it's pretty cool, despite the whole "white Helvetica on light blue background" thing not exactly being the most original concept in the world. 
 
Anyways, here it is: http://almostillustrated.com 
 
It works great with Chrome and Internet Explorer 8, and reasonably well with Firefox. Internet Explorer 9 Beta's new rendering engine doesn't seem to like the sub-pages (click "about" and "songs" [but not in too quick succession; it'll bug out on you, I'm still working on that]) for some reason. 
 
It does some cool Javascript stuff, so it won't look very impressive as a still image, but why the hell not: 

So this time I decided to make it look pretty and not like someone pooped it out of their butt.

I capped this during this week's TNT. It can be yours too, should you so desire.

So I finally decided to start working on i'm calling it again. I'm doing a full rewrite from the ground-up, making everything more robust and laying the groundwork for tons of new features. Also, I'm writing the whole thing with Ruby on Rails instead of PHP and Smarty. 
 
Anyways, the biggest new development is kind of hard to explain, but I'll try: 
 
"Users" and "Accounts" are two different things. When you sign up, you register a new User just like you would on any regular website (without the crazy confirmation process that i'm calling it alpha/beta had). Once you have your User registered and you're logged into it, though, you can't do really anything until you connect an Account. Connecting an Account works pretty much like the old crazy confirmation process did, but hopefully it'll work better this time. 
 
I did this because each Account is tied to a certain website. For now, it only supports Giant Bomb (and you can only have one Account for each website on your User account), but I'm hoping that someday the Whiskey engineers are going to give Screened an API, and maybe one day they'll have another awesome wiki with an API that I can tie in also. 
 
I haven't quite worked out exactly how it's going to work, but I'm pretty sure that, as of now, all imported XP and subsequently-earned points will be tied to your Account, and not to your User (well, they'll be tied to your User by extension). That way, you have to "make it big" on each site independently. 
 
The other big feature change-thing that I have planned out but haven't begun work on is: splitting betting into two separate categories: "Release betting" and "Event betting." Release betting is the same old betting you're used to, but Event betting will be bets created for whatever I feel like, such as: 

• Game of the Year stuff
• A new Dueling Endurance Run pops up and we want to bet on who will win first
• How long until Jeff mentions Star Trek: Online again on the Bombcast

Sometimes I like to make flowcharts for comedic effect. After playing Blops for awhile, I was left with no choice:

I just woke up from a dream wherein I renewed my WoW account for a month to check out all the new stuff (something I've been thinking about doing for awhile now). It was a crazy dream, because, in it, I accidentally went to a phishing site and, realizing my mistake, then went to the actual website. 
 
So I decided I'd at least go and look at the WoW account page, and see if I got any discount for getting back in the game or anything, when, lo and behold, it says that I'm banned and my account has been permanently disabled. 
 
I never cheated or did anything wrong at all, so I was confused at first, and sent an e-mail to customer support asking what the fuck was up. But just now, after thinking about the situation a little bit, I remembered that, in the past few months, when trying to log into Starcraft II, it would tell me to go and reset my Battle.net password all the time. So... maybe someone stole my account, or something? I always assumed that someone was trying to get my Starcraft II profile, but maybe they were doing evil things with my WoW account, too? 
 
Or maybe this is just a sign from God that I shouldn't be trying WoW.

So we all know about Super Tofu Boy, PETA's Super Meat Boy parody game, and we know that Tofu Boy is now a secret character in the PC version of SMB, but did you know that Tofu Boy has actually been around for months? 
 
I'm moving from one dorm room to the next, so I'm cleaning out my room (and posting this is part of the procrastination process). While cleaning, I found the Super Meat Boy comic book thing that was in the swag bags at PAX. I flipped through it, and, lo and behold! Tofu Boy! 
 

So I'm playing through Persona 3 FES again, hopefully to completion this time, and, while playing it, I got a hankerin' for some Endurance Run. So I'm watching it, again, and I'm now almost done with it (Episode 136 at the time of writing).

While playing Persona 3 FES and watching the ER of Persona 4, I decided I'd try making a Persona-like game engine thing, just for the hell of it. I tried this once in the past, in XNA (so as to make a PC/360 game), but I failed miserably, as I didn't really have a handle on XNA yet. ...I'll try to find images of this later, as the code is on my other computer, but basically it was pretty bad, and only featured 3D boxes talking to each other. 
 
So this time, I thought "why not just do the traditional thing that programmers do when they're making a solo indie project and are terrible at making art and sound and music and so forth, and just make it a roguelike?" 
 
After a couple weeks of working on the project instead of doing homework, I have: 

• NPCs with scripted dialog sequences
• important text
• social linking (!)
• dungeon exploration (with a little work on dungeon generation, also)

• You must extract everything for it to work
• Arrow keys or numpad to move, spacebar to interact with the girl, ESC to bring up the pause menu
• Stairs and chests do nothing
• You can keep S-Ranking with the girl until she reaches Max rank
• The icon is a green "Z" because I based this game off of my zombie-based roguelike, Z-Day, and I'm too lazy to make a new one just yet
• You can mess with the map, script, and character files, but expect crashes
• "Resume" and "Settings" on the main menu don't do anything, neither does anything on the pause menu except for "Resume" and "Quit"
• No combat or day-changing or anything cool like that yet

Inspired by ethan's "data porn" blog posts and fueled by me being in bed all day with a cold and possibly an ear infection, I bring you the results for the imcalling.it bets placed on Gran Turismo 5. (I promise I'll only do stuff like this for major releases going forward, so as not to spam the forums.)

My first Xbox 360 was a family console, and after its optical drive broke, we got a new Arcade and popped the old hard drive in it. Everything worked fine, except for one thing: any game content we had paid for and downloaded from the Marketplace wouldn't work unless the owner of said content was signed in. Being the oldest child of the family, and the only one with an Xbox Live Gold account, this meant that my account had to be logged in at all times to play Castle Crashers, or to play the Metallica songs on Rock Band, etc. 
 
Anyways, now I'm in college, and I have my own 360. My roommate wanted to play some Rez HD, but it wouldn't let him play past the content that's in the trial version. 
 
After some investigation, it turns out that Xbox 360 content is tied to both your Gamertag and your console. You're only allowed to re-assign the console ID associated with your paid-for content once a year, and you have no granular control over which items go to which console; you have to mass-assign them to one console. Here's the link if anyone wants to do this; it was mildly difficult to find.
 
That's not the worst of it, though: once you've gone through that process, you have to re-download everything on your new console, even if you already have it there. So I had to go through and delete most of my Arcade games and queue up like ten downloads for games that I already had on my hard drive! 
 
So that kind of sucks.