Happy birthday Jelena Janković!

Today is former WTA world number one Jelena Janković's birthday!

As you can see, she's the hotter of the two top Serbian ladies, and after the divine Maria, my favorite player.

Happy birthday!

Happy birthday Jwoww!

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, it's Jwoww's birthday. You remember her. Real name Jenni Farley, famous because she's on Jersey Shore, the MTV show almost all of you have watched but won't admit it. I do.

Last year, she posed for Maxim:

Hell, she's cute. And as I'm writing this, I find out she made an appearance in pro wrestling; to be specific, on TNA Impact last October, creating a nice ratings spike for them. Here's a picture:

At the end of the day, any chick who punches the Situation is okay by me.

Happy birthday!

Bog iron in Goblin Camp

Okay, so Blogger tells me that over the last few weeks, several people have come to my blog by Googling for "goblin camp bog iron". In case you're doing this because you're wondering how to gather bog iron, here's what you do:

1. Designate an area of bog (Orders -> Designate bog for iron)

2. Go to the Territory menu and mark the bog you've just designated as part of your territory

3. Designate a stockpile to receive Metal ore

4. Order up some bog iron in the Stock Manager

Your goblins will start collecting iron. I imagine the trouble is caused by phase 2, which is undocumented.

Hope that helps!

**

If you need more pointers to get your Goblin Camp going, there's a video tutorial series on YouTube.









That should get you started!

Goblin Camp 0.14 out!

The new version of Goblin Camp is out! Get it at goblincamp.com. I had a go at it over the weekend.

Here's a lovely view of Camp Sixteen...



...just before imps attack from the charcoal burning clamp and set it on fire.



It wasn't so bad, actually. I only lost 5 orcs and 8 goblins. That is, until a swarm of killer bees and another bunch of imps showed up, and set everything on fire again.



At the end of the day, I'm down to five orcs and 16 goblins. Any way you look at it, it's way too few guys to defend a camp this size, which is conveniently proven true by two packs of starving wolves and, yes, a third group of imps. Now my camp is on fire and overrun with wolves.



After a party of kobold raiders also pays us a visit, I'm left with two orcs and six goblins, and a wrecked camp.



Having gone from a total population of 50 to eight, and with the camp in ruins, I might as well quit. It's hopeless.

Or is it?



Incredibly enough, I've managed to get the camp cleared up somewhat. At best, I had four orcs and over a dozen goblins! A fired golem later, the orcs were down to one and the goblins had taken a beating, but it looked like I might get this thing up and running again.

Until the imps showed up.



And it was all over.

**

No matter; let's try again. Here's Camp Seventeen:



And just as I was getting it up and running, guess who waltzes right in?



And this is what happened.



Goblin Camp. Harsh, but fun.

Eastern Europe

Or, in other words, a double birthday. First, happy birthday to Russian singer Yulia Olegovna Volkova (right), the prettier half of t.A.T.u..

And also to Polish model Iga Wyrwał.

She seems to have gone and had a baby, but I hope we'll still see more of her. Happy birthday!

Moving on

Here's a video someone put together for the best song in a long, long time.

Belaboring the point

Lots of other people have already said this, but I'm not letting it stop me. Hypocrisy is something I dislike in general, and in sports I dislike it intensely. I think part of the reason is that we have to put up with so much bullshit in school, work and politics that I really don't need it in my entertainment as well. However, a former hockey player named Mario Lemieux, currently owner of the Pittsburgh Penguins, just made himself the frontrunner for this year's Brooks Orpik Hypocrisy Award.

The Pens-Islanders game last Friday got a bit wild, with 14 fighting majors, 21 misconducts and a total of 346 penalty minutes handed out. It was straight-up goonery, and the two Islanders players that got suspended deserved every game of it. The trouble is that after the Isles players got their suspensions, and their team was fined $100,000, the owner of the Penguins waded into the fray himself by releasing a statement. In it, Mario complains that the league isn't cracking down on players attempting to injure their opponents. It's not exactly clear what he wanted the league to do, but there you are: he complained.

It's bad enough that it only bothers Lemieux when it's his team that's on the receiving end. None of the other incidents that took place while he's been owner have really troubled him, at least not to the point of issuing a statement. That's not the worst of it, though. The worst part is that Matt Cooke plays on Lemieux's team.

Earlier this month, Cooke kneed Ovechkin:

It went unpunished, but when he went on to check Fedor Tyutin from behind, he was handed a four-game suspension.

Of course, these days Matt Cooke is mostly notorious for, well, this.

It still makes me feel sick to watch that. Now, most of the time I don't agree with the things Don Cherry says on Hockey Night in Canada, but this time, I can't hope to sum up the kind of player Cooke is better than he did on Coach's Corner.

I mean, hell. This is so serious that Cherry's actually decently dressed.

**

Matt Cooke is the most damning indictment of Lemieux's moral sensibilities, but it's worth remembering who his captain is. I've been meaning to post a couple of videos on that, but this seems like a good time. Here's some examples the class shown by the guy Mike Milbury has called "the perfect face of the NHL"; Mario Lemieux's team captain. I've said before I hate him. Here's why.

He dives, he slashes. To sum up:

Oh, wait, I nearly forgot the single greatest example of the amazing class, grace and leadership that Sidney Crosby brings to the game of hockey. I'm sorry, but I can't forget this one.

Yes. That's Crosby, punching a guy in the junk. While he's being held down by Brooks Orpik.

These guys play for Mario, and he's just fine with them. I'd say this pretty much defines hypocrisy.

Can't explain that

As we all know, fundies say the darndest things. My personal favourite from the site is this gem by awesomestnerd:

"One of the most basic laws in the universe is the Second Law of Thermodynamics. This states that as time goes by, entropy in an environment will increase. Evolution argues differently against a law that is accepted EVERYWHERE BY EVERYONE. Evolution says that we started out simple, and over time became more complex. That just isn't possible: UNLESS there is a giant outside source of energy supplying the Earth with huge amounts of energy. If there were such a source, scientists would certainly know about it."



Yes, awesomestnerd, they certainly would.

Recently, conservative political commentator Bill O'Reilly offered his own contribution to science concerning the heavenly bodies, specifically the Moon.



From the LA Times blog The Big Picture:
"But when it comes to seeing the world through the wrong end of a telescope, no one tops Bill O'Reilly, who has been the butt of a thousand jokes after confronting an atheist on his show with irrefutable evidence of the existence of God--using as his evidence the fact that the tides come in and the tides go out. I mean, O'Reilly said with great certainty, who else could possibly be controlling that?"

When confronted with the more conventional explanation of the tides, O'Reilly went one level higher and speculated on the origin of the Moon.




All this has caused much hilarity on teh internets, and you too can participate in the meme with the handy MemeGenerator.

Here's our contribution:

Camp Five

Here's a composite image of my fifth Goblin Camp camp:

Population around one hundred; click on the picture for a closer look. You can see some of the main features of the camp pretty well in this large-scale image. Your orcs and goblins muddy up the ground and leave copious amounts of filth behind; you can see the main thoroughfares outlined in brown, as well as the brown piles of filth at the south and west gates, because of the permanent guard stationed there. And then there is, of course, the giant pile of filth that is the main camp, slowly spreading outward and seeping into the river.

For security, I've gone with a concentric layout of palisades and moats. There are gates and bridges only at certain points, which channels incoming attackers there, to be dealt with by my guards. The other security risks are the improvements that occasionally spawn monsters; ants will attack from your stone quarry, golems from the clay pit and so on. You can see all of these improvements just south of the south gate, meaning that mostly (mostly) the guards at my south gate deal with the bad guys before they get into my camp.

Another notable feature are the huge lumber yards that dominate the outer two circuits of the camp. The game is set in a forest, and one ends up cutting down quite a few trees to make way for moats, workshops, stockpiles and so on. Of course, you could just leave the logs lying around, but I like my huge lumberyards.

**

Now that I have a camp this size, I thought I might weigh in on some problems I've read about people having with Goblin Camp. For starters, several people have complained that their camps get bogged down with interminable hauling jobs, especially of seeds. If you take a look at my camp here, you may notice that the fields aren't very large at all. That's because in my experience, it's very easy to destroy the efficiency of your camp through one simple expedient: overfarming.

Starvation is a constant threat early in the game, so I see the appeal of planting as many crops as possible. The problem is that the yields in the game are quite generous: bloodberries IIRC 5:1 and nightbloom trees 4:1, and with very little wastage. In 0.13, you start with 30 bloodberry seeds. Plant all of them, and by next fall you have 150. Another year of maximum bloodberry farming? 750. And so on. See where the endless seed hauling jobs come from? The size of the fields needs to grow relative to the size of the population in the camp. It's not that hard; as you might guess from the name, this is my fifth camp, and because I got the farming right from the get-go, I never had a problem with starvation.

The other point is that the day-to-day operation of a goblin camp is messy in many ways. Seeds and other things just end up lying around and if you're anal-retentive, they need to be cleaned up into their appropriate stockpiles. Another essential thing is to give your goblins time to do that. If they're constantly running around on errands and constructions jobs, the hauling jobs are going to spiral out of control because nobody's doing them. So take a break every now and then and let your goblins clean up the camp. Even with that camp, I've managed to get my jobs list down to one screen.

Managing your job queue is a question of resource management, and that is, after all, the point of the game.

Power Change

Like Sea Org, only smaller.




Cleared sailing clear!

Fishnets

Fishnets, mesh, web, whatever you want to call it, is the sexiest clothing material in the world. Here's the proof.

Lily Goga:

Former pro wrestling goddess Amy Dumas:

Kira Kener:

The one and only Tera Patrick:

Erica Campbell:

Montréal's own Bianca Beauchamp:

And finally, Jenna Presley.

Super Bowl preview

I haven't really bothered to watch the NFL since Super Bowl XL, but it turns out I'll be watching this year. So I thought I'd do a little preview.

Super Bowl XLV is going to feature the Green Bay Packers going up against the Pittsburgh Steelers. The Packers are quarterback Brett Favre's old team. Remember, he's the guy who sent pictures of his junk to a chick. Namely, Jenn Sterger, who's pretty hot.

That's all I got. Have a good weekend, everybody!

Musical Minecraft

Minecraft is the best game in the world.