Weekend good times

Went over to my friends Eric and Katherine's place this weekend for Eric's birthday. Good food, good drinks and great company were the order of the evening. Those pics are fairly well into the night -- I'm in the first picture in the blue jacket and I'm working pretty hard on that water. I'm pretty sure Chad was saying something interesting at that moment.

I was gently but repeatedly (I keed, I keed because I love...) reminded by these good folks that it has been awhile since I've updated my blog. Indeed it's been about three weeks, which is entirely too long. I'm teetering on the edge here of breaking my unspoken personal rule (D'OH!) of not mentioning blogging in my blog posts, but rest assured things will be picking up around here.

You can see part of the shirt I was wearing that night. It's a new acquisition and the design was a runner-up* in gamepolitics.com's Pixelante t-shirt contest. Profits from the sale of the t-shirts benefits the Get-Well Gamers charity. Pixelante is a term coined by Miami attorney Jack Thompson to describe gamers who, in his words, are "sociopaths with mouses." I won't give Mr. Thompson any more pixels than is necessary to understand the context -- he's a self righteous holier-than-thou blowhard who makes inflammatory remarks to stir up publicity for himself and his causes. He has campaigned to have music and music videos censored (2 Live Crew, Ice-T, Madonna), filed a complaint with the FCC that led to Howard Stern being taken off the air in Orlando, Florida, and has made reckless connections between criminal behavior and the playing of videogames. He is the attorney who filed the lawsuit in Alabama alleging that the playing of the Grand Theft Auto series of games led to the murders of three people.

So the shirt is a jab at him and all that he "stands" for. A Wired article provides a bit more context.

* For those unfamiliar, as I was, Zazzle.com is the online store for the t-shirts and is a pretty slick and efficient outfit. I placed my order around 1:20a Thursday morning and the shirt was in my mailbox by Friday afternoon. They don't have a "bulk" or "slow" shipping option (the cheapest is priority 2-3 day shipping) but the few extra bucks are worth having a reliable shipping method. They even have USPS Priority Mail envelopes preprinted with their logo. I was very impressed.