Writing this from my parents’ computer in the middle of somewhere called Kansas, a place polite company will hear me refer to as “where I’m from.” Their Christmas gift was a new 19″ flat-screen monitor (model AL1917W) to replace the 17″ stock Dell CRT that came with their computer, and a black keyboard with huge letters, numbers and symbols. Much easier for my mom to see.

I imagine many families with grown children, like mine, celebrated Christmas a day early this year. Ours is a tradition of family and routine and best wishes. We eat things that came from my mother’s years as a Navy wife and through necessity, finding ways to make best use of guests’ energy as well as her own, so she wouldn’t have to slave in the kitchen all the time. Curried chicken over rice. King crab legs. Cold marinated shrimp, onions, capers and black olives. Hand-rolled egg rolls. (I did about half of them this year.) Caramel pull-apart monkey bread.

And a party in my aunt and uncle’s basement, where we greet extended family. My dad raised his glass to toast the face he didn’t see, the one he’d seen every Christmas Eve with a drink, seated in the same place at the bar. My cousin Matt is a lawyer and an Army Reservist in the Judge Advocate General’s Corps, on some classified diplomatic mission in Afghanistan. “Wherever you are, counselor,” my dad said, ”remember to keep your head down and stay safe, because there are a lot of people here who are proud of you and who love you.” And then, “I miss him.”

In about six hours I’m going to be up and heading to Wichita to catch a flight back to Texas, after which I’ll be going near-straight back to work.

Glad I didn’t miss this.

This is a really nice monitor.

Right here. The best article about Second Life that anyone is likely to read. If anyone needs a reason not to have anything to do with it, that it is on its best day a honeypot for the worst kind of humanity that ever thought it was creative, this is it.

You think I’m kidding. I’m not.

I passed my Video Game Design 2 class at ACC. Considering I’d all but given up on attempting to finish my final project, a NWN(1) mod, because I had no effing clue how to use it, up until a week before it was due, that’s pretty good.

It’s less than two weeks from Christmas, and I haven’t got all my shopping done yet. So that means braving weekend traffic to Austin. Not sure when I’ll get sat down to write my report on Aaron Thibault’s lecture. It’s starting to get stale in my mind.

Twisted Sister was just on Jay Leno, performing a version of the carol with the above title, featuring “We’re Not Gonna Take It” guitar chords. Watch for that on YouTube tomorrow morning. It was surprisingly well performed and heartfelt.

Edit: No YouTube of Leno, but TS has their own video on their site, and audio/official cartoon video on their MySpace page. There’s also a live-action version. And it turns out, they know good and well that their song and the carol are basically the same tune with different rhythm.

Booyah. I didn’t pick out the screenshots, but at least someone did. It’d be boring without visuals. I also wrote this almost a month ago, but it took this long to work through Gama’s enormous backlog of features. I’m not complaining — Monday releases are prime time.

Jake Song is probably the least guarded and the most open game studio head I’ve ever met, or at least he seems to be. Made it an easy interview, although his honesty might surprise you. It did me.

Deep background: I went into the interview with two things in mind: one, if your career is defined at least in popular culture by one of the biggest games of all time, where do you go from there; and two, given the “too many cooks in the kitchen” analogy cited in the article, was Jake one of the cooks?

You figure out if I got answers to those.