counting birds & drinking birds
Feb. 19th, 2012 01:18 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
thanateIt is Great Backyard Bird Count weekend! You too can donate 15 minutes of today or tomorrow to Science, or just go and check out North American February bird distributions.
Winter continues to be a tease, with colder temperatures and maybe-snow sitting a week or so out on the forecast and vanishing when it gets in sight. We're not even supposed to have below-freezing lows for most of the next week anymore. If we end up starting mosquito season a month or two early, I will be very much Not Pleased. (Not to say that I'm pleased to miss winter, either, but I've said that part already.)
Other things of potential interest:
*a rather long-winded but interesting I09 article about the fascinating world-building in Mass Effect. Like Fallout before it, I am intrigued by the world-exploration cumulative consequences style of game engine, (as opposed to the Skyrim model of infinite wandering with no visible consequences) but I am afraid that, like Fallout before it, I would spend an hour or two playing and then be defeated by my complete lack of combat skills or interest in obtaining such. (On a related note, I stopped playing FFX because we had to fight stupid Seymore a third stupid time, despite having killed him twice already... I want intensive story-based games that have an opt-out setting for combat. Or none at all would be ok.)
*another cool short story from Martha Wells about a secondary character in her Raksura universe (The Cloud Roads/The Serpent Sea)... and the awesome news that she's got a contract for the third book, so that should be out next winter. (It has been terribly frustrating seeing one of my favorite authors blog about writing a book I didn't know if I was ever going to get to read...)
*And I am now officially signed up for the Maryland Master Naturalist program that starts in about a month, so that should be fun, too.
Xposty from dreamwidth.
Winter continues to be a tease, with colder temperatures and maybe-snow sitting a week or so out on the forecast and vanishing when it gets in sight. We're not even supposed to have below-freezing lows for most of the next week anymore. If we end up starting mosquito season a month or two early, I will be very much Not Pleased. (Not to say that I'm pleased to miss winter, either, but I've said that part already.)
Other things of potential interest:
*a rather long-winded but interesting I09 article about the fascinating world-building in Mass Effect. Like Fallout before it, I am intrigued by the world-exploration cumulative consequences style of game engine, (as opposed to the Skyrim model of infinite wandering with no visible consequences) but I am afraid that, like Fallout before it, I would spend an hour or two playing and then be defeated by my complete lack of combat skills or interest in obtaining such. (On a related note, I stopped playing FFX because we had to fight stupid Seymore a third stupid time, despite having killed him twice already... I want intensive story-based games that have an opt-out setting for combat. Or none at all would be ok.)
*another cool short story from Martha Wells about a secondary character in her Raksura universe (The Cloud Roads/The Serpent Sea)... and the awesome news that she's got a contract for the third book, so that should be out next winter. (It has been terribly frustrating seeing one of my favorite authors blog about writing a book I didn't know if I was ever going to get to read...)
*And I am now officially signed up for the Maryland Master Naturalist program that starts in about a month, so that should be fun, too.
Xposty from dreamwidth.