Move your money to a community bank.

Watch this video, and then decide if you want your money in the hands of Mr. Potter or George Bailey. Support your community banks. Vote with your feet and move your money out of the hands of the fat cats.

You can touch this Bayonetta.

The action figure is now shown in a painted version. Unfortunately, the hair stays put on this one. But she does have guns IN HER SHOES!!!

Please share your stories about quitting smoking.

My Lovely Wife Cheryl is quitting smoking, starting today. This makes me very happy! I want to do whatever I can to help.

Please share your stories about quitting smoking, whether it’s your story of how you quit or your story of how you helped someone you care about.

Holy trinity from MMO to IRL.

An interesting article about how the memes and systems from MMOs are permeating other kinds of games. In particular, the “Holy Trinity” of “tank/DPS/heal” is invoked once more. It’s even applied to real life work situations.

I know that I’ve had good line managers who ‘tanked’ senior management so that the dev team could get on with finishing their project on time. How does it fit into single player games? Well, the metaphor is so pervasive that it’s easy to feel that you just tanked a level or that some NPC is your personal support class even when there’s no tanking or healing involved at all.

Our design team certainly has a tank to take damage from the higher-up bosses at work, and I don’t know if I fill a DPS role or healing role when it’s time to help him out. Maybe I’m a Druid and do a little of both. Don’t forget Crowd Control! CC is not part of the “holy trinity,” but it’s good to have when the meeting gets too big.

Ferrari victory.

Ferrari Victory is the wonderful LEGO set I received from LWC for Christmas. The attention to detail in these models is absolutely astounding. I have a larger Ferrari F1 model from LEGO, but these two cars show an amazing awareness of the sport. If you’re an F1 fan, you’ll appreciate these touches.

• The drivers have accurate helmets for Massa and Raikonnen. The faces are even different! Stickers for the front of the uniforms have their names.
• The cars each have a single taillight, centered like on the real car.
• The bottom of the cars is flat, except for a slightly lower part just below the driver that I’m sure was meant to represent the legality plank.
• There’s a shroud that you have to remove to put the driver in, a recently-added safety feature in F1 cars.
• Atop the air boxes are stickers with red and yellow IDs, to differentiate the drivers.
• Two round grey pieces just in front of the cockpit I swear look to me like the coil dampers used on F1 cars. You can’t even see these when the model is finished!

All in all, I am thrilled with this LEGO set. It commemorates the years I spent watching and cheering for this team, these cars and these drivers. Bravo and kudos, LEGO designers! You guys are the best!

The game is afoot.

We like the early show. I mean the very first show of the day, usually on Saturday, where it’s cheaper and there’s nobody in the theater. Except that doesn’t work on Christmas Day. We strolled in rather late as usual and the place was packed. We could not find anywhere to sit except for the dreaded front row. These were the worst theater seats we’ve had in many years.

I must say that I have never read a book about Sherlock Holmes. My previous experience is the old Basil Rathbone movies and the Consulting Detective board game. Up to this point, I have disliked Holmes and found the portrayals of his character totally annoying.

However, Sherlock Holmes was delightful! Downey shined, but I think I’d pay right now to see him do Pollyanna, I love that guy. The music was awesome, all the actors were terrific, and I felt like nothing was overblown until the final scene in which things got a bit too silly, but that was okay.

Yes, it was designed to be a blockbuster, and yes, it was also the first in a new franchise, I get all that, and even despite those drawbacks (and the worst seats in the house), it was still thoroughly enjoyable from beginning to end.

Plate mail bikini.

You might call this the Red Sonja Effect. Why did she always wear a tiny little bikini of armor? She was a warrior woman, and she should know that more armor is better in combat. Redheads are smarter, you know.

In World of Warcraft, as my female Night Elf Warrior leveled up, she would loot armor with better stats. And the armor always got smaller. Well, not always, but it wasn’t unusual for Item Level 49 to be a full chestplate of armor and Item Level 50 to suddenly become metal pasties.

As shown in the accompanying image, armor looks different on gals in the game than it does on guys. That’s the same armor, called Pants of the Naaru, shown on a female toon and a male toon. Smart clothes that change to fit your gender! This would cut the size of department stores in half.

This lovely article explores the issue with many more illustrations. It also links to another awesome article about drawing men and women for comics and how they’re different. You can say this is just pandering to the majority of your customers. You can say I’m part of the problem since I’m a guy who wanted to look at female elf butt for a thousand hours. You can say all of that stuff, and you’d be correct.

Our Christmas tree, 2009.

When will white people stop making movies like Avatar?

A wonderful discussion of the underlying themes of Avatar, which we have seen dozens of times before, and how truly embarrasing they are. Examples of remaking “the white guilt story” as seen in Dune, Dances With Wolves, The Last Samurai, District 9, and countless other Pocahontas ripoffs. Warning: Spoilers in this article about the plot of Avatar. Not that there is much to spoil.

Whites need to stop remaking the white guilt story, which is a sneaky way of turning every story about people of color into a story about being white. Speaking as a white person, I don’t need to hear more about my own racial experience.

New Miss World from Gibraltar?

The new Miss World is Kaiane Aldorino, from Gibraltar.

That’s not even a country. It covers 2.6 square miles and has a population of only 30,000.

Oh hell, look at the picture! She’s gorgeous. Who cares.