I’ve known for well over a year now about the upcoming Will Wright game called Spore. I’ve known what it’s about - you start off as like a single-celled organism and go through the entire evolution process right up to an intelligent creature and beyond. I’ve also known that the buzz around the Internet about the game has been pretty good. Lots of people seem to be eagerly awaiting the release. But even though the concept sounds pretty interesting, I for whatever reason haven’t really been all that captivated by it.

That is, I guess you could say, until now. Last week EA released a free downloadable demo for the Spore Creature Creator. I decided I would give it a shot and I’m really enjoying it. The things you can make and the things you can do with the things you make all lie somewhere on the edges of hilarious, cute, depressing, and awesome. I’m blown away at the amount of different ways you can shape and modify your creature and seeing how the different physical traits you give it respond individually to the different actions you can make it perform is really cool. There are also some really great features built right into the game, such as the ability to take pictures (including “animated avatars”) and record video. The video recorder even gives you the option of automatically posting the video on Youtube and THEN lets you send the Youtube link to friends via e-mail. Here’s a short clip I recorded of my first creature:

I think I’m officially excited for the full game to come out.

Update: It seems I totally forgot about taking pictures. The computer did come in last week and I managed to get it all put together and up and running. There were some complications but it all worked ou in the end. I’m extremely satisfied. But I guess I just became more involved than I anticipated, hence the slow update. I might still take some pictures of the final product later, but don’t hold me to it.
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So a couple days ago I finally placed an order for my computer. I ordered all of the parts individually from newegg. This will be my first time putting together a computer myself, and I’m freaking excited. A couple weeks ago, Windows XP on my 2.5-year-old laptop decided to stop working correctly, which was enough incentive to break down and get something new and much nicer. This is something I’ve been wanting to do for more than a year now and it’s finally happening. It’s going to have a huge (to me) 22″ LCD monitor, a GeForce 8800GT video card, 4gb RAM, a massive 640gb hard drive, and blue lights in the case. You might thing it’s excessive, but I wanted to push the limit and get something really nice that will last me a long time. Being my own creation, I wanted something I’d really enjoy, rather than a stock factory-build machine out of a box.

I will continue to use my laptop for school and on trips. Fortunately, all of my documents (music and pictures mainly) are there so I haven’t lost data. I can run a Linux distrobution and everything is peachy.

The monitor and a majority of the components should arrive tomorrow, shipped from a Memphis warehouse. The case and a couple other things should be in Thursday, as they’re being shipped from California. I plan on taking pictures of the building process, and if I do I will be sure to share them here.

Lately I’ve been noticing a very annoying problem with Youtube videos. Whenever I go to watch one, 90% of the time I get an error message saying it’s no longer available. This even happens if I’m trying to watch the video on the video’s page, which doesn’t make sense at all. I’ve learned that other people have been having the same issue.

I tried to research the problem and from what I can find, it has to do with embedding. Apparently, once a video has been embedded on other websites (and consequently viewed many more times) the video times out and doesn’t want to load.

So far the only solution I know of is to just keep refreshing the page. If you’re watching the video embedded on a site, go to the video’s Youtube URL and try there (again refreshing if you need to). Eventually the video will load, because if the video’s URL is active then the video is available.