I was right...and other There stuff

I was speculating about There approvals being delayed last week because of Sonny being on vacation, and I was right! Sonny sent me an email last night/this morning at 3:50am!!! "Why?" I wondered, "Why the HECK is he sending email at 3:50am, especially on a weekday???" Well, when I read the email I knew...he said he was up until then approving stuff! I don't know where Rosie was, but that new guy approver got pretty behind, I guess.

No wonder Sonny almost never takes time off. You kind of can't blame the new guy, though...I mean we have some pretty high expectations of approvals sometimes BECAUSE Sonny works so hard, but does that mean everyone is going to work as many hours as he does? (Or approve as fast as Rosie, who has been doing it for I dunno...four years?) Maybe the dude is hourly and wasn't authorized for overtime...maybe he just doesn't want to work 60 hours while being paid for 40, maybe he was askeered of approving all those things people try to sneak through submissions...maybe he wants to stand around chatting with Baloo about WoW all the time (oh no wait...Baloo is long gone...that was one of the old approvers, it would be nice to think they don't do that any more.)

I don't really care if my silly wallpaper and floors (I had some floor covering approved...whee) take a few extra days...it's not like it's going to be a runaway best seller or anything. I'm just hoping to sell a few copies once there is some matching other stuff to go with it, but mostly I'm glad to be redecorating my clubhouse slowly but surely.

Hey, I heard There is moving! Not like they are going far, more like next building over, but it's mention-worthy because Forterra isn't going with so they will finally be physically separated.

I was watching YouTube There.com videos yesterday. It's so cool to watch this stuff just to see all the content that is there somewhere in There. I mean, people don't always keep pazzes out all the time, stuff goes in and out of auctions, neighborhoods can be hard to find, so a nice lazy way to take a tour is by checking out all those videos. My favorite one is still the one Chagall did in 2004, "Party There".

Catwars

(Click for a large version)

I thought I had my desk mostly set up, but I guess not. I forgot to make room for my cats. If I don't make a place for them to sit, they will sit on my drawing tablet or stand on my keyboards and just stare at me while my computers and I start making very urgent noises about there being a problem, get paw prints all over my printers and scanner, in Rodney's case he will sit on the floor by my chair and cry plaintively and/or stick his claws in my leg. Nothing can really get done until they have their own spot right in the middle of everything.

First thing I did was make a place for China. I took a cat bed, placed an electric heating pad on it, and put a micro fiber dish cloth on top of that. Heated bed? Oh, she loooooves that, and the dish towel is perfect for sopping up snot. Hey, she is the Cancer Kitty and she needs a nice warm spot that isn't the closet.

Now, check out Rodney, on the right. Does he look like he is looking at China all jealous and stuff? Good, because that is exactly what he was doing at that moment. (And a lot of other moments not captured on film.) Rodney longs for that bed. Actually, he longs for anything China is using at the moment, the catfood dish, the water dish, the hammock in the other room, a certain corner of the bed, the grass on the balcony that he had ignored until China decided she wanted some, etc.

Being a little short of options at the moment, I set Rodney up with one of China's cat carriers (he loves both of them. Every time she comes back from the vet he will squeeze into the carrier du jour and take a nap.) The thing you have to understand is, China is just barely 7 pounds and Rodney is at least 14. (Yeah, I don't know when that happened, either.) He can BARELY squeeze himself into the carrier. Fortunately for me (and for China, who he has actually tried to sit on when she was in her bed) he can and does squeeze himself into her carrier...but of course he still stares longingly at her bed and sometimes manages to aquire it for himself.

Today I ordered a new little hammock bed that should go right beside the desk at the same height. Hopefully both cats will think this is great spot and they'll use it. Meanwhile, the cat carrier HAS been known to fall off the desk with Rodney in it. Ouch.

Months to assemble, minutes to eat

My bf and I have been meaning to make chicago deep dish style pizza for months now, but we needed to prepare first.

It started with a few books, then the gathering of baking/cutting and other implements, then gathering of the less perishable food items, like flour and crushed tomatoes, and then today we spent hours selecting cheeses, making sure we had cornmeal, etc.

Our pizza (shown above) wasn't perfect - I was a major dork and I put an extra cup of water in the dough and then I was frantically trying to scoop it out, and some of the other ingredients came out with it so I was trying to add back in some yeast, corn meal and flour, then I think the oven ran kind of hot, plus we were kind of following three different recipes at the same time (don't ask!) but in the end it was not only edible, it was very fun to make. I think we now have a Sunday pizza making tradition.

In case you want to make chicago style deep dish pizza, too...here is a list of items you may find helpful:

1. American Pie: My Search for the Perfect Pizza - this is not only an interesting story for foodies, it has a lot of good pizza tips and many delicious recipes, for MANY kinds of pizza.

2. The Great Chicago-Style Pizza Cookbook - American Pie looked like the better cookbook at first glance, but this one has a bunch of great illustrated and captioned pages and we ended up following the instructions here more often during our evening of baking.

3. Chicago Metallic Professional Deep Dish Pizza Pan - A traditional Chicago-style pizza should be made in a heavy duty 14" pan like this one, and this one worked great.

4. Mario Batali Pizza Wheel - This is a biiiiig pizza cutting wheel, perfect for a big, thick pizza.

5. King Arthur Flour - one of my biggest regrets moving away from the East Coast is that I never got to visit King Arthur Flour in Vermont. I usually hate getting mail order catalogs for anything, but I find theirs quite drool-worthy. It's easier than going through their website. We got a bunch of stuff for the pizza here, whole wheat pizza crust mix, pizza sauce seasoning, yeast (which we didn't need), pizza dough flavor (which we also didn't need), churro mix (okay, churro mix doesn't help you make pizza. 'tth), ginger scone mix (yeah, yeah, i think it was on sale), belgian waffle mix (I promised I'd make belgian waffles...sometime) a lava cake making mix (we made that for dessert and it came out perfectly so pththththt!!!) etc...etc...I actually want one of everything they sell.

I can't think of anything else much I'd recommend. Grocery Outlet had crushed tomatoes and organic butter at a HUGE DISCOUNT because they freaking rule. We went to a specialty cheese shop and they actually told us to go to Safeway grocery store for our mozzerella cheese. I would recommend you get an oven thermometer that can both sit on and hang off of an oven rack to make sure your oven temp is reading accurately, but in general pizza making was REALLY FUN, pretty easy and has nearly endless variations, although I'm quite open to making, oh I don't know...caramel rolls or something instead if/when we run out of types of pizza.

Why, There, Why??

Okay, below I have proof that There does stuff with regard to the Developer program that makes no sense. Not exactly a newsflash, I knew this at least since 2003 when one of the approvers rejected a TON of my builder items for basically no reason other than maybe he didn't want to take the time to approve them right before they shut down the developer program for six weeks. Six weeks that were some of the most depressing of my life.

Yeah so anyway, I know we don't exactly have resource based pricing and I mostly understand that ('whatever) but...

I was submitting a few rasta style hairstyles, and I noticed I was accidentally submitting them as hi-res and I kind of panicked. OMG...I don't want to pay high-res prices for this little tiny texture! Turns out I needn't have worried. See the chart below...rasta hi-res is only 100 ThereBucks (or about 12%) higher in price than the "regular" version...


Now let's look at the item I just submitted. I submitted a house painter floor texture, which is 128x128 pixels. After submitting it, I wondered if I should have submitted a high res version instead. So, I checked out the pricing....


Both the rasta high res and the house floor high res have a texture that is four times the size of the "regular" resolution file, however, the hi-res floor texture is 133% higher in price than the regular texture. That is over ten times the increase of the hi-res rasta! What sort of crack are they smoking at There? I want some!

*disclaimer: I don't REALLY want any of the crack they are smoking at There, I'm just kidding. Drugs are bad, boys and girls (and thereians and There employees)...just look at what they've done to these prices!) You need to be a rocket scientist to figure out what to use when...although how many rocket scientists do you know that have time to develop stuff for There?

Not a There Hermit today

This past week, I've been spending some time in There in my clubhouse, which is ALWAYS deserted by anyone but me, and I've visited a few places like THE WATER and the amusement park (also deserted), but today I actually hung out with other avatars!

No kidding.

ZachC IMed me to tell me that he was with Nalora who was doing a video on Icons of There, and he was all like "I saw you signed in and I was like if anyone is a There Icon it's Jinx_tv", and I was like "yeah, haha...you're the icon. Nalora should be filming/interviewing you. Oh wait...that's why you're with her right now." Yeah, I'm a little slow like that.

So I spent some time hanging out with some different peeps like Nalora and ZachC and several others that you can probably see in my screencaps. It felt somewhat surreal to me to spend time with Nalora because it seemed like she held a grudge against me forever for making fun of some spelling mistakes her nephew (who is an amazing developer) made in his There auction descriptions. Sorry, I have a childish sense of humor and his descriptions made me laugh. I need a "doesn't play well with others" shirt. Then one day, she started buying ThereBucks from me and I was like, "that is sooo weird, I thought she wasn't even SPEAKING to me." Now she says she prefers to buy them from me. Maybe that's just her moving on while I'm obviously stuck in the past.

Yeah, so, these great diehard Thereians gave me lots of info/gossip (you can set the environment in pazzes now! The new "real" water can be turned back to cement in preferences! etc) and Nalora showed off her incredible pazzes, which you see here in my screencaps. I was quite flattered to find Jinx_tv stuff here and there, and btw I made those dice you see in the first pic :P

It's soooo cool to look around and be able to name the designers of half the stuff in her bedroom. AND to be included among them.

Also, this wasn't from Nalora and I'm not going to tell you who I got this info from as it's kind of gossipy, but I was told that WikkeDiva is not buying/selling ThereBucks any more because it got to be too much like work (I can definitely understand that...it's work for me, and not just like, really cool fun work, I like to compare it to being a night watchman, because all you're doing is babysitting stuff.) Also, it sounds like she had a hard time with people sending her money for ThereBucks when she was sold out, and then getting mad they didn't get any ThereBucks in a timely manner. I can totally relate to that, too. That used to happen to me at tbux.com, but it rarely happens to me on my new site...that's why my new site shows you EXACTLY how many ThereBucks I have for sale, it won't let you buy more than I have, and if somebody buys some, the number reflects that. It makes life sooooo much easier that way.

Oh, oh and...lookie! I had some wallpapers approved and not a minute too soon. Actually, this pic doesn't make it look very nice...I hate the compression of the ThereCam. My new approvals totally make me want to get some more stuff in (Like, um, WINDOWS, FLOORS, FURNITURE!) I really need to start making some models. I got really distracted using Adobe Captivate today and of course CHATTING IN THERE. Argh.

Tomorrow I can't make models because we are going to be making Chicago Style Pizza. If the pizza won't come to Jinx, Jinx will MAKE the pizza. :)

Irony: Comcast Style

So, today I'm trying to log in to the Comcast site in order to pay my bill. I eventually gave up because my connection was so bad the page kept timing out.

Yeah, that really inspires me to want to make the effort to pay my bill.

Are Comcast and ATT both actually part of the same larger corporation?

Maybe I shouldn't laugh at the stupidity of Comcast...for several months I had both Comcast and RCN, and RCN worked flawlessly the whole time. It got more/better tv channels, too. I really am not sure why I still have Comcast but no longer RCN...I guess I'm the stupid one.

Actually, the Philippines are RIGHT THERE

Okay, what do I know...it seems that There Philippines IS actually right on not just the There servers but right on the There planet mingling with the rest of us. This is great because I was on There last night and it was like being on a ghost planet, I think we could use the additional members.