Expanding the network.

This has been in the works for awhile, to be frank- Clean Cut / Well Kept is no longer the singular blog- I seek writers and photographers and artists alike to join a group of like-minded content publishers.

Our aim is to establish a readership and create an attractive, networked team of bloggers.

Cross-contamination to increase audience is common enough these days- note the rather daunting number of pop tracks that are of the format "Title - Artist A w/ Artist B feat Artist C" - A, B, and C are potentially exposed to all of the others' fans.

The idea behind the network is something like that, I'd suppose. If you're interested in joining, shoot me an e-mail at [ disposablenamenlos at gmail dot com ].

Something I missed: [ ai-class.com ]

A partnership between Stanford Education and knowlabs, the class offered over at [ http://ai-class.com ] is pretty neat. I wish I had signed up for it sooner, even if my current workload isn't always getting done. I'll have to settle for watching videos on occasion, I guess.

A news article (FD: written by Stanford) detailing what's going on can be found [ here ].

Neat stuff, AI.

Overall, I find the idea of a class where the material is taught in compact format outside of the classroom (in a potentially passive medium, perhaps) to be a pretty neat one- classes could be shorter, wouldn't require an hour-or-longer attention span to take in all the material, and the educator could utilize their time more efficiently- rather than spending time lecturing more than once, they can record the lecture, and spend valuable class time helping the students with more advanced or difficult-to-understand concepts.

Food for thought, I guess.

Magic: The Gathering

This is probably going to be a really expensive habit if I get seriously involved.

I'm also a casual player, which means the prohibitive rules about which cards you can use don't apply (as much).

I am a huge fan of Slivers- a creature type that (usually) has a unique ability which it shares with all other Slivers in play. This means that if you have three Slivers that increase power and toughness by 1, they all experience a buff of +3/+3 - turning little cards into bulky swingers.

The real nasty bits come in once you get the more esoteric variants into play- including poisonous, rapidly-regenerating, and mana-creating abilities.

I'm personally considering purchasing one of these, since it's premade and the entire collection is foils- but it doesn't have quite the number of slivers I'm looking for, and omits some of the particular slivers that I want to use in a deck.

Enter this ridiculous spreadsheet: [ link ]. It's going to be out-of-date in less than a week (link and pricewise), but it is a rough estimate of the different costs associated with purchasing cards separately. In most cases, I'm ordering them 4 at a time, and probably only using 2 of each in a deck. I might construct two copies of the same deck, and resell one to recoup costs (if possible, anyway).

What decks would y'all run?

Blogs I like: Easy Tips for Business Writers @ Wordpress

If I recall correctly, now is approximately crunch time for college essays (and applications, too)-

Here's [ http://lisakusko.wordpress.com/ ] - Articles about improving your writing.

A few recent posts of hers: [ 1 ], [ 2 ], and [ 3 ] (in reverse chronological order of publication).

Coincidentally, I'm adding this to the reading list.

On being a developer:

I know very little about programming complex things- how to go about coding something like Minecraft, for instance- where would I even start?

I am good at scripting, though, given that I know commands.

It always amazes me how other folks seem to grasp these complex constructs with ease- Everyone tells me that I could, too, if I spent the time to learn, but I don't see it happening anytime soon.

Simpler things come easily, though- blatantly re-using (read: plagiarizing) code that works and hobbling it together (into some sort of frankencode construct) is what I'm good at. Kinda unethical, I'll admit, but I don't sell or otherwise profit off of these things.

Something about reverse-engineering can be relevant here, too. Reading through code that accomplishes something similar (or a part of what you want to do) grants insight into how what you want to do might work. It also presents the tempting opportunity to copy-and-paste, which is a bad habit of mine that I'm working to break.

More to come on all this later.

200th post!

A milestone! For me, anyway. Is that a kilometerstone in countries that don't adhere to the customary system?

Here is a picture I took. It is of an apparently unremarkable white door. Make of it what you will, I suppose.

I'm just kidding, I know units! The door will make sense later, I promise.

Shameless Plug: The Dark Bite @ Blogspot

The inaugural plug of the newly-created CCWK Content Network is here:

I give you the newly-formed blog of a good friend of mine, a comic aficionado and foodie- A blog whose title speaks for itself. This is [ http://thedarkbite.blogspot.com ].

Be gentle, folks- he's new to the scene. He's treated me to excellent breakfast tacos and given excellent recommendations on where to get delicious [ barbecue ].

On the slight decline in visible activity:

I'm slaving away at decent guides!

Maybe I should publish portions of them, and then a summary post later?

I'm also working on getting a few other sites up.

Until then, I'll post occasionally and with tidbits I think you'll like:

[ http://reddit.com/r/aww ] is just a colossal collection of cute.

It makes me feel warm and fuzzy.