loonyblog.

As you may have guessed, judging from the fact that this is Oscars Eve and I haven’t posted anything related to the Academy Awards, I will not be posting Oscar picks this year. I will (most likely) be watching the show live, but with all that’s been going on, I haven’t even had a chance to read over the nominees, let alone do the weeks of research needed to come up with my annual picks.

That’s a shame, but don’t be mistaken - this is a one time deal. Next year I fully intend to return to form. Watching the show this year will be a strange experience…this is the first time in nearly 20 years that I haven’t had any stake whatsoever in the outcome. I can’t even imagine what it will be like…will I be bored? Usually I’m literally on the edge of my seat…every award called - big or small - is a huge deal. With that aspect removed, it’s just going to be another night of television.

I’ve only seen one of the Best Picture Nominees (Juno) and while it was enjoyable, it’s no Best Picture winner (nor is it another Little Miss Sunshine, in my opinion). I have no stake this year, but I’d bet No Country for Old Men is going to pick up best picture, with second Oscars going to Julie Christie and Daniel Day Lewis for actress and actor respectively, Javier Bardem and Amy Ryan for supporting actor/actress respectively, and Los Hermanos Coen for Director. But again, I have no stake, and only briefly glanced at the nominees just now, so don’t take any of that as a recommendation. This year, I’m just not qualified.

But I am looking forward to the show, even if it will be a very different experience for me. And if the baby needs feeding/changing, well, that’s what the TiVo is for.

After 16 days, two hospitals and two surgeries, we brought baby Alice home yesterday. Which inevitably left us with the “WTF DO WE DO NOW?” question that all new parents wind up with (we’re just a little behind because of her extended hospital stay). In any event, last night, as a distraction from the frustration of new parenthood (she won’t eat/sleep/tap dance…what do I do??) I finally plugged a hole in this website.

Ever since my loonygames days, I’ve been a master of search engine p1mping. As a result, I get quite a few referrals from Google. Unfortunately Google Images’ ubiquity, added to the popularity of sites like MySpace, has led to a whole generation of image leachers. I post a lot of images in this blog, and it always irks me when someone direct-links to one of them without credit of any kind. I don’t even mind direct linking…it’s direct-embedding that annoys me. You get an image on your site as if you had posted it yourself, but in fact you’re just draining resources from my site.

Well, that’s not a problem any more.

Last night, in my sleep-deprived state, I threw together some simple .htaccess trickery to keep leachers from manhandling my images. Anyone who attempts to do it will now, instead of the intended image, wind up with the one on the right there*. We’ll see how long it takes people to notice the difference, but here’s an amusing example, of a site that just leached photos of Jessica Biel from around the web and loaded it up with Google ads for clickthroughs. Scroll down a little to see my image nestled in there among the glamourous shots of Ms. Biel.

The funny thing is that I don’t even care about the bandwidth hit. It just annoys me that this is acceptable behavior to some people. It was considered poor taste back in the Geocities days, for god’s sake (then again, a lot of MySpace resembles the worst of Geocities, come to think of it).

So anyway, feel free to steal my images. Nine out of ten times I just repurposed them myself anyway. But don’t direct link. That’s just sleazy.

*Old school readers may recall this image as Mike Sanzone’s cover painting to loonygames issue 1.2. It’s still a gem.

This has not been an easy week. Our baby girl, born back on Super Tuesday, was diagnosed with choanal atresia, a scary sounding issue that was preventing her from properly breathing through her nose. This required surgery, which she’s had, and is recovering from now. More info (and still more pictures of our little prizefighter) is up over at AliceBergman.com.

In any event, as I said, this was not an easy week. Alice was transferred to UCSF Children’s Hospital last weekend (once it was determined that whatever was causing her breathing problem wouldn’t be able to be addressed locally), and we’ve been going back and forth to the city every day.

During these times of uncertainty, it’s not at all uncommon for a person to reach out for some kind of solace. For me, that something was Robert E. Howard’s Conan.

The funny thing is that I’m really not joking. When we were sitting around waiting for our week old daughter to come back from surgery (or even worse, when we were waiting around waiting around to wait around for when she might actually go in to surgery), I escaped into the world of Hyboria.
I had with me at the hospital The Coming of Conan the Cimmerian, the first volume of the complete Robert E. Howard Conan adventures, and would read this whenever I needed to get away. For some reason I can’t entirely explain, I found this to be extremely comforting.

There’s something so simple, so pure, about these stories. In all of them, Conan is this gruff (but surprisingly intelligent) brute, the women are all voluptuous and sexy, and the enemies are always deserving of their ultimate fates. There’s never any ambiguity, although there are frequently some nice surprises (I had no idea, for example, how much Howard had in common with his contemporary Mr. Howard Philips Lovecraft). Also, those Mark Schultz illustrations are fantastic (nice to see him back in form all these years after Xenozoic Tales disappeared).

Mostly though, it was all about leaving behind anything even remotely resembling reality. This was a world of sex, violence and magic. I love deep fantasy too, but I don’t think Tolkien’s brand would have done the same thing. This was simple escapism, and it’s some of the best I’ve read since I was a kid. I’m not saying the next time there’s a major event in your life you should look to Robert E. Howard and Conan for solace or anything…

…but it can’t hurt.

Hey, it worked for me.

If you were afraid that this site would turn into all baby news all the time, I have good news. Like any good geek, I purchased a domain name for my little girl long before she was born*. Rather than subject readers of this site to constant updates every time my little girl sneezes (which she’s done, and yes, is a miracle of miracles…ALERT THE INTERNETS), I have launched AliceBergman.com, intended to be your one-stop shop for all things loonybaby.

That isn’t to say that there won’t be some crossover here of course, but generally speaking, this site is for the bizarre crap that pours out of my head. So while I’ll be posting in the near future about the iPhone and DualShock3, I’ll keep the incessent baby updates elsewhere.

I’ll leave you with this picture (taken yesterday) which I just think is the cutest thing ever (and is naturally my Blackberry’s desktop image)…you’ll find more over at the AliceBergman.com photo gallery.

*(This of course meant that anyone with total mastery of the WHOIS database might be able to find out her name before we told anyone, but since it was bought through a proxy, I figured the chances of anyone really caring that much would be pretty slim. I was right).

Last night at 9:24 PM, Heather gave birth to Alice Anne Bergman. She’s four weeks early, so she’s a little small at 4 pounds, 14 ounces, but her and mommy are both doing well.

I’ll post more soon — I’m a little busy at the moment — but I’ve posted some photos of us and our little girl for everyone to see…here’s a preview:

 

From The New York Times’ article on Exxon Mobile’s unbelievably profitable fiscal year (italics mine):

By any measure, Exxon Mobil’s performance last year was a blowout.

The company reported Friday that it beat its own record for the highest profits ever recorded by any company, with net income rising 3 percent to $40.6 billion, thanks to surging oil prices. The company’s sales, more than $404 billion, exceeded the gross domestic product of 120 countries.

Exxon Mobil earned more than $1,287 of profit for every second of 2007.

The company also had its most profitable quarter ever. It said net income rose 14 percent, to $11.7 billion, or $2.13 a share, in the last three months of the year. The company handily beat analysts’ expectations of $1.95 a share, after missing targets in the last two quarters.

Like most oil companies, Exxon benefited from a near doubling of oil prices, as well as higher demand for gasoline last year. Crude oil prices rose from a low of around $50 a barrel in early 2007 to almost $100 by the end of the year — the biggest jump in oil prices in any one year.

I’m no economist, and I’m the last one to jump into a topic like this, but I don’t understand how as the economy is suffering, we allow this to happen.

A long forgotten classic for the SMS.

Such a great soundtrack. To this day, I can’t believe I actually finished that game. I remember it being brutally hard. With the news last week that Sega Master System games are coming to the Wii’s Virtual Console, I might have to give it another whirl. (Being able to quicksave and come back later will certainly help).