National Novel Writing Month is almost here! For those of you who don't know what National Novel Writing Month is (le gasp!), it is basically a month - November - in which you write a 50,000 world novel. Well, 50,000 words is more of a novella than a novel but you get the picture. The motto is that there's a novel in each and every one of us and its in November that we can speed write it. Because the number one thing that prevents us from writing a novel is the lack of deadline. We'll do it and put it off for a few days and do it some more. With National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) we have a deadline - the end of the month. For more information go here: http://www.nanowrimo.com

Last year I barely reached half of the goal. So this year I have to surpass half. I already have a vague idea of what I'm going to write. Give me a few days and I'll have it fleshed out.

But as I was going through the forums I came upon a cool site. It's where you create your own country and based on how you vote on certain issues the country grows to be a liberal or a dictator state. NationStates.net. Take a look at my NationState - Empire of DennisNguyen. I know, creative name, right? Pfft.

Miers won't waver - EVER: This must be the weirdest Bushism ever. He was heard saying,

"I've known her long enough to know she's not going to change, that 20 years from now she will be the same person with the same judicial philosophy she has today," Bush said during his first full-fledged news conference since May. "She'll have more experience. She'll have been a judge, but nevertheless the philosophy won't change, and that's important to me."

I never knew that the quality of not-changing (aka being old fashioned) is a good thing. And its even better since she's going to be on the bench for some time (despite the fact that she's much older than the average age of a new Justice). I shudder at what Miers will be saying 20 years from now - the same thing Bush is saying in the present. Yes, we need another Bush-mind in the next 20 years. Yes.

MarchDesign.com/blog - So I was reading this blog today, right. They had a link to an online article about Videogame graphics becoming perhaps too real, too photorealistic. Sometimes photo-realistic videogames work but sometimes you just don't need it. A side note on that is the Uncanny Valley theory which is very very interesting.

The Uncanny Valley theory is by Masahiro Mori. Apparently, as an object approaches the appearance of a human being its power to draw empathy and wonder are increased until a certain point in which the empathy levels from humans severly drops and picks up after the object (robot) becomes exactly human. The reason behind this is that as the object approaches the appearance of humans the human characteristics are more noticable. As it crosses a certain point, the non-human characteristics become more visable because there is less of it. And so humans (us) would reject it as something uncanny and weird/twisted. But as the machine/robot/object approaches 100% humanity we are either fooled or empathic because it is pretty much human.

I can't explain it well but its very interesting.