Ed is home.

Here are a few phrases you might hear in your average Dungeons and Dragons game:

• "Do you have a hell minion? It's 39/27"
• "I'm up to 92/84"
• "I was dumping it all into stamina, then I thought, I should probably be putting some into attack"
• "I'm up to level 37"
• "I need to level up, then attack again"
• "I have enough for a serpent's shield"
• "I have SOOO many dragon gems!"
• "Have you started the undead world? You finished it!? the new one!?"
• "I received a little archer person thing"
• "I didn't get the orb until I had, like, done everything"
• "I'm working on Azeron right now"
• "I thought you had Ambrosia"
• "He's +1 attack."

If you are in the right context, you can understand pretty much all of those statements, but if you don't know about that kind of thing, you would look at those statements and become disinterested faster than you can say, "I don't even know what level up means!"

Now, you're thinking to yourself, "What, is he showing off his geekiness? Throwing out all those phrases that don't mean anything?"

Well, no. I'm showing of my wife's geekiness. I have yet to say a word this morning, and I have heard the preceding phrases come from my wife's mouth while talking on the phone in the same manner you might hear the phrase, "I need to go return those towels."

I would like to stress that it is not my doing that she's playing Castle Age. It was completely not my doing. And yet, when I hear the phrase, "What's your attack/defense?" come from her lips, it makes my lower lip tremble, ever so slightly, as she crosses over the line to our side, and now she can never go back.

I've been working more on my ant hill "game" (those are the biggest finger quotes you can imagine). Right now, I'm making them shove rocks around. Basically, you throw rocks at ants, and they move them away from their hill, trying to keep it clean.

The stupid ants though, sometimes one ant would walk up to a rock and start pushing it, while ten other ants are already pushing it in the opposite direction, so the ant gets squashed under the rock.

"Stupid Ant," I say.

Only after this do I realize it's my programming that caused the ant to act that way. D'oh!

If you had to rank which you'd rather have teenagers doing, how would you order Having Sex and Killing People?

I'm just going to go ahead and assume your answer is in that order. Not that your decision was influenced by the order of presentation, because even if I put them in the other order, I'm pretty sure you'd rather not be afraid of teenagers killing you in your sleep with a chainsaw.

So here's my question: Why is it that violent video games get an M rating, but any video game that has sex in it is suddenly AO?

It's not just games of course, it's the same with movies and TV shows. I'm surprised they don't have ratings on books yet, honestly. Though the rating system would be a much compressed version. Either it's a kid's picture book, or it's Mature. I make this point because books generally are much more, well, graphic than movies are a lot of times.

But that's not the point. Why is it that nudity and sex are seen as a horrible violation of humanity that nobody under the age of 17 is allowed to think of, but it's pretty much a guaranteed necessity to prolong the human race? It is, essentially, something that almost everybody will come in contact with at some point. Conversely, why are violence and killing seen as an everyday occurrence that you can stick in every show past Teletubbies and Barney, but it's a guaranteed stopper to the longevity of the human race? Killing, essentially something that your average person will never come in contact with.

I put forth the notion that the rating system is obviously trying to kill us off! Everybody can go out and kill people, but dear god, don't have sex! Why don't they just devise a suppression field that kills off all the embryos, and our sex drive while they're at it. Sterility for all!

But seriously, why does the rating system create such disparity between the two? And in the wrong direction no less!

God, as I'm sure we all presume to know, created everything, yes? He created light. Good thing, too, because I hate it when I bump my shin in the middle of the night. Imagine doing that all the time!

He proceeded to create heaven, and earth, and gave it form. Then he cried to make every child feel terrible about whatever it is they're doing, and the oceans filled up. Seriously, God must have been the absolute worst baby. I mean who cries for forty days and forty nights straight?

Then He made scriggly little things to annoy you at your picnic. He created cows and jellyfish, and they pretty much went at it to make all the other animals.

After some figuring, he finally came up with an idea: Sentience. So he made man, who was immediately just as bad a baby as God was, and whined about being lonely, so, as the joke goes, he asked God for somebody who's loving, and caring, and gives him foot massages when it hurts. God replied, "Okay, but it's gonna cost you an arm and a leg."

"Ehh... What can I get for a rib?" was man's reply.

So now we have man and woman. At this point, being omniscient, God already knew it was not going to work out. He must have, because he stuck this giant tree like ten feet from Adam's front door, for everybody to see, and said, "Don't touch it."

Now why, being omniscient, would anybody give you temptation, and tell you not to resist temptation, knowing full well (being omniscient and all) that you could not?

Because he didn't like where it was going, that's why. It's just a rough draft. He learned from these mistakes (if you can call them mistakes. Perhaps experiences) and moved on to bigger and better things.

Why do you think the universe is so darned big? Just for us to look at? No, God just gave himself plenty of space to work in. If he hadn't, he'd have to get rid of the Earth just to make space for new experiments. The universe is like God's GMail box. It's space keeps growing, and he doesn't have to delete anything, he just puts it in storage and never has to look at it again unless he wants to.

Which we presume he doesn't, of course. He already knew we were bad to begin with.

This is all just my way of saying, "I bought Spore recently, and I'm sorry Jatrak'a race: I'm starting a new game."

So my first game has been released. It's right here. I've worked on other things, and even Girls Gone Mobile has long since gone out the door, but this is the first real game I've done by myself, and it's out the door!

It's nice that I've completed something and I can actually see it right there! My past programming jobs have never been so visible to me. People are buying this thing! Schweet!

Anyway, I've moved on to the next project, which isn't actually my own game, but it's adding multiplayer support to a game we have, which is quite a task.

Oh, and I've also got ZSNES working on my system, and it even has sound, too, so good news there. Time to play FF.

kthxbye