Jacob’s Escalator

Okay, I’ll be straight up honest with you: I am way too excited about this for my own good.

In six days’ time, I will be enjoying a bit of BK lunch in Richland while people around me, including myself, open six booster packs of Pokemon Cards from a set that hasn’t come out yet - then we’ll make a small deck out of those cards and play a tournament for fun. For you guys, this doesn’t make a whole lot of set, so I figured that while I’m thinking about prereleases, I’ll “prerelease” a little bit of information from my Thunderlight post for the Trading Card Game. Read More »

Freerice.com is a wonderful little site for pretty much anyone.

It’s a very simple concept - it includes a vocabulary game in which it gives you a word, and you must select another word whose definition is close to it. For each answer you get right, you earn enough money for the site to buy ten grains of rice, which it then donates to the UN’s efforts to end world hunger. As you answer more and more of their questions correctly the vocabulary gets extremely advanced; they have sixty levels of English vocabulary. They say it is very rare to get above level 50, and I myself haven’t passed level 35.

I’m going to be donating about 2000 grains a day to help study for the SAT, which is coming up this Saturday. I encourage everyone to try it, just for 100 grains or so a day, just for fun.  According to the statistics on their site, FreeRice has - since its creation in 2007 - donated enough rice to feed 100,000 people for a month. That’s pretty cool. In actual distribution FreeRice has fed just over a million people for, in some cases, up to two months.  It feels nice to be a part of that.

So begins 2009 - awake half-an-hour from noon, and still waiting on my sister and her friend; the Gator Bowl (?) is playing downstairs amid the sea of confetti from last night. It doesn’t feel like January, or winter at all for that matter; I’m quite comfortable in a loose shirt and shorts at home. There is probably snow left, but it looks and feels out of place; the world looks more like a chilly November morning than a cold January afternoon. Read More »