i_hope_that
For many of us, the holidays can be kind of rough. If you're searching for a network of understanding friends, this ultra-nurturing community encourages you to express your heartfelt wishes and offer other members encouragement and acceptance. Not for the terminally snarky or emotionally-challenged, this is a good-spirited place to lend comfort and support.

diygifts
Feeling crafty? If you've got a few last folks on your holiday gift list, this is a great place to seed your creativity and generosity. You'll also discover wonderful DIY tips to decorate your home and entertain guests. Offering a no-frills-no-skills attitude that welcomes the cash-challenged and arts-phobic, you're sure to get ideas and make friends in the process.

cooking_club
A fun and friendly community dedicated to those who love to cook, whether you're a meat-and-potatoes type, an aspiring gourmand, and/or a vegan. In search of a brilliant dish to use up those weekly leftovers? Post your ingredients and you'll be whipping up a feast by dinner. You can also share favorite recipes. For Type A chefs, you can spice up your culinary repertoire with exciting cooking challenges.

stepstomarrow
When granddaughter, Jada, was born with leukemia, a donor-match was located and Jada made a miraculous recovery. In honor of her grandaughter's health, Jeanna has decided to walk across the country (in the dead of winter) to raise awareness and build support for the bone marrow registry (all that's required is a cheek swab). Follow Jeanna's remarkable journey as she travels the United States by foot.

Get to know My Guests. Want to know who's checking you out? You can now view the 100 most recent, logged-in users who visited your journal during the past 30-day period with My Guests. For those who prefer to fly under the radar, you can update your My Guests privacy setting here.

Introducing My Stats. If you have a Paid or Permanent account, you can now see detailed reports on how many people are visiting your journal, friends pages, and entries (wherever they're posted on LiveJournal). You can also view data on comments and RSS requests. My Stats is only available to Paid and Permanent account holders, but you can upgrade anytime. (FYI, an annual subscription costs less than a large pizza with everything on it, PLUS it's rumored to make you lose weight in your sleep!) For additional details on this feature, read this article in paidmembers.

Get ready to check your vital statistics!. To begin, mouse over Journal in the upper nav bar and select My Stats from the dropdown menu (Horizon) or select My Stats under Journal in the side bar (Vertigo). If you're using another design scheme, you can visit My Stats directly. You'll find My Guests on the My Stats tool bar.

Happy holiday promotion!

We're delighted to tell you about our holiday coupons, which will help you share the love with your LiveJournal friends! If you have a Paid or Permanent account, you can send up to 10 LiveJournal Basic/Plus users a $10 coupon for an annual paid subscription now through January 15th, 2010. Recipients can upgrade for $9.95 (instead of $19.95) for one year by enrolling in our automatic payment plan or make a manual payment of $15 (instead of $25). Please note that these coupons are not transferable and cannot be used to renew existing paid accounts. If you're a Paid/Permanent user, you can send out your holiday coupons now!

Tweaks and Enhancements

1. The search is on: We've replaced our default search tool with one from Yandex, a leader in search engine technology. This means you'll get smarter, more granular results! To get started, enter your search terms and click the Go button to the left of the Find box on the upper right of the LiveJournal header. This will take you to the search landing page where you can further refine by Entries, Comments, People & communities, and FAQs. You can also access the search page directly.
2. Whitelisting: We've released a new option to help you moderate your busy communities more efficiently. If an entry contains a link to a whitelisted (i.e., trusted) site, it will be posted automatically without need for moderator approval. If a post contains a link that is not on the whitelist, you'll be prompted to approve. To access this option, please visit settings for any community you maintain and select the third option in the Community Moderation box (located in the lower left-hand corner). Click the enable link to custom-edit your community's whitelist, which has been prepopulated with trusted domains. You can manually add or delete URLs in the text box. Please note: If you're the maintainer of an unmoderated community, you may see the radio button for this setting checked, even though it's not active. This is a known issue. Please select whichever option you prefer and click Save Changes at the bottom of the page. If you're happy with your current settings, then no need to do anything!
3. TMI, dude: We've added some fun FREE sponsored vgifts! You can send up to 50 TMI vgifts to mutual friends (btw, you cannot send free vgifts to communities). If you're a Paid/Permanent user and you want to view sponsored gifts, click Show sponsored gifts on your homepage or visit the sponsored gift page. These vgifts will only be available through Wednesday, December 23rd.

You can view more awesome user content after the jump!

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Curtains

Thanks, again, for joining us. Until next time, stay snug!

taste_buds
Holidays provide a built-in excuse for indulgent entertaining. This all-purpose foodie community covers everything from homemade hangover cures to dinner party menus. Need quick advice? Get five-minute snack suggestions, low-fat ingredient substitutes, and even measurement conversions. Delicious recipes garnished with humorous advice. Yum.

naturesbeauty
Always on the lookout for compelling images, we were delighted to discover this flourishing community of artists who share a love of nature. Honoring the subject with photographs, paintings, sketches, prose, poetry, and other creative works, you'll be simultaneously riveted to your monitor and inspired to run helter skelter towards the nearest wooded dale.

Here's my question on my alma mater's game design classes, after seeing their work. If you are interested in the design of a game, in trying to do something new, then why not work on it using existing tools first instead of trying to build it from scratch to start with. REAL game developers usually prototype using mods or something like that before they invest the time building a game engine. So why not do that in a college program?

I think it comes down to what you want to teach. If you want to teach game engine programming, then just have everyone start out making a clone of GTA or Mario Bros or something. THEN go on to making a new game. Heck, my programming text book I've been browsing through teaches you how to clone Asteroids as a programming exercise. Start with something like that.

If you're trying to teach them how to design a game with branching choices, storylines, characters, etc, then at the very least have them use something like the Unreal engine. Not only will they be able to get it done much more quickly, they're learn how to use existing tools, just like real game programmers. Heck, Unreal programming is a sought after skill by many developers.

Anyway, I digress. I'm off to make my Little Big Planet level that teaches you about the triune nature of the Christian God.

Got a lot of stuff done around the house this weekend. Started building my compost bin in earnest, since I finally got all the supplies and cut all the wood to size. I got about 1/3 of the way done and then it got too dark. Oh, and I must have been high or something when I was at the hardware store since I only bought half as many washers and nuts as I needed.

Nicole & I spent some time yesterday working at a local homeless shelter. I was impressed by the smoothness of the operation, but I was also saddened at how ungrateful many of the people were for the free lunch being served. I had several people complain to me that the food was over-cooked or they didn't like it. So odd for people getting LITERALLY a free lunch.

Now I'm paying bills, writing letters and clearing out papers from my laptop bag.

I managed to setup the oddest yet most appropriate double feature at the movies this weekend. Two magical films about New Orleans. 2 films that have more true love for the city than all the earnestness of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button ever did. Nicole said that between the two they give a full picture of New Orleans, from the fairy tale to the grim reality to the honest humanity.

I'm talking of course about The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans and The Princesses & The Frog.

Bad Lieutenant is a stunningly fun, depraved and beautiful film. It mixes noir, exploitation, procedural and redemption story all in one brilliant absurdist swoop. From the digressions involving heart-broken alligators and possibly illusory iguanas to the spellbindingly beautiful monologue that Nicholas Cage delivers in an rusted out wood shed. Remember Sideways, when Virginia Madsen stops you dead in your tracks with her stunning soliloquy about the wine as a living thing(you can read it here). Somehow, a film that opens with two cops betting on how long it will take a man to drown ends up as the most unexpectedly wonderful film. Not just an exercise in watching Nic Cage stare at iguanas, although that scene is certainly a highlight. Even Brad Dourif even shows up playing a normal human being. Certainly one of the best movies of the year. Unlike Rescue Dawn, which Herzog seemed compelled to play straight(probably out of respect for real events), this film pulls in some of the best elements of Herzog's recent experiments in new ways of filmmaking and storytelling like The Wild Blue Yonder(awesome film, check it out!) and Grizzly Man.

The Princess & The Frog on the other hand presents a classical Disney film that is updated to the 21st century, sometimes somewhat oddly. For all the paranoia about Aladdin telling "gentle children to take off their clothes," The Princess & The Frog has the most innuendo of anything that can rightly be called a Disney film. Perhaps its because of all the Disney animated stories, the characters here are the most fully adults of any in the history of the studio. No fairy godmothers or kindly grandparents steering their kids here. These characters are grown-ups, talking about opening their own restaurants, marrying for money and paying the Devils their due.

The animation is as sumptuous as you would expect from a studio trying to prove that it is worth the effort of coming back to life, even if I did count at least 3 other animation studios that assisted in the production of this film. Tellingly, there still isn't a trailer out for the next hand animated Disney film, but this film feels fantastic. There is a great energy and variety to the animation, and it blends wonderfully with the music. I find it funny that John Lasseter supposedly didn't want Alan Menken to do the music because he thought it would be repetitive since Menken did Enchanted. So he went with Randy Newman, who's done how many Pixar movies now?

As far as the story goes, I was impressed with Princess Tiana's gumption. Probably less so than any other Disney princess, ever, she had no time to wait for Princes to help her out. It's not unusual for a Prince in a story to be jolted out of his complacency by a Princess, but Tiana does more than that. She is the active player in this story, bargaining with the Prince Frog and looking out for her own interests. He has to pursue her pretty vigorously, since she has no time for gadabout royalty. Her interest in the Prince is based upon his character and his actions, not his title.

Tweaks and enhancements

• As a number of you reported, a service interruption impaired sending and receiving notifications for a couple of days. This was due to an avalanche of snowflake cookies. We've removed the free snowflake cookie and unclogged the pipeline. Timely notifications should resume shortly. Please note that there's a backlog in our queues, so you'll be getting earlier notifications first. For more details, check out this post at lj_maintenance.
• In anticipation of the new year, we've embarked on a self-improvement kick to boost our backend (pun semi-intended). This will allow us to offer you a holiday promotion in the next few weeks (yes, we're listening and working very hard to make it happen). We sincerely appreciate your continued patience and support.

Holiday vgifts are here!

We've added some fantastic new vgifts to help you spread holiday cheer. We also hope you'll honor AIDS Awareness Month by purchasing virtual red ribbons. Priced at $2.99, we'll donate 100 percent of gross proceeds to IAVI.org (the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative) to support the development and global distribution of an affordable HIV vaccine.

Introducing: LJLimericks

We cordially here do invite you
To craft a fine limerick. Might you?
Each week, a new theme,
Then a poll, that's our dream
Winner posted on news to delight you!

In honor of all the brilliant writers on LiveJournal, we've created a brand new community: ljlimericks! Each week, we'll enter a handful of limericks into a poll (which we'll tuck snugly under an LJ-Cut). The winning poem will be published in the following newsletter. In addition, the author will receive a virtual blue ribbon! If you have the time, come drop us a rhyme. Please keep the "Nantucket" stuff on the downlow, since this is a youth-friendly community. Our first prompt is: Insomnia in winter.

Photos of the week

We're back with more incredible images from our global photography community. Congratulations to sempre_marseeya, who has been awarded a virtual blue ribbon as the winner of our second lj_photophile poll.

We hate to squelch your creativity, but, as a courtesy to other users, please post only one photo at a time and keep the main photo no larger than 350x350 (so images display properly via mobile and on friends pages). You can link to a larger image and/or post photos under a cut. Just so you know, we select photos for the poll blindly, based on user comments and staff feedback. Please continue to vote, comment, and, of course, enjoy. You can check out the week in pictures and view more awesome user content after the jump!

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Curtains

Thanks, again, for joining us. Stay warm and safe out there!

Over Christmas I have a lot of video editing I want to get done, I need to make myself a damned website and I need to do some serious writing. I also want to design some North Pole buildings for a friend's video game and learn some more programming.

Ugh.

Today I'm doing some fun 3D renders, getting a dome piece ready to go as a stereo 3D piece. Just doing the camera setups is a lot of fun, by far my favorite part of 3D animation. The connection to photography and real filmmaking is just a joy.

AND I AM SO SICK OF HEARING GOLD INVESTING COMMERCIALS!!!!

Gold is not a good investment, and even if you want to do that, there are about 10 million better ways to invest in gold than to buy coins from some guy on late night TV/radio.

backpacking
Want to embrace your wanderlust on the cheap? If you're tall on adventurous spirit, but short on funds, this community can help you plan a trip to anywhere. Offering plentiful tips on how to travel light, you can post about bargain hotels and hostels if you're into urban exploration or discuss camping gear and mosquito netting for the great outdoors. Hitch your backpack, pitch your tent, and carpe diem!

Today was a kind of scattered day at work. I got to do some really fun work on putting a film clip together(for 3D projection no less), and then I spent several hours sitting through a meeting that was supposed to be about supercomputing(which I'm working on and could have said some constructive things), but instead became about how can we lure more post-production to New Mexico. I think the one question they forgot is that in this world of internets and pocket hard drives, what is the reason for anyone to do their work in a particular place. If the practical issues are the same for working in Mumbai as Midland, what can Midland do to make itself attractive.

Uh. Nicole is poking me about bed. Good night.