Viva Piņata is indeed full of fun. It's obviously a game that's geared towards kids, but it has enough depth to keep me engaged.

Sonic, on the other hand, is as broken as the little statue that it came with. I love the Sonic franchise, but they've managed to ship a completely broken game. I'll give it another go in a few days, but I had to call it quits before I broke something out of frustration. Not surprisingly, it looks like they didn't fix any of the problems with the demo they released a few months ago.

Back to my garden full of Whirlms, Sparrowmints, and Fudgehogs.

Voters in Pierce County did something I thought I'd never see around here: The voted to try out instant runoff voting.

Here's a reasonable explanation of how it works. I'd like to see instant runoff voting spread, but I fear it's too complex a process to ever be used on a wide scale when we can barely make our current voting system work.

Warner Home Video announced they've begun production on a direct-to-DVD release of Babylon 5.

I loved Babylon 5, and I'm really happy to see news that some new stories will be making it my way some day.

While I'm not super excited about the initial line-up of shows, this is a very cool development. It'll be my first foray into video on demand type service, though I'm not super excited about trying to stuff all of this onto the Xbox 360's smallish hard drive. The press release above mentions a few movies will be making their way onto this service. If they actually release on or near the DVD release window, Netflix might be in for some serious competition.

That reminds me, I haven't bothered to check out "Current TV" in a while. I wonder if they've managed to get more than a sliver of any viewer ship.

Perhaps the funnies part of this is that we actually managed to create cookies that look more appetizing and visually appealing than the sample cookies they had on the box art. You'll just have to believe me on this.

What is the Dissenting Pebble?