I’ve been exploring different ways to market this blog and gain loyal readers.  I comment on other blogs, utilize social bookmarks, and try to write quality, searchable content.  One thing I had not tried is using social networking.  It seems like this would be one of the first things I would use.  I made the decision early on that I wanted to wait until the blog had matured some before I started mass promotion.  My archive is sizeable, the site is programmatically stable, and I’m finding my voice, so I figured that it had become time to create a Facebook fan page for 2Lincolns.com.

Anyone with a Facebook account can join.  You can go to Facebook and search for “2Lincolns.com”, go directly to the fan page by clicking here, or utilize the Facebook “fan box” you see before the comments section of this post (must be viewing full post to see comments section).

The fan box is located at the end of every post, before the comments section.  On the 2Lincolns.com fan page, you can perform most of the standard Facebook functions and interact with other fans of the page.  In addition, click on the “Blog” tab to become a follower and have posts appear in your Facebook news feed.  Feel free to invite your Facebook friends to join as well.

For the tech saavy, remember that subscribing to the 2Lincolns.com RSS feed has, and always will be, an option.  If you don’t know what an RSS feed is, you’re a few years behind the rest of the class.  Click here to catch up.

However you decide to follow 2Lincolns.com, I appreciate you spending some of your precious internet browsing time here.

Is 2Lincolns.com becoming a food blog?  Seems odd, though it would be fitting seeing as though I got the idea for the name from a commercial for double bacon cheeseburgers.  Food-related posts began with my post regarding a Fig Newton packaging faux pas.  Shortly thereafter, I wrote a post on Taco Bell cheating me out of what I’ve come to expect for around a dollar.  A few months back I expressed my disdain for rogue onion rings in my french fries.  Recently, my friend sent me a picture of a package of pizza bagels with one overturned, mockingly keeping with the spirit of the original post.

Another friend of mine has decided to keep the spirit alive by sending me what you see in Figure 1.  That, by his account, is supposed to be a McDonald’s Big Mac.  While vacationing in Chicago, he ordered this from a cafeteria in a museum.  Well, actually, this isn’t at all what he ordered. This is three patties, one and a half buns, what looks to be mustard, some very sad lettuce, and what I hope is small pieces of onion.

The Big Mac is a sandwich so popular that it has its own jingle.  I have never worked at a McDonald’s and even I know what goes on a Big Mac.  Two all beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, and onions on a sesame seed bun.  Good, we all know that one.  I hope whoever screwed this sandwich up does not have lofty goals in life.  Of course, when you pay someone minimum wage, you can’t expect your employees are going to be above doing half ass work and doing whippits in the cooler.  Perhaps this particular employee is just putting forth the appropriate effort that aligns with his or her wages.  In that case, I applaud the fast food fuck-up.

I don’t know what special sauce is, nor do I want to know what makes it special.

HBO has put out some quality programming over the years, but if you’re anything like me, the cream of the crop aired in 2001 when Band of Brothers aired.  Following the success of Saving Private Ryan, Stephen Spielberg and Tom Hanks set out to tell the story of E Company (”Easy Company”) of the 2^nd Battalion, 506^th Parachute Infantry Regiment assigned to the 101^st Airborne Division during World War II.  The duo is at it again, this time focusing on the United States Marine Corps’ actions in the Pacific theater of World War II.  With a budget of over $200 million, it seems they’re pulling out all of the stops.  Lucky for us, the first trailer of The Pacific has surfaced, and it looks pretty sweet.

If you haven’t seen Band of Brothers already, head on over to Amazon.com and pick it up on Blu-ray for the criminally low price of $43.99.

“I believe in ammunition.”  Video after the break.

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When my friends on Digg.com used to find something interesting, they would “shout” it to me.  I’d review the stories they sent me, and I would Digg the ones I liked.  This was the how we shared our findings on the vast space known as the world wide web.

Not anymore.

In late May, Digg announced that “shouts” were no longer going to be an accessible feature to notify your friends of articles on the site.  Let me take a step back.  For those of you not familiar with Digg or social bookmarking in general, I’ll fill you in.  Social bookmarking is a method for internet users to store, manage, share, and organize bookmarks of web pages.  I’ve written an article on social bookmarking here.  More specifically, Digg is a site where users submit images, articles, and videos in different categories, and other users “digg” or “bury” the links.  Those with the most “diggs” make it to the front page, where they get more exposure.  Community interaction is encouraged in the comments of each link, where comments themselves can be “dugg” or “buried” as well.

Shouts were an easy, localized way to share links with your friends.  Now, when someone shares an article with me, I typically get an email saying something to the effect of “Digg is completely retarded and disabled shouts, so I’m sending you this link.  Copying and pasting sucks dick.”  If shouts were an easy, widely used method of distributing content among Digg users, why were they removed?  The Digg blog says:

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Sony’s Playstation Portable is getting some major love these days (Figure 1). I had gotten mine as a gift last Christmas, deciding a few months thereafter to swap the motherboard out for a hackable one so I could enjoy emulated goodness of my favorite games of yesteryear along with the PSP’s library of games.  My PSP seemed complete, though it seemed like something was missing, some traditional part of the PlayStation gaming diet. Then it came upon me:

Where the hell was Gran Turismo PSP?

Gran Turismo has made a name for itself in every PlayStation generation, and today serves as what many consider to be the definitive racing simulator.  It seems like a perfect candidate for portable gaming as well, so what was the holdup? To all of you laughing, yes, to confirm, I just admitted to wondering why Polyphony Digital had been taking so long to develop something.

This is the same game studio that released a “prologue” versions of Gran Turismo 4 for PlayStation 2 and Gran Turismo 5 for PlayStation 3, both a year before the full version releases. After a long time coming, Gran Turismo is coming to the PSP this year.  The quality of the final Gran Turismo offerings usually make up for the grueling waits, and it seems as if Gran Turismo for PSP will be no different.

LittleBigPlanet joined the likes of Gran Turismo and Metal Gear Solid last year, making its case to be a face of the PlayStation brand with Sackboy’s debut on the PlayStation 3. While playing through the game, I thought that the platforming aspect of the game would make a fantastic transfer to the PSP. I’m not sure how the level creation and sharing that makes LittleBigPlanet so expansive would work, but as long as the gameplay and physics engine came over intact, I wouldn’t care all that much.  Apparently some people at Sony and Media Molecule agree with me, and LittleBigPlanet is coming to the PSP this year.

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