Talking smack about the Nintendo Revolution, Mark Rein, VP of Epic Games, had this to say,
“Don’t kid yourself - you’re going to see more gimmicky, crappy, cheap, ‘I wish I hadn’t bought it’ gimmick games based around that controller than you can ever possibly imagine… I guarantee you there’s going to be lots of people who say the whole reason for this game is this controller, we made the perfect game for the controller. And all it’ll be is about the controller, and not necessarily a great game.”
Ah, yes, and true innovation resplendent in non-crappiness and notable absence of gimmickry would be those excellent FPSs your company keeps dropping like two day old turds. What’s that another Unreal? Oh wait your making a different game? A military themed shooter in the near future where you get to shoot demons?! Yawn. Wake me when you get a clue and your game designs evolve beyond scripted shooting and levels populated by oddly placed crates and barrels.
via Ars Technica
Geek synergy would be an apt description. I’m going to take two things that make my heart all a flutter, RPGs and databases, and let the two run wild through a field of wild flowers and see what offspring they produce in time. This has been an idea that I have toyed with for a long time, plans often centering on building a web application, but the time and tools never felt quite right. This time, however, I am going to jump right in but scale things back a little bit.
OpenOffice 2.0 was rolled out with the latest build of Ubuntu and it includes their database solution, Base, which for all intents and purposes is very closely related to Microsoft Access. It seems that Base would be a great place to start building a self contained campaign manager similar to the commercial offerings out there. Those commercial offerings have really been a thorn in my side as well, only running on Windows and often featuring some real janky interfaces and cludgy reports so I figured I’ll do the opposite; I’ll make it open - you’ll just need OO2 - and easy on the eyes - none of this VB Forms 1.0 crap.
The very first offering 0.001 should be ready in a day or so and will cover characters, both PC and NPC and basic reporting on said characters. The challenge will be translating the one-dimensional yet relational character sheets into normalized data sets; I would like to do it right the first time because nothing is worse than normalizing and existing structure. Trust me it can me like eating mayonnaise sitting out on a sweltering July afternoon.
Now just to think of a name. Base Camp, sounds just cheesy enough.
From the EFF: A New Gaming Feature—Spyware. It is moments like this that have me breathing sigh of relief that I have all but given up on PC gaming. This is a terrible trend in computing as in society; the notion that the consumer is judged to be a criminal with little to no rights with regards to privacy or ownership. My feeling is that the path the nation is heading down with regards to intellectual property could ultimately be our undoing.
via Boing Boing
We are coming up on a year in the house and life still feels like it is in disarray; so much is still packed in boxes and we have not hung anything on the walls. It all feels spartan, utilitarian, yet disorganized at the same time - a likely reflection of the past year. In all of that I cannot help but feel that I and living The Ant and Grasshopper except instead of playing all summer I stumbled about trying to keep up with forces outside of my control and in the end I am left ill prepared.
We are making headway on the house, albeit glacially. Last week my father and I poured the concrete pad for the new oil tank, which should get installed this week and will go a long way to stemming the tide of complaints about the bone cracking chill that grips the house, that is if you can classify 61° as bone cracking. I’ve also managed to carve a substantial hole in the third bedroom to set up an office for myself and to give our plants a winter home. However, it was really only achieved by heaving more boxes into our already full attic. Someday I’m going to rent a dumpster when my wife is not looking and proceed to toss it all out but it will be luck that I toss out some of Imelda’s shoes.
Looking farther out, we have a number of projects that we want to undertake from putting up fencing to give Peri a place to run around to tearing out all the carpeting and putting in that snap together faux wood flooring. Then we want to paint all the rooms something other than the drab neutral tones. The talk of painting has been our excuse for not hanging anything up, though I think that it is wearing thin on the slow trickle of visitors we have. Maybe I’ll find this winter affords me more time to putter about the house; if anything I can at least finish my office and do something about all these boxes that are crowding us in.
Your political compass
Economic Left/Right: -6.00
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -6.72
Looks like I am some sort of leftist anarchist
. Not that I put much stock in personality indicators that are ~ 30 questions in length.
