T w e n t y S i d e d
Wow. Here is someone who hand-knit an iPhone. It looks great, but I bet the reception is fuzzy. (Boo.)
Perfect for the Nameless Extra in Your Life
Think Geek always has great shirts, but Wil Wheaton points to one which is particularly funny.
Which reminds me:
In talking about shows and movies which are ripe for the DM of the Rings treatment, I think the richest target out there is Star Trek: TNG. It has all the ingredients that make DMotR work:
- Like LOTR, the material is popular, widely recognized, and filled with familiar tropes. Even people who didn’t watch the show are likely familiar with the idea of Holodeck Mishaps and Expendable Extras.
- It has a huge supply of material to work with, even larger than LOTR. (The show ran for seven years and 178 episodes. Chances are if you need a shot of character X talking to Y with expression Z, it will be in there somewhere without the need for lots of tedious photoshopping.) The sets and costumes didn’t change much from one episode to the next, which means the screenshots would be nicely interchangeable. The only things you’d have to watch for are Wil Wheaton growing up and Jonathan Frakes growing the beard.
- Like LOTR, the show takes itself pretty seriously, which makes the jokes and dialog easier.
- Like LOTR, the show borrows from other works of fiction, and in turn is used as a source for later works. Thus an ST:TNG parody would have a reach well beyond the show itself. (This would be less true for something like Firefly, for example.)
I don’t know how good it would be as a source for roleplaying jokes. I’m betting there’s a Trek RPG out there somewhere, but if there is it isn’t nearly as popular as D20 Star Wars. I think using it to parody sci-fi in general would work much better.
Picture Picard as a touchy-feely pacifist politically correct diplomat, Riker as an intergalactic manwhore, and Wesley as a sarcastic potty-mouth teen. The jokes pretty much write themselves. You could do ten pages with just those three characters. It’s a goldmine.
DM of the Rings CXXIV:
Medic!
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “DM of the Rings CXXIV:
Medic!”
Sins of a Solar Empire
I’m a big fan of Stardock. I loved Galactic Civilizations. I loved the sequel even more. Even aside from the quality of the games, I like how they do their thing: Their games have no anti-piracy hassle. They continue to update and enhance the core game for free for many months after release. I’m not taking about the usual bug-fixery, I’m talking about making the game deeper and more robust based on feedback from the user base.
Now I find out they have a new game in the works: Sins of a Solar Empire. I visited the page, read the synopsis, and thought Hey – Homeworld clone. That’s nice. I guess. But a closer look reveals this to be more than a remix of an earlier hit. It looks like they’re trying to take the Masters of Orion / Galactic Civilizations gameplay and… make it realtime? Really? You can do that? How does that work, exactly?
I guess we’ll find out. The game is in beta now. I’ll be watching this one.
Akismet vs. Two Billion Spam
Akismet, the anti-spam WordPress plugin, has been around since November 2005. In that time, the software has dealt with 2 billion spam messages. What’s really alarming is the shape of the curve. To be fair, some of the curve is the result of more and more people using WordPress, and more of those people getting Akismet, but still.
Such a mammoth waste of everyone’s time and energy for just a tiny bit of money for a miniscule number of people.
The spam solution I’m using is still going strong. It’s been 2 weeks since the last time I saw a spam. It’s been over a month since one slipped by that I had to delete manually. Given the sheer volume of spam I was getting five months ago, and given the fact that this site is several times larger now, I’m very grateful for how well the CAPTCHA is working.
If you look at the problem from the POV of the spam programmer, there are many ways to make his job harder and more annoying. You can’t make it impossible, of course, but the appeal of spam has always been the fact that it is “free” for the spammer. Making it less free might go a long way to making less of it. Given the normal level of lazyness and stupidity of the average spammer, I think that even CAPTCHA are probably overkill.
Most spam scripts go right for the wordpress comment-posting script. Just having this script to have a configuarable name would probably be just as effective as the CAPTCHA solution I’m using now.
Another technique would be to simply insist that comment POSTS are the result of an honest-to-goodness page load. Embed a secret number (which changes automatically) into the form as a hidden field, and make sure incoming form submissions contain the number. The advantage of this would be that it would be seamless and transparent to normal users – they wouldn’t even need to enter a CAPTCHA. The only downside would be if a user loaded the page, and then did something else for a couple of hours, and then came back and left a comment on the open page without reloading it first, then their number would have expired and the system would eat their comment. The disadvantage for the spammer is that they will have to parse all that HTML on the page if they want their comment to get through.
DM of the Rings CXXIII:
You Go, Girl
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “DM of the Rings CXXIII:
You Go, Girl”
BioShock: Upgrade Fatigue
I’ve been waiting for this game since I first heard about it, way back in February of 2006. At long last, they have released the minimum system requirements. Let’s have a look:
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “BioShock: Upgrade Fatigue”
From The Archives:
The Best of 2018
I called 2018 "The Year of Good News". Here is a list of the games I thought were interesting or worth talking about that year.
Fixing Match 3
For one of the most popular casual games in existence, Match 3 is actually really broken. Until one developer fixed it.
Video Compression Gone Wrong
How does image compression work, and why does it create those ugly spots all over some videos and not others?
Secret of Good Secrets
Sometimes in-game secrets are fun and sometimes they're lame. Here's why.
Civilization VI
I'm a very casual fan of the series, but I gave Civilization VI a look to see what was up with this nuclear war simulator.
Dead Island
A stream-of-gameplay review of Dead Island. This game is a cavalcade of bugs and bad design choices.
The Biggest Game Ever
Just how big IS No Man's Sky? What if you made a map of all of its landmass? How big would it be?
In Defense of Crunch
Crunch-mode game development isn't good, but sometimes it happens for good reasons.
Who Broke the In-Game Economy?
Why are RPG economies so bad? Why are shopkeepers so mercenary, why are the prices so crazy, and why do you always end up a gazillionaire by the end of the game? Can't we just have a sensible balanced economy?
Do It Again, Stupid
One of the highest-rated games of all time has some of the least interesting gameplay.