I just watched a commercial for Lunesta, a drug meant to calm one's "restless mind". It was toward the end of one of those shows on Faux News where Republicrats and Demoplicans do their best to shout louder than their opposite numbers. This is not a new thought to me (at least not since the first time I saw it last week) but I can't help but think that there are awfully good reasons for one's mind to be restless.
So, here I sit Watching 60 minutes and after a piece on the impending demise of GM and a bit with Osama's old bodyguard there was a feature about Americans working over 60 hours a week. Some of the people were working 80 hours end were actually happy about it. One couple's daughter's favorite Toy is a Blackberry!
So, where did we go from there? An ad from hallmark showing a group of Children clustered around a singing rabbit toy and ignoring the father figure who is trying to draw them into an Easter egg hunt.
So, I was reading a story on global warming and I found a nice link to a USGS page about volcanic gases.
My Benz is once again in commission. I replaced the alternator, which was kind of a suck-ass job, but honestly not all that bad. You just have to yank off the air filter system including the tube going to the turbocharger and you can get at it all from the top. You can also get there from the bottom, but I was doing the work on dirt and couldn't get there that way (can't put a jack stand on dirt, can't really block tires safely either.)
I was driving to work this morning and on the big uphill between Lower Lake and Kelseyville, I was jammin' up the hill behind an Eclipse when a pinecone jumped down the hill to my left and out in front of my car.
I spend a lot of time on Slashdot and today there was a story entitled HOWTO, Cook an Egg With Your Cell Phone. It linked to an article - hopefully a humorous one - claiming you can cook an egg with a cellular phone in two minutes. Those who use a cellular phone and haven't yet cooked their head after hours and hours of talking on it are surely wondering how this can be.
Putting it all together
We've all seen the grandiose attempts at adding continuity to network gaming. Probably the best deal going right now is the SquadWar stuff for Descent:Freespace 2. There's also various systems that keep track of statistics for various first person shooters. Naturally, we're all familiar with UO (remember when that just used to be a band?) and Evercrack. But [I feel] all of these games fall short of the mark in one way or another.
It's about time someone really used the network for something.
We all have our favorite kind of game. Mine just happens to be space combat sims. This doesn't mean I own them all... Just the best ones. For my own personal reasons, I consider the best sims to be Tie Fighter, and Freespace 1 and 2. The Freespace games are not really innovators exactly, though they do bring better-than-usual graphics into the equation, and of course the kilometer long capital ships are just badass. The ship in the original Descent:Freespace with the hole in it that you can fly through is just wonderful.
(Subtitle: What's wrong with navigating space sims today?)
At this point, it's hard to imagine someone not having played a space sim at some point. Whether it's the pithy original Wing Commander, or the venerable X-Wing and Tie Fighter games, or the more modern Descent:Freespace titles, we've all at least seen them, and most of us have done our best to break a joystick or two (I killed one playing Freespace... A Wingman Warrior, too!) dodging enemies.
You may have noticed that just about every game today is done in three dimensions. Even card games have cute little shadow effects. These days, form is seen as just as important as function everywhere; Take a look at a Ram truck sometime.