Tag Archives: Games

Scatterbrain

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16

GeForce GPU

I haven’t been able to update the blog as much as I’d like over the last few weeks, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t been thinking about things to write about.  Instead of letting all of my random thoughts go to waste, I thought I’d present them here as a collection.  If you’re just looking for a few moments of entertainment, you like reading the musings of the slightly insane, or you’re looking for something to spark your pent-up rage, the following list is probably for you!

Never Too Zune

Each time I plug my iPod (5th generation) into my computer and it freezes up, I secretly hope that it won’t come back on, so I have an excuse to buy a Zune HD.  From everything I’ve seen online, these things look pretty nice, and I’d like to try something different than iPod for a while.  I have absolutely no interest in the iPod Touch or an iPhone; the 32gb Touch is $110 more than the 32gb Zune HD, and being tethered to AT&T again just makes me feel sick.

But I digress; the Zune HD looks slick in its own right.  Wireless streaming capabilities and built-in HD radio are great, and I also like the idea of being able to output HD video and, of course, web browsing.  If Microsoft opens up the Zune to user-created applications, it would become an even great alternative to the iPod.  They seem to be making an effort to get developers to consider their other mobile devices, so I don’t think this is too far-fetched.  So far, however, they’ve been pretty tight-lipped about it. Continue reading →

Swashbuckling Under Pressure

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39

Pirates

I’ll admit it – I am a former pirate.

Back in high school and college, I traded MP3′s with friends.  We burned each other copies of games.  I was not a stranger to the occasional DVD copy.  And I ran an illegal OS with illegal software for years.

Much has changed since those days, however.  When I fire up my computer today, I’m pleased to see a completely legal copy of Windows XP appear on the screen.  Every piece of software and every game I run on my machine has been paid for.  And even though a few remnants of my freebooter past resurface now and then in my MP3 collection, the vast majority of the music I listen to was purchased from iTunes, Amazon, or ripped from a CD I bought.

It makes me feel good.  But now, I seem to find myself on the opposite side of the fence from many of my fellow internet users.
Recently, the crew behind The Pirate Bay website was put on trial and subsequently convicted of “assisting in making copyright content available,” with a total of $3,620,000 in fines, and each member of the team facing a one year prison sentence.  It’s hard to say whether or not the verdict was just.  On the one hand, The Pirate Bay is brazenly obvious about the purpose of its site.  The pirate theme has been taken on in name and symbol, it organizes torrent files by media type (music, movies, programs, etc.),  and a cursory search of the site will reveal that the vast majority of the content being traded among users is not legal.  But on the other hand, The Pirate Bay doesn’t explicitly host any of the files in question; they merely house the torrent files users download to find peers in their BitTorrent client.  So it could be argued that it is the site’s users who are in performing the illegal activity, and not the site itself (dubbed the “King Kong defense“).

I happened to read this news on Digg, and many people there disagreed with the verdict.  What disturbed me though, was that the majority of these people didn’t care about the legal intricacies or implications of the matter.  They seemed only to think that piracy should be legal, and that it was in the best interest of everyone to continue pirating movies and music in protest.

Continue reading →

Apologies for the Absence

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10

Time

Has it really been over a week since I’ve posted here?  Well, my apologies for the delay – it’s been a busy time for me over the last week, and I just haven’t been able to find the time to write anything.  I’ve meant to though, so hopefully I’ll be getting back on track with this post.  In the interest of everyone’s time, here’s a quick list of everything I’ve been up to over the last couple of weeks that has contributed, in one way or another, to my lag in blog posts:

  • Met my brother at a bar and watched my dad play music for a few hours; I also saw a woman drop a cake straight onto the floor of a bar
  • Took a trip to San Francisco for my work, got halfway there, and then realized my boss had texted me the night before to tell me the trip was off
  • Worked on a game that you might just see on TV someday (hopefully!)
  • Took another trip to San Francisco for my work, and was nearly late to the meeting because I followed my own directions wrong
  • Worked on a redesign for my blog, scrapped it, then started working on it again
  • Fixed a long-standing server bug in the Reflect system (thanks for the help, Matt!)
  • Worked on a redesign for Reflect Games, scrapped it, then started working on it again
  • Watched the two hour long season premiere for Lost, and the hour long preview before it
  • Finished Fallout 3 (goody-two-shoes style)
  • Went home to see my dad before he had to have a minor procedure done at the hospital (he’s doing fine now, thankfully)
  • Played some quality Team Fortress 2 with Yourself (alltalk servers are basically Skype on steroids, eh?)
  • Finished Prince of Persia (need to play it again for achievements)
  • Got my previous landlord to drop a bogus move-out bill after catching their cheating, and exposing it to them
  • Released a Windows Vista / Windows 7 compatible version of Linked
  • Began learning Visual Basic all over again
  • Watched a few classic episodes of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia with my mom
  • Rediscovered my love for Joe Frank (an awesome radio show)
  • Bought World of Goo on Steam
  • Almost finished reading Lord of the Rings (I’m on page 947 now!)
  • And probably a lot more stuff that I can’t remember right now, due to the ever-growing fatigue I’m feeling from writing such a long list!

Anyway, you probably get the idea – I’ve been a bit busy.  I’ll try to get back on th blog a bit more this week though…  I’ve got a lot of stuff I want to talk about, but which I just haven’t had the time to organize into coherent sentences yet.

Thanks to everyone who continues to read my sparse posts – I appreciate it!

Image courtesy of Time.com