The Avernum world is full of wonderful and zany things, from a hive of cheerful spiders all called Spider, to an entrepreneurial barkeep looking to open a hot springs spa. There are epic battles against the usual high fantasy cultists and drakes and the like, but there’s also a foreman looking for some cheap wine for his workers. It’s worth noting that Avermun women are soldiers (Wearing practical armor, even!), armorsmiths and mayors.
When I was younger, I really wanted to be an astronaut. I’m still fascinated by space travel, and I get excited when I read about the possibility of a Mars colony. I hope it’ll require not just the scientists and survivalists but the essential skills of an aging games blogger as well. I have a great love for NASA, and am following the blog of astronaut Chris Hadfield from the ISS.
Station’s power relies on ammonia coolant. A few hours ago, we determined that the ammonia was leaking out of the Station and into space. At the analyzed rate, one of the Station’s cooling loops could shut down within 48 hours.
It is a serious situation, but between crew and experts on the ground, it appears to have been stabilized. Tomorrow we find out for certain.
(Source: nasa.gov)
It’s probably good that I never became an astronaut, because I would be running around shrieking Coolant leak! Coolant leak! right now.
New piece about “RPG” Spirited Soul over at Hardcore Droid.
Everything one can say about Snailteeth’s new tower defence/RPG Spirited Soul is colored by the game’s poor localization. The translated game text is usually a bit awkward, lacking punctuation and confusing your and you’re, but some sections are as incomprehensible as only Google Translate can be. The game story seems to be about a peaceful land suffering from the encroaching, uh, something bad, not entirely sure what. You begin in the only village unaffected by the bad thing — maybe it’s a monster plague? I’m not really sure, thanks to the poorly localized game text — and are tasked with stopping the yucky thing, and reclaiming the once beautiful land.
Via Spirited Soul Review: RPG Meets Tower Defense Meets Yawn | Hardcore Droid
Obligatory press pass photo!
In The Lost Husband, Katherine Pannill Center somehow combines a list of fairly generic chick lit tropes into an original and compulsively readable story.
Sure, the protagonist, Libby, is a young widow bringing her adorable children to find peace and the simple life on the family farm, but it doesn’t lead to worn-out epiphanies about finding the value of Real Life (TM) after giving up Starbucks and smartphones.
The story opens when Libby’s Aunt Jean, a goat farmer and the small town’s psychiatrist, invites Libby and her two children to escape living with Libby’s self-absorbed mother and help her on the family farm. Which is, incidentally, managed by a handsome, rugged loner who is wonderful with children and likes to sing to the goats. Also Aunt Jean likes to read zombie thrillers and make out with her octogenarian boyfriend. His granddaughter, Sunshine, is a post-rehab Hollywood actress who becomes Libby’s friend by offering the contact Libby’s dead husband. Also everyone wears a lot of overalls.
On the family farm, Libby deals with a nuanced grief over her husband, and resettling her children as a single mother. She also uncovers a family secret, which is, fortunately for us readers, not the obvious, and eventually confronts the rocky relationship has has with her mother, as well. Dramatic moments and drastic twists are all very believable because the characters are so human and complex, both delightfully quirky and believably flawed. While there is the required romance between Libby and the Handsome Rugged Texan, it’s a lot more than boy-meets-girl. Throughout the novel, all the characters grow and change and are generally awesome.
You could shelve The Lost Husband with chick lit, but it’s so much more than an airport novel.
When I was in Brooklyn, and I asked Harold to come over and help me put my new bed together, I assumed he’d be done in a few minutes, and probably make a few modifications and improvements on the design. My first sign that I was not entirely accurate in this assumption was that Harold doesn’t own a toolbox.
Most of the men in my life are do-it-yourself New Englanders, Eagle Scouts, engineers with a penchant for improving things, and so forth. (Eric is all of these!) I was kind of shocked that Harold doesn’t have a tool box. If you have guys in your life like Eric, or Scep, or Stick, or my dad, or basically every man I know, you don’t really do too much with tools. I mean, I’ve used a screwdriver when upgrading parts of my desktop, but most men I know will turn an Ikea box into a couch in seconds. Usually with a couple design improvements. (Message to the reader: Sometimes when I am being positive, readers assume I am being sarcastic. I actually mean real improvements like the reading-and-glasses tray Eric built for my loft bed in college. I am not using “design improvements” for things that fall apart, because everyone is so freaking good at this that nothing falls apart.)
Since we’ve been in Chapel Hill, I thought I’d give some of this furniture assembly a try. After about ten minutes, I had a working lamp, and that was pretty cool. It’s grown from assembling package furniture to doing a couple repairs, to… somehow ending up with a dresser in pieces on the floor. Harold’s mom brought it over, she runs a secondhand shop, and comes across cool pieces all the time. I was only going to going to take the drawers out to spray the runners with WD-40, but then I thought I might as well stain the worn parts, because I already had some wood stain from doing the dining chairs, and then if I’m going to go through all that, I should varnish it, right? Right?
I thought he was being nice to me, but as it turns out, Eric has been hogging all the fun.
I’m working on a review for Hardcore Droid of Avernum: Escape From the Pit
I spent the last few days at TechCrunch Disrupt, checking out amazing cyberpunk tech to improve every possible aspect of our lives, like BitPonics, to automatic hydroponic gardening, InBetweenJobs, to gameify job hunting, and Magisto, an artificial intelligence for automatically editing videos.
Also, here is a picture of the sign for TechCrunch Disrupt registration. This door is kept locked. Attendees are actually supposed to go in a different door, where there was no sign, a system that confused enough people that it was worthwhile to post a staff person to point at the correct door, but not worthwhile to move the sign.
Human beings are amazing contradictions.
My Geek Insider colleague, Mohseen Lala, covers the fantastic story about Greenheart Games’ Game Dev Tycoon‘s anti-piracy message in the pirated version of the game. Game Dev Tycoon allows players to run a virtual game studio, hiring devs and trying to make fun, profitable games. There’s a slight different between the pirated and legit version of the game:
The pirated version, uploaded by the title’s developers, will eventually feature decreasing profitability due to rampant piracy. Which eventually means, that a player’s virtual career as a game developer will come to an end, one way or another.
The hilarious part is, a lot of people who did pirate the game simply are not getting the message, and have flooded Greenheart Games’ forum (the home site is currently down, whether due a server overload, angry pirates or some other reason, it’s unclear) with complaints about decreasing games sales and possible DRM measures to curb piracy.
So good.
