News You Can Bruise for 2002 January 29

Tue Jan 29 2002 13:01: Woohoo! We're back in style. As always, check out the backup site for stuff soon to be reposted here.

Tue Jan 29 2002 14:38:

In The Ballad of Michigan J. I have some fun naming space aliens (Zcat and Grep) after Unix utilities. It turns out I'm not the only one to do this sort of thing; witness The Saga of Argc and Argv.

Tue Jan 29 2002 14:39:

One thing that happened to me in Texas was that my uncle Robert showed me Diablo II. Whee! It's quite fun, and I got up to level 11 without much trouble (then I went back to San Francisco; that's not where trouble abruptly started). I went away thinking there was a Linux version of Diablo II and I could continue to play it, but I couldn't find any evidence of such a beast. Oh well. I'll just have to do productive things with my time.

Now, a famous article compares Diablo II to Nethack ("But what about the Amulet of Yendor?"). On the other hand, Diablo II's mechanical similarities to Angband have so far passed largely unnoticed. Until now!

• In Diablo II you have a base camp exactly like Angband's town (complete with black market and "your house"). The only differences: there are fewer shops (because Diablo II has no food, digging equipment, or books of magic) and no hostile monsters in the base camp.
• The inventory system is the same annoying slot-based thing as Angband's, though its graphical object-size nature makes it both more restrictive (though actually less annoying). You can only stack scrolls, but you have a few extra slots reserved for potions which makes it more bearable.
• The combination of the above two items means that in both games you spend most of your time gating to a dangerous place, killing a bunch of monsters until you've got all the good items you can carry, then gating back to town and selling your good items. Only in very rare circumstances and only for short periods of time does this ever happen in Nethack.
• Diablo II's randomly generated magic items are like nothing in Nethack but similar to the randomly generated artifacts in Angband.
• The quest and wilderness system is not like Angband proper, but Zangband has many of the same features. However, I won't push the similarities any further.

In one of the bizarre twists that marks my life, Robert used to play the Palm game iRogue a lot. The author of iRogue, Bridget Spitznagel, also ported robotfindskitten to the Palm.

Tue Jan 29 2002 14:39: This kid is perilously cute.

Tue Jan 29 2002 14:40: I Wanted My Banner Ad To Look Like A Web Form But It Never Occured To Me To Actually Create The HTML Mockup I Want And Take A Screenshot Of It So I Ended Up Doing A Half-Assed Job Of It In Visual Basic: First In A Series.

Tue Jan 29 2002 15:57: One of the projects I engaged in over the weekend was to properly arrange and name the tracks of My Dinner with Andre Nguyen and What do you call those Pork Things?, the two crup albums hosted on this site here (cf.). Previously available only as unnamed blobs of unordered tracks, now shiny and recognizable. I highly recommend (just off the top of my head) Dodge Reliant, Robotfindskitten (completely unassociated with robotfindskitten), Cap'n Ron, and Fiestaware.

Note that a couple tracks from Andre Nguyen, including the fabulous "6660 Minutes", are missing.

Tue Jan 29 2002 17:23: Ambiguous Headline Watch: Danger pets warning

AHW is the new, much better title for the previous Crummy feature Multiple Meaning Headline Watch, which is itself a side project of Funny Headline Watch (more), a wholly owned subsidiary of Crummy Headline WatchCo (NYSE: HEAD), a figment of my fevered, headline-obsessed imagination.

Tue Jan 29 2002 20:03: So, what else did I do in Texas, you ask? Well, in San Antonio I played RISK with my cousins and my uncle Robert. I did this the last time I was in San Antonio, with much the same people, though I did better this time (I died last, fighting to the bitter end with my valiant Australasian troops). It was pretty cool the way we did it; among the many games on Robert's laptop is a RISK game, so we ran it, hooked up his laptop to the huge TV in my aunt's living room, and took turns at the mouse. This was a lot of fun because it had the feel of a real situation room like you see in movies (except for the big dice on the screen). The game also moved a lot faster than it would have on the board. I can't say I think much of the game interface, though.