News You Can Bruise for 2002 October 4

Fri Oct 04 2002 10:33 Puerile Puns For Angry Robots: Ed Felten over at Freedom To Tinker has been mocking the CDTPA by highlighting the seemingly endless list of devices it would subject to the phlegmatic rubber stamp of government regulation; recently it was the TinkleToonz Musical Potty. For the occasion, he did not, but should have changed the name of his site to "Freedom To Tinkle".

Fri Oct 04 2002 12:06: A while back Sumana mused on why English associates positive or utopian connotations with 'dream': "like a dream", "living in a dream world", etc. After all, one's dreams are not neccessarily good; usually when you remember a dream it's because the dream was frightening or disturbing. Sumana thinks that dreams have gotten worse over time. I thought I disagreed, but while writing this entry I've decided that I don't. Dreams have gotten worse because real life has gotten better.

Most of the good dreams of earlier times are dreams about not being a starving subsistence farmer. It's very rare, I think, to dream about things above the lowest level of Maslow's hierarchy of needs, because that part of your brain that cares is the part that's asleep (sometimes I try to have such a dream and it's pretty funny). When your physical needs are effectively met, you dream less about your physical needs being met, and more about fear, pursuit, etc.

Fri Oct 04 2002 18:38: Googlewhacking is much, much easier on Google News than on Google proper.

Fri Oct 04 2002 19:32 Game Roundup: I visit Linux Game Tome so you don't have to! This is fun, almost like running a BBS. Here are some Da Warren-style descriptions for some games that caught my eye recently.

• Salp Wars, a multiplayer action game based entirely on in-jokes.
• Hubris, an amusing retelling of Tetris. "[T]he player arranges multiple falling blocks into sacrifical lines to please the gods, while avoiding building too close to the heavens lest his hubris arouse their wrath."
• Pachi el marciano, a nice-looking but slow (slow in the sense that your character doesn't move as fast as I'd like; not in the sense that it's processor-intensive) jumping game. I originally didn't look very closely at the title and thought it was about a mariachi singer named Pachi, but it turns out to be about a Martian named Pachi. The game would be more interesting if Pachi were a mariachi as well as a Martian. [Maybe he is! --Ed. Well, he does a good job of hiding it.]
• cars, the only game I've ever seen where the GIMP is the level editor. Now that's hard-core innovation!
• Linley's Dungeon Crawl, a Roguelike game with an emphasis on character development (skills and religion). I had to mess with the source to get it to compile. I remember seeing this a while back but it was just for DOS; there's a Linux version now and it's pretty nice. [Nb. this game gave me an idea for a silly little Rogue-based (but not Roguelike) game, of which more later; I may try to write it tomorrow.]
• Powermanga, a game which I'm not sure why it's called that since its raytraced sprites look more like Mr. Funercise In The 25th Century than anything that comes to my mind when I think 'manga'. However, the French probably do things differently. It's a nice shooter-with-purchasable-powerups game.
• Crossfire: I keep meaning to try out this game and then not doing it. I'll let you know how it goes.

Fri Oct 04 2002 19:47: Mike's started up yet another Hiptop weblog, but this one is open to posts from anyone with a Hiptop. For one brief moment I saw the trend (if any) this embodied and the direction (if any) it would take us. But those epiphanies only last a moment, and now I have no idea. I just hope it's not the Tar Pit From Hell.