News You Can Bruise for 2002 October 13

Rawr!

Where is the baby alligator, you ask? It's right here!

Just released NewsBruiser 1.6.0, "Sheep May Safely Graze". It's an overlapping mix of features implemented for the benefit of others (specifically, Mark and Mike), features implemented as part of checklist mania, and features implemented so that I can resurrect Segfault as a NewsBruiser site. There's not much new in there for 1.5.0 users, but pre-1.5.0 users should upgrade.

Have you seen a sunfish? Fill out the Sunfish Sighting Report Form!

1. At one point you enter a creaky old tower... and the only place you visit is the cellar! It's got a five-story cellar even though the tower itself is only about 20 feet tall in game terms!
2. Another problem of scale: in act II there's a big fancy palace which at first you can't enter. You finally get to enter it and all you see is this big stairway overlaid with the game text: "To the Harem level 1". This guy's palace consists entirely of his harem!
3. There is a unique monster named Creeping Feature.

Dave sent me a CD containing almost all of the Da Warren files (yay!). I can't put them up at the moment, though, because of the lack of disk space on the Crummy-hosting machine. Will keep informed.

Baudolino comes out tomorrow. Sumana acquired a review copy for me a while back (thank you!), but I'm not even halfway through yet (sorry, people who get to read the review copy after I'm done with it!). It's quite good; one might describe it as the tragedy[0] of which Foucault's Pendulum is a retelling as farce.

[0] I don't know yet whether or not Baudolino is actually a tragedy; what I meant by that is that the characters in Baudolino take their cockamamie medieval idees fixes more seriously than do the characters in Foucault's Pendulum.