News You Can Bruise for 2003 January 11

A. Holloway read the entire NYCB ouvre for 2002, and decided that his favorite entry was the very first one of the year, the one about Carmel. Runners-up: Smells Like Teen Circuit, The Two Saturns (aka "How Leonard Thinks"), The Weblog Foundation series, and the one where it gets weird.

My mother's favorite is the putative description of Kiss Me Kant.

That's it (unless you have an email on this subject that you've been holding off sending).

A longer game roundup coming soon. Here are three interesting non-game programs I saw on Freshmeat:

• Bright Noise, a counter-Tempest program for the terminal. Has the side effect of making your terminal look like a pointless special effect out of a movie, which raises the intruiging conjecture that many of those pointless special effects are actually counter-Tempest measures (think about it; can you ever make anything out on those screens?).
• soundmosaic is the aural equivalent of a photomosaic program. It doesn't work as well with sound, because sound has a time dimension, but it's a cool idea.
• Diet Monger Ass Kicker is a nice-looking interface to the USDA nutrition database. I actually think the nutrition database is the star of this entry, and that DMAK is only along for the ride because of its cool name. DMAK is written in a programming language called Euphoria, which I'd never heard of before.

Some of these games I've actually played, others I've just looked at the screenshots. Just like real game reviewers, except I'm honest.

• Polyroids is a cross-platform port of an old Asteroids-ish SGI game. In this game, you must prevent the sentient shapes of Flatland from taking over the universe. Space Command has equipped you with a ray which will reduce the many-sided Flatlanders to successively lower castes until they die of shame. Unfortunately, there's a bug (?) which makes it easy to cheat, even inadvertently. It's still a difficult game, although I find all Asteroids-ish games difficult because I never move around the screen.
• Senken is a Simcity-style game. It's too micromanage-y for me, but others might like it.
• Kamikaze is a nice-looking KDE Bomberman clone.
• The Perl BlackJack Engine does what I was going to do, only in Perl.
• Gnome Attacks, a game worthy of the "Carnage" brand. In fact, it's very similar to City Destroy Carnage except that the cities can't fight back.
• I should mention PoopmUp, "An Urban Flight Simulator", and leave it at that.
• AirStrike is a clone of some Amiga dogfight game or other. I think all such games should have a Snoopy vs. the Red Baron mode, but this one doesn't (in fact, I don't think any of them do, unless there's a special licensed game which only has that mode).

I wrote a rough draft of an abstract for a presentation for the Python conference. The topic is the advantages of CGI-based configuration systems, and the implementation of same. I sent the abstract to Jason, who's published papers galore. Anyone else want to see it?