Facebook stealing away Google employees

Facebook as stolen 116 Google employees away in recent months.  Google is now making outrageous offers to keep employees (mid-level developer example:  $175,000/year plus $500,000 to stay).  The employees are still going to Facebook despite the offers.

The unstated fact is Facebook is soon to IPO and even a 0.01% stake is assumed to be worth $100 million.

All I got to do is being willing to move.... too bad I'm not willing for I live in the perfect place. Its funny because I like to think that there is a $ number out there to get me to do anything...which there might be except to get me to move.

Abe Lincoln: Vampire Hunter

This is a shockingly good book.  Shocking because I wasn't expecting to actually make it through the book.  But I not only made it, I loved it.

Lets start off by saying I'm not a part of the vampire fan club.  Mostly this is from weariness for a story rehashed so frequently these days.  Then we have the other half of this book, Abe Lincoln... oh how dull could this be?    So, in general, I don't seek out vampire stories or books on historical figures but I happen to read this one because it seemed so off the wall different.

The whole vampire side of this book wasn't what was so cool about it.  Though if you have found you enjoy vampire novels this one will not disappoint(very violent).  The coolest part of this book was how cleverly history was meshed into the fabric of this book.  It was so masterfully done I kept finding myself slipping into believing vampires were real and Abe Lincoln spent his life fighting them!

I think if your an actual Lincoln history buff you would gain an even higher level of appreciation then I saw because I do believe that if I spent time researching some little details they would all check out.

Anyway, give it a read.

Time-traveler ad story

That ad appeared in the back of a 1997 magazine just as a filler for ad space they didn't sell.  Well, 13 years later it still A Thing.  Title link to the story, good read.

But many letters came from people who wanted me to correct a past tragedy. Dozens, in prison, asked me to go back in time and talk them out of committing the crime that put them away. Others (and not a few) were from people who begged me to go back and save a loved one from a tragic death. Those letters were so heartbreaking I almost couldn't read them and I felt a certain amount of shame for not anticipating the false hope I placed in so many hearts.

Drinkers live longer

While I tend to ignore "study of the week", I choose to value this study:

The sample of those who were studied included individuals between ages 55 and 65 who had had any kind of outpatient care in the previous three years. The 1,824 participants were followed for 20 years. One drawback of the sample: a disproportionate number, 63%, were men. Just over 69% of the abstainers died during the 20 years, 60% of the heavy drinkers died and only 41% of moderate drinkers die

First iPad reboot

For months I've used my iPad nearly every day and I've never once turned it off.   Today I couldn't get it to make a blue tooth connection so I turned it off and back on.  Which fixed the issue.  Everything else was working as good as the day I took out of the box.

Wish I could say the same about my Window's boxes....  I might be slowly converting to the faith.  Maybe I need an intervention?

AMD ditches ATI brand name

So long good bye to ATI branded video cards.  All will now be AMD branded or just simply say "Radeon" or "FirePro".

Part of this move is to prep the market for CPU-GPU all in one products (Fusion) coming down the pipe.

Little bonus ATI news:  AMD now has a $30 display port to DVI adapter to make it considerably cheaper to do Eyefinity multi-displays.

Klingon Opera comes to Earth

Buy your plane ticket now: Zeebelt Theater in The Hague, Netherlands, from Sept. 9 through 12

Hear such classics as Kahless's Assault on Stovokor, Storm Over Kronos or Hot Gagh .... wow, talk about useless information that fills me!  

While I might have made up the song names....the Opera is for real.

Xbox Live price to increase

I guess the voice chat update needs paid for because yearly memberships are about to go by $10.


I have a feeling I'm going to own 3 Xboxs by years end....starting to add up.  I'm going to have to go pray at the Synagogue after making that purchase....


You can lock in the savings by buying more subscription time in advance.

Heroes of Might and Magic Kingdoms now live

Its free...if you like the browser game MMOish web formula then this is the game for you.  Be ready for building a building to take you 5 hours (real hours) and such.  That's how these games work as your meant to come back at various points in the day to check on things.

Could be cool but for some reason I just can't bring myself to try it.

Ghost hunter killed at ghost train

Ghost Train in North Carolina is off the list....  though I can't imagine anyone talking me into standing on a long (300-foot span) toss-myself-to-my-death trestle.  Apparently it doesn't work right if your standing on the ground?

I have visions of the movie Stand By Me but that only [dramatically] works out in the movies.

Xbox Live chat quality to be improved

About freak'n time!  While no date is listed, the update is planned to take the sound quality from "two tin cans" to "mid-80's oversea calling".

Target gets in on the used game action

Wal-Mart and now Target all have big plans to roll out in-store used games.  GameStop look out!

Impairing the morals of a child

That was the arresting charge for the guy that paid a $1 to an 8 year old to bust out a bunch of racial slurs for a YouTube video named "Swearing Kid.".  

I'm not sure if I'm more troubled by the law or by the guy that got the kid to do this.  I think there is a law for any given situation.....again, not defending this idiot at all, he certainly needs his ass beat....


Do I impair the morals of my child when I let them watch something with mild violence or other mildly scandalous story line?  I'm just trying to say that that law could be applied to nearly anything that involves a minor.

25% of viruses designed to spread through USB drives

So keep that in mind next time you drop your USB anchor into a dirty harbor!

And just to shore up your paranoia..... IBM Cybersecurity is telling us that computer virus activity is up 36% this year.  Who knows where IBM gets these things but I will say that activity is noticeably on the UP.

Star Gate Worlds MMO fallout continues...on and on and on...

Destined at birth to fail (at least that was always my opinion), the Star Gate Worlds game folks continue to make the news:  This time with legal battles as the primary investor is pissed that they sold all of the art assets off for $100,000.  Said investor is suing for the $10,000,000 they feel the art was worth.  Apparently they CAN milk a turnip!

What amazes me mostly is how slow this death has been.  These guys should have been a bad memory a long time ago.

The Bible Online MMO otw

I can already see the first quest: Stone 3 homosexuals and return for your reward of Wine (unfermented of course)....

Dice art

I wish I had this kind of time....

1987 Star Trek TNG casting memo

Here's a nice piece of history.... Wesley Snipes for "Geordi"?  lol

Speaking of Geordi, LaVar Burton is still truck'n along as the 2010 Indie Cade host for Indie games.

"Lost" Official auction results

Highlights include:
• DHARMA Van: $47,500
• Dial mechanism & mirror array from the Lighthouse: $27,500
• Island time-shifting frozen wheel: $22,500
• DHARMA Jeep: $20,000
• Hurley’s Camaro: $20,000
• Daniel Faraday’s journal w/extensive handwritten notes: $20,000
• Swan Station Computer: $16,000
• “Pilot” script signed by J.J. Abrams & Damon Lindelof $15,000
• Season Six production artwork: $15,000
• Season One production artwork: $14,000
• Desmond’s fail-safe key with “Joe Inman” dog tag; $11,000
• Jack’s death costume from the series finale, “The End”: $9,000
• Large section of Oceanic Flight 815 wreckage: $9,000
• Charlie’s “DS” ring: $9,000
• Locke’s Compass: $8,000
• Baby Aaron’s crib: $8,000
• Fragment of Jacob’s tapestry: $6,500
• Hurley’s winning Mega Lotto Jackpot ticket: $5,500
• Jack’s Pilot episode costume” $3,000
• Sawyer’s paperback copy of “Watership Down”: $2,750
• Sawyer’s improvised reading glasses from Season Three: $2,250
• Set chair for Matthew Fox “Jack”: $1,200

Steam saved Introversion

Through a revamp of DEFCON to support achievements and convincing Valve to run a promo they went from looking for jobs to back in business with a year of operating capital in the bank.  Good read.

Torchlight 3 predicted before Diablo 3

If Runic's CEO were a betting man, he'd bet that Torchlight 2 (yet unreleased) and Torchlight 3 (yet unannounced) will be out before Diablo 3.  I think he's made a safe bet.

Elemental MP info update

WTF, they released with out MP even turned on?!!?!?  LOL  I take this as proof positive of a cash-crunch-gotta-ship situation.  Maybe if you had some DRM (though I'd personally call activation a DRM, apparently you don't) you might earn enough money to avoid this situation.

On the plus side....his lordship heard the pleas of the commonfolk and will turn back on tactical battles sometime in the future.  I guess this isn't the first time I've had to wait for a shipped product to become playable.

Now, a couple words on multiplayer.  The servers are up but we are not going to enable multiplayer until next week. Part of this is, to be honest, team exhaustion. The early release meant a lot of people who were expecting this weekend off to rest from the grueling last few weeks had to come in.  So we’re going to let them get a couple of days off later this week and open up the MP next week.

One piece of good news on MP. Originally we had planned to eliminate tactical battles from MP entirely because of balance. Some people correctly guessed the misguided (in hindsight) reason for this: We were approaching MP from a purely competitive point of view.  Based on the persuasive arguments made by our players, we have decided that tactical battles will be made available in MP – as an option – at a later date as a free update.

Neverwinter gets some details

4th edition DnD being classified as an OMG....not Oh My God but Online Multiplayer Game (meaning online play required but not an MMO).  I'm smelling Guild Wars here....

Glad Cryptic realized this:

...we knew that Neverwinter had to be the highest possible quality, and we had to improve, dramatically, everything that we did. The best way to do that was to sort of change the style of gameplay so that the focus wasn't on hundreds of hours of mediocre (some would say even worse than mediocre) content, but instead create a rich story-driven multiplayer game.

AppStore sales numbers

I so need to build something for Apples AppStore ASAP.  The title link explores the rewards of a successful app.  Especially if you happen to win the lottery and get app of the week (which was worth $18,000 that week).

80's Atari Commercial

Look at how much fun you could be having right now if you owned an Atari 2600!

Last Steam Hardware/Software survey results are in

Always worth looking at:

59% Nvidia cards
56% DX10 supported
Quad core processors up 15%
Multi-monitor setups 9%
72% Intel processors vs 27% AMD  -- whats stunning about this stat is this is a game platform, not a business platform.  I'd have thought AMD would be a lot higher.

Next BioShock: Multiplayer unlikely

Kenny L says:

"I will say that we experiment with things, but for us we are never interested in making a multiplayer mode you could just play in some other game. Because, A) that's not creatively interesting and B), financially, you're wasting your time. They're going to go play Halo. They're going to go play Call of Duty

So I take that as a no, unless someone makes them do it.  Might not be so shell shocked if you wouldn't have made that stinker MP mode in BioShock 2....just say'n.


Put together a quality co-op multiplayer feature, that works just like single player, an you will have a winner.  Really not that hard!  You know you can do and you know you want to it.  So make it happen.  As it stands right now, I have zero interest in this title - its just same shit different game (and I loved Bio 1).

Neverwinter

Well this is blog worthy.... 2011 release D&D 5 player co-op RPG penned by RA Salvatore.  Atari is backing the project so lord knows what we're going to get in the end.  But one can only hope...

Elemental War of Magic MP blunder

I should have known they'd fuck this up somehow:  Tactical battles got removed from multiplayer with a insulting excuse of unfunness.   Either that's the excuse for "ran out of cash had to dump this game on the market" or some complete morons built this game, people that apparently never played a 4x game before.  In which case they had no business building this one.  Clearly people whom never played any Heroes of Might and Magic or Sword of the Stars (just to name a few).

I guess we should be thankful these jokers didn't get the rights to the Master of Magic name so they couldn't tarnish it with this pile of crap.

So what's the answer here:  Clueless or broke or both?

Here's Stardock's CEO posting below.  While I appreciate the honesty but if you honestly knew it was a problem then you should have honestly fixed it before shoving it out the door.  Oh and know the market your selling to better might not have been a bad idea either:

I'm still going to buy your game in the hopes it good despite this problem but I may curse your name till the end of time....

I speak to you now as a gamer. A person giving his own personal opinion of Elemental's multiplayer experience.

I don't find Elemental's multiplayer in 1.0 to be fun in general. Elemental was designed as a single player game that happens to have MP. And this has come through in the final version. 

There is one exception: Playing 2 people as part of a team vs. AI players is fairly fun. But playing against random players is just an exercise in frustration. This is a game that requires a significant amount of time investment and too many random games will end in dissatisfaction in my opinion.

I do think the game has potential with a group of friends playing together. But I don't think it's there  yet. I think it'll take more time and more thought to do this.  

Here is what Stardock will need to do, and plans to do, in order to make MP more enjoyable:

#1 Local Servers.

On day 0, all MP games will get their data from dedicated servers that Stardock has put in place around the world. We are doing this to eliminate connectivity issues. Connectivity marred the launch of Demigod and it is my opinion that if we had had dedicated servers in the first place, Demigod would have had a much better experience. (as opposed to having a particular individual host a game).

However, in the mid-term to long-term, Stardock WILL be providing custom servers so that people can mod up their own games and put them on their own networks to host games.  The priority this is given will depend on the demand of course but regardless, it is something I will be insisting be done because I really think that the best long term success path for Elemental is in letting users take Elemental and do cool and interesting things to it.

#2 More Multiplayer Game Options.

I would like to see the tactical battles take on a life of their own.  The day 0 multiplayer does not have tactical battles in them. We took them out. Yes, in an ideal world we could have made this an option, but anyone who has been on a forum for any amount of time knows that you'd still have people flaming us who found tactical battles boring because while the other guy was fighting some drawn out battle, they were stuck watching it.

I don't have any ready ideas on how to make this better except to say that I would like to see tactical battles made into a seperate game mode where players pick their units before the game and then go up against other players with those units.

This is an idea we'll have to think about more and see when or if it can be implemented at a reasonable cost.

#3 LOTS more game play styles

I don't really have any good ideas on this as I don't generally play TBS games in multiplayer (even with friends). We play a lot of Settlers of Katan here and Twilight Imperium as board games but I think we will have to look at more game modes (and these can be made available in SP as well) to help make MP more fun.

My advice would be this: If you are buying Elemental primarily for MP, don't. It has it. It works. But IMO, it's not worth $50 to play the game MP primarily.  If you like MP in ADDITION to having a fantastic single player game (and make no mistake, Elemental, as a single player game, is awesome in its release form) then absolutely, get it.

So there's my 2 cents.

Razer BlackWidow Mechanical Keyboard

I can hear the clack-clack of a real keyboard at work already!


Mechanical keyboard and 1000Hz polling for a 1ms response time.  $80.  Awesome?  Available Sept 21, 2010.  Also available in an $130 ultimate edition with a mic port and 5 levels of back lighting.


Bonus:  Logitech K800 keyboard available soon for $100 features ambient light and motion sensors.