The first link comes from Soma. Now before you click on the link a little context is in order. Soma advertise itself as the only English language Kurdish newspaper around. We shall have to take there word for it as we don’t really feel like fact checking that fact. According to the blogger over at Live a Life Worthy…..
On the back page of every paper, these two men have a chat about…well, everything. Their conversation rambles and jumps and rabbit-trails, never to return.
But we think that anyone who has ever followed a conversation in the Ethereal Land will have no trouble following the logic of conversation on the back page of Soma.
Our second link comes from Doctor Bob. Let us just say that some people should not self medicate.
Our third link does not really need to be read in its entirety. We are just brining it up because it articulates a philosophy that we share. Namely….
See, I can be reasonable. All I ask is that the bureaucrats paid to harass me and violate my privacy do it with a bit of irony, and I’m willing to play ball. Irony about the crappitude of the situation gets me in a good mood. Giving orders and pulling the loyal citizen BS gets me in a bad mood.
It is poor form to post a second video from the same source and in the same style so close together. But I think both this and the Art video are hilarious.
Berlin Zoo had put the carp into his moat to help keep the water clean by eating algae. But the 140-kilo (309-pound) bear shocked onlookers by catching the chubby fish and playing with his live prey until they stopped flapping. Then he gobbled them up.
“He ate them all in just a day and a half,” the zoo’s bear expert Heiner Klös told SPIEGEL ONLINE. “Whatever people may say, he’s a good hunter, and it’s all part of being a polar bear. This shows he’s totally fit. We won’t be placing any more fish in his moat, though.”
Germany’s top-selling daily Bild reported that onlookers were disgusted by the spectacle. The newspaper ran the headline “Knut Embroiled in Carp Scandal” and quoted animal welfare campaigners as criticizing the zoo for letting Knut eat live vertebrates in breach of German animal protection regulations.
If you have never heard of the Blog called “Things that White People Like” your cultural awareness is sadly lacking. In just a few short months the blog has become an overnight sensation.
Its title is misleading. It is all about what yuppies like, not white people in general. But we can forgive them this false advertising because its title is deliberately designed to poke fun at the yuppies reluctance to talk about race. (It works; the comment section always has a bunch of people complaining what a racist he is)
In support of its broader goal of telling it like it is, we thought we would make his post on white people and shorts rant of the week.
I found this post on the damage a medical transcriber did to her keyboard after years of use to be interesting. I am surprised that the keyboard lasted long enough to take this kind of damage. In fact, if it were not for a lot of comments that talked of similar damage, I would have thought that this post was a hoax.
This is an incredibly successful walker robot. I think it is still being controlled remotely, but its level of mobility is still astonishingly life-like.
I knew that snakes climbed trees in warmer climates. But I never thought I would see a snake climb up into a pine tree. And I never thought that a snake would do that just to get away from a rabbit.
For those who know Galactic Civilization II and Homeworld, this very corny clip will make you sit up and take notice.
For those that don’t know, Homeworld had one of the few innovative ideas ever to come out in the world of strategy gaming, but its execution was terrible. Galactic Civilization was great execution of the tired old 4x model with a much needed focus on the A.I.
Now the makers of Galactic Civilization have taken the idea behind Homeworld and tried to do it properly. By all accounts, they have succeed.
This from Gamespy…..
The difference between SoaSE and other “4X” titles is that all of a player’s decisions are carried out in the manner of a real-time strategy title. Click on the capital ship factory and it takes approximately 30 seconds for the ship to be produced. Put together a fleet of a dozen or so ships and send them on a three-jump trip to an enemy world and it’ll take them eight or so minutes to get there. Once in combat, battle is decided by spaceship strengths and weaknesses, proper positioning and the use of player-controlled special abilities in the manner of a classic RTS — all of it rendered in stunning graphical splendor.
The final result of this unlikely blending of styles is an elegant and stately ballet in which players use the mouse wheel to zoom from an overarching view of their empire down to the local level where they can tweak the placement of ship factories, defensive emplacements or direct individual spaceships in battle. Despite being in real time, the game’s pace is fairly sedate. This allows players plenty of leisure to concentrate on things like developing planetary infrastructure, conducting diplomatic relations with other players in multiplayer games, buying and selling resources on the black market and tweaking their trade networks to maximize revenue. As a “4X” title, Sins of a Solar Empire is filled with the sorts of global “guns or butter?” decision-making that make these titles so much fun.
When battles do occur, players have an impressive amount of control over the makeup, disposition and tactics of their space navies. Each race has a wide variety of purpose-built spacecraft ranging from six different types of mothership down to tiny missile launchers, fighter carriers, gunships, support vessels and much more. The game’s deep but easy-to-understand research tree has both a “civilian” and “military” wing that lets players further tweak both their imperial and close-combat strategies to their liking. These different varieties of spacecraft aren’t just for show, either. Players can and must put together purpose-designed task forces using a variety of spaceship classes in order to be competitive. They can even take direct control over their ships, though the excellent unit AI is perfectly capable of fighting a decent battle. The result is that the game requires as much strategizing at the unit level as running the whole empire does.
Most other reviews seem to say similar things. As the Wikipedia article on the game states….
Since its launch, Sins of a Solar Empire has received almost universally positive reviews. It was named Game Informer’s PC Game of the Month, and was awarded a 9/10 review.[7] The US edition of PC Gamer awarded the game a 91%, as well as an Editor’s Choice award, whilst the UK edition awarded it 84%.[8] GameSpot awarded the game a 9/10, as well as an Editor’s Choice award.[9] GameSpy awarded the game a 4.5/5, as well as an Editor’s Choice award.[10] IGN awarded the game an 8.9/10, as well as an Editor’s Choice award.[11] Maximum PC rated the game a 9/10, and bestowed upon it their KickAss award. In addition to these accolades, Sins of a Solar Empire has received Editor’s Choice awards from FiringSquad[12], Gamer 2.0[13], GameShark[14], GameTap[15], and Pelit. As of March 2008, Sins of a Solar Empire has a recorded aggregate score of 89% on Metacritic (based on 23 reviews).[16]
Common praise for the game has been directed towards the game’s clever blend of RTS and 4X gameplay (hence the RT4X moniker), the seamless zoom function, and the user-friendly Empire Tree and UI. That the game was designed to play efficiently on older as well as newer PCs has garnered considerable praise. Criticism has been focused on the lack of a single-player campaign, and the potentially lengthy game-play times.[17
