Check out the mmolist , a huge list of games that are free to play online. Technically not all of these are mmo’s, and some are stretching the notion of free, but there are many games worth checking out, including quite a number I’ve linked to from here.

Check out this collection of images of a collection of rocks as rendered by various videogame engines. You pretty much have to be a gamer to get the humor, but if you are it’s worth the click for a chuckle or two.

Check out the very old school Escort Wing, a moddable Mac and PC action arcade game. Top down view, decent graphics, and lots of fan content available for it.

Oblivion is one of the finest videogames to be released in the last couple of years. It’s available on PC and Xbox360, and the gameplay is similar to games like Gothic/Gothic II, Ultima Underworld, and Oblivion’s predecessors in the Elder Scrolls series (Morrowind and so on). It’s an action RPG with first and 3rd person cameras and an (almost) unprecedented amount of freedom in terms of how you approach the game. There’s an epic plot you can choose to follow and solve, but at any point you can choose to ignore it and do your own thing, and there’s a huge variety of things to do - want to become the world’s greatest alchemist? Head of the Fighter, Mage or other more secretive guilds? Own a house? Hunt wild game in the woods and take their skin and meat? Explore the wilderness and investigate strange ruins and caverns? All of these are in there and tons more as well. The game’s graphics are spectacular and the audio, including spoken dialog for every character and every line in the game, is also mostly great, the only exception being some of the voice acting which is occasionally bad but never awful. The scope of the game is absolutely huge - there’s a huge landmass to explore which if you chose to walk across it in realtime would take you a couple of hours, and there are many cities and towns, each with a distinctive look and one that is itself huge.

The game’s flexibility extends to the character system as well. Want to be an armor clad tank bashing your way through your enemies? Fine. Prefer to be a stealthy assassin who prefers to sneak about and backstab, then dash back into the shadows? That’ll work. Perhaps a mage with devastating elemental spells is more your speed? No problem. Or maybe a summoner who counts on his minions to do his dirty work? How about an archer who relies on speed and devastating accuracy with a bow? It’s also in there, and again so is a ton more stuff. It’s really amazing how well the engine manages all this - all these approaches are viable and fun.

The combat engine is mostly great - it’s got a very satisfying feel to it, whether you’re bashing it out hand to hand, plinking away at a distance with spells or a bow, or dashing in and out in stealth mode. The one problem is that you often have allies and companions in your adventures and they invariably get in the way. This was especially bad for the character I solved the game with, a sort of Paladin type in heavy armor with some healing magic, who was constantly getting in fights with his allies after whacking them one time too many by accident in the heat of battle.

The plot’s a mixed bag but generally good - the first epic encounters in Kvatch blew me away, and the ending is absolutely fantastic, but there are some elements of drudgery along the way.

The game balancing system is as far as I know unique to this title and is also something of a mixed bag. Instead of the traditional RPG mechanic of opponents slowly being more difficult the further you make your way through the plot, everything in Oblivion scales dynamically with you. The good thing about this is that you’re generally never overwhelmed and you never have to go through a grind to raise your level in order to take on new challenges. The downside is that there’s not much incentive in terms of gameplay mechanics to explore anything beyond the main plot, and you also never get much of a sense of accomplishment like you would in games with a traditional balancing system (as in - you go to a new area, get your head handed to you, flee, spend some time leveling up, come back and whomp whatever was devastating you before, then cheer). It also leads to some oddities, as in like the common roadside bandits who occasionally accost you are equipped with artifacts of ultimate power by the end of the game, and it’s also tough to gauge the strength of opponents - is that a goblin over there, or an immortal vorpal goblin of ultimate doom? It’s tough to say in Oblivion. All in all it’s a mixed bag in this department. I didn’t hate it, and I could see the benefits, but by the end I had concluded I would have liked it better with a more traditional system.

The game’s also infinitely expandable and in only a month of release there are already literally hundreds of mods, including some that I would consider essential, and some from the game publisher themselves.

So - all in all I would recommend Oblivion to basically anyone who enjoys computer action and RPG games. It’s almost perfect, and the modders are already working away to perfect it. The ending is one of the finest RPG endings ever and well worth some of the drudgery you have to slog through to get there, and by and large it’s a fantastically fun experience. The one caveat would be - it’s a hardware hog in a major way. The engine is very tunable, but at a certain point turning down the options removes some of the magic of the experience. I have a pretty middle of the road gaming rig at this point and some of the ending battles where there were dozens of characters (spoiler alert - and a giant fricking god the size of the sears tower…ok maybe I exaggerate but when you’re playing and you’re desperately trying not to get stomped by him, tell me you don’t end up thinking the same thing!), my machine was slowed to single digit framerates. So - buy this game, unless you don’t think your machine can handle it - if that’s the case, get a new machine

I’m already figuring I will replay the entire game in about a year, when an expansion pak or two is out and the modders have really tuned it to perfection - that’s how good it is. 5 stars from me, and right up there with Gothic II as one of the best games of this generation.

So I’ve learned something. It’s actually cheaper and more convenient to pay someone else to do your laundry than it is to own a washer and dryer. It’s costing me a little over $10 a week to get my laundry done, whereas when I was in NY and doing my own, I was paying at least that much in electricity to power the washer and dryer. And as a huge positive, the laundry service is folding my clothes for me. I don’t think I could even get it done cheaper by going to the laundromat myself, even without factoring in what my time is worth to me.

Here’s my favorite story about my Grandpa Fisher, my Mom’s dad. Through most of my childhood my sister Kirsten and I used to spend at least a week pretty much every summer out in Ohio, and usually longer than that, visiting the extended Hamilton and Fisher clans. I loved going to my Grandfather Fisher’s house. He was a hunter and gun collector and had a pool room upstairs with hundreds of guns mounted on the walls. Most were hunting rifles of one kind or another, but he also had antique weapons and a large handgun collection, and I was allowed to play with them to my heart’s content, while my sister and cousin Heidi were not. Most summers we’d also bring a few out into the back yard and practice shooting. I could almost always bring a pellet rifle down, but occasionally he would also bring down one of the muzzle loaders, or the blunderbuss, or some of the handguns. I even got to fire a .357 once with my Grandfather helping me to keep my arms steady. The girls never got to shoot unless my Aunt Sandy was around and got on my Grandfather’s case, and even then it wasn’t a sure thing. Such was the generational gap - my Grandfather had been raised in a different time and with different rules.

Anyway one summer when I was in my mid-teens I was in the yard shooting at cans with a pellet rifle and thunderstorms began to roll in. This area of Ohio (Akron-Canton , in the Portage lakes region - basically the northeastern quarter of the state) was prone to violent thunderstorms and even hail in the summers. My grandfather asked me to stop shooting and come up on the porch but I resisted, asking him if I could wait until the rain actually arrived. My Grandfather got cross and told me to come on up before I got hit by lightning, then joked about me with a lightning rod (the gun) in my hands. When I kept arguing he complained that the gun would rust what with the moisture and insisted I come up onto the porch, but allowed that I could continue shooting from the porch if I moved the targets in closer, which I then did.

The rest of the family was sitting around on the porch and I took a seat and started shooting as the thunderstorm rolled in. It was a powerful storm and pretty soon it was coming down hard and lightning was cracking, and my grandfather joked again about how I was a lightning rod and was going to get electrocuted. I said something mocking about it and kept shooting.

Suddenly as I lined up another shot a huge bang went off seemingly right at my feet, and I screamed ‘holy SHIT!’ and threw the gun out into the rain, thinking I had just been struck by lightning. My feet also felt burned. Meanwhile everyone on the porch had begun laughing and I came to realize that my grandfather had tossed a lit cherry bomb at my feet as I had been lining up the shot. I had never sworn in front of any of the Ohio relatives before and this was half the joke to them. Meanwhile the old coot had scorched my feet with the damned thing, but even so I also started to laugh. He had gotten me but good.

So the much improved yahoo webmail client has been in beta for more than a year now, and they’ve been slowly rolling it out to their customer base. If you’re impatient and want to get in on the beta without waiting, follow these instructions over on cybernews.com. I just did it now (24th, around 9PM) and it was still working fine for me. In brief this is taking advantage of a glitch in their system but it seems harmless enough, but use at your own risk.

I’ll also observe that having played around with it, they’ve failed to learn one of the lessons of gmail - yes, gmail has ajaxy goodness, but it’s also drop dead simple and loads relatively quickly. The yahoo mail beta fails on both those counts. Still, it’s an improvement over the existing yahoo webmail client.

This was making the rounds a couple of weeks ago, back when I was so busy with the move to MA, the new job and so on, that I had no time to post it, but check out the flash-based Murloc RPG. Great graphics and decent old school side scrolling rpg gameplay. Free, easy to get into. If you’ve played WoW you know just how damned annoying the Murlocs are - now you can play as one.

Looking for something offbeat and maybe free to play? Check out the jayisgames.com weblog now and then, or add his feed to your aggregator. There’s a pretty steady stream of content and some excellent reviews of small, offbeat games to be found.

Check out Autoviewer, which is by the same folks who brought us Simpleviewer. It’s a very slick little system that lets you create galleries using either Google’s Picassa tool or by manually editing a couple of text files. If you’re a picassa user this is a great way to easily get image galleries online. If you’re not, it’s still worth a look if you want to post image galleries with a slick interface.

So I’ve been posting reminisces about my grandparents lately. Here’s one of my favorite ones about Grannie.

A couple of years ago I moved to Saratoga Springs NY, and shortly after I went to a family barbecue at my Aunt Melissa and Uncle Danny’s house, and Grannie was there. It was one of the few times I had seen her in years and years. At one point most folks went outside - I think the kids were roasting marshmallows or something - but in any case Grannie stayed inside and I sat there shooting the breeze with her, trying to get a sense of what she was doing those days. The fact that she was still driving came up, and given her age it was a little surprising, and I said so. She got a twinkle in her eye in response and said ‘yes, and I don’t use the brakes!’ I gradually got out of her that she would leave her house, head to her hairdressers, which was down a steep hill, and try not to use the brakes on her car because she enjoyed zooming as fast as gravity would take her down the hill.

!!!

I thought this was pretty funny. Picture a woman in her 80’s with a grin on her face zooming down a hill and maybe you’ll see the humor. But I also think it speaks to something I said about Grannie in one of my other stories about her - she was still enjoying life, and getting a kick out of it, at her age, something which is often not true of the very elderly.

I’ve posted now and then about how other countries, asian countries especially, are completely kicking our butts when it comes to bandwidth. There are lots of side effects of this and one of them is the sheer number of online multiplayer games asian developers are producing - there’s already a whole generation of citizens, male and female, that are acclimated to playing games online with folks, and the game producers are developing all kinds of things to appeal to them. Some of them are getting translated to english as these asian developers try and crack the US market.

Here’s an example of on. I happened across a fun, free action rpg for pc set in wwII on the eastern front. Check out Blitz 1941. It’s a relatively small download at around 150 megs, signup takes only a minute, and the hardware requirements are very modest. The primary gameplay is basically capture and hold in european cities as you work with your teamates to capture them. If you sign up drop me a message so we can group - I’m a level 3 tank commander specializing in repair so far.

Google will eat itself. That’s the premise behind gwei.org, where they’re using the money they make from google’s adsense program to purchase google shares, with a goal of ultimately owning the company. I laughed when I realized what they’re up to. However, at the present rate it’s going to take 200,000,000 years to achieve that goal. Let’s hope their adsense network is growing at some exponential rate to compensate for this.

Even if the concept doesn’t interest you the site’s worth checking out just for the trippy background patterns. Just stay away from the bright tie-dye colored one, I have a hunch it would cause seizures if you stare at it too long.

They say owning a dog’s good for your soul, and today I have a perfect example of why. Most afternoons, weather permitting, Soolin and I head out to the farmland behind my house and play fetch. I have one of those ‘chuckit’ sticks that look kind of like an atlatl that enables me to throw the ball 50 yards or more. Usually I have Soolin sit until I throw it, at which point she tears off after it. It’s her favorite thing on earth. Every now and then I let her run off without throwing the ball, and wait till she is 50 or more yards away, then issue a command like ’sit’ or ‘down’ as a way to reinforce her training. She wants the ball so badly that she’ll do anything I ask in return for me tossing it.

So yesterday we head back to the field and after a few tosses I release her before throwing, wait till she is far away, then toss it as high as I can in the air. It was very windy and I had noticed the wind was carrying the ball so I figured I would toss it high to get it to go further than normal. Soolin loses sight of the ball and amazingly, it comes down right on her forhead, giving her a good soft bonk before bouncing away. This disorients her, and she barks once then proceeds to spin in circles trying to figure out what it was that bonked her. Or maybe she knew it was the ball and was just indignant, but either way I laughed for at least 5 minutes. I had to apologize to her when she finally came back with the ball. This little episode basically made my day.

For whatever reason a couple folks emailed me about this recently. Maybe because I just updated the movie review section, who knows (it’s on the right in the links section). Anyway, it’s not a huge secret - basically since I’m single and have a lot of free time, I get to see a lot of movies. I also do a lot of ‘watch movie while working on laptop on the couch,’ and a lot of the movies I see are when I’m in this mode, especially the mediocre to crappy movies, which I tend to watch when I know I’ll only half pay attention whilst I’m working on something else. Lastly, I eat dinner in front of the tv, and generally watch at least half of a movie every night over dinner.

I stopped posting the movie reviews to the weblog because most of the time I only have a sentence or two to say about any given movie, and because if I posted to the weblog for every movie I watched, the reviews would quickly drown out everything else. The use of the wiki is sort of an experiment - so far it’s working ok, though I might end up folding the content back into the site, we’ll see how it goes.

And yes, I know I’m behind on the book reviews section, I’ll get to it when I can.

This is a pretty slick web 2.0′ish site that has full api documentation for a collection of programming and markup languages. Next time you’re struggling to remember to, say, set a background color in CSS, try gotapi. It’s not doing anything you couldn’t easily find elsewhere, and in fact many of the api docs for these languages I already have installed thanks to tools like devboi, but they’re all in one place and stitched together with a decent interface.

Advance Wars is a little strategy game available for the Nintendo GBA and the Nintendo DS. If you played Strategic Conquest back in the day, you’ll have the general idea, though Nintendo has expanded greatly on the concept and added a lot of character to it. The basic premise is you control units with a set of characteristics - how far they can move, how far they can shoot, the kinds of shots they can make (vs air units and ground units, for example) and a how much damage they can take. You use your units to take control of cities and manufacturing centers on maps, which provide income and the means to produce more units. There’s now a free version which is basically a clone of the Nintendo games available online via Advanced Wars By Web which allows web-based online play against other players. Well worth a look if the game style appeals to you. As usual I’ll offer to beat any comers - just issue the challenge and I’m in.

Enjoy.

So this is pretty silly, but still it’s the first thing that’s come online here at Amherst that I’ve had a direct hand in - a webcam we’ve setup to show the reconstruction of a collection of fossilized remains the college owns which will be on display in the new Earth Sciences building. We’re also capturing 4 frames per second so that we can build a time lapse movie of the reconstruction once they’ve finished. I’ll post a link to that once it’s finished. The reconstruction itself is only going to take 3-4 days, and in their first day there’s already a good bit of progress.

This post is for my friends who love bikes. My brother just bought his heart’s desire after talking about it off and on for what seems like forever. I won’t spoil the surprise by saying what it was he got aside from noting that it’s an excellent motorcycle, though I will warn Andrew - you’d best not click through the link to the photos since you might burst into tears, lamenting your long lost love.

Anyway check out my brother looking like a motorcycle geek on his site - warning, he’s using flash.

So I’m majorly majorly bummed to find out that my dog Soolin has Lyme’s disease, and in fact has likely had it since January or so. I completely misread the signs and feel like an awful dog-dad for missing it. She started experiencing joint pain in January of this year but I chalked it up to this spectacular wipeout she had on ice one day which led her to be unable to rise off of her haunches unassisted for several days, and to off and on bouts of pain in her hips.

I’m fortunate in that the disease could have chosen to attack something aside from her joints, which could have quickly killed her. There’s still some concern that permanent damage might have been done that won’t evince itself immediately, but on the positive side she hasn’t shown any indications of other maladies so there’s also hope that the antibiotics she’s on now will be the only issue she has to deal with.

For now it’s a month on antibiotics and a hope that all will end well.