January 27, 2012, 2:53 pm
As you may know if you’ve been reading for a while, I’m a gamer. Have been pretty much my whole life. In fact, it was the prospect of creating my own video games that first got me into programming.
A while back, I purchased Elemental, the latest game by Stardock, a company with a reputation for making high-quality games and for being a lot more ethical than many gaming companies. Their Sins of a Solar Empire was the best-selling game of 2008, for example, even though they refused to put any DRM on their software. (So much for piracy destroying sales!) They’re also the guys who created Impulse, a Steam competitor that ended up getting bought by GameStop last year.
Elemental, unfortunately, was not a high-quality game. The basic concept was decent–not exceptional, but not *bad* either–but the game itself was a slow, crashy, bug-ridden mess. Several patches over the course of several months eventually got it to a mostly-decent state, but in no way did it live up to expectations.
They just did something that does a lot to redeem them in my eyes. I woke up this morning with the following letter in my email: Continue reading ‘An email from Stardock’ »
June 10, 2011, 1:03 pm
Someone recently asked a very interesting question over at programmers.stackexchange.com. Unfortunately, though somewhat predictably, people jumped all over it and it ended up getting closed and then deleted within 20 minutes of being asked. That’s actually happening a lot recently, to the detriment of the community IMO, but that’s a subject for another time. But I think there’s some actual, worthwhile discussion to be had in this deleted question, so I’m preserving it here, along with the answer I would have posted. Hopefully it’ll be of interest to some people. Continue reading ‘Programmers and social skills’ »
October 16, 2010, 12:46 am
A few weeks ago, I mentioned the release of The Way of Kings, the first installment of Brandon Sanderson’s new epic, The Stormlight Archive. I’ve had a bunch of other stuff distracting me since then, but this week I’ve finally put some time aside to read through it. And it did take all week. This is an enormous novel, 1000 pages in hardcover. Howard Tayler called it “the best argument you’ll have all year to get an e-reader, because you HAVE to have this book, but you might not be muscular enough to carry it around.” I’m going to disagree with that conclusion. Get the real novel. A digital display just won’t be able to do the beautiful, detailed illustrations in between some of the chapters justice. But he’s right that you have to have this book; it’s the Must Read Novel Of The Year if you’re into fantasy literature at all. Continue reading ‘Review: The Way of Kings’ »
August 10, 2010, 2:36 pm
This one’s way off-topic, but I figured it would be worth sharing.
Continue reading ‘What would you do in an emergency?’ »