A New Economic Engine: Energy in the 21st Century

Barack in Richmond, VA

Happy Halloween

Thinking of voting for John McCain?

I normally shy away from posting about politics because it tends to be a distraction from making real contributions to science and technology. Sometimes you have to...




This should be seen by every American who is thinking of voting for John McCain. Pass it on.

Good programming doesn't mean great software

I recently found some of the best C game programming from the previous decade; the source for the game Angband. The code has seen quite a lot of revision and it does what it does well. However, the game is basically a huge waste of time. If there was ever a game to identify with hard-core, hack-n-slash, geeky role-playing, this is it.

Chief faults:
1)Interface design -Too Cryptic, requiring knowledge of macros to work well. 2)Game play -Extremely tedious and permanent character death is part of it's culture. 3)Story -Uh, you make a character and you go around killing stuff. That's about it. 4)Scope -One town and huge frigging dungeon to crawl. 5)Frustrating -Character Death occurs too frequently and load/save is considered cheating by it's community.

Moral of the story, good programming does not make a good game.