Lulz.

I've been playing Tremulous for a couple of days now, and I have to say that I'm really enjoying it. For those who aren't familiar with Tremulous, it's an RTS-FPS that runs on the ioquake3 engine, which is a modified version of the open source Quake III engine. The reason I said RTS-FPS is because it has elements of both genres. You can be either the aliens or the humans, and in each race, there are two types of players that get stronger as you play:

Note: "Engineers" and "Soldiers" are not the official names. Both races have their own names for these type of players, but I'm referring to them in general, so I just used these names.

Engineers-

The alien name for this is Granger, and what these guys do is build stuff. They have to build turrets, armories, and that sort of stuff, but most importantly, they have to build spawn points. Without spawn points, the other players can't spawn. If both the spawn points and all of the players currently spawned are destroyed/killed, the other race still alive wins. It's breathtaking when the other race is raiding your spawn points, and really forces the teams to cooperate amongst themselves.

Soldiers-

This is very hard to define, because the alien soldiers and the human soldiers are very different. The weakest alien soldier looks like spider and is able to move about quickly, run on walls, and has to touch the human enemy for a short period of time to kill him. The weakest human soldier has a weapon that resembles the mini gun in Unreal Tournament, and can upgrade himself via the armory that engineers build.

This is only a VERY basic outlining of the game, because there's a lot more detail to all of the aspects that I just described. I strongly recommend you download it, it's a blast to play.

During Hollywood's "Golden Age", getting an independent film released was like sending a tiny, red ant to war with the Roman Empire. One, if not the only, major distributor back then was Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, or MGM. They owned theaters and made movies. They owned a lot of theaters, and made a lot of movies. See, back then, cameras and that sort of thing were expensive. Especially in the 1940's, if you wanted to put a movie up on the big screen, you would need A)a good camera, actors, and funding for your location and B) theaters, because there wasn't a cheaper way to distribute films. You could've tried to make and sell your film independently, but it would only result in epoch fail.

Now let's take a look at 1993, the year Doom was released. I'm sure most of you are familiar with Doom, I certainly am. For those who aren't, you pop into a room with a pistol and shoot sprites with awesome music playing in the background, eventually you go to larger levels with stronger sprites and bigger guns.The creators of Doom, iD software, weren't in the same position that MGM was in. To make a game back then, all you needed was a computer, and the internetz to distribute it, so it really wasn't a very expensive endeavor. And iD knew, god bless them, that you can't monetize and control open standards.

So they made Doom with extensibility in mind. Because of their hard work, tons of people were distributing WADs, which were packs of sprites, sounds, and maps that could mod Doom into a very different game, or simply another level. People made a Batman WAD, a Star Wars WAD, even a Simpsons WAD. Doom was all the hype back then, so these WADs got a lot of exposure.

Let's go back to Hollywood for a moment, but now looking at the 21st century. Movies like Juno and Sideways are getting made. These movies aren't backed by a billion dollar budget, instead they are little independents that made their way up via the system, which has drastically changed since Hollywood unionized.

Back to games, but this time, we're looking at 2008. Most of the gamers who buy games in the industry are in the casual market, buying games like Madden and Mario. The game industry has been almost exponentially growing, with sales in 2008 far greater then sales in 1998, and the game industry isn't dominated by only one or two major players like Hollywood was back in the "Golden Age".

That will soon change: Grand Theft Auto 4 is being published by Take-Two, a company that's been on a sort of a decline financially, but is expected to improve via the estimated 1.4 billion that GTA 4 is going to make. EA knows this, and so they've decided to buy out Take-Two and make all the profit from GTA 4, and the take-two sports games, and the Elder Scrolls series. EA would become a major player, of strength that resembles MGM. Their capital (money supply) would become much larger then that of other company's, and they would buy out more of the little guys, until it's only them and the mega publisher's like Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo.

A popular tool on Linux is WINE, which is a free implementation of the Windows API. Developers use the WinAPI to develop programs for Windows. It's still a beta, and it's definetly not a wholesome implementation of the Win API yet, but it's extremely popular among Windows gamers who move to Linux but still want to play their games. WINE is supposed to let users use Windows applications on their Linux box. Photoshop CS2 works almost flawlessly with it, as does the original Counter-Strike, Call of Duty, WoW and plenty of others. But there are a ton of games and programs that either don't run, or suffer from some problems during runtime.

Which is why PlayOnLinux is totally kickass. It is a UI (User Interface) for WINE programmed in Python, and it uses BASH scripts, or a bunch of commands from the command line, to pre-configure specific programs. Say you want to install Bioshock on your Linux box. You try to install it, but, HEY! The sound isn't working! So you check the PlayOnLinux list of supported games. Say someone hasn't written a script for Bioshock yet. Aw, shucks! What now? Well, open up your favorite text editor, and write a bash script to configure that game so that it works great. Run it with PlayOnLinux, and viola! You can share this script with the rest of the world, and people can add to it.

Apparently, Sony is now going to have a smaller and cost-effective blu-ray player, which will save them money, and save the consumer money. If they're able to drastically reduce the price of the 40 GB PS3, I may just go out and buy it. Ever since Warner Brothers made the move to Blu-Ray, along with Paramont, I've started to crave it a lot more. About a week ago, I went to a block buster with my dad, and after we selected our movie (3:10 to Yuma, which was awesome), I stood in line to give it to the guy. While I was standing, I noticed that they were playing Spider-man 3 on a PS3. The picture quality was stunning, and I ended up dropping out of line and oogling next to it for a good five minutes.

The game line-up is pretty exciting. There's Little Big Planet, Tekken 6, Metal Gear, Killzone 2, and Resistence. Oh, did I mention free online? Did I mention that? Boy, I hope I mentioned that, cause free online kicks balls. So maybe I'll buy the PS3. Christmas?

Ever wondered exactly what George W. Bush left behind? The changes he made.

Ever heard the word AIM used outside of Duck Hunting? If you have, you're probably a little familiar with Instant Messaging. And you're also well acquainted with the fact that AOL Corporation owns AIM. A corporation is legally a person with special benefits. And when you use e-mail or IM, you're sending your conversations and private thoughts through their servers and most often using their clients.

Lemme take a moment to show you an excerpt from Microsoft's privacy statement:

"In particular, we may access or disclose information about you, including the content of your communications, in order to: (a) comply with the law or respond to lawful requests or legal process; (b) protect the rights or property of Microsoft or our customers, including the enforcement of our agreements or policies governing your use of the service; or (c) act on a good faith belief that such access or disclosure is necessary to protect the personal safety of Microsoft employees, customers or the public."

Did you read that last bit? Yeah, act on good faith. Okay, pretend for a second that the PS3 or the Nintendo Wii are better then the 360. I'm not saying they are or they aren't, but just using it as an example. Say you go to the Microsoft forum and log into MSN. You start posting topics about how some console that Microsoft doesn't own is better then the 360, and people start to believe you. So much so that the moderators and admins and soon the actual corporation is paying attention. You're endangering their product, and therefore endangering Microsoft's employees because Microsoft might not be able to pay them.

You're, in their eyes, endangering their employees. So what can they do? They can sell your private information to the highest bidder. They can **** up your IM's with some noob using filters like not sending any IM that has the words "Microsoft" and "lie" or something like that.

Okay, that doesn't sound dangerous. But what if you lived in Natzi Germany (pretend that the Internet existed)? You're IM-ing American soldiers about how bad Concentration Camps is and that sort of tragic stuff, and you're telling them that they should come and destroy Natzi Germany. Take the last three words of that sentence, "destroy Natzi Germany". Microsoft or AOL or Yahoo could start filtering your IM's for those three words and deleting the IM's that contain them. After all, you're threatening the government, which is supposed to "protect" the public. You're "threatening" the public.

Now you might be thinking, "You're making an awful lot of fuss about something that looks kinda small in my eyes". And I'll give you that. This might not seem like a big deal to you, and you might not want to put up too much work to protect your constitutional liberties. And I get that. That's why we have Jabber.

Jabber, or XMPP, is an open protocol (protocol is like AIM or MSN, a chatting service, not necessarily a program, but a group of people, like everyone signed up for Yahoo uses the Yahoo protocol). And open protocol is a protocol that isn't owned by anyone. It isn't owned by a corporation. You can have your own server, and you can communicate to other servers. A person on server A can talk to someone on server B.

There is a variety of Jabber clients, some that have features similar to AIM. If you prefer freedom, you probably prefer Jabber.

:D

SHAZBOT!

Oh, thank you Father in heaven, for blessing me with with the greatest system ever...again. Sega Dreamcast. 2.

I just want to know how many of you play free games, instead of commercial ones. I want to get into that type of development, and need to know if people are interested in that type of shmuck.