Tikkabik

Cornerstone TSP Games has done this excellent Mac conversion of Pocket Tanks from BlitWise Games. Pocket Tanks is a straight-up homage to Scorched Earth, one of the best games EVER.

Basically it's a one or two-player artillery game where you man a tank and have to figure out the right velocity and angle to blow up your opponent, using a variety of creative and unusual weapons -- everything from laser guns to fission weapons.

At a time when even shareware games are in danger of getting hideously complex, I'm delighted to see Scorched Earth reborn for Mac OS X way. Please, download this game, and give CTSP the $15 or so they're asking for the game if you like it -- it's ridiculous fun.

CTSP's Web site has links to BlitWise's Web site, too, if you're one of THOSE people.

Posted by flargh at 02:36 PM | Permalink

And with him, a piece of collective childhood dies too. At least we'll have the reruns.

Posted by flargh at 12:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

We were watching a science show about crabs. These little buggers are delicious, and they've populated almost every conceivable nook and cranny on Earth. It was pretty cool -- the forest crabs of Christmas Island, giant crabs, tiny crabs, crabs that live symbiotically with sea cucumbers, and more.

All the closeup photography made these things look like giant monsters, which inspired Bonnie to ask if there was ever a Godzilla movie that featured a giant crab-type thing. As near as I can tell, she was thinking about Ganime, who was featured in the 1970 Toho classic Yog Monster from Space.

At the time she asked, though, I couldn't remember. "I'm not sure if Godzilla ever fought a giant crab," I said.

James, our almost three year old, had been playing with toys on the living room floor, but had been living listening intently.

"Ackshy," he said, his word for 'actually,' "I just like Ghidowah. Him have thwee heads."

Posted by flargh at 09:51 AM | Permalink

Well, any misgivings the US' foreign allies had about Bush's planned war on Iraq sure-as-hell weren't abated by Dan Rather's interview with Saddam Hussein last night. Hussein came off superficially as a measured, calm, fairly reasonable leader trying to protect his nation's sovereignty -- not the psychopathic dictator he is in real life.

I'm not really anxious to see the US hop into another war with Iraq -- the bill for this one we're gonna foot ourselves, unlike the last war, and our European allies are already pissed off enough at us for our rampant cultural imperialism and other foibles already ... it's clear we don't have their backing this time around. But still, Saddam's talk with Rather didn't impress.

An interview Saddam gave with Diane Sawyer more than a decade ago shows just how out-of-touch with reality this guy is -- he was dumbfounded when Sawyer explained to him that people in the US are allowed to criticize their government and their leaders without fear of being tortured or killed. Things haven't changed that much, though Saddam -- to his credit -- seems moderately more media-savvy than he was back then.

Saddam's suggestion of a television debate with Bush may have made for good copy, but I'm a bit disappointed that Rather spent so much time in his interview obsessing about it -- it's a superfluous suggestion at best, and it doesn't go to the root cause of Bush's complaints against Saddam, which seem to transform on a constant basis.

Bush says that Saddam is an ironfisted dictator, and of that there seems little doubt. Any leader that gets 100 percent of the vote can't be ruling by legitimate means -- dissent is normal human behavior. But I think part of the misgivings that many people have about this aggression towards Iraq is born of Bush's rather weak case that Iraq is a major sponsor of international terrorism.

Sure, Saddam actively supports Palestinian terrorists, and harbors the Abu Nidal Organization, but didn't this start out as retaliation against the 9/11 attacks? By that measure, shouldn't we be bombing Saudi Arabia? After all, that's where most of those hijackers were from.

Then again, that would mean unseating a corrupt middle eastern dictatorship the US *still* supports, instead of one that we've decided is *bad*.

Posted by flargh at 08:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Apparently Glaswegian accents cause more problems for speech recognition software than any other regional accent in the UK, along with the dialects spoken in Belfast and Cornwall. My favorite part of the article is the phrases the author recommends that the researchers should start with.

Maybe after that they can move on to South Bostonian.

Posted by flargh at 09:39 AM | Permalink

Last time it was the Columbia blowing apart in the skies over the southwestern US. Now it's this fucking nightclub fire in Rhode Island during a Great White performance. I'm not sure who I'm mad at -- the media, for milking this situation, or the public, for overreacting in a really revolting sort of way.

While the Station fire is a tragedy indeed, the public and official reaction to this has made me wonder if we've collectively lost our minds all together. To see the media saturation and the solemn hand-wringing of public officials in RI to this event, you'd think this is a national tragedy on the level of 9/11.

Jeff Derderian's tearful pleas over the weekend that he and his family are having trouble coping with the horror of this event, yet the ass managed to quell his crocodile tears to point his finger at the band without so much as a quavering note in his voice. He's also done a great job of avoiding talking with the AG or the police, unlike, say, EVERYONE ELSE ASSOCIATED with what happened.

The endless processions of news reports about the fire don't help, showing the same snippets of video over and over again as people fled the building, stomping on one another, interspersed with video of people leaving flowers at the now-immolated site.

For fuck's sake -- one news station interviewed this weeping, hysterical woman, who was thankful that her niece wasn't there that night. Yes, let me repeat -- this woman, openly hysterical and sobbing, lost NO ONE in the fire. The same news agency had an interview with another woman who was "touched by the tragedy" because her husband WASN'T there that night.

The AG for the state of Rhode Island has pithily pointed out that his state is so small, everyone has about 1 and a half degrees of separation, instead of the customary six -- apparently those folks who don't have that sort of connection with what happened at all feel a need to make one up, too.

The day following the event one of the local Boston stations interviewed an AP reporter who grew up near the Station, when it was still a restaurant. How they felt this was even remotely newsworthy is utterly beyond my comprehension.

Some asshole lawmaker in Rhode Island says that he'll FIGHT to make the site of the station a memorial park. This isn't Timothy McVeigh blowing up daycare kids. This isn't some Saudi nationals plowing a 757 into a high-rise office building. It was a stupid, senseless way to die for dozens of people who shared one thing in common: Utterly rotten taste in live music.

If there's a nadir to the tragedy of this fire, it's that 97 people -- perhaps more, since the body count doesn't match the missing persons report -- died watching a second-rate metal band whose prime has definitely passed, during a moment in their career that echoes the waning days of Rob Reiner's classic mockumentary, "This Is Spinal Tap."

Personally, I can't think of a more ignominious way to go out than to burn to death waiting to see a crappy cover of Ian Hunter's "Once Bitten, Twice Shy."

Posted by flargh at 03:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

I have been witness to what is unquestionably the most senseless bitching ever, and it stands perfectly to reason that it's in the hallowed halls of GameRanger -- home to some of the most drooling imbeciles ever.

The spark that lit this flameage is GameRanger developer Scott Kevill's recent decision to start a premium service, offering gamers who want it some benefits for forking over an annual fee of about $50. Players who do so get access to special features, the ability to create their own chat rooms, prioritization on player lists, and more.

Now, one can debate the relative merits of these new features until they're blue in the face, but you don't HAVE to pay to use GameRanger -- basic membership is free, just as it always has been. People who want to reward Kevill for three years of development can fork over the cash. People who find the new features worthy of payment can do so as well. And the rest of them can go on doing what they do. On the surface, it's such a simple, elegant solution.

Alas, there is absolutely no nadir to the depth of human dumbassery.

Some "basic" GameRanger members have their panties in a twist because they don't understand why other users are willing to pay $50 for what they see as superficial and meaningless capabilities. Some have gone so far as to change the color of premium users' text to the same as their background color, so they can't see what they write.

Some feel that the service is overpriced. Objectively, if I was fourteen or fifteen years old, I might feel the same way. I have little sympathy for them, however, since they don't NEED to pay the amount. They're just incensed that some folks ARE able to pay the requested amount, and consider it tantamount to sparking class warfare by creating a group of "haves" and "have nots."

I mean, for fuck's sake: It's a gaming service. This isn't the United Fucking Nations.

Posted by flargh at 01:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (19)

Bonnie had some minor surgery yesterday to repair a hernia-type condition she developed after delivering James, who turns three next month. They kept her overnight just to make sure that she's healing all right, and I'm sitting by the phone waiting to hear from her to make sure she's ready to be discharged.

That left me with the three kids alone last night, which wasn't nearly the trauma I expected it to be. They all behaved themselves, which I attribute to a few different factors: A) They'd spent the night before with relatives at a hotel, so they were tired out from a day and a half of swimming in a pool and other activities; B) They suddenly found themselves in a different routine than usual and C) They knew their mother was in the hospital, so they knew not to mess around too much lest they raise the wrath of their father.

The biggest trauma I suffered today was trying to brush Emmeline's extraordinarily long hair. I'm not good with the long hair -- I don't know what to do, and if god forbid she'd asked for a braid or something I probably would have begun hyperventilating. Fortunately she took it easy on me and simply handed me the detangling spray, a brush, and a hairtie, and told me to do a ponytail. It's a bit messy but I think it'll work.

Posted by flargh at 10:05 AM | Permalink

This marketing trend over the past few years to try to attach an "extreme" label to everything irritates the hell out of me.

Believe me, I understand the importance of marketing products towards children -- and I can perfectly understand how "extreme" stuff appeals to them. Products marketed with pictures of skateboarding or rollerblading kids with bulging eyes and their mouths distorted into Munch-like O's of wonder certainly seem exciting and wonderous. There are limits, though.

One of these limits was crossed on my last trip to the grocery store. Wandering down the condiments aisle, I spied a mustard squeeze bottle. But it wasn't normal mustard, no. It was EXXXTREME mustard. Honey mustard, specifically. And it's marketed as "Honey Mustard MADNESS."

I mean, for chrissakes.

Posted by flargh at 09:09 AM | Permalink

So the snow's coming down so fast it looks like a crew of people is standing on the roof dumping out flake detergent from boxes. I'm not going out in this crap, and I'm really wishing we lived in the Caribbean or Mexico right now. My mother sent me a link to a house down there for $155K that looked damn nice, even if it means I have to boil my water and buy an armored SUV to keep my family safe.

Anyway, I'm sitting here in my underwear, idly looking out the window, playing MacMAME and eating some microwave taquitos. Pokemon's on the TV. And then it strikes me: It'd be interesting if I could go back in a time machine about 18 years ago and track down my 15 year old self and tell him what I was up to today, that younger version of me would say, "OMG! Dreams *do* come true."

It reminds me of that old maxim: Be careful what you wish for -- you might just get it.

Bonnie has an interesting theory about sunny climates. Everywhere that doesn't snow has some other major calamity associated with it: Earthquakes, tsunamis, hurricanes, mudslides, forest fires, killer bees or terrorists.

Posted by flargh at 12:37 PM | Permalink

I'm up to about 700 - 800 spam e-mails a day. It's partly because it's really easy to find me on the Web -- as a reporter, I've never disguised my identity. It's also because there are about five or six e-mail accounts I check on a regular basis. Whatever the reason, I'm sick and tired of it.

Unfortunately, there's not a lot the administrators at my company can do. Because we get tips from all sorts of sources, my boss and I are opposed to applying anything server-side to get rid of it, as we're always concerned that doing so will somehow filter out valuable communiques from our sources.

The best I've been able to manage thus far is to set up a horrendously complex but fairly effective rule in Entourage that grabs a whole bunch of the most annoying spam -- in particular, anything with a .PIF or .BAT attachment, so those morons that don't bother to use virus protection on their PCs have all their worm-garbage thrown into the trash immediately. Anything with "viagra," "penis" and the other usual suspect keywords in the title gets thrashed, and anything -- ANYTHING -- from Yahoo.com or Hotmail.com instantly goes in the bucket.

Doesn't stop the fact that the crap still comes in, though, which means my Mac is forced to digest each and every single bit of shit that comes in the door.

If I ever meet someone who's making a living by selling Unsolicited Commercial E-mail, I'm going to break some part of their body, I swear to God.

Posted by flargh at 01:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Here's something funny.

Posted by flargh at 04:34 PM | Permalink

You know that grainy silhouette photo of the underside of the Columbia that's been shown off now for days? I'm talking about that low-res, pixelated shot showing the plume coming off the left wing.

Turns out an 11 year old Mac took the photo, hooked up to a homemade telescope. Neat.

Posted by flargh at 06:15 PM | Permalink

Check this shit out.

Posted by flargh at 01:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

So I've been cleaning my office on and off for the past few days, and it's looking a hell of a lot better.

First of all, I live in a great house (thanks, Mom!). We have enough space to stretch out a bit -- three kids and two adults take up a large amount of real estate. But as someone who works from home, it was equally important to have a good office. One of the things that sold us on this place is that the basement had already been half-finished as a workshop cum bedroom. It was pretty half-assed: Plywood walls, a suspension ceiling that hadn't been finished and half-finished drywall.

There are three problems with having an office in your basement: The lack of natural light, the temperature, and the flooring.

Problem #1 was resolved last year when we finally had the office finished properly. Real, plastered walls painted with Benjamin Moore's best stuff and flourescent lighting provide adequate enough illumination that I no longer ruminate about tricksy hobbitses stealing my preciousss. I've got a temporary solution for #2 thanks to a Toastmaster Heatlog, that casts a surprisingly large amount of heat for the room -- enough to raise it from 55 to 65 by lunch.

It's not the perfect solution -- I'd prefer to have a plumber come in and put a real heating system (we used forced hot water heated by natural gas here), but that'll require an outlay that I probably won't be able to afford until the summer. It'll also mean knocking out part of a wall we just had finished, which doesn't really thrill me either. But the spaceheater works for now, and it'll get me through the winter.

Surprisingly, problem #3 -- the bare concrete floor -- has been the toughest problem to find a solution for.

See, when we first moved here, the room had been covered by carpet remnants stained by numerous pets, so the entire office stank of rancid, mildewy and long-stale cat pee. We pulled the rugs at the same time we had the office redone, but didn't have a new floor put in at the same time, because the flooring I wanted is fucking expensive. We were also incented to wait when it was discovered that the bulkhead leading to the basement had certain structural deficiencies that let rainwater come in in a veritable flood.

The bulkhead has since been replaced, but no flooring has been put down. Fortunately, last weekend, we had a breakthrough -- cheap foam flooring like they put in workshops and garages.

Turns out that Ocean State Job Lot has the stuff in 2x2 jigsaw pieces; 4 packs cost $10, which is a a buck and a half cheaper per square than what K-Mart sells 'em for. So I picked up a dozen, and I liked them so much I managed to finagle another two dozen for the other side of the office.

It's not a shag carpet, but it'll do until I can afford something better.

Posted by flargh at 01:37 PM | Permalink

Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3 is the latest game to ship half-assed on the Macintosh. Specifically, the game lacks multiplayer and force-feedback capabilities. Aspyr Media is promising that a patch with these capabilities will ship within two weeks. If there's one dead horse I've been continuously beating for the past while in my talks with Mac game developers, it's "ship it when it's done."

This annoying trend surfaced about a year and a half ago when MacPlay shipped out a few titles that hadn't been completely finished. Feral Interactive did the same thing with their Mac release of Black and White. So this isn't an isolated or unique incident, by any stretch.

Now, I can understand why it happens -- publishers are on deadlines to get titles on store shelves before they start getting dinged by retailers and penalized by their publishing partners. But I think it's unfair to expect the consumer to be aware enough of what's going on to buy the game and then have to download a patch -- presuming it's even released fairly quickly -- to get the title to work properly.

Posted by flargh at 11:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (7)

So one of the detergent companies ... I think it's Tide ... has recycled an Irving Berlin tune for one of its new ad campaigns, comparing itself to Oxy Clean. The song is from "Annie Get Your Gun," it's called "Anything you can do I can do better."

Well, the tune features two alternating voices -- one's a soprano, the other's a baritone, singing "Anything you can do I can do better, I can do anything better than you" "No you can't" "Yes I can," etc.

James LOVES this. For an almost-three year old, he's got a really good sense of the absurd, and a wicked sense of humor. So every time this ad comes on, I noticed that James watches it with rapt attention.

The other morning I come down stairs, and I hear little voices. Emme and James specifically, and I can't quite make out what they're saying. As I get to the bottom of the stairs, I hear James shouting, in his deepest voice, "NO YOU CAAAAAN'T." He had the inflection and the tone perfect.

He's gonna grow up to do stand up comedy or something, I swear.

Posted by flargh at 10:45 AM | Permalink

Martin Bashir's documentary of Michael Jackson (broadcast last night on ABC TV's 20/20) was one of the most egregious examples of character assassination I've ever seen broadcast. It's the second example inside of a week of ABC News trying to pass off utter tripe as news, and it's pissing me off.

Maybe it's just that bad television journalism is a lot more blatant and apparent than bad print journalism, I dunno.

Listen, I don't question for a second that Jackson is eccentric. And it's obvious that he suffered a lot as a kid -- both as a celebrity and as the child of an abusive, manipulative parent. But a lot of the public criticism I see of him is book/cover superficial judging. He looks weird. He acts weird. Therefore he must be different enough to be ostracized.

It's gradeschool politics, and we collectively as a society ought to rise about it. Oh yeah, though, that would require Americans (and, well, most of western civilization) NOT to be idiots.

Bashir complains that Jackson has built a fantasy world for himself. The guy is worth $300 million. I have news for Bashir -- if I had that much cake, I'd have a fucking fantasy world of my own -- hell, I'd buy a couple of fantasy worlds for friends and family, too.

Admittedly, it'd be a bit more hardcore than what Jackson has, but even as an adult I can understand how much fun it would be to have your own private zoo and amusement park (and anyone who knows my kids knows how much they'd like stuff like their own go-karts and a private choo-choo train). And left to my own devices, I'd probably have as little to do with the outside world as possible.

While Bashir didn't come out and say "Michael Jackson rapes children," by talking out of both sides of his mouth like that, Bashir might as well have. Bashir repeats over and over again that he never once saw Jackson do anything to his own or other kids to raise suspicion that Jackson was a child molester, yet he says in the same breath that underprivileged youth shouldn't be left unsupervised at Neverland Ranch.

Bashir said that one of the things he found so remarkable about it is that in England, the authorities would never let Jackson get away with raising his children unsupervised. Bashir's suggestion is essentially that Jackson's wealth has bought him privacy, even from the government. That's funny, and here I thought it was Amendment IV to the Bill of Rights. Silly me. We Colonials sure have some strange ideas, like personal freedom.

As far as the plastic surgery thing goes, who gives a shit? Jackson can afford to do whatever he wants. If he wants to have his nose redone to look Bajoran, more power to him -- hell, I think that look is pretty hot. Just because the guy has had his face resculpted once every couple of years doesn't make him a bad guy. Lord knows I'd have some lipo done and some hair transplanted if I could afford it.

Well, as it turns out, it looks like Jacko is gonna have the last laugh after all. The Santa Barbara County DA basically told hysterics who think Jackson is having pre-teen orgies to fuck off, which should hopefully encourage that pasty-faced trollop Gloria Allred to take Jacko's advice.

The best part is that the public seems as disgusted with Bashir as I am. Record stores report that Jackson's albums are selling like hotcakes -- even selling out in some locations. That reminds me. As soon as the snow stops, I'm gonna go to Hyannis and pick up copies of Off the Wall and Dangerous on CD.

Posted by flargh at 01:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

Platform bigotry hacks me off.

It's because I'm a long-time Mac user that I have absolutely no patience for people who feel the need to proselytize others. I was an evangelist in my younger days, and I fully expect to do karmic penance for it. To all of you who have heard me utter the words, "Macs are better, you should get one," I humbly seek forgiveness.

Whenever I write an article about Microsoft, some wiseass feels the need to respond with a snarky comment about monopolization, about the quality of the company's products, about Bill Gates' personal hygiene. Their witty banter is usually peppered with clever turns of phrase like "Micro$oft" or "Microsloth."

I could say a lot about what I think of these people, but I think the boys at Penny Arcade pretty much summed it up definitively.

This was most recently made evident when I published an article about graphics chip maker Nvidia Corp. settling legal arbitration with Microsoft over how much Nvidia was getting paid for the NV20 chips it makes for Microsoft's Xbox console. The ensuing firestorm has had everything to do with which game console people think is better and nothing to do with Microsoft and Nvidia.

It's shit like this that drove me from GameRanger. Quite literally. I was in the midst of the fourteenth platform war of the day when I finally just threw up my hands and said, "Forget it. You fucktards win."

I quit the app, deleted it off my hard drive, and haven't spent more than a minute back there since then.

I'm thoroughly convinced that platform evangelism is ultimately little more than extroverted buyer's guilt. People feel the need to know that they've done the right thing -- invested in the right box -- and bitching at others about their choice of what computer or game console to use is their way of doing it. Same thing happens with Ford and Chevy owners; BMW and Mercedes people; East coasters and west coasters.

Posted by flargh at 09:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

So Apple's 12 and 17 inch PowerBook G4s have GeForce4 420 Go and 440 Go chips, respectively. Apple, what the hell were you thinking?

The PowerBook G4 was, up until this point, one of the best portable gaming rigs you could get on any platform. I mean it.

Sure, you could spend a gajillion dollars on an Alienware Area 51m and get something that lasts for about 5 milliseconds on a battery and turns your lap into osso bucco. Or you could get a heinous Dell or Gateway laptop like every other friggin' bovine on the planet. But just for raw sex appeal, the 15.2 inch PowerBook G4 was and is an awesome gaming rig.

Why? Mobility Radeon 9000, baby.

ATI continues to kick Nvidia's ass when it comes to portable graphics chips. GeForce 4 Go hardware, while infinitely better than the ass-ugly stuff that preceded it, is still an immature technology. Nvidia just doesn't have the same engineering in this area that ATI does.

The reason I'm so hung up on this is because the Mobility Radeon 9000 processor gets programmable vertex and shaders in hardware. First time it's been done on a mobile chip, according to ATI. That means that some games run faster -- a lot faster. That means that other games run, period.

By comparison, the chips Apple chose for its new PowerBook -- including Mini-Me's collosal 17 inch aluminum powerhouse -- can't. What does this mean? Well, for some software, it'll be slow as ass. For others, it won't run at all.

Bottom line is that Apple has engineered a new laptop that in many respects is a lot better than what came before it, and in other respects doesn't work nearly as well. Apple could have at least opted for the GeForce4 4200 Go.

I'm sure Apple's saving money. I'm sure they're making someone at Nvidia happy, and I'm sure this is filling some middle manager at Apple's mandate. But for me and the people who care about the things I care about, it's one step forward, two steps back. I hate this shit.

Posted by flargh at 02:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Colin Powell's speech before the UN Security Council may have lacked the punch of Stevenson's famous "hell freezes over" query to the Soviet ambassador, but it was okay in my book. He made a pretty compelling case that Iraq's been fucking around way too much, but it's clear that the vote's still out for using force to make Iraq comply.

Listen, these Iraqi guys are, for the most part, sleazeballs. Saddam Hussein's manly images showing him wearing a fedora, sucking on cigars and firing rifles make him look like a third-rate country bumpkin, which, from all I've read, ain't far from the truth. And watching Amer al-Sa'adi try to convince the world press that it's all just smoke and mirrors makes me feel nauseated. Even Blix and ElBaradei, the Batman and Robin of the UN weapons inspection team, seem pretty content with the analysis that Iraq is full of shit -- not to mention chemical and biological weapons.

But does that mean that it's time for GI Joe to invade? Not by a longshot. Ultimately, the people that are gonna get screwed the worst are the civilians, because they're the ones who ALWAYS take it in the seat during a war, America's best war technology be damned.

Personally, I think Iraqi VP Taha Yassin Ramadan is on the right track -- let's make Saddam and Dubya RASSLE for it.

And by the way: Americans are fucking idiots.

Posted by flargh at 12:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Okay, so Neverwinter Nights is finally gonna come out on the Mac soon, and it's time for me to rant about shit I can't rant about in Macworld or on MacCentral -- the toolset, and Mac users' attitude towards it.

In case you live in a cave, Neverwinter Nights is this phenomenally kick-ass role playing game that Bioware has spent much of their collective existence working on. These guys known D&D games, these guys live and breathe D&D games, having already brought some of the best D&D games in existence to life on the computer.

Neverwinter Nights came out for the PC last year, and one of the reasons it's so huge for those of us that dig this genre is because the developers released a toolset thar lets the folks who buy the game create their own modules. It's a throwback to the old days of D&D -- dungeon masters, dice and the whole nine yards, only much cooler, since it's all in 3D and on the computer.

Mac users don't get those tools. And I say, who really gives a shit?

Mac gamers -- all seven of them -- have been bitching up a storm since last month when MacSoft's Al Schilling announced that the toolset wasn't going to come to the Mac. Mac users are getting shortchanged, they said. This is why games suck on the Mac. Want some cheese with your whine?

The way I see it, The Omni Group overestimated their ability to port the toolset, and got MacSoft in trouble for overpromising too soon. Hey, it's an honest, albeit unprofessional mistake that under ideal circumstances wouldn't have happened. Water under the bridge, though -- acknowledge and move on, I say.

As Al explained it to me when I saw him last month, MacSoft could had waited -- a year or more, by the way -- for the tools to finally get released for OS X, and paid The Omni Group for their time. But given the number of boxes that MacSoft will sell for NWN, it would have been the same as if they had just stuffed a $100 bill in each box. The economics just don't make any sense.

None of this changes the fact that the game itself is coming to the Mac. What's more, the data structure of NWN is identical from Mac to Windows, which means that Mac users will be able to play the modules that PC makers create. The only hairball Mac users might run into is with PC-centric installers, but Bioware's aware of that and hopes to make the mod community aware of it too.

Mac gamers are a small minority of Mac users. And even in the PC realm, the number of gamers who actually use editing tools comprise a tiny minority of the overall population. One can easily extrapolate that the number of actual Mac gamers who are going to be put out by the lack of tools is infinitesimal -- literally, probably able to be counted on a couple of hands. Having tooled with the excellent world editor included with Warcraft III, I can safely say that this shit ain't for the faint of heart, baby. It takes a more creative and better organized mind than mine to make sense of this stuff and to do something real and good and useful with it.

Unfortunately, it's about perception. And with each added complaint dropped in the collective cesspool of human retardation and misery that is places like MacGamer.com's discussion boards and GameRanger, people who can't think for themselves and don't know any better are left with the presumption that Mac users are really getting screwed this time, and that Macs are bad for gaming.

But that's a different rant for a different day.

Posted by flargh at 11:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

*cough*

*cough cough*

*COUGH cough COUGH cough cough* HORK *cough*

Well, at least I have some butter for my muffin now.

One of the things I hate most about this bronchial infection (for which I refuse to seek medical treatment, as I HATE DOCTORS) is the bizarre percolating sound my lungs make when I exhale. Apparently air is bubbling up from my lungs through a mass of congealed sputum, amplified by my trachea to sound like pop rocks going off in my throat.

It's really lovely.

Posted by flargh at 09:29 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I'm as aghast as everyone else is about this tragedy involving the space shuttle Columbia, believe me, but this morning some coverage just pushed my buttons.

My morning routine is pretty predictable. I wake up around 7, or as late as James and Bob let me when they're running around shrieking and playing with loud toys (this morning that was about quarter to six). After a cup of coffee and a quick check of e-mail on the PowerBook, I usually fire up the television and watch a morning show while the kids get ready for school. More often than not, it's Good Morning America -- and it has a lot more to do with the local ABC affiliate in Boston than it has to do with Diane Sawyer or Charlie Gibson. Besides, it's background noise while we round up the kids' backpacks, winter gear, homework and so on.

As anyone who has a TV in North America can attest, news coverage since Saturday has been almost singularly obsessed with the Columbia. It's a sad story, obviously. And a lot of people both within and without NASA are trying to make sense of what happened, for good reason.

Good Morning America ran a piece on the music the shuttle astronauts listened to every morning of the voyage. I found out that one was a Talking Heads fan. Another seemed obsessed with bagpipe music. Yet another listened to pop tunes. That's when I realized just how voyeuristic and how emotionally manipulative this whole segment was.

Although the entire nation, and indeed much of the world, no doubt, is trying hard to establish some firm emotional connection to the seven people who died, it's disingenuous for most of us at best, and it's about the same as trying to establish an emotional connection to seven people who died in a carpooling accident.

These astronauts died spectacularly -- in a shower of flames and debris at 18 times the speed of sound almost 30 miles above the surface of Texas. But outside of the grisly aspect of their demise and the reminder that, almost half a century into it, space travel isn't perfectly safe, there really isn't much to connect Joe Public to the Columbia Seven.

The fact is that most of us didn't know those seven were up there until they found out the Columbia exploded, and up until that moment, most folks didn't give a shit. It's a cruel truth that space travel and NASA in general has lost much of its romantic luster since JFK's message to Congress on Urgent National Needs really provoked America's involvement in the space race almost 42 years ago.

Nowadays many see the entire program as of questionable value and extraordinary cost. Americans spend more on home pizza delivery than we do on the space program, which tells you where Joe Public's priorities lie.

Media outlets have to -- as a matter of basic economic survival -- capitalize as much as they can on whatever disaster or conflagration it is that captures our attention at that particular moment in time. We saw the same sort of single-minded obsession during O.J. Simpson's trial; during the Gulf War; when hostages were taken in Iran; when the World Trade Center fell. It's a vicious cycle that feeds itself: People are hungry for info. News outlets are desperate to give it to us -- even if it means an owl-eyed reporter standing outside the scene telling the world he doesn't have anything substantive to add to the coverage.

This isn't specific to the Columbia tragedy. I just wish that some of the producers of these news broadcasts would take a moment to ask themselves, "Is this really newsworthy? Am I really bringing anything of value by broadcasting this?" Because more often than not, the end result tells us that they aren't.

Posted by flargh at 09:07 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

I know it sounds like a Steven Wright bit, but I swear to God it's true.

I bought a book on how to overcome procrastination six years ago. I still haven't read it.

When I sit down and really think about it, I have two overwhelming problems: Procrastination and disorganization. I'm not sure how it came to be this way.

Well, I've always owned procrastination. I can remember plenty of times in high school when I'd be pulling an all-nighter cramming for an exam or writing a report because I'd blown it off all together up until then. But organization is a different story. Near as I can tell, it happened about the same time Bonnie and I started living together. Now, I don't say this to blame Bonnie in any way -- it just seems to be an infection that's taken root with me too. But she's the first person to tell you that she's disorganized, to the point where she's convinced she's got ADD.

Before we met, I was meticulously organized. My CDs and books were in alphabetical order, by composer, performer or author (then subcategorized by title). I kept trays of incoming and outgoing correspondences and bills. All of my receipts, warranty information and other data was organized in a filing cabinet.

Now, looking around my office, I feel as if it's been ransacked by Algerian terrorists, and ordinarily I'd blame my kids -- only this time I know I have to own it. Boxes are strewn everywhere. Piles of paper, CD-ROMs and receipts are collected in almost every horizontal location available. Bundles of correspondences are stuffed in plastic bags.

I really have to get my shit together one of these days. Not today though.

Posted by flargh at 10:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Due to better self-control than I have and the ability to metabolize Slim-Fast meal shakes without getting violently sick, Bonnie has already managed to drop most of the weight that she wants to lose, while I'm left wallowing in self-pity and self-loathing at my corpulent, flabby condition.

Anyway, Bonnie's big goal is now strength training -- she wants to tone and firm herself, which I consider an admirable and eminently achievable goal, for her at least -- provided, of course, she doesn't become freakishly large as a result. Neither of us really want to deal with the social or logistical nightmare afforded by local health clubs, so we opted to buy a home gym instead. We got a great deal on a Weider system at Sears yesterday, and brought it home.

The strapping young men at the Sears Warehouse got it in the van without any problem, but getting the gym inside was another story. Bonnie's not supposed to lift anything heavy, according to her doctor (and yes, there is a different between strength training and lifting weights), and our neighbor, who in better days might have helped, can't do that sort of thing. So here I am, coughing up lungers the consistency of oysters, in pouring rain, trying to drag a 110 pound box out of the back of the van and up the porch steps to the kitchen.

After about 20 minutes I managed to get the box in the door, grunting and heaving, panting uncontrollably. I think I collapsed on the bed afterwards and took a nap.

Maybe I'll end up using the Weider gym too. Once I figure out a way to get it down the stairs and set it up, that is.

Posted by flargh at 09:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

So I woke up at the crack of ass yesterday to take a train to New York City. I went to Madison Square Garden to go to the NY DV Show.

It was pretty low-key -- there were only a smattering of new announcements from the show, but the vibe was good, and I got to see a few people I knew, folks whose products I was familiar with but due to the hell-that-was-Macworld-Expo didn't actually get any hang time with before now. The best part of it, though, is that the Garden is right on top of Penn Station, so I never actually had to go out on the street if I didn't want to -- instead just looking at mid-town Manhattan like a hamster in a Habitrail.

Now, I've been fighting off a bronchial infection for the past couple of weeks that's left me coughing every couple of minutes like someone suffering from a terminal case of tuberculosis, and on top of that, my scalp has been peeling uncontrollably ever since I came back from SF a few weeks ago -- a victim of the cold weather and the dry air, I expect. I didn't realize how bad the peeling was until I looked in the mirror at lunch time. It was so bad that I had to go out and get a tube of moisturizer just to try to get it under control. All this, while I'm horking up vanilla pudding from my lungs every few minutes.

I was happy to get home last night, even if meant renting a Dodge Neon, which I swear to God felt like the world's smallest vehicle, especially after driving a mini-van for a year.

Posted by flargh at 08:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)