Ooo, hit me again Agent Smith
You know, if I were one of Morpheus’ freedom fighters for Zion, I’d spend a *lot* of time researching electronic ways to block the ‘pain’ and ‘damage’ signals the Matrix wanted to send to my meat body.
Imagine if you hacked the connection ever so slightly to redirect the pain signals so they’d send a tiny jolt to the pleasure center of your brain instead. Agents could shoot you all day and it would just make you giggly. Your Matrix body might end up looking like The Crow, but that might be turned to your advantage; and you can always get another the next time you jack in.
Owie owie owie
Well, apparently someone waltzed into Valve Software‘s computers, and waltzed out with the source code to Half-Life 2. The code and compiled binaries are all over the net, and soon script kiddies will be able to cheat at multi-player before the game is on the shelf.
I’ve always wondered what the point of cheating in online shooters is. Isn’t that the same as stating up front, “I suck so badly that I don’t have a prayer of beating anyone”?
I’ve sometimes used cheat codes in the single-player missions of some shooters, but I know I suck. 🙂
Speaking of free games…
The original developer of “Glider PRO” has released the Windows, Mac OS X and 9 versions of the classic game as freeware.
This is a game which can cause some serious productivity loss 🙂
Hako!
I love the old Ray Dunakin World Builder games. Sure, the graphics are quaint, antiquated, but the puzzles are fun, and the bad jokes just make it better. (Actually, the antiquated graphics add a bit to the charm!) Legend has it that Myst was inspired by games like these.
Unfortunately, the sounds don’t want to work right in Power Macintoshes. That’s why I was installing a System 6 emulator for OS X the other day.
SoftMac and Basilisk II can both emulate older Macs under Windows and Linux, respectively. Users of other systems probably know more about available emulators than I would.
Free games rule!
First things first…
Happy belated birthday to meiran. My calendar said your birthday was on the 27th… on the other hand, it also said you were born in 2080, so it obviously needed a bit of correcting.
Thanks to vond, jdunson, corin_wolfkin, and the Carilion crowd for showing up at Rain’s party, and thanks to yubbie for the cake on Saturday 🙂
It was a heck of a weekend – I got a little personal time in after work Thursday, but Thursday evening I drove some stuff over to Rain’s gaming venue, and finished the evening with dinner at the Tanglewood Macado’s… Friday I went from work, to bill-paying, to home to pack for Rain’s party, to Anne-Marie’s for the actual party *puff-puff, whew*.
Saturday, over to VTSFFC click-base day, where I discovered (by running demos) that the Shadowrun Duels system is fast-paced and fun, and does lend itself to use in actual RPG situations. OTOH, Benny and jdunson both found out a click-base truism: though two sides may be even in points, the side with more figures has a noticeable advantage.
Saturday night was dinner at the Blacksburg Macado’s, where we plotted to make everyone at nius‘ high school reunion jumpy and confused, and we discussed the details of wirelessly networking sex toys.
Sunday, I had a little personal time, but it got divided between a long-distance phone call, laundry and dishes, and installing MacOS 6 on my G4. (Really – and I had a good reason.) After that, dinner with rattrap, corin_wolfkin, and Rockbender. Back home, to a couple hours of private time with the lovely raininva, and finally to bed.
And after all that – I couldn’t sleep last night!
Puppet violence on the increase
A gentleman named Laz Rojas makes new character “skins” for the Voyager: Elite Force shooter game. Thanks to his work, one can clothe the Voyager characters in uniforms from any series except Enterprise, play Original Series, Next Gen, or Deep Space 9 characters, or even some unusual creations such as Tom Paris as a Blues Brother, or the feline Lieutenant M’Ress from the Animated Series. (trenn, take note!)
But with the upcoming Thunderbirds movie in the works, Rojas has apparently decided to go even farther afield… soon, Scott Tracy will be able to take out all those long-held frustrations on the other players!
(Click for a larger image)
All Rojas’ skins and practice bots can be found at his Elite Farce website, and most can be modified for use in Quake 3, No One Lives Forever, Medal of Honor, or other Q3-based games.
Of small interest
Yes, I too would like to have a 3-GHz Mac on my desktop for $899. However, despite the fact that OS X is quite capable of running on an Intel chip, here’s a nicely thought-out editorial on why that won’t happen soon.
And for those on my friends list who still need a PlayStation 2, Deals On The Web has a Sony refurbed PS2 with a subwoofer tossed in for $129. That’s only $30 bucks more than a PS1 if I remember correctly.
Some observations
Well, I’m actually feeling a bit accomplished these days. This weekend, I shook the rust from my joints and did some serious database programming, teaching it how to build (static) webpages for manual upload. Today, I forced our server (which recently graduated from peer-to-peer file sharer to real server) to take an OS upgrade that it supposedly can’t, getting better networking and filesystem performance from it.
The Matrix Has You
From the useless-but-cool department…
You can now watch your movie files in ASCII in the Terminal application of MacOS 10.2!
Here’s some shots from a certain video – each image links to a larger version:
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| Space Rogues logo | Brion (Me) |
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| Extra (ypawtows) and Kat (snidegrrl) |
So I don’t bore everyone: if you want to know how to do this, leave a comment and I’ll reply.
