Success downloading new Opera! Last night I kept getting mirrors sending .rpm as RealAudio, so it tried to play the installer #

Fires

• Mt Wilson still intact for now! Status, Towercam. #
• Image from Mt. Wilson Observatory Towercam at 12:06 pm. Observatory website still up, but towercam very slow. #
• Mt. Wilson Towercam showing lots of smoke: 12:21 was the last image I could get. #
• Definitely cooler today, but humidity & smoke since the wind changed make it feel worse outside. #
• Mt. Wilson good news: smoke on towercam was from backfires. Bad: website offline, cam not updating. Status on backup server. #
• RT @ThisIsTrue: Awesome photo! Los Angeles Fires Seen From Space via @ecolady #nasa #jpl #stationfire #

Fans even went in and recolored the screenshots to show what they think it should look like. The link above is an article where one of the game designers goes through and, over and over, points out, “Sure, you might like that better, but it interferes with gameplay.” You know, things like being able to tell the skeletons from the zombies — or from your teammates in a multiplayer game.

Oh, and to the fan who captioned a (relatively) colorful shot with “wow gayness” — I believe the word you’re looking for is gaiety.

(via Comics Should Be Good)

CNET UK presents The 30 dumbest videogame titles ever, including “Spanky’s Quest,” “Ninjabread Man,” “How to Be a Complete Bastard,” “Touch Dic” and “Attack of the Mutant Camels.” (via Slashdot).

Cowboy Bebop at His Computer — examples of media articles (especially about pop culture) in which the reporters (and editors) clearly didn’t do their research. The title comes from a caption on a still from Cowboy Bebop. That’s not the character’s name, and the character in question is female. It probably is her computer, though.

Archeophone Records: Actionable Offenses: Indecent Phonograph Recordings from the 1890s. Comedians telling bawdy stories, recorded on wax cylinders. The write-up is PG, though the track list looks to be at least PG-13. Looked up after reading NY Times’ article on voice recordings from 1860 (recorded with ink on paper), which is also worth a read. (via Slashdot)

Edit: Forgot to list the (temporary?) resurrection of 1994-era home.mcom.com, the website of what was then Mosaic Communications Corporation and would soon be renamed Netscape. Subsequently picked up by Boing Boing and Slashdot. For more old web browsers, check out the Browser Archive at evolt.org. (via Justin Mason)

Yes, we found both Waldo and Carmen Sandiego—twice! We didn’t even need a GPS! (And who would have guessed that she’d be in San Diego?)

Now if we’d only found them together…

Edit: a CBR thread pointed me to this piece of fan art that simply must be seen!

Given that the lawsuit was basically the equivalent of suing pencil manufacturers because they could potentially be used to draw Spider-Man, it’s good to see that Marvel didn’t win (though a precedent-setting loss for Marvel might’ve been better in the long run).

(via Slashdot)

The graphics are nice, and apparently they’ve put together a very elaborate conversation engine, but I have to wonder who this will really appeal to. The way she’s described she’s pretty high-maintenance—why go to all that effort when you don’t get the benefit of a real person?

Of course, there are other possibilities for the technology:

Vivienne, for instance, will double as a translator for travelers. Type in the desired words in English while traveling and, with additional programming in the next few months, her synthesized voice will coo it back in Chinese, Japanese, Korean, German, Spanish or Italian.

Just as games have driven desktop computing to keep pushing the envelope, this could lead the way toward the conversational interfaces that are so prevalent in science-fiction.

I’ve played and enjoyed games 4-7, and I’d heard bad things about #8, so I went straight to #9. So far it’s interesting and immersive, although there are some things about it that are really frustrating.

I like the new decision-tree class system, where you start out as a fighter or an initiate magic user and specialize more and more over the course of the game. I’ve played computer RPGs that didn’t even have classes, and I’ve always thought that the idea was rather limiting and oversimplifying.

The graphics are very immersive, and there’s ambient sound down to conversations you can overhear in taverns, or sounds of smithing on the edge of a town. They’ve worked very hard to create realistic towns, for instance.

The problem is that a lot of the extra touches of verisimilitude don’t enhance the game play, and many even detract from it. It’s realistic that the people you would be looking for to learn skills from wouldn’t always be in the same place, so it makes sense for them to be walking around town. But it makes them hard to find, especially since there’s no way to identify someone from a distance. Similarly, in MM6 and MM7, nearly all objects – or at least all objects of certain common types, like barrels, crates, cabinets, etc. – were usable. Even if a drawer was empty, it would open. Well, cabinets, crates, barrels and the like are all over the place, but I’ve found just one that actually reacted to anything I tried to do.

My second major frustration with the game design is the crippled mapping system. In MM6 and MM7, you had a constant automap in the corner of the screen that showed the area around you, and you could zoom the automap in or out as needed. Bringing up the map screen showed you a larger view of what you had seen so far, and you could zoom and scroll to show the entire area at once. Well, now the automap is gone, and the map screen will neither scroll nor zoom. It’s not quite useless, since I do keep popping up the map screen whenever my party gets turned around. And to make matters worse, they’ve crippled the Wizard Eye spell as well. Previously it would place markers on the automap to indicate hostile or friendly creatures, treasures, and so on, and would last something like an hour per skill level in the appropriate magic sphere. It was a standard spell for setting foot in a dungeon or a new land area. Now it brings up a radar-type view with a number of symbols that I have yet to identify… and lasts for only 20 minutes. Now this is internal game time, not real time, so it really doesn’t last very long.

Finally, whoever designed the interface actually made it less usable than before. For example, the spell casting system used to display a page for each sphere of magic, with each spell in a particular place on its page. This meant it was easy to locate the spell when you wanted to cast it. Now, since there are no spell spheres (a move that I like, actually), it displays all the spells on a single list… in alphabetical order, resorting every time you learn a new spell. So one character might have “Heal” in the third position on page one, while another character with more spells might have it in the fifth position on page two… until you teach that character a new spell. So every time you cast a spell, you have to look for it first.

Anyway, despite these problems, it did get me to play all day yesterday and most of this morning (at which point I realized the afternoon would have to be set aside for the real world), and I expect it to be fun and interesting enough to keep playing a couple of times a week.