Stolen from elsewhere

In Google Reader, input:

up,up,down,down,left,right,left,right,b,a.

Planet Roguelike & The Oblong

Planet Roguelike is a new feed aggregator for roguelikes featuring a number of roguelike blogs that Altefcat recently announced on rec.games.roguelike.development, that you may wish to have a look at. It has all the usual suspects, but a few new blogs that I wasn't aware of...

including the Oblong, which features an as yet unnamed roguelike under development by Snut. I've included a screen shot from the left of the impressive 3d engine he's building the game with. Please note that these levels are procedurally generated...

Google Reader Century

And while we're on the Google Reader tips section, if you were wondering which 100 blogs you should be reading, here's the list. With mathematical proofs.

Having gone through the part of the list, it appears more to be a 'here's a list of blogs that will mention this as a news item.' I'm not sure who benefits more here: the blogs, or Carnegie Mellon.

[Edit: This is 2006 data, so probably not a good list to base your evidence from. But with a good understanding of Cascade theory and some more up to date samples, I'm sure you can reproduce your own list.]

Google Reader Australis

I would like to point out that while I raved about Google Reader in a recent post, I've just discovered the down side. Or at least the downside of living in Australia.

It's not so much of a case of you northern hemisphere types vs. us southern hemisphere types (which is what I can blame my lack of productivity in the NaNoWriMo, as we had superb weather yesterday - luckily today is properly rainy). It's you east of the Pacific Ocean timezones vs. west of the Pacific Ocean time zones.

I would have read maybe 10-15 articles yesterday in reader, during the day. And then I get up this morning and have to go through 100+ of the damn things, due to the beavering away of the Western hemisphere game industry journalism machines during our night. I can see the supposed 'time-efficiency wins' I talked about being eroded quickly by the necessity of getting up an hour earlier just to read everything. I mean, I still have 20 tabs open from where the article didn't have quite enough information shown in Reader, and I've been doing this for 45 minutes already.

[Edit: Blogspot is a little time-zone impaired. It was 8:15 am when I posted this.]

Leave Neal Stephenson Alone!

I mean, look at what he's done for you. Saying he's a pastiche of Thomas Pynchon and pointing out he likes to finish stories abruptly is like comparing Christopher Marlowe to Shakespeare and, besides, you know, he should have learned to knife fight.

Sure, you loved him when he came out with Snow Crash, and put him up on a geek-culture pedestal, but now you're just using him. I don't know whether it was the fact the Cryptonomicon was too much like Gravity's Rainbow, or the Baroque cycle meant you had to learn all these new words and brush up on your 18th century history of geekdom. Or maybe you discovered Iain M. Banks and Alistair Reynolds, and have ended up in the post-singularity cyberthulhu chick-lit that is Charles Stross. Sure, you bag on Iain M. Banks too: for not writing enough Culture novels - but you just say each book wasn't as good as the previous one, or that he's just ripping off Orion's Arm - and Alistair Reynolds is, you know, rewriting the same great novel again and again and again. But nothing feels as good as kicking the big guy. Heck, you might just go deface his pretentious art house wiki again.

So leave Neal Stephenson alone!

(To be read while crying on Youtube, preferably in front of a sheet)

Recommended reading:

Neal Stephenson
Snow Crash
Cryptonomicon
The Baroque Cycle: Quicksilver, The Confusion, The System of the World

Thomas Pynchon
Gravity's Rainbow

Charles Stross
The Atrocity Archives
The Jennifer Morgue
Halting State
A Colder War (free to read online)

Alistair Reynolds
Revelation Space
Redemption Ark
Absolution Gap
The Prefect

Iain M. Banks
Consider Phlebas
Use of Weapons
Inversions

(This is just a selection of the above authors work. My apologies for any hurt that may have been involved in writing this review.)

Google Reader

Yesterday morning, I suddenly looked at the Internet differently.

I woke up, checked the usual sites I go to, and then thought 'Hang on; I usually just click through a whole lot of sites checking whether they have any new content.

I mean, they probably have RSS feeds, but even the built-in RSS reader in Firefox isn't that flash hot.

I'll google for something - online so I can use it from different machines.'

And link number one was Google Reader.

I've gone from 20+ links in my Firebox bookmarks bar to 10, a third of which are websites for my wife to check the current weather on and exchange rate on, and the rest short cuts to the various Google tools I use.

And I've started reading the Internet on one screen. What's more every time I find someone saying something intelligent, I'll add their blog to Google Reader. I'm up to 38 links and growing fast. And I'm so much more time efficient I end up having to write blog entries to fill up the rest of my day.

Has anyone else had this revelation yet?

And on the gripping hand...

Its worthwhile pointing out that so much of what I just said feeds into concepts central to Orion's Arm which is one of those places on the net that is filled with so much goddamn content it becomes impossible to read, except in short bites.

And its a great primer for Charles Stross and makes you think Iain Banks has been cribbing his ideas from somewhere...

Books He Recommends

Sirlin just recently published a list of books he recommends. While I don't necessarily agree with the sentiment that you can improve yourself by reading, it is a great list.

I'll have to pick up some stuff that's on there, particularly the Feynman, who've I read a lot on when researching the American nuclear program, but haven't read especially much written by him.

I'll also have to start compiling my own recommendations at some point.

Great Science Fiction

I'm an addict, but I'm really picky about what I read - just found a great sf book review site that I'll be trawling through shortly.

Nothing to do with roguelike game development, until I write that sf crashed on an alien planet roguelike I've always wanted to (that's right after the end-of-millennium pre-apocalypse real time strategy game I'm also working on).