Take a rail shooter and subtract everything but the bosses. That is the basis for “Warning Forever.” When I first heard that as a discription of the game, I thought it sounded different, but unexciting. Then I found out the bit of genius that makes this game so worthwhile. The bosses adapt to your style. That is to say, the way you beat one boss will play a role in determining the next one. Kill it one way and its successor will have more lasers. Kill it a different way and it will have wider wingspan. And so on. This increases the replay value tremendously. You have a time limit. Read more »

In the piece that follows, I am about to reveal some of my colossal computing blunders. If you have entertaining stories from your own computer history, feel free to send them to lewis.powell@gmail.com, with “Computer Mishap” in the subject line, and, if I get a number of entertaining stories, I will publish them here on ForeverGeek. All published stories will be suitably anonymized so that you don’t lose your hacker street-cred. In all seriousness, one of the most appealing features of Linux, to me, is that it gives me ample opportunity to royally interfere with my computer’s proper functioning. I have a truckload of stories about times my computer has Read more »

Recently, I went from being a normal web user (or as normal as us internet people can be) to being a Wikipedian. Wikipedians are people who edit the Wikipedia; the open content online collaboartive encyclopedia. For those of you who aren’t familiar with wikipedia, or, if you read pages from it sometimes, but haven’t been involved with its editing, or even if you are a veteran wikipedian who is curious as to the reaction of a new member, I am going to share my experiences and observations. If your experiences and observations differ, feel free to share them via the comments. I have used Wikipedia for a while, mostly to Read more »

Many TV worlds collapsed under the weight of logic recently, as it became clear that 164 different different television shows were all figments in the imagination of an autistic child. “Tommy Westphall’s Mind: A Universe Explored” examines the results of tv series crossover/intermingling. Technically, in the material that follows there is a spoiler of sorts, so be warned that I mention the final episode of “St. Elsewhere.” Also note that being concerned over just how fictional a tv series is (a fiction within a fiction, perhaps) is probably not the best way to spend your time. Read more »

http://www.nintendo.com/pop_video.vm?url=http://media.nintendo.com/mediaFiles/e2bcbfd3-aa36-4b65-8170-b07c7083bab5.mov&width=600&height=420 Read more »

I love amazon. It’s where I do a great deal of my shopping. However, I would like to take this opportunity to warn people against pre-ordering video games from them. When F-Zero GX came out, I pre-ordered it from them; their shipping estimate was the release date, so it was all set to arrive in my mailbox a few days after it came out. Instead I had to wait a few weeks. The frustrating part was, having already ordered it, I didn’t want to cancel the order and go pick it up from a local game shop, since it could be shipped, they claimed, at any time. I learned my Read more »

“You’ll love it, it’s a lot like smash, but, you know, you can digivolve in the middle of combat,” my friend Leland says to me. “Digiwhat?” I respond, somewhat (read: very) incredulously. Ok, I’m a bit old to be into the whole Digimon thing. I really only know about Pokemon because of Super Smash Brothers Melee, but the other day I purchased “Digimon Rumble Arena 2″ for the Nintendo GameCube off of the recommendation that it was like Smash Brothers. Read more »

Who would have thought a 444 line perl script could do so much? Recently, I began the search for a content management system that met my admittedly simple needs. Basically, all I wanted was some system that would let me add blog-style news posts easily, be easy to install without, for instance, recompiling apache, and give me fairly simple but flexible control over the appearance of the site. A friend recommended “blosxom,” which, after about ten seconds, was fully installed. I then proceeded to play around with it a bit, and it has been a lot of fun to work with. Read more »

I go through phases in my usage of Linux. Or rather one phase every once in a while. It’s my minimalist phase. There is this part of me that looks at a mouse as a “new fangled” invention, or thinks I would be better off without any sort of GUI. This part of me is stupid, I’ll admit, but regardless of that, I still have these minimalist urges. In order to slake my thirst for the minimal, I experimented with a number of different window managers before settling on Fluxbox. During my non-minimalist time, Gnome has served me well (Metacity also being an excellent window manager), but when I do Read more »

Apparently the U.S. Patent Office has recently granted a patent for ethical A.I. John LaMuth was granted the patent for his ethical core of A.I. rules, which, are designed to allow for the creation of virtuous thinking machines. Few things are as exciting as when it seems like reality is approaching the technological level of science fiction. However, because every time I read a book wherein we do something this arrogant, I promise not to get snowed by it in real life, I hereby cry hubris on mankind, for thinking we can create a virtuous thinking being, and I predict it will backfire (I’m the Nostradamus of bleedingly obvious predictions). Read more »