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. Your ship is vulnerable at a one pixel area. If you are hit in that area, you die, are respawned, and lose 20 seconds. Each boss you beat will restore some time. You keep going until time runs out. That’s it. Simple, elegant, fun. The game is small, and free to download.

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 been effectively inoperable as a direct result of my uninformedly mucking about with things.

The reason I like that so much is because, when it comes down to it, I learn about computers best by fixing things that I broke. I don’t sit down and think, “Ok, I’m going to learn about how this configuration file is structured” or “Let me study and understand the intracacies of the login sequence.” However because I sudo nano without proper regard for what I am doing, I will sometimes make it impossible to, say, login. In those circumstances I do have the inclination (and often a pressing need) to fix it.
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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 satisfy personal curiosity about some topic I wasn’t clear on or some term I’d heard mentioned. One of the people who lives on my floor in my dorm had taken a more active role in the Wikipedia community, fixing typos, adding content, and so on.

It was at his suggestion that I got a user account, and began participating in the wikipedia process. At first, I was participating oblivious of the community that exists; as I imagine most first time editors do. I think the nature of the wikipedia encourages this type of participation, initially, and the result has a profound effect on how one responds to discovering the community of editors.
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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.
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Recently, whilst in a local video game retailer, purchasing WarioWare Mega Party Games, an excellent gamecube rejuvinator, I was asked by the customer service representative if I would like to pre-order the upcoming gamecube Zelda title.

“[Heck] yeah, I’ll preorder that [expletive deleted],” I exclaimed, temporarily unaware of the small children milling about the store. That’s right, I was so excited about a new zelda game, I swore loudly in front of small children.

Does this game justify that level of excitement? Well, Watch the video and decide for yourself.
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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 lesson, or so I thought. Until Guardian Heroes Advance came onto my radar. Guardian Heroes, for the Sega Saturn, is one of the best games I have ever played. Treasure is one best game developers ever. So, from the comfort of my home, I foolishly pre-ordered Guardian Heroes Advance (the sequel to the Saturn Game, for the GBA) from Amazon.
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“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.
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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.

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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 without an environment, I find that fluxbox does exactly as much as I want it to.

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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).

Here is the actual patent.

Here is a summary for those curious as to what, precisely the ten laws are. John LaMuth patented the following, in his endeavor to create virtuous A.I:

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Leave it to Gabe and Tycho, of Penny Arcade fame to decide to throw a massive gaming exposition just because they wanted to attend one.

If you are able to attend this, and you’re the sort of gaming geek who thinks that it would be fun to, well, be completely immersed in video games for a while, you should support it.

What sort of things are likely to go on at this “exposition”? Well:

Whatever your obsession, chances are good that we will have something to interest you – it only starts with rooms for tabletop gaming, and a robust LAN rocking the newest Unreal Tournament or Battlefield games. Linked consoles for Mario Kart, Crimson Skies or Splinter Cell. Want to hear how to break into the industry? Stop by one of our many industry panels. Want to pitch your game ideas to the pros? This is also something we have.

I, sadly, cannot make it to Washington State, August 28th and 29th. I live in New York, and don’t like forty hour drives. But any of you who are closer than 2,600 miles away should look into going. And if you get a lot of cool stuff while you’re there, feel free to share it with me.

Pre-registration for the event is closed, but you can still buy passes at the door.

Voldemort has been cast, and evil, thy name be Ralph Fiennes.

So, we now know who will play the ultimate enemy for Potter in the next few movies. I don’t have a strong opinion on this, but perhaps other people want to comment on who they thought should have been it, or how excited they are about this turn of events in the comments.

UPDDATE: Because I was originally unclear, it is worth mentioning that Voldemort is a character in the phenomenally popular Harry Potter series. Harry’s arch-foe, in fact. If this explanation was needed, you have some reading and/or movie watching to do.

There is a warm place reserved in my heart for the geekery that got me through junior high and high school. That particular brand of pseudo-social activity was Dungeons and Dragons, and, I loved it despite its quirks. Which is why I have such appreciation for comics that make fun of it in a warm and knowing way.

Order of the Stick chronicles a band of merry stick figures, an adventuring party, if you will, who are playing a somewhat self-aware game of dungeons and dragons.

When my friends and I played D&D, Game mechanics oft-times caused us to behave oddly, and Rich Burlew (maker of the comic) captures oddities like that with comical genius.

Check out this comic if you’re the sort of person who can appreciate jokes about failing your spot check.

Sometimes, you just really need to read a comic about dinosaurs stomping on things. That’s where Qwantz comes into play. See, pretty much every day, you can check Qwantz and find a new comic about Dinosaurs crushing things.

To be fair, its the same dinosaurs every day, crushing the same things; but somehow it remains fresh and interesting. Seriously.

Sometimes the humor is intellectual. Other times, it teaches us moral lessons. But, you might want to just start from the beginning.

Gitaroo Man might just be the most insane game I’ve ever played.

In this Playstation 2 rhythm action game you are U-1, a loser school boy with an annoying dog. But, low and behold, you can turn into a Gitaroo Man, which means that you get a magical guitar and costume change, and fight villains/win a lady’s heart/become the ultimate gitaroo man.

The game has a unique spin on the rhythm action genre, graphics reminiscent of, but far superior to, Parappa’s, and fun animations in the background to distract you from doing well. The music is good, and the gameplay is straightforward, but challenging.

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This article by sci-fi author Neal Stephenson, is a very interesting and insightful read on the world of user interfaces. Though a bit dated (covers up through roughly 1999), it is still worth the few hours it will take you to read it, and it is available for free on the internet.

Stephenson on the idea that one could sell an OS to a consumer:

Even those few who actually understood what a computer operating system was were apt to think of it as a fantastically arcane engineering prodigy, like a breeder reactor or a U-2 spy plane, and not something that could ever be (in the parlance of high-tech) “productized.”