Getting Started with Dwarf Fortress
So a few years ago a good friend of mine wrote a series of tutorials on the most complex video game ever created: Dwarf Fortress. His tutorials gave him fame within Dwarf Fortress Circles and thanks to that O'Reilly approached him late last year to ask him to write a comprehensive guide on it in a published media format.
The game is always in a state of flux so it was also a prime candidate for O'Reilly to start testing out a new method of keeping their books up to date using version control using Subversion and O'Reilly's rapid publishing framework.
Anyway, the book came in April and there has been a lot of critiques by people commenting about the book being published without approval from Toady (the developer of the game) - but these are just internet scum who don't do their research, as if they even bothered to look at the free preview on Amazon.com they'd see that the book has a forward written by Toady himself!
Anyway, now after defending his honor… As Dwarf Fortress is highly verbose in every interaction that occurs in the game, Peter has told me some of the most entertaining stories based on events that have happened in his fortresses based on essentially random chains of events, one of my favorites being the story of a troll wondering into a fortress that starts to attack an unarmed dwarf with a club, the dwarf then wrestles the club from the troll where upon the troll rearms itself with a stray sock that fell from the dwarf during the wrestle, then precedes to flap the sock at the dwarf resulting in both bewilderment and light bruising.
Anyway, you can buy the book in both print and ebook formats from O'Reilly
The Author's twitter: @TinyPirate
Also!!!
If you're in Wellington and order a print copy, i can arrange to have your book signed for free by the author himself!!!
That's AMAZING!!!
An epic week for television
It's that time of year again where some of my old favourite tv shows come back on! Plus we get some new tv shows to watch too!
Some shows i'm especially lookigng forward to are Fringe and Criminal minds.. Both of which ended their previous seasons with some stellar cliffhangers! I blogged about Fringe in an earlier blog post and draw some parallells (funny if you've watched Fringe) to a series of books I've read, read it here.
In Criminal minds, Tim Curry played an awesome role in the series final, it was great to see a world class actor perform and I can't wait to see him in the new season that started screening today.
Just started on Monday was HBO's new show Boardwalk Empire. I don't know what it is about HBO but they have put out some really awesome TV shows.. Sopranos, The Wire, True Blood to name a few, Boardwalk Empire stars Steve Buscemi, screenwritten and produced by Terence Winter (Sopranos) and the first episode was directed by Martin Scorsese. Boardwalk Empire is set in 1920 Atlantic City at the dawn of proabition in America. In typical HBO style it really doesn't leave much to the imagination, nudity, gore and the acting was beautiful. Go and watch it.
To list some of the shows that are coming back this week, in no particular order of preference:
- House
- Criminal Minds
- Bones
- The Big Bang Theory
- 30 Rock
- Greys Anatomy
- The Office (US)
- Fringe
- Smallville
Next week starting again is:
- The Simpsons
- Family Guy
- Stargate Universe
How do i keep track of all of these shows and when they screen?
I use a free TV Calandar hosted by a UK based web development company called Pogdesign, it pulls data for hundreds of TV shows that you can include in your filter, set your timezone and get the local screening times - check it out:
That's about all for now... off to watch some tv shows...
Peace!
Improve your digital privacy
In case you were not aware, when you visit a website, use your cell phone, participate in company loyalty programs, using twitter, Facebook or any kind of social media. Hey you're willingly compromising your privacy. Though personally I think privacy isn't compromised as such, it's more of a linear scale in that we trade off acceptable amounts of our privacy for convenience.
Privacy is something which has been described as a commodity that is hard to hold onto in this day and age.
Frank. M . Ahearn teaches how to reclaim privacy in this digitally enabled age. By following his (somewhat over-zealous) advice you'll be able to fall off the grid.
He authored a book with Eileen C. Horan entitled "How to disappear: erase your digital footprint, leave false trails, and vanish without a trace" - Quite a catchy title and very apt for the very privacy concerned individual.
In my experience those who are really privacy concerned have nothing that any marketer would value as they are in fact just an outlier and therefore help very little with statistics. Modern society seems to be geared up to deal with and accept casual tradeoffs of privacy for ease - and I personally am subscribed to this. You're reading my blog and know I have a twitter, I'm willingly giving a plethora of information about myself out into the ether that is the Digital Age, but hey, who really cares about what Mark is doing?
Take a look at the book, it makes for an interesting read.
Peace.
My favourite scifi author
My favourite Science Fiction writer is Peter. F. Hamilton. There are several other close contenders in my eyes - to name a few: Alastair Reynolds, Ian. M . Banks and Stephen Baxter. But none of these others quite appeal to my particular taste as much as the work of Hamilton. I have read all of his books and thoroughly enjoyed them.
I should start by first explaining that I got into Hamilton’s work completely by accident, I purchased a book on New Zealand’s EBay-equivalent (TradeMe) and the seller had sent me the wrong book. The book that arrived was “Pandora’s Star” by none other than the author this blog entry is about. The seller had sent my book somewhere else and somebody else’s book to me.
I started to read Pandora's Star and one chapter in i was hooked! Unfortunately I had to return the book to the seller as they wanted to send it to its rightful owner, very reluctantly I packaged it back up and sent it on its way.
Over the next couple of weeks I went to the library to try and find the book, all the libraries had the second book in this saga “Judas Unchained”, but none seemed to have “Pandora’s Star” (this has actually happened quite a lot to me with other authors too – I think it’s a reflection on the state of the public library system in New Zealand – but that’s a story for another day).
After a lot of looking I finally found the book and continued to read it. Rather than sitting here and giving you a plot summary – like most bloggers about books seem to do - (I can’t for the life of me work out why! – Nobody can explain the books quite like the author wrote it - so why spoil it for a potential reader) - I’m going to simply give a brief background and leave the rest up to Hamilton.
Part of what makes this series of great interest to me is the “Immortality for Everyone” principle - everybody in this universe can live forever due to two technological concepts: Rejuvenation treatment (reversing aging) or with a memory crystal implanted in the brain (meaning that in the event of brain death memories can be extracted and placed into a new living brain).
Not only does Hamilton go into great depth explaining the mechanisms behind the technology used in the books, he takes it further and also explores the implications that such wonderful technology could have on society. Hamilton also explores very diverse and interesting themes such as: sexuality, war, religion and politics as well as several other concepts you would expect to find in any science fiction novel: Artificial Intelligence, space-travel, man-machine integration and aliens, all of which cleverly complement each other to make his work a real winner in my opinion.
Go out and find this author, you won’t regret it.
Fringe & The Entire and the Rose
About half an hour ago I finished watching season 2 of the TV show Fringe. I started watching season 1 just over a week ago and got completely hooked – I’ve been watching them every night after work for the past week!
As we got deeper into the thick of Fringe and the parallel world situation arose, I was reminded of a series of science fiction books I read last year by Kay Kenyon titled “The Entire and the Rose”.
There is a lot of similarity between the two: only one world can exist, protecting the knowledge of how to move between, inter-worldly wars and characters learning to live in a foreign universe. (there are probably a lot more than this but these spring to mind immediately)
For those fans of Fringe, take a look into the Kay Kenyon books I mentioned, the first one is called “Bright of the Sky” – conversely, if you’re a fan of The Entire and the Rose and have not already seen Fringe, take a look at it.
Meanwhile I’m looking forward to season 3 of Fringe starting next month.
EOF