2005 11 28 - Mon
Ladies and Gentlemen,
Please welcome
Torched Turf to the world. Torched Turf is based on the standard old "artillery" style of computer game, but with a few new elements that make it stand out on its own.
Torched Turf was created for the
iDevGames Original Mac Game Cup contest. The terms of the contest call for a game with one complete, playable level, and currently that's what we've got. In other words, despite its 1.0 status, Torched Turf is still a work in progress, and will be enhanced further in the future.
In the meantime, download the
Mac version or the
Windows version and give it a try! Later, sometime between Dec 1 2005 and Dec 15 2005, be sure to go
vote for this or any other game you feel is a worthy winner.
I am proud to consider myself a member of this world-spanning team of like-minded would-be game-builders, and hope that the release of Torched Turf paves the way for yet more games featuring exploding sheep.
2005 11 21 - Mon
posted by jack at 12:14 CET in / politics 
The notion that
electronic voting machines without paper trails are dangerous to democracy is something that's been
talked about before. Now, a
General Accountability Office report shows pretty clearly that there were lots of irregularities in the 2004 U.S. elections, connected to the use of electronic voting machines.
Regardless of your political affiliations, regardless of whether you believe that Bush & co stole the elections, it's important to understand that
electronic voting machines without paper trails produce unverifiable results. The simple fact is the
actual results of last year's elections are, inherently,
UNKNOWABLE. There is simply no way to know how many people voted, or for which candidates they voted.
This goes beyond the issues of
"hanging chads" that vexed us after the 2000 elections; Then, you could at least theorize the existence of a person or device that could divine the intent of the voter with a high degree of precision. With unverifiable electronic voting machines, it's just a total crapshoot. The GAO report cites several known cases where large numbers of votes went to the wrong candidates, which were supposedly "fixed" afterwards. The problem is, how many
unknown, similar cases are there? We'll just never know.
Again, this is an issue for EVERYONE concerned with the preservation of American democracy, regardless of party ties. This time it may have been criminal, unethical Republican asshats who used some wide-open holes the security of these machines to secure elections for their candidates; Next time it could be criminal, unethical Democratic asshats doing the same! For that matter, it may be that BOTH parties had people trying to fake out the voting machines in 2004, and that the Republicans just did a better job at it. Who knows?
2005 11 14 - Mon
I'm pleased to announce the release of spinvaders 1.0.0!
The main change in this release is the introduction of fantastic music and sound effects courtesy of
David Tweet. Collaborating with David on this release has produced fantastic results. It's almost like a whole new game!
Also new for this release is that spinvaders is now open source, with its own
project hosted at sourceforge. This means that not only can Mac and Windows users download a precompiled package, now users of BSD, Linux, or other unixy platforms can download the source and all its dependencies (which aren't too terribly many) and run it on their platforms as well.
Here's where to get it:
Installation is the same as before: The Mac version is in a disk image; you can copy the enclosed application and run it from wherever you like. The Windows version is a zip file containing a directory; unpack the directory wherever you like, and run it by starting "spinvaders.exe" from within the directory.
