The blog

Okay, been playing Spore since release, and wound down a bit, primarally because I'm trying to wipe out the Grox. I thought I'd give a few tips for anyone who tries such an endeavour, and to clear up some of the lies surrounding them. 1) The Grox are easy to defeat. This is what is technically known as "not true" - they are not easy. It will take a long time. By which I mean "weeks if not months of playing for hours a day" 2) The Grox only have around 600/700/1000 systems. LIES! Well, okay, maybe... per arm and not including the middle. I'd estimate them to have closer to 7000 systems. 3) Each system will only have 1 Grox planet I've encountered more systems with 4 or 5 planets than those with 1 or 2. I've even encountered one with 6 inhabited planets! 4) The cities can be destroyed with a single mega-bomb. Once again, no. This is only true of the planets which are on the outskirts of their territory - I've fought cities in the centre of area...

I've been thinking. You know that Zen Koan, "If a tree falls in a forest and no-one is around, does it make a sound?" Previously I've always said yes, since the sound is caused by the energy being transferred through the particles in the air, which is caused by the tree falling. But really, what is the sound? Is the sound the energy, the transferal of said energy, or is it the interpretation of the vibrations of the air particles? If the latter is the case then the question should not just be whether it makes a sound when no-one is around, but whether it ever makes a sound.

This is hillarious. Spore has already been cracked, making EA's security measures only hurt their legitimate customers. I'm still buying the game, because I've wanted it for the past 5 years, but it is still nice to see EA get punished.

It's a shame it's a port with some extra dungeons rather than a full-on remake (a la FF3 and 4) but still, it's awesome. If you own a DS, buy this game. You owe it to yourself. Seriously

I master teh webz, lol. Been messing around with the css, html and js again. "What have you done?" I hear you wail. Get out of my head right now. Anywho, I have now added an external links section to the sidebar, and made each section of the sidebar have a header (h2, to be precise.) Why? So now the "Blog archive" h2 looks like the others. Hurray for conformity within my code! I was also getting a lot of "font" css errors from firefox: though the pages would always validate, the web developer toolbar didnae like it (what, a firefox extension being stricter than the W3C?! Preposterous!) So, that's all fixed. I am now xhtml strict and css 2.1 uber-valid and have an external linky thing. THIS page, however, still doesn't validate, but none of the errors are mine - they're all blogger's annoying widgets (though, they may not realistically be any way to have a centralised blogging service without them.) The errors are quite interesting. Do you w...

So, yesterday I got into papercraft a bit, I can't remember how, precisely. I think I was looking for homemade Half-Life plushies , and found headcrabs made of paper. Whatever happened, it developed from there, and I spend about 4 hours downloading almost 800 megs of patterns. Most of which are awesome. For example, I found one of Okami Ameratasu (which looks mighty difficult) I also, however, found the second best thing ever: MACROSS papercraft! The best thing ever is, of course, Macross papercraft of all the VFs (particularly the 19 and 21) in P, D and B modes, rather than just P. [edit] It's interesting to note how many referrals I'm getting from torrent sites and gothic forums (though, only to the timeline, but it's not like there's much else here) I no longer need (did I ever need...) to plug my site. Hurray?

The most exciting news this year? Maybe.

http://www.doritosinstantparty.com/

http://uk.gamespot.com/news/6190987.html?sid=6190987&part=rss&subj=6190987 http://softrockhallelujah.blogspot.com/2007/11/november-first-things.html Wait a minute: Second link: Also working on a Frederick Reynal game? Awesome. I hope it's LBA3, or if not, still freaking awesome.

Done a bit more now, however - now everything (except this blog, as it uses blogger-specific code which won't validate [and the applet page, but that's not meant to be permament anyway]) is both CSS and xhtml valid! Woohoo!

If you've been watching these pages for the past few days (I can barely stop laughing at that concept) you may have noticed some changes. I've been messing about with the CSS, and making things as XHTML and CSS valid as I possibly can. The font sizes still need some dealing with. Also, for the opacity to work properly I've had to mess with the compatability a bit - most browsers today are bloat-ware, made compatible with older code. To make my pages compatible with older browsers I had to use particular tags (-moz-opacity: .65 and alpha:opacity(=65)) so my pages are neither CSS2 nor 3 valid. Oh wells.