Anna and the Bunches

Puzzling - that is, solving puzzles recreationally - is a hobby of mine. I enjoy it immensely, although I enjoy some puzzles much more than others. I enjoy the sorts of puzzles that involve both intuitive leaps and a combination of generalized and specialized knowledge. The sorts of puzzles that happen at the MIT Mystery Hunt are probably the best examples of puzzles I really enjoy (and, indeed, I had a lot of fun at my first Puzzle Hunt this year).

So, I was playing around with the ‘sparks’ feature on Google+. Since I’ve been working with OpenGL lately, I made a spark for it. On that spark, I came across this thread, which gave me this advice:A general rule of thumb is that if a tutorial contains calls to glBegin, glEnd and/or any of the glTexEnv functions then it’s old and you should avoid it.Now, I wouldn’t generally trust a single person on the Internet with nothing to recommend them, but I’m seeing this advice repeated in several places now that I know to look.

Over on Shamus Young’s blog, he recently said this when talking about a programming project of his:One of the things I like about this project is that it is uncluttered by goofy, awkwardly-designed libraries.Shamus is working on a procedurally-generated 3D world using OpenGL. Now, I know what he means. He is trying to avoid relying on things like graphics and physics engines, or 3D model importers, or any of a number of other tools that often have asinine and byzantine APIs.

The TreeWars project is a week and a half old (at the time of this writing). It’s come a long way; in its current form, it actually looks pretty neat:There are now stats, and hit points, and the basic gameplay mechanic is in place. I’ve also laid the groundwork for some more complex gameplay, as well. Of course, I haven’t talked about gameplay all that much yet - we’ll get to that at some point, I’m sure.

In D&D Post-mortem, I talk about my experiences running D&D 4e games, about 4e as a whole, and about collaborative storytelling in general.Our most recent D&D session was pretty short - a small amount of cave exploration, and a single encounter. During that encounter, however, a few things happened that highlighted two fundamentally different approaches to roleplaying games. The scenario in question was this: the party’s Wizard wanted to use Mage Hand to disarm an enemy spellcaster.

Doctor Who is off the air until September, and a number of questions remain unanswered. But just because we don’t get any new Who for three months doesn’t mean we have to stop talking about it! So here is my chance to answer all of your burning questions. Because I know everything that’s going to happen in the second half of series 6. All the reveals.Spoiler Warning for everything, up to and including A Good Man Goes to War, and for the rest of the series too, if I’m right!

My goal is two posts a week - typically, one on Wednesday and one on the weekend. This is usually a pretty easy goal to obtain - it doesn’t take too much of my free time to churn out two posts between 750 and 1500 words. And yet, there almost wasn’t a post this weekend. Was I playing Minecraft? Nope.I was writing code.Programming is something I’ve always wanted to do professionally, but somehow I managed to end up doing enterprise technical support instead.

The Rambling Review is a series where I review games, books, movies, and TV series, both new and old, in a rambling, disorganized style.“Can video games be art?” is one of those questions that has been discussed to death. Of course, the problem domain of defining art is a notoriously snare-laden landscape. But by almost any definition, it is clear from nearly the beginning of the game Braid that it is a conscious attempt to argue the case that video games can be art.

I have been a fan of The Escapist for a long time. I’ve been watching Zero Punctuation almost since it began. I’ve been following Unskippable, Experienced Points, and Stolen Pixels for a long time as well. And I regularly browse around the site, watching videos and reading columns that look interesting. You could say I’m a fairly loyal customer of The Escapist.But I’ve had it. I can’t stand it any more.

Today’s post was going to be a review of Braid. But Duke Nukem Forever was released yesterday, and, well… I have comments. So, next week: Braid. Now: Angry Feminist Rant.Trigger Warning: descriptions of rape and violence ahead. Please do not read if these things may be harmful to you.First, the backstory - Duke Nukem Forever was released after a decade of anticipation and shifting release dates, with the game being dropped and picked up by development houses and publishers along the way.