The tracks go off in this direction...

Stack trace… and hours later. Somewhere in here is a problem.

:(

Working on the site: Part 2

Looks like this is going to be a trilogy. Meh. How about some economics to inform and delight?

This recent talk by Robert Reich (Secretary of Labor under President Clinton) is really quite good. Speaking at Google, Reich outlines, simply and succinctly, some of the gross imbalances in the current economic model and how those led to the current situation. A worthwhile 57 minutes.

Working on the site

So it might get messy… and a little weird at times. If things look really terrible, just wait a second and hit refresh — I should have fixed whatever it will have been by then.

Why not watch this remix of Astra Taylor’s talk “The Unschooled Life” in the mean time?

I’ll add a few more videos throughout the day to ease the pains. I should be done with the updates by the end of the day.

Thanks for your patience.

Politico

I would rather not turn this into yet another blog ranting about politics, so instead I’ll just embed videos. Fault Lines: The Top 1% via AlJeezera:

Short break

Sew buttons… Ok, well I really wanted this latest version of Kaizer out by now, but I’m in the middle of moving and will have to put off working on it for a week or two while the actual move goes down.

It’s also taking so long because:

A) I won’t release a version that has not been properly tested (which, given the amount of changes and possible captain combinations, can take a while);

B) There are a lot of little bugs to fix and fine tuning-ings to do;

C) It’s incredibly difficult to accurately gauge how long things are going to take, wish I was better at it, but, again, I’m still learning.

The good news? Apparently Kaizer works fine under Linux (with the aid of Wine).

Granted, there are a few quirks, but nothing killer.

Hazzah!

Smart Gamification via Google

I was looking through google’s recent tech talks and found this one covering “gamification” and player interation in general. Good stuff, and highly recommended for those interested in audience engagment, player types, reward schedules and such.

Bit o' News

Hey all!

Quick update to inform you that the Kaizer downloads are no longer going to be hosted here :( . Squarespace apparently has a 20 MB limit and my games are… well, certainly not under that.

What’s that mean? Very simple: All future versions will be primarily hosted by indieDB. But what if indieDB ever went down? Well, the very nice people at FilePlanet have also taken a liking to Kaizer and allowed me some space there. And I’ll be working on getting a few more mirrors (i.e. extra download links) set up after the next version.

What else? I should point out that I am still able to host the web version of the game (it’s much smaller) so you’ll still be able to access it (and now past versions, in case you prefer those — there will be links on the Kaizer sidebar) wherever you may be.*

And… The game is damn near there. Just gotta put up this blasted wallpaper, spackle some bits and carpet the ceiling fan.

Ciao.

* “…Wherever you may be” does not, at the moment, include Linux computers. But I have heard Unity is making some good progress on their Linux ports, so hopefully very soon.