Hagrimm

For those not in the know, Dwarf Fortress plays pretty much like a combination of Nethack and The Sims, with a touch of that really old dig-and-collect-diamonds-game of which I do not remember the name. You choose a spot in the huge randomly generated world and carve huge fortress underground, build rooms, build production facilities, mine, build furniture, build weapons and fortifications to ward off invading goblins and try to keep the dwarves happy. Then one of the little buggers goes crazy, kicks the forge into pieces and kills seven people, and half of your population starves to death because your experimental irrigation system accidentally flooded the underground fields, and with everyone else hunting rats for food nobody has time to clean up the dead rotting bodies, whose stench in a confined underground space pushes more of the already tense dwarves over the edge and into the bottomless gorge of madness, creating more dead bodies, until finally the goblins show up to let the survivors out of their misery.

I happened upon the Saga of Boatmurdered, and finding it hilarious, decided to learn the ridiculously overcomplicated interface and try the game myself. I was pretty much instantly hooked to the huge, mad engineering projects. I am reminded of Lego blocks. The game hands you a rather large set of tiny pieces and you are then expected to combine them in complex ways to produce something useful. You can dig canals, build walls and construct pumps, and if you spend enough time you can build a giant artificial lake with switch-operated floodgates to flush your enemies into a gorge with spikes at the bottom.

And the world actually manages to respond appropriately to pretty much everything the player thinks up. The dwarves have individual, if simple, personalities, and can react to things that happen to them. If a dwarf has miscarriage, her husband gets killed in a cave-in and she has to eat her cat for sustenance, she might eventually become terminally depressed and drown herself. And they remember major occurrences. Boatmurdered had dwarves decorating everything with images of elephants murdering dwarves and occasionally screaming or burning.

I've always wanted to solve problems by digging a tunnel.

it's 2008 now. The future actually started about seven years ago. And the latest innovations in locomotive technology are Segways and hybrids. Those robot legs that you wear over your real legs look pretty neat, but they're still a long way from a huge yellow exo-skeleton you can wrestle aliens with. With which you can wrestle aliens.

You'd expect creating a cheap mass-producible flying machine would be, if not easy, entirely possible to achieve during the over five hundred years that have passed since Leonardo da Vinci drew several nearly functional blueprints. But they always seem to hover somewhere twenty years from now. Maybe we'll have them after the singularity.

After several weeks and distros, I am once more running Ubuntu. The Gentoo auto-installer didn't work. Sabayon failed to initialize kernel unless I disabled ACPI. Mandriva was just diabolically slow, possibly a optimization issue of some kind. Debian was pretty good, but Ubuntu made installing software easier. This feels like coming home again.

Whee! Finally got the scanner I had ordered. This will make several things much, much less complicated. Now if only the curséd contraption would support or be supported by Debian. Alas, such is not the way of life. Perhaps someday.