STG's

To Outlive Eternity - by Poul Anderson - is a very old (1967 - older  than me!) collection of short stories. It was a wonderful book, full of memorable stories. I find it a bit hard to comment on the stories, since I'm afraid to give away any spoilers. The first story - To Outlive Eternity - is a awesome story on a ramscoop that can't stop - and will have to go beyond the local eternity to stop (I realize the phrase is a bit dorky, but, again, I'm trying to avoid spoilers). The sequence after the big wars (starting with the second story) goes through some military sequences, through the UN-man super-agent stories. They aren't only good as stand-alone tales, they also fit very well together. The tale of the Earth destroyed and the remaining man seeking vengeance is hardly unique, but it was pretty good too. As with many of the other stories, the fact this is an old book shows (no mixed gender crews!), but I felt that the prediction mistakes were far outweighed by...

I've just finished reading For The Win - by Cory Doctorow. It was preempted by The Fuller Memorandum  while I was reading it, but it was pretty interesting too. As quite usual with Doctorow's books, it is both sci-fi and contemporary, as well as having some social lesson implied. The book focus on poor, developing countries (specially India and China) and the exploited workers, focusing mostly on the gold farmers. The games are imaginary, but the description of their mechanics, characters and battles is pretty cool by itself. I wouldn't be surprised to see a Zombie Mecha (a Zombie and Mechs MMORPG in the book) style game in the future. The economy scams are particularly cool, too. The ending is a bit on the dark side, but quite adequately so. It was nice of Doctorow not to chicken out and have a forced happy ending. As usual for his books, you can download this one for free  . If you want a paper book, you can use the link to Amazon above.

I've just finished The Fuller Memorandum - by Charles Stross. I'm a big fan of Stross, and I've enjoyed many of his series and short stories. This book is the latest in the Laundry Files series. The Laundry Files were described as a mix of Lovecraft horror and spy series. I guess it also has a little geek mixed in - magic works on large form by computation, which is a large part of how things work in the Laundry's universe. When I first heard about the book, I decided to download a sample for my Kindle for PC software on my notebook (I don't have a Kindle - there were iPad rumors when the international version was released, and I'm waiting for the Android/Linux/Windows 7 pads to be available to be able to decide what's best). After reading the sample, I was hooked and immediately bought the Kindle version - my first purchase at Amazon in about 7 years  (there was a time when I bought 30-40 books a year from them, but them I started switching to e-books...

Another game that I got at a discount on Steam was Left 2 Dead 2. I played the first one, and found it reasonably fun, although it didn't have any lasting power to me - I find it fun for a few minutes, but I tend to get sick of it after a while (say, more than 30 minutes). The feeling is the same with Left 4 Dead 2. It looks great, and it is fun - but only for short periods.

I've recently completed the single player campaign of Bad Company 2. I got it from a Steam special offer (which is how I get most games these days), and I wasn't really aware that it was a regular, Call of Duty like campaign, instead of the Battlefield style multiplayer-with-bots maps. It was a pleasant surprise. The game was pretty good, with great battles and very fun destroyable walls. The M60-S is pretty awesome - you can snipe with it and seriously clear enemy groups in seconds (just like Modern Warfare MP). The story isn't particularly good, but I don't feel it was particularly bad for a FPS. I believe the campaign took about 8 hours. I haven't looked much into it, but at first glance I really didn't like the MP section. AFAIK, there is no way to do as in BF2 and BF2142 and just play the maps with bots. BTW, in the few games that I played, I can't help but think that the group coordination of the bots is actually better than the players... My...

I've had Multiplicity for years, but I just got a new computer, and thus have been using to try it out and copy my software over. One thing I didn't know is that it works well for games. I didn't have any problems nor noticed any lag, even on new games such as Battlefield: Bad Company 2. Another thing I didn't know - but didn't like either - is that if I turn off my secondary computer while it has the keyboard focus, everything gets locked up on the main computer. Turning the secondary on does make it go back, however. PS: That last problem depends on how you are doing the computer switching. I was simply switching with the mouse, with shift pressed. If you configure shortcut keys, those do switch back fine...