The Lair

Desktop TD 1.5 was released a couple of days ago. I’ve been obsessed with that game for a while now – it’s taken the place of Tetris and a few other games that I play to switch jobs for short sharp spurts. A bit of background, the creator recently left his real job to focus on online games. As such, I realized that some degree of commercialization was inevitable – but I was optimistic about the gameplay being mostly unaffected.

I think I was wrong. There has been a mini-furore about the over-commercialization of the game. Personally, I don’t care about the tiny Ks floating around the screen or the rather ostentatious kongregate pass on the desktop background. What annoys me the most is that offline play (that is, downloading the swf and playing offline) has now been disabled. I’m going back to 1.2b.

In other news, I’ve written recently about downloading Safari – the browser formerly available only on Apple’s own Mac OSX. I have to say that my experience so far has been surprisingly positive. It’s quick to load and minimalistic; two useful traits for an application which would spend a lot of time on my desktop. Unfortunately, Safari 3.0.2 beta horribly mangles proxy support (again!). So I looked around a little bit and found this nifty Webkit Nightly Download site. Another great reason to run a nightly build instead of the beta – a new web inspector which looks very tasty indeed.

And completely randomly; it was Paul Gallico who spake thusly – “No one can be as calculatedly rude as the British, which amazes Americans, who do not understand studied insult and can only offer abuse as a substitute. (NY Times 14 Jan 1962)”. So why is the British government now deciding on the opposite? Quite apropos, last night’s Balderdash and Piffle featured the earliest sightings of some interesting putdowns and insults (plonker, wassock and tosser among them). This reminds me a bit of the fuss over the Seven Sins of England last month.