The Lair

Been busy and bored in alternate spurts. I keep my idle hands busy with various amusements. The thesis work itself isn’t that interesting; I’m fast losing the will to live in the face of a wordcount to satisfy. The amusements, on the other hand, are worth documenting.

Everyone should know of Desktop TD by now. It’s addictive like crack, might be one of the few non-annoying uses of Flash on the web that I’ve seen (excluding Youtube, of course) and well, it is personally responsible for a lot of time wasted. A while ago, I was sent an email asking me to reserve my username for The Casual Collective; a new venture by the maker of DesktopTD. The Casual Collective offers (among other things, I’m sure) a chance to play a multiplayer version of DesktopTD. What’s not to like? I registered. A couple of days ago (after I had forgotten all about it), I got an email inviting me to login. Today, I played my first multiplayer DesktopTD.

It works slightly differently from the single-player DesktopTD, of course. That threw me for a while. I kept hitting the N key repeatedly to get the levels in faster than my opponent, but that doesn’t work. Instead, each player has the chance to win a level. I won the first few, but got trounced in the later levels, predictably enough.

I’d like to say that my excitement at being able to play multiplayer and frequent screenshot breaks are responsible for what happened next.

But in reality, I think my opponent would have kicked my n00blar ass anyway. You can actually spy on the opponent structure while the game is being played; which is one of the niftiest advancements evar. It really is rather cool, but I think it might be slightly spotty behind restrictive firewalls. Having said that, once again, DesktopTD is going to conspire to prevent me from graduating this year. Dammit.

And just because I felt like avoiding more work, I’ve built yet another Facebook widget to while away the time. Based on the lifestream concept; this basically mashes several different datasources into one Facebook profile box display. I pull in my last.fm, del.icio.us snippet links and allconsuming.net info and a few other bits and pieces into one little display box on Facebook. Why? Um. Don’t ask me. As with all these shiny widgets, it amuses me and that’ll have to do for now.