Monthly Archives: June 2012

Braid

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Braid is an awesome work of art and game. I know it’s a few years old at this point, but I don’t have the time for much gaming nowadays. But Braid has been on my radar basically since it came out. It made me want to buy a 360, though eventually it came out for PC, and I played the demo and loved it. A couple weeks ago, I finally bought it. It’s the perfect kind of game for me, since I can play for just a few minutes at a time, solve one puzzle, and put it on hold until I next get a few minutes.

I have now completed it (in the sense of getting all the puzzle pieces and getting through the ending), though I wouldn’t say that I’ve beaten it. The plot is… a fascinating statement that I haven’t completely worked though yet. The gameplay is astoundingly good.

Please, no spoilers here. Of any sort whatsoever. Thank you.

Moderation of a different sort

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I’ve been the moderator of Charlton’s Town Meeting for the past three years, which has been an enjoyable experience. But I was asked to moderate a meeting of a different sort on this coming Saturday: a candidate debate for the local candidates of the Town of Southbridge. As I told the Southbridge Evening News, “local politics is important,” and I look forward to being an impartial party helping the people of Southbridge choose their leaders.

Adventures in migrating from Opera to Chrome and Firefox

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I’ve been a loyal user of Opera since version 5. Back then, they were the innovators of features like tabbed browsing, mouse gestures, and excellent support for web standards. I even paid for it back then (as it was on the “shareware” model) since it was just that awesome. I’ve been using it ever since.

Sadly, over the past couple years, the quality has definitely gone down. It may have started roughly around the time Opera got a new CEO, though I’d be hesitant to place the blame completely there. It crashes much more often. It likes taking up CPU for no discernible reason. The next version, Opera 12, will be removing many features that make Opera distinctive, like built-in BitTorrent support and their awesome Opera Unite idea. Opera just doesn’t seem to be the cutting edge innovator that they used to be. (Or perhaps, they’ve been so busy trying to innovate that they lost their core focus on making an awesome browser.)

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Moving blogging to my own domain

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I’ve decided that I finally was sick enough of LiveJournal that I’d move the sporadic blogging I did to my own domain. LiveJournal was fun, but more and more I’m not a fan of having my data on other people’s systems (especially as I have my own), and I haven’t been a fan of the charities that LJ’s been encouraging people to donate too lately. So, now I have WordPress set up here with me having control over my own data, and perhaps it’ll encourage me to post something a little more often. Or maybe not.