Orkut.com says at me, You are connected to -31062 people through 72 friends. A negative number of people? Could it be that the programmer used a 16-bit integer somewhere and more than 65535 people signed up?? At any rate the number seems to be moving towards zero, strengthening the hypothesis.
I notice that of the images in my deviant art gallery , the ones marked as Wallpaper/Medieval seem to be one to two orders more popular than the others. I am guessing that a lot of people browse the site by category and choose Wallpapers, so I've move all my pictures of the right size that might be useful for screen backgrounds into that category, to see if it made a difference. It did.
What interests me about this is that it presumably indicates that the Deviant Art site is browsed by a lot of people who are not part of the community. This is very different from orkut, where you have to be a member to be signed up. Of course, the popularity of sites ilke Digital Blasphemy indicates a strong demand for screen backgrounds too, so it's hard to interpret the skimy data I have ;-)
Speaking of orkut, if you know me and want to be invited, get in touch and I'll happily invite you. Don't forget to tell me what colour socks you're wearing.
I've been running Knoppix for a few days, because my laptop died and I'm borrowing a system that doesn't boot except from floppy. It'd be nice to have Flash installed - even nicer if fewer Web sites used Flash, especially now there is SVG - and it'd be nice to have more memory, and it'd be nice if Knoppix's hardware detection was as good as Mandrake's seems to be - Knoppix didn't find the sound on this system for example - but it's a lot better than having to walk up the road to use an Internet Cafe.
Speaking of Flash, I went to see Lord of the Rings / Return of the King last night. I tried to book a ticket online, but the Paramount web site is totally useless without Flash. Luckily there was plenty of room, and I saw the film projected onto an IMAX screen. I love the Alan Lee drawings in the closing credits, and definitely felt it was the best of the three films. I forgive them their deviations from the book - not that they care about what I think, but I do :-)
Someone asked me to scan in some samples of Serbian script I have; when my laptop is back I'll do that. Possibly tomorrow.
When I get back from the O'Reilly Emerging Technology conference next week I want to post an article about why I use the particular distribution of linux I do (when my laptop is working!) - not to start a distribution war, but to try and elicit discussion about the maturity of Linux, and a bit about the cultural and social problems we have to solve. If you're willing to help by reading a draft, please let me know.
elanthis, my favourite rogue-like game was always Omega, for what it's worth, by (I think) Lawrence Brothers. Part of that was that the humour was clearly separated from the mechanism. Looking at AweMud's "screenshots", the game mechanics seem very in-your-face; I think I'd find it felt more like wargaming as a result than a fantasy/quest sort of game, but maybe I'm showing my bias (or my age?). I assume that calling a forest clearig a "room" is just poor scripting, and not part of the game engine. The last two face-to-face roleplaying campaigns I ran (in 1989/1990 and in 1992 or so) didn't have any combat, which was just as well as I didn't write a combat system for them. The players seemed to enjoy them, though.