Yup. Not a lot of visible improvements to the site just yet. V19 still has a couple of things to be revised. I'm just having trouble caring about it.

Part of the problem is the way I think. Meaning the process itself. I get most stuff figured out while playing videogames. And that's not working well at the moment.

I tried playing Civ4. Which we've talked about. With the latest almost-out-of-alphatesting patch, I can occasionally get a normalsized planet to run logistically [though the images start puking around BC4000, still] up to about this year. I've got games to run up into the twenty-third century, but only by saving every year, letting it crash, restarting, and trying to be nicer per turn before saving per year, letting it crash again, and restarting. Being nicer is a matter of staying away from the edges, since any scrolling once the game is housing hundreds of units from a dozen countries guarantees a crash.

Of course, the typical crash comes with a popup from Windoze warning, in essence, Civ4 has a massive memoryleak which should have been plugged in the first week of alpha; instead, Firaxis were in such a hurry to release it by Giftmas of any given year that it's now so incomplete that LucasFilm wouldn't know where to start replacing shit with modern technologies. At that point, any pseudotheraputic value in playing a game so I can think about other stuff is lost entirely.

Figuring that it might just be that I'm trying to play a game which, while available now, won't be ready before 2008, I give up and go all retro. Since MGMInteractive released Civ4 ten years ago and called it WarGames.

New problem. Playing a game written for, at best, Windoze95 on a computer running XPPro. It works. But it tends to puke to the desktop with nothing better than wargames.exe, being older than most cars, got tired. Better still, I haven't seen the manual for the game since 1998; if there's a hotsave option at all, I haven't figured it out this year. So, when I lose wargames.exe, I get to start over from the commandscreen, choosing NORAD or WOPR.

Sadly, it's actually a better game than Civ4.

I can't go back to Civ3. It's a solid game, but there's that one issue I've always had a problem with: that, regardless how much you tell it not to, it'll keep producing workers; and, regardless how many animations you shut off, by about AD1950, your ten million workers will take half an hour per turn to get done wandering around, fixing nothing at all. My favourite thing about Civ4 has got to be the SkipTurn button. Even though it helps to crash the game once a percentage of a normalsized planet is occupied by cities, windmills, and tanks.

SimCity4 is working so far. And that's news. Initially, it would barely run. Since then, I've added RushHour and upgraded my computer. Now it works; it's just kinda boring. Meaning that you can't get cities to attack each other. Also, you can't really get the game to puke every few turns. I'm starting to rationalise that as a sort of Advanced Difficulty option.

There's a hint for Firaxis. In Civ5, let's add it to the list. No Barbarians; Raging Barbarians; Random Crashes to Desktop....

Meanwhile, when games do puke and I'm dropped out of their screenres into my main computer [I'm still waiting for any game to understand that my screen is an HDTV running at 1280*768, so 4:3 displays look stupid on a 16:9 screen], the first thing I usually end up looking at isn't the board and its goofy images, but wastedinc.com. Something else I'm in the process of revising to a new version.

I kinda like how the site looks at the moment, but it's not really practical. As much sense as it makes for Wasted, Inc. to have wasted whitespace, it's not helping things much. So I'm redesigning it to be tighter. Kinda like V19 here is now. Bascially a square with stuff along the top and the left side. Like every other site on the 'net: boring, but functional.

That part being fairly easy, the real work is in the backend: reworking the sections, subsections, infrasections...there's really no end to it; the backend retains elements from 2001; I really need to just scrap the damned thing and start over. Except I can't just scrap it, since so many places are linking directly to specific things [there were more such places, but a lot of them have deadlinks now, since I've already scrapped a few things from 2001 without considering who might be linking directly to them].

So that's not easily done either. At least, not if I can't play a videogame long enough to think it all through.

Maybe FreeCell still works. I'll try that for a while.

More later....

Forgot to add tags for this stupid entry.