Linux Uptime: 21:46:52 up 25 days

“Save often and Save Well” that was the motto of one of the best pioneering games of the 80s and 90s, King’s Quest. They spouted that advice because it was easy to make the wrong move and have your character die. If you hadn’t saved, you could lose hours and hours of game play. As anyone knows, it’s just too frustrating in those circumstances to play the game over. The same shoud go when writing a blog post. I had about two paragraphs I had been writing about how I kept forgetting what I had wanted to write so badly while I wasn’t home. One click too many in Firefox killed that sucker. Just like the video games, I don’t feel like writing it again. I’ve always felt that way about writing – unless it’s ridiculously important to me, I just will let it go. On to some of the other things I wanted to write about.

I will be saving often and well in the new Civilization IV which will hit the shelves in four days once this post is available for reading. As I said on my post in Binary World 1.0, I am really looking forward to this latest game in a franchise I’ve been playing since the beginning. One feature of the game that really interests me is the fact that religion will play a much greater role than it has in the past. I think that when the first Civ was created, Sid Meiers and the others gave religion a backseat for two reasons. First of all, it is pretty complicated and the game was already complicated enough for the computers of the time. If you played Civ back then you were pretty impressed with the AI. The second reason I think they left is out is because they probably felt at that point in time that religion had been important in the ancient days, but was now on the back burner. Although I haven’t followed up too much on the Civ developer interviews, I am sure that recent events such as the recent islamo-terrorism have made people question that idea. In previous games, a lot of the religion was tied to Euro-centric religions with things like Artemis’ Temple, Zeus’ Temple, Cathedrals and other such things. In Civ 4, the first Civ to discover a religion becomes the “Mecca” for that religion with others coming to visit. You can create missionaries and other civs of the same religion will be friendly to you while other religions will be more hostile. I am very excited about it!

Another thing I wanted to talk about was a recent move by Google where they updated their maps on Google Maps to no longer listed as a province of China. This put China into an uproar because, as they always assert, Taiwan is just a renegade province; never mind that Taiwan happens to think it’s a country in its own right. Personally, I think China is full of crapy, but don’t tell them that! They get pretty peeved. I’d like to follow this and see if Google bows to the pressure or not.