Yesterday I put in for the GOG Galaxy Beta and today I got my invite. I couldn’t wait to get home to see it in action. I did not bury the lead, it was exactly as I state in the title, A Good First Start. The settings are so minimal at this point that it doesn’t have any tabs:

GOG Galaxy - Settings

As you can see, many of the most exciting features are marked as coming soon. Still, it’s exactly as I hoped they’d do it. I meant to remark in my last blog post that I hoped they’d make the game pages just like their webpages. I find their webpages very, very useful. It’s less cluttered than Steam and brings the reviews to the fore. Let’s take a quick screenshot tour of the client. (I was going to do a screen capture video, but the client is so simple at this point that a few screenshots will do it justice)

If I mentioned it on this site, I wasn’t able to find it in a search because of the generic word, but I was very annoyed and pretty upset about EA’s Origin store and platform. Part of what I enjoy so much about playing PC games is that the only limitations on what you can run are based on OS and the power of your hardware. In the console world there are games exclusive to Playstation or Xbox and for the non-exclusive games I have to figure out (if I’m planning to game socially) which platform my friends and family are going to buy the game on. For PC games that’s not an issue. All games run on Windows and a greater and greater number run on Linux and OSX. Usually, no matter the OS, everyone can play together online.

May the Fourth Force Be With You!

Although I didn’t play as much on average, I did take advantage of one weekend to do a mini marathon in my Extra Life playing. It led to my biggest donation yet!

The Witcher (17 hours)

I’m still having fun playing this game, mostly due to the great dialogue writing. I’m at a point in the game where the main quest has narrowed to one path and it’s a little boring with their enforced seeming passage of time where I have to leave and then come back when someone says “I need to think about this”. There isn’t any real indication of when I’m supposed to go back. I’m itching for the story to pick up a bit.

…is pretty universal: punishment.

The man who recorded one of two videos showing Baltimore cops dragging a screaming Freddie Gray into the back of a police van was arrested Thursday night, two days after voicing concerns that police were trying to intimidate him by plastering his photo all over the news, saying they wanted to interview him.

For the past two years we’ve had increasing evidence that something needs to change in the police/neighborhood dynamic. But Fergusson, New York City, and Baltimore are only the tip of the iceburg in every sense of the metaphor. If, like me, you follow the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Boing Boing, and other organizations committed to justice, you know that for every Freddie Gray there are dozens whose injustices don’t make it to national prominence. Of course, this isn’t even a new trend. African Americans have been complaining about harassment and being framed for a long time.

After all, we’ve always been at war with Eastasia Afghanistan and will always be at war with Eastasia Afghanistan.

The war in Afghanistan is not ending, US government attorneys said in court documents unsealed Friday, undercutting statements President Barack Obama made last December and in his State of the Union address a few weeks later when he formally declared that “the longest war in American history is coming to a responsible conclusion.” But Obama didn’t really mean that the war was over, the government now argues.

I just updated the Desktop Screenshot page. Here’s a gallery of my latest desktop with KDE 4:

I’ve been meditating on a blog post about the riot in my figurative backyard. While I’m still unsure if whether I’ll end up writing anything about it, I came across some interesting MLK Jr quotes today.

A riot is the language of the unheard.

Martin Luther King Jr

and this one seems to apply not only to what I’ve heard about Baltimore, but also to what I’ve heard about Fergusson and New York City: