Only Civ this month as I’ve been focused on my semester work.

Civ V ( 29 hrs):

Mesa Bros:

It was my oldest game that didn’t yet have any war, but Germany broke the peace. In general, my style seems to be OK with AI warfare. Usually I can ramp up my units quickly enough to stave them off until they exhaust their units while I build up my army. However, I’ve noticed a slightly higher aggression rate in Civilization V compared to previous Civ games so I’ve started trying  to keep my unit counts high enough that most civs won’t spontaneously attack me. Didn’t work with the Germans, but after rebuffing their first advance, I may be able to steal a city. Especially since right after they attacked I was able to upgrade my catapults to trebuchets. We’ll see how this goes because at a theoretical max of 30 turns per month (usually because of our schedules I can’t do more than one turn per day and some days we miss turns), I may or may not have finished attacking the first city before April’s up.

Ok, Now you try it.

-Scarlett, handing me her new Slinky

I started 2014 with a bunch of music I’d acquired in 2013, but which I still hadn’t listened to. So I created a playlist with a high weight on unplayed music from Q4 2013 to Q1 2014. I changed my Amarok settings so that instead of populating the next 11 items, it would populate the next 3. That way if I was getting bored with the new music (a lot of which is music I got for free so sometimes it’s awesome (to my tastes) and sometimes it’s just OK) I could switch to another dynamic playlist for a while and I’d just be three songs away from hearing some music I know I like. I also bought an album with 100 of the best Beethoven compositions. However, since I’m scrobbling the orchestra that played it (not the composer), I’m not sure if any of them will end up dominating the list. (They didn’t)

Yesterday, just outside my neighborhood, my Civic reached 100 000 miles. So far the only problem is that the radio’s a bit wonky with the front speakers.

Skip to 28 seconds in. Sure, there are way too many Super Mario Brothers covers, but that theme is amazing as is seeing this performance of the theme on an ancient Chinese hyper flute. The instrument looks like something out of a science fiction movie.

Finally Got my URL: www.ericmesa.com

Here’s a funny fake-news video reporting on the mass-migration of teens from Facebook (where their parents have migrated) to the comments section of a slow-motion Youtube video of a deer running. While I don’t think there’s going to be mass-migration of all the world’s teens to one comment board, there’s a grain of truth here. My old Informationweek editor, Mitch Wagner, once discovered some young girls holding a gossipy chat in the comments section of an old blog post of his; when he asked them what they were doing there, they told him that their school blocked all social media, so every day they picked a random blog-post somewhere on the Internet and used it as a discussion board for the day.

Civilization V ( 20 hrs):

Lefties

[caption id=“attachment_7758” align=“aligncenter” width=“480”] Civ 5 - Lefties 1896[/caption]

Dido tried to be opportunistic and attack me while I was at war with the Celts. Now she is facing my wrath. I will not stop until she has been wiped off the map.

[caption id=“attachment_7768” align=“aligncenter” width=“480”] Civ 5 - Lefties 1898[/caption]

Left a contingent behind to make sure the Celts don’t get cute.

If you’ve been following Internet news recently, you know that the World Wid Web is celebrating its 25th Anniversary this year. Lots of people have been talking abou tthe first websites they ever set up. Unfortunately for me, my earliest sites were not captured by the Internet Archive. But I started on the web around 1995 or 1996 on Angelfire. From there I went to Tripod and Geocities. Eventually, I joined the two so that I could have a whopping 20 MB of hosting space between the two providers. I’ve mentioned it many times before, but my first web presence was a Squaresoft fan site - mostly revolving around Final Fantasy 6 (3 in the US) and Chrono Trigger. I also used it here and there in High School for various things. When I got back to Tripod in college and found that Tripod had deleted that site, I created a personal site for the first time.  Around 2003 I started messing around with running my own server using Fedora Core 1. And since 2005 I’ve been blogging here at It’s A Binary World 2.0. And in the last few years I’ve had a web comic and a site that comments on commercial comics. It’s incredible that we’ve gone from 10 MB at Tripod to my current host giving me unlimited storage because it’s gotten so cheap. I’ve gone from one website to 3 with more to come in 2014.

That this blog is at the strange URL of server.ericsbinaryworld.com/blog is the product of the circumstances at the time that I got my first ever URL - www.ericsbinaryworld.com. That URL went to my tripod site, the only way I knew how to do hosting at the time. In 2003 I wanted to play with using Linux to host my own server, hence the server.ericsbinaryworld.com. And I wanted to do other things than just blog, hence the blog being in a subdirectory. Time has passed and Wordpress has grown to be a full CMS. I’ve gotten more sophisticated when it comes to the Internet and understanding how things work and should be structured. I’m not 100% sure right now, but I’m leaning towards moving the blog in Mid-April to www.ericsbinaryworld.com for simplicity and elegance’s sake. I’m not 100% sure because I’ve been at this URL FOREVER. At the same time, the Internet has wonderful things like redirects and since pretty much every domain registrar provides subdomains for free, I’ll be able to handle people coming to the old URL seamlessly. I might also condense a few of my other URLs to reduce the amount of money I’m paying each year to register my domains - especially since most of them are not getting enough traffic that it would matter if I gave them up. Unlike Jeff and some of the other Giant Bomb guys, I don’t have enough money to throw away on URLs just for fun. When the time comes and it’s certain, I’ll make another post so you can update your links, bookmarks, and RSS feeds.