Still Alive!

Lest we appear to have abandoned our 3 loyal readers, I present to you a bulleted list of things that have happened since last we wrote you:

• We watched Olin College’s Class of 2008 graduate in the third annual commencement ceremony. As pointed out by one of the administrators, at this point it’s hard to argue that we got lucky the first two times - they really will keep doing this every year. Also, I posed for some photos that I don’t doubt will appear on a Facebook mini-feed near you soon. We were joined for the weekend at our humble abode by the Inimitable Lauren H.
• In my long-running attempt not to graduate on time, I spent a while posting photos to flickr of various recent escapades.
• I know I’m quite late to this particular parade, but I have fallen in obsessive love with Vampire Weekend and Okkervil River. Their most recent CDs are both very excellent and you should buy them. Or acquire them some other way.
• Jon and I have discovered two wonderful games that approach the issue of time in games in very different ways.
  • Sins of a Solar Empire is a terribly named but generally quite delicious space RTS. A full explication of its qualities requires a separate post, but in brief it stretches out the temporal experience of an RTS and reveals a number of delectable treats within gameplay crevices that have traditionally gone unexplored. Also, I get to say “Set Condition 1 throughout the fleet” more than I already do, which I guiltily enjoy.
  • On the other end of the spectrum, Trackmania Nations Forever is the second coming of the free branch of the Trackmania franchise, this time without hardware-destroying-DRM. It’s an incremental improvement over the previous version in pretty much all aspects, and is absolutely worth your attention. Again, it deserves more written attention on our parts, but in brief: it abstracts the process of moving a vehicle from A to B through a set of tiles T which in turn generates a huge variety of styles of rewarding gameplay. I’m still astonished by how good a game can be with only four buttons. Our usernames are “heresiarch” and “randomjuju.” Friend us so we can feel like our hours accumulating medals have not gone to waste. P.S. I am 14th in Rhode Island.