Weekend Update

Just an update as to what I've been up to lately.

Bardcast, The Shakespeare Podcast continues to amble along. We've just tried a new format for The Two Gentlemen of Verona, which should be up before the end of the weekend.

I've been idling a lot in TF2, but my absurd number of duplicate hats has irritated me so much that I've given up idling entirely. Once trading comes out, I should be able to get all the hats I want. (Top of my list: Killer's Kabuto, Hustler's Hallmark, the HotRod, the Physician's Procedure Mask, [possibly with the Otolaryngologist's Mirror] and and the Professional's Panama.) I'm not getting Sam and Max for lack of money, so I won't be getting the bunny hat and alternate guns. Too bad.

I have been playing a lot of another Fortress game that has a lot of idlers, Dwarf Fortress. Probably the most complicated simulation game I've ever played, Dwarf Fortress has many notable things, but I'll just mention a few: it has the most detailed fluid processing system I've ever seen, which includes the ability to create pipes of magma that can be used to trap enemies in burning rooms and piping water throughout your fortress. The cool thing about the interface is that you never tell an individual dwarf to do a specific action*, you define what work needs to be done, and the dwarfs get to it when they feel like. This sounds more frustrating than it seems, except when it's more frustrating than you can possibly imagine.

*except for very narrow exceptions, it seems that everything in DF has an exception.