Draginol

Can you be an environmentalist but be a global warming skeptic? in Politics JoeUser Forums

One of the sites I hang out on is called TreeHugger.com . People who know me in person know that I’m pretty into helping the environment. However, I just don’t find the evidence of humans materially affecting the climate to be persuasive. Most of the discussions are about things like making your home more energy efficient or how to improve your local environment. But every now and then, you get a global warming discussion and

Minor update in Demigod Journals JoeUser Forums

The team got us a minor update today that improves connectivity. They also identified an issue in the lobby where a user exiting the lobby can cause a game error. We consider it pretty serious. It’s been there for awhile and it revolves around timing and the type of connection and various other things but in a mixed gaming environment it happens enough to be a major issue IMO. So now that we’ve identified the cause, it’s gone up the priority list. GPG also got us an update tonight (th

Elemental team dinner in Elemental Dev Journals JoeUser Forums

The Elemental team having a night out.

Elemental Alpha Plans in Elemental Dev Journals JoeUser Forums

As some of you know, the Elemental Beta 0 got nixed due to us needing to throw developers onto Demigod to help GPG and Raknet with the online exper

Ashley at future house in Blogging JoeUser Forums

[more]

When you give the government power it will abuse it in Politics JoeUser Forums

http://directorblue.blogspot.com/2009/05/dealergate-statistical-evidence-that.html Evidence is mounting that the Obama administration is closing Chrysler dealerships based on whether or not they donated to Republicans or not.

Elemental multiplayer evolves in Elemental Dev Journals JoeUser Forums

As some of you know, we had to assign quite a few members of the Elemental team to help with Demigod after it was released. Most of them are back on Elemental but a couple of our developers are still attached to Demigod to refine the multiplayer system in that game. It’s been particularly challenging since initially there was virtually no “Stardock code” involved and now it’s thousands of lines. So we have definitely “gotten involved”. Th

Couple ordered to stop holding bible study at home without permit in Politics JoeUser Forums

Wow. I mean, wow! San Diego county is demanding that people stop inviting friends over to their home for a bible study on the grounds that they do not have a permit. This is why, I don’t care where you stand on most political issues, I fear government power. A lot of people view politics as either liberal or conservative. I view it as the tug of war between those who push for anarchy and those wh

Media bias video in Politics JoeUser Forums

A very interesting video on media bias. http://www.pjtv.com/video/Afterburner_/The_Cost_of_Media_Bias/1736/6337/

Happy Memorial Day in Demigod Journals JoeUser Forums

Greeeeeeeetings! Well tonight we updated the new network system a couple of times. Micro updates via Impulse are totally the way to go. Anyway, the proxy server system is working far better than anticipated. But to go any further with improving the networking, we need some changes that GPG is putting into v1.01 which I mentioned in a previous journal. I don’t have a set day for that but I am hoping this next week. We already have the release candidate for it.

House progress: May 2009 in Building a home JoeUser Forums

The house progresses. 1 year down, 2 more years to go. [more]

Demigod: Weekend status in Demigod JoeUser Forums

Well, what a dramatic week it’s been. The teams at Stardock and GPG have been burning the midnight oil this week. As those of you who have the game can already see, the server issues are gone. We’ve recreated a duplicate of the server infrastructure we had but dedicated to users who have the most recent version of the game and a valid CD key (serial #). Based on the logs, we are seeing lots of games being played on-line now. Yay. Average game has approximatel

Steam games on Impulse in PC Gaming JoeUser Forums

I was reading a forum post about Braid somewhere where the person said they were going to wait until it came out on Steam because “they like all their games on Steam”. The thing is, you can put all your games on Impulse with a simple drag and drop: <img title="image" style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; display: inline; border-left: 0

Reply to Net Code updates in Demigod Journals Stardock Forums

At the very least we'll have a ZIP file that has the latest ImpulseReactor.dll for public download.

Reply to Net Code updates in Demigod Journals JoeUser Forums

What we'd like to do is on day 0 have a slightly updated version of Demigod that people can play with as a beta if they'r feeling frisky. It would be compatible with the release version but lets us work with people who have difficulties for one reason or another.

Reply to This is why I’m a kook in Politics JoeUser Forums

[quote]What happens if your neighbours are aware of this, and in this cataclysmic scenario decide they'll take it from you by force (since if they're starving they won't have much to lose, while such an event would likely incapacitate the security services)?[/quote] Part of being a kook means knowing how to defend oneself.

Reply to Impulse: Road Map in Personal Computing JoeUser Forums

Annatar - actually the way it works is another user purchases the license and the publisher gets a cut of it. The transfer is still from one user to another except that the Impulse Marketplace is fascilitating it.

Reply to Demigod Tournaments in Demigod Demigod Forums

All this of course depends on how well Demigod does... But one of the types of tournaments we want to do is clan-based tournaments. Right now, you have "forces of light" and "forces of darkness". Think of that as us just creating two hard-coded clans to see how well the concept functions. Now, fast forward a few months and instead players see a series of tournaments they can partake of with one of them being clan-based. You join a clan and those clans battle for

Impulse: Road Map in Misc JoeUser Forums

One of the things that developers regularly do is they’ll make bold announcements and then, years later, you realize they didn’t stick to it. Right now, the web team is working on the ImpulseDriven.com website which will include a new “Developer” tab on it. Now, if you check out the current www.impulsedriven.com website, you’ll notice that it doesn’t make it that easy for developers to find out how to contact us to add their game to Impul

Some thoughts on being an Entrepreneur in Business JoeUser Forums

The other day I got my social security statement in where it shows how much I have made each year since I started working. The amounts are all over the place, especially after I made Stardock my career. There is something truly unique in the personality makeup of the entrepreneur that founds his (or her) own company from scratch to execute on some new idea and then builds it up to something that involves hiring employees and dealing with significant amounts of revenue. For one

This is why I’m a kook in Politics JoeUser Forums

Anyone who reads enough of my posts can probably tell that I’m a kook. As I get older, I become more and more of a kook. I have some theories as to why people in my position inevitably become more and more weird as they get older but that’s for another conversation. Former speaker Newt Gingrich has a fantastic article pointing out something that many people who follow this stuff are not just well aware of ut preparing for but is probably news to most Americans: There is a pretty

If Bush had done <insert action here> in Politics JoeUser Forums

Whether it be Obama’s poor handling of the British Prime Minister or his crazy remark that the US invented the automobile or even Obama’s aggressive plans to introduce ever more troops into Afghanistan (talk about a real quagmire opportunity) the question that keeps coming to my mind is: What if Bush had done the same thing? What would the reaction had been? Today’s example is Obama’s firing of the CEO of General Motors. Think about that. The President of the United States just

Can a 6 year old computer be cheaply updated? in Personal Computing JoeUser Forums

I have downstairs an old Dell Dimension from 2003. It wasn’t state of the art, not even back then. It is running a

Brad’s PC CPU benchmarks in Personal Computing JoeUser Forums

It’s amazing how fast PCs continue to get. Whenever I get a new PC these days, I try to benchmark it to see how it rates. For my benchmarking purposes, I use: Performance Test CPU test . I name my desktop PC’s “frogs” with the year I got them and the laptops “Turtles”. I’m a little bummed that Performance Test 7.0 scores don’t correspond with 6.1 since I have a <a href="http://draginol.impulsedriven.net/article/168

Long-term, I’m a short timer on forums in Internet JoeUser Forums

As I get older I am coming to understand the phrase “I’m too old and too rich for this shit”. I hang out on forums and each year, I get a little less patient for the basement dwelling idiots who seem to exist in the comments section of most websites. It’s not that I think that I’m better than these losers rather than I think they’re just a lot worse than I am. Most of these people (and I use the term loosely) have some serious misconceptions about the nature of the world.