Gaming Stuff

As always, you can join my army with two clicks (and you can do once a day). Likewise, head over here to see other armies you can join (which will also help my own army).

I've also, thanks to shawnj, found another addictive HTML resource game, Strife. It does not have the pyramid scheme structure, but it's a lot more strategy-based. I'm pretty sure that our clan is full (they cap clan membership based upon the total number of players), but as it expands, there will be more room (and I'm sure our clan, The Commonwealth, wouldn't mind having another clan of LJers to ally with).

Goddamn Amazon

So, Amazon has changed their wishlist structure. Now, on your wishlist page, you no longer have a nice convenient drop-down with everyone else's wish lists available.

So I figured I'd just go to my Amazon Friends page, and I could get to wislists from there. I went to an "About" page for a friend, and noticed that the wish list link is gone. Completely. Tried it on other folks, and it's gone for them, too.

I emailed Amazon, and got the response, "We're sorry to hear that you dislike this new feature on our web
site."

"Feature?" What the fuck? That's not a feature. That's a fucking downgrade. Motherfuckers. They've made their own site incredibly less useful, and they don't seem to give a rat's ass.

Wonder if anyone else has bitched to them about it. I can't imagine anyone, other than whatever unqualified sysadmin blew Jeff Bezos to get into position to make this change, thinking that this is a good idea.

Strife Update

Looks like we do have some room in the clan. See shawnj's post here. for info.

BattleCards!

Does anyone else remember the section of Good Omens in which we find out about Newton's luck with owning computers? How he'd buy machines that seemed great, but would be discontinued within a week?

That was me for a while. I was a major booster of Atari's computers (had an 800 and a 1040ST), I had a Turbografx-16 as my primary videogame system, a Gamegear as my portable, etc. I don't regret any of those decisions, but let's just say I've been wrong about The NExt Big Thing a few times.

Which brings me to 1993.

I'd heard a lot of advance hype about collectable trading card games. And one day, I walked into Titan, and there it was: A new collectable trading card game called Battlecards, from Steve Jackson Games.

The cards were pretty nifty, and the idea behind them was that you would scratch off parts of the cards to reveal stat points when playing against other folks. If you won (each scratch-off spot would be either a hit or a miss, and whoever lost their hitpoints lost their card), you would scratch off the treasure chest, and you could send in treasure for prize cards.

It was a pretty nifty concept, and I enjoyed it for a little bit. I thought it was much niftier than the other CCG that came out a few months later, and which I bought one pack of, shrugged., and then ignored for over a year.

Ten years later, Magic: The Gathering is the biggest money-making machine this side of the US Mint. And Steve Jackson's website doesn't have a single mention of Battlecards.

Yeah, I can sure pick 'em.

Sekrit message for beagledance, <user site="livejournal.com" u

Go here, now! Y'all are on the verge of being eliminated!

The Google, it doesn't lie.

Go to Google.

Type "Miserable Failure" (including the quotations) into the search field.

Yep.