http://www.pitchforkmedia.com/news/04-10/26.shtml

Wasn't there a theory that any random string of John Peel's own DJ voiceovers would be indistinguishable from the name of a band that he'd play on his show?
The above headline would probably be a rather macabre act but either way it's true.
If you don't know who John Peel was then you could be reasonably assumed to know nothing about popular music. So many major bands (from all parts of the world) were broken by him that a list seems meaningless. He wasn't big and strong and he made the occasional error but he was a great man because he never gave up and that's what it takes.
But lets not mourn too long. If you have a copy of Teenage Kicks put it on and pogo to it, if not then steal one. Dance to celebrate greatness. And when you've danced crazily for a couple of hours go out and find some new music you've never heard before. You don't have to like it but at at least you'll know it's there.

Linkage Constructed by David Gentle on 10/27/04 00:00:09

http://www.furia.com/log/

For me Glenn McDonald gave the internet a concrete purpose with The War Against Silence. It's not that I couldn't imagine something like it, but that, with all the talk of portals and push and the internet economy (oh how quickly the hippies of Wired turned into Libertarian economists of finaincial prognostication), it was hard for me to believe that anyone really got it as thoroughly as he did as early as he did and kept at it for so long.
And then TWAS stopped. Glenn decided that he had better things to do with his time. His new blog is one of those things and I hope it will be a rewarding read.

Linkage Constructed by David Gentle on 10/14/04 23:47:17

http://massiv.sourceforge.net/

I've been reading the news page for Sourceforge's Games foundry every day for a while now and I'm sure that the way they have the page configured means that I miss a lot of news on projects but I'm mainly reading it to discover new ones.
Massiv is a project that attempts to simplify the mreation of MMORPGs with a persistant object model and...some other stuff I didn't really understand. It's one of those thing that you encounter from time to time in the open source game world where you think "yeah, sure come back when there's some actual code done" (normally I would reject this kind of cynicism but in the case of open source games, where there are an awful lot of people making claims about what they are going to do who then fail to do anything, it's an understandable response) but in this case it seems that the project was started (at a University in the Czech republic) in 2001 and has been completed recently.
I don't know how this will effect anything (if anyone actually has the balls to try and use it) but it has the potential to be extremly effective. Open source games would seem to be heading in the direction of being semi-"plug and play" where you take the graphics, physics and sound engines you want and the net and server code you want, bind it all together with Python or Lua and...well...wait for people to make some graphics and sounds for it I guess.

Linkage Constructed by David Gentle on 10/12/04 06:08:26