Hai guyz.

I haven't put up a journal in a while, so I figured I oughtta do it. Let's see if I can present this information in a precise and coordinated manner.

First off, I read some books! I finally got around to reading 'Nineteen Eighty-Four'... probably the greatest book I ever read. It was scary and exciting, and it's nice that I've finally read it, so now I can get all of the references on Slashdot and on the EFF website. So, w00t.

I also read an interesting answer to 1984 by the name of 'Little Brother' by Mr. Cory Doctorow. It was interesting, although I was probably ahead of the book's target age by a bit. Even if you don't like conspiracy theories, the book is cool because it basically features a cameo of all of the popular pieces of Free Software, from Firefox to the GIMP. I liked it, personally. The book is also available under a CC license, and you can download it Free from Doctorow's site. Check it out if you want to: [link]

Secondly, I downloaded like 30 new games from the Ubuntu repositories. Naturally, several of them were terrible, but here were a few of the ones I particularly enjoyed. I'm not going to try to find their websites, but just put them in a search engine of your choice to try and find them.

Angry Drunken Dwarves: Like Puyo-pop, except shinier.
Liquid War: A really interesting strategy-arcade game where you command a puddle to assimilate all the other puddles.
Xpilot-NG: A classic space shooter (something I've really been into lately).
Meritous: A bizarre rogue-like where you're a psychic dude running through a dungeon (lots of fun).
Droidbattles: A programming game where you build a robot to kill other robots (recommended for either programming enthusiasts or people trying to learn it).
Robocode: Like Droidbattles, except the program is written in real Java, so it might be even easier than Droidbattles (although I find the former to be more fun).

I've been in a serious programming slump recently. I can't come up with any good concepts and I can't follow any of them to the end. If anyone has any game ideas that they'd like to toss around, I'm definitely open to them.

Oh yeah! I almost forgot. There's a great Creative Commons Manga artist right here on dA! ~seotch is the author of 'Ubunchu', a delightfully ridiculous story about a Sysadmin Club installing Ubuntu on their new machine and learning how to work with it. dA's own *doctormo is keeping everyone posted on Ubunchu's currently ongoing English translation (which has a version number and changelog like a piece of software. It's even Open Source!). Check out his page for the most up-to-date information on the comics.