THE RETURN OF THE PODCAST IS HERE!

Episode 9 of the All Things From My Brain Podcast is here.

In this weeks massive, DOUBLE SIZED, MAXI-PODCAST, I am joined by a special guest on his very first podcast [...]]]> I said I’d do it, I warned you – you didn’t listen, did you? Well, now it’s TOO LATE!

THE RETURN OF THE PODCAST IS HERE!

Episode 9 of the All Things From My Brain Podcast is here.

In this weeks massive, DOUBLE SIZED, MAXI-PODCAST, I am joined by a special guest on his very first podcast appearance as we discuss the iPad, about Apple, Google, Blizzard, Doctor Who, Dollhouse, Torchwood – and the fact that his youngest son may be stalking me via iPhone.

With Episode 9 I am dumping Podbean and everything is going to be hosted here on atfmb.com. If you’ve subscribed to the podcast via iTunes, that link is in the process of being changed and you’ll have to resubscribe – I’ll let you know as soon as that’s ready and available.

In the meantime, click below and stream to your hearts content or you can download via this link by right clicking and choosing ’save as’.

~P

[podcast]http://www.atfmb.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/AllThingsFromMyBrain009.mp3[/podcast]

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A HUGE fan of the original Cartoon Wars game (I wrote something up on that game last year), I was really psyched when I saw that they’d come up with a new game.  With the original, [...]]]> On the list of things that can distract one from writing the next great American novel comes Cartoon Wars: Gunner.

A HUGE fan of the original Cartoon Wars game (I wrote something up on that game last year), I was really psyched when I saw that they’d come up with a new game.  With the original, you had two towers on opposite sides of a battlefield.  bad guys streamed out of the enemy tower – all stick figures with cool weapons & big heads, and you had to fight them off.  Between battles you could upgrade to different kinds of soldiers.

With Gunner, they’ve amped up the fun and the upgrades.

You start out as a simple bowman:

As you fight, you gain gold which you can use to upgrade your bowman’s speed, power, range and skill (which I’ve done in the screenshot above).  You also have a host of other attributes that you can also upgrade in between battles – if you have the gold.

Just as you upgrade, so do your enemies, going from simple spearman to bowman, gunman and monsters of all sorts – jumping spiders, leaping tigers, fire spitting dragons – even guys in battle armor.  To fight them, you need to upgrade out of the bow and arrow phase and into something a little more powerful.  Lucikly, you have tons of choices.

The very next thing (in affordable gold) that you can buy is the semi-automatic rifle.  Slow and steady, this thing blows away most of the bad guys and, just like the bow, has it’s own upgrades to increase it’s power.

While playing the game, I also got the next step up in weapons – the twin automatic pistols.  Then I decided that I needed to jump to the end of the book, so to speak.  So I stopped upgrading everything and I started hoarding gold until I could afford this: (80k gold)

Yep. It’s a BattleSuit. A mech, even.

And it’s friggin suhweet!

“Oh.. that’s right. I’m just a harmless looking guy standing over here minding my own business… that’s it… come closer…  closer…”

“BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!”

Your main weapons are, of course, your guns, but you also have some other stuff to play with.

Each weapon has it’s own ‘mega weapon’. The Twin Pistols, for example, has lightning that ZAPS the bad guys.  The Bow has flaming meteors that fall from the sky and the BattleSuit drops bombs.

Some added stuff – your weapons (except for the bow), heat up.  If you look at the image above, you’ve got three icons in the upper left – each is a different weapon (you can have 3 equipped at any one time).  You can switch between them by tapping the icon or pressing the button with the arrows circling it.  If the weapon you’re on overheats, you automatically switch to the next one.

The red button on the left controls your gunner, who can run left, right, up and down – the battlefield is wider than your screen, so you can run back and forth across it.  The blue button is your ‘fire’ button and you can shoot left or right as needed and, with certain weapons, you can fire while running.  This is handy as you can run right to escape, and still be firing left or behind you.

Standing still you are the most accurate and your automatic weapons will fire faster.

Overall, this is a great game to play.  You can jump in, fight a couple battles, save the game and come back later.  Perfect for break time

Cartoon Wars: Gunner is for the iPhone and iPod Touch.  You can get it at the App Store for just $0.99, which is an awesome price (Clicking this link will launch iTunes and take you right to the games page).

~P

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When you installed the disk on your computer, a couple of things happened; first off, you could now dial into the AOL servers [...]]]> Back in the day, there was a company called ‘AOL’.  They provided a service to people.  You had to have a computer and one of their disks that would come in the mail.

When you installed the disk on your computer, a couple of things happened; first off, you could now dial into the AOL servers and ‘experience the Internet’. Second, your printer would stop working.

Anyway, AOL was what you called an ‘Internet Service Provider’, they provided to us, the consumers, access to the Internet through our modems.  Our modems used phone lines and essentially dialed a number (or a group of numbers) to gain access to the server.

Now, usually, these disks had a deal associated with them.  Some free hours versus the paid hours you had to buy.  “20 hours free!” and whatnot all.  In order to redeem your free hours, though, you had to call special numbers dedicated to those offers.

That’s where the trouble started.  You had a month to redeem your free hours by calling those numbers, only AOL didn’t have enough servers up and running to accept your calls, so, you got a busy signal.  A lot of people would go the whole month without being able to connect and use their free hours, which made them very upset.

I believe this would be the very first ‘bandwidth’ issue in Internet History.

AOL was sued over these busy signals and were forced to admit that the demand for their service was greater than their network could handle.  They tried their best to beef up their network, but it wasn’t enough and they ended up having to pay up on that lawsuit and now, their service is pretty much a long standing joke.

All because their network couldn’t handle the demands placed upon it by consumers.

…sound familiar, AT&T?

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Ars Technica

Ars Technica has a lot of interesting articles each week. Sometimes I link em on Twitter, sometimes I don’t.  Last week, they talked about advertising and file-hosting sites.  It [...]]]> I find these things interesting, and thought I would share em by compiling a list here today.  The names were NOT changed to protect the innocent.

Ars Technica

Ars Technica has a lot of interesting articles each week. Sometimes I link em on Twitter, sometimes I don’t.  Last week, they talked about advertising and file-hosting sites.  It piqued my interest because I mostly hate advertising on websites – this got my brain working and thinking.  Note that I haven’t done any much (I sometimes have an Amazon thingie…) advertising on this site. I especially hate the kind of ads that pop up as your mouse passes over text – those really annoy.  Anyway, FireFox has a lot of neat plug ins that interrupt the flow of advertising to the consumer – things to block flash and ads and whatnotall.  One file-host site doesn’t like a new plug in that bypasses their site altogether, allowing people to download directly from the site instead of visiting pages with endless ads on them.

I really wish we could find a happy medium. Advertisers want to blanket us with Coke and Pepsi ads (among other things) while we just want it all to go away because we’re on overload.  When a page takes four times as long to load because of all the ad crap – we have a problem.  When we can’t get to the content we want because the ads keep interupting us, that’s a problem too.  When the content GOES AWAY because the advertisers have left and the content creator can no longer afford to operate, guess what?  We have another problem.

CNET is another favorite of mine for news.

Last week they talked about a couple of things I wanted to point out.

The 5 best (and worst) game preorder trends.  I found this interesting because the only game I have ever pre-ordered has been the expansions for World of Warcraft.  Nothing else has ever interested me enough to pre-order it.  Of course, I also tend to buy my console games used once they’ve come down considerably in price (which is why I’m usually behind the trends). This article is amusing and worth a read. Talks about what gimmicks work/they like (like getting the game ahead of the actual release date) and what doesn’t work/they don’t like (getting in game special stuff or crappy trinkets). Check it out.

The other is about Adobe bringing Photoshop.com to the iPhone, which is just neat.  Apps like this, which allow you to enhance the photos taken by your camera phone, are just nifty.  And Photoshop is pretty much the leader in this field now (sadly. I prefer some competition).  Looks like a cool deal.  Need to get that on my iPhone…

Comics should be good.

I can’t say enough nice things about this blog. I love the classic stuff and the contemporary stuff they cover every day. I usually can’t keep up with their updates.  Really worth some time on your part to check em out if you’ve ever cared about comics.

Life, Doctor Who and Combom

If you are a fan of Doctor Who, present or past, you really should check out Life, Doctor Who and Combom.  This is another site where I can’t keep up with all the updates.  If it’s Doctor Who related, it’ll show up on this blog.

Some more individual items for you.

“Fiction: In Blood 2009″ from @authormancuso. Warning for graphic violence/gore.

GameLife has a story on Sega’s SG-1000 (Sega’s 1st Game System) and gets extra points for showing Golgo 13 – a game I had for the NES.  Trying to remember his name…  Duke Togo? Something like that. 007 only Japanese.

The NY Times has a puff piece, but still very nice, about a woman on A Quest to Read a Book a Day for 365 Days.

I have never particularly cared for Batgirl.  Since finding the DCU blog ‘The Source’, however, I find myself intrigued.  Almost enough to venture to a comic book store again.  Almost.

Ya know what? I don’t want to grow up to be Sam Raimi.  Not that it wouldn’t be cool to be all rich and stuff and know Bruce Campbell and Xena.  But, I don’t want to be the guy who puts Sandman above Venom because ‘in his day’, Sandman was the big bad and Venom hadn’t been invented yet.  When I think of Batgirl, I think of Barbara Gordon (who became Oracle when Joker shot her in the spine and put her in a wheelchair for the rest of her life).  So much has changed.  Need to stay up with the times.  The Source helps with that.  And I have to say, it’s much better than Marvel’s blog – which is all selly.  The Source feels more low-key, which is probably why it sticks in my brain.

HOLEY SUBLIMINAL MARKETING, BATMAN!

…I am so sorry.  I really am.

~P

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As you may or may not have figured out by now, I am most definitely an Apple head.  I’ve got 2 iMacs at home and an iPhone in my pocket and I love to discover new games and apps to play with AND I love to share those finds with the kind folks who read [...]]]> Well.

As you may or may not have figured out by now, I am most definitely an Apple head.  I’ve got 2 iMacs at home and an iPhone in my pocket and I love to discover new games and apps to play with AND I love to share those finds with the kind folks who read this blog and listen to my podcast.

A bit of an old school gamer, I am quite the fan of a side scroller.  S’why I like the games coming out on iPhone so much – they are simple to figure out, fun to play and, for the most part – they scroll sideways!   It’s also why I bought the Sega pack for my X-Box – SONIC!  ALTERED BEAST!  HECK YEAH!  But let’s get back to the iPhone for a second.  I was trolling the lists to see what was making the rounds in the Top 25 the other night, and I came across something that looked interesting.

Enter: Cartoon Wars

Cartoon Wars is a side scrolling game that you can scroll back and forth on, if that makes any sense.  The concept is simple: you have a castle and the computer has a castle.  You have mana and the computer has mana.  Use your mana to create your army and then attack the other castle and its army. Scroll to the right to see your forces attack the enemy.  If the enemy beats you back, you’ll find yourself scrolling left again pretty quickly.

It gets better.  Taking down the other army brings you gold.  Taking down the other castle also brings you gold.  In between battles, you can use your gold to upgrade your units or purchase new types of units.

You start out with your standard fighter dudes – they’re the stick figurey guys with the white heads shown above.  Next, you can purchase Ninjas, Gunners, Wizards, Dark Angels -the list goes on.  Each new class of fighter costs a little bit more mana – could be 10 (normal fighter dude), or it could be 400 (Dark Angel, I believe).  And each unit can be upgraded – so you can take a training Ninja and turn em into masters – depends on how much gold you have.

You also have a turret on the top of your castle that can shoot massive arrows out into the enemy forces.  Control of that thing is a little tricky.  I really thought I had it but then I upgraded the weapon between battles and everything went to hell and my boys got SLAUGHTERED!

So, Cartoon Wars is part strategy, part side scroller and though I didn’t know that I would like it, I find myself getting a bit addicted.  It’s taken over as my break time entertainment during the day.

It’s available in the iTunes store right now for $0.99 and is worth it.  Check it out in iTunes: this link will launch iTunes.

~P

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In the eighth episode of the All Things From My Brain podcast, I talk about the petition to make the Kindle open and non-DRM, DRM in general with books, music, movies and dvds, how ESPN, the NFL and the Marine Corps have all banned Twitter and Facebook, TiVo’s new [...]]]> Episode #8: All Things from My Brain

In the eighth episode of the All Things From My Brain podcast, I talk about the petition to make the Kindle open and non-DRM, DRM in general with books, music, movies and dvds, how ESPN, the NFL and the Marine Corps have all banned Twitter and Facebook, TiVo’s new web video support, the FlyCast App from the App Store, TomTom on iPhone, Sam Raimi’s (fictitious) World of Warcraft movie production Diary from Wired, chargebacks via PaymentOne causing Warcraft accounts to be suspended, G.I. Joe; The Rise of Cobra. 73 ways to become a better writer and my own writing and blogging this week on All Things From My Brain.

[podcast]http://www.atfmb.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/AllThingsFromMyBrain008.mp3[/podcast]

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In the seventh episode of the All Things From My Brain podcast, I talk about the Kindle once again and the lawsuit against Amazon, about Firefox passing one billion downloads, Apple’s new 3.0.1 update to fix an SMS exploit on the iPhone, the buzz around the iTablet from Apple, [...]]]> Episode #7: All Things from My Brain

In the seventh episode of the All Things From My Brain podcast, I talk about the Kindle once again and the lawsuit against Amazon, about Firefox passing one billion downloads, Apple’s new 3.0.1 update to fix an SMS exploit on the iPhone, the buzz around the iTablet from Apple, Torchwood: Children of the earth, Green Lantern First flight, the San Diego Comic Con, J Michael Stracynski and his advice to writers, my own writing and what’s been happening over on the blog.

[podcast]http://www.atfmb.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/AllThingsFromMyBrain007.mp3[/podcast]

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In the sixth episode of the All Things From My Brain podcast, I talk about the Palm Pre bringing BACK its iTunes sync, about:  Amazon’s apology on the whole Kindle deleting books flap, Microsoft changing their ‘laptop hunter’ commercials, a new iPhone App called ‘AudioBoo’, Warcraft: The Movie, Star [...]]]> Episode #6: All Things from My Brain

In the sixth episode of the All Things From My Brain podcast, I talk about the Palm Pre bringing BACK its iTunes sync, about:  Amazon’s apology on the whole Kindle deleting books flap, Microsoft changing their ‘laptop hunter’ commercials, a new iPhone App called ‘AudioBoo’, Warcraft: The Movie, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Kahn gets a new soundtrack released, Stargate in all its forms is coming to a comic book store near you, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince and my own writing and the blog.

[podcast]http://www.atfmb.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/AllThingsFromMyBrain006.mp3[/podcast]

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In the fifth episode of the All Things From My Brain podcast, I talk about the Palm Pre losing it’s iTunes sync functionality, how India plans to issue biometric ID cards to its 1.2 BILLION citizens, how the Kindle and Amazon are once again in the news with BAD [...]]]> Episode #5: All Things from My Brain

In the fifth episode of the All Things From My Brain podcast, I talk about the Palm Pre losing it’s iTunes sync functionality, how India plans to issue biometric ID cards to its 1.2 BILLION citizens, how the Kindle and Amazon are once again in the news with BAD PRESS, about Galaga coming to the iPhone in both retro and new forms, how Farragut films is bring Star Trek back to animation, how the family of Lord of the Rings author J.R.R. Tolkein are suing New Line Cinema cuz they ain’t been paid, about G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra, Iron Man 2 & Green Lantern: First Flight, Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince, Buck Rogers in the 25th century, Flash Gordon, and The New Universe book projects currently on my plate.

[podcast]http://www.atfmb.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/AllThingsFromMyBrain005.mp3[/podcast]

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In the fourth episode of the All Things From My Brain podcast, I talk about the 1st anniversary of the Apple App store, a couple of public radio aggregators for the iPhone and iTouch, Dig Dug for the iPhone and iTouch, Google Earth’s plans to show us the moon, [...]]]> Episode #4: All Things from My Brain

In the fourth episode of the All Things From My Brain podcast, I talk about the 1st anniversary of the Apple App store, a couple of public radio aggregators for the iPhone and iTouch, Dig Dug for the iPhone and iTouch, Google Earth’s plans to show us the moon, Google losing the ‘beta’ tag from many of their projects, whether or not Facebook is still relevant and why I prefer Twitter, Starcraft 2 and the possibility it might not show up on store shelves this year after all, the death of the SciFi Channel and birth of the SyFy lunacy, warehouse 13, Doctor Who – in comics, Ernest Hemingway – KGB Spy, 5 tips for developing your writers voice, 5 tips for editing your writing and a bit about my own writing and how the novel is coming along.

[podcast]http://www.atfmb.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/AllThingsFromMyBrain004.mp3[/podcast]

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