menalaos1971

Today over 100 people were killed in multiple attacks by terrorists.  God bless the French people and protect them in these dark days.

And that crack is called Space Engineers by a little software house called Keen.  It is kind of like Minecraft in Space, but with much better graphics.

Basically, you get a pallet of blocks you can place, and you can combine those into just about anything you can imagine.  There are three basic types of things you can build.  Stations fixed to a grid in the game world and cannot be moved.  You can build them free floating in space or, like I like to do, you can build them on an asteroid.  They're even working on adding small planetoids to the game, so soon I'll be able to build a base on one of those, too.  The other two things you can build are Large and Small space ships.  Each type has a pallet of blocks you can use to assemble pretty much any kind of ship you can imagine.  I've barely scratched the surface with these, but I've liked the few I've made.

The game is in alpha right now.  This means that they're still working on the base mechanics of the game.  There's no ETA when it will shift to beta, where they'll stop adding new stuff and work on polishing what's there.  The biggest things that need polishing are some save file killing bugs and optimizing.  It's pretty polished as it is now, though.

It also has a multiplayer that I haven't messed with, yet.  You need a server to play it on, and these tend to be rather twitchy right now, so I'm sticking to playing with myself.  ;0p

Got back from my sister's house a while ago.  And for the first time in memory I had fun.  My whole family are from the other political party, so if the subject of conversation ever shifts to politics it becomes me vs the rest of the family.  And since they're all incredibly thick headed they just won't see sense.  But the subject never went there, and we all had fun.  Weird.  Met my nephew's girlfriend.  I was a little surprised she was a girl.  I thought he might be gay, but there you go.  Still don't know about my oldest niece, though.

When I got home I played some WoW.  Not many online on Christmas Eve.  But we ran a daily in Everbloom, and managed to trigger an invasion.  With just the two of us we managed to do better than we've ever done in one before.  1740 points.  Now, it was a madhouse.  We had swarms of mobs pouring in from all over, but we managed to kick some ass and have some fun.

I'll start this off by saying that, yes, I have died many times before in my dreams.  I've fallen and hit the ground, I've been shot, stabbed, burned, etc, etc.  And it sucks every time.  But I didn't die in the waking world.

As in dreams I don't remember how I got to the water park.  I know I dreamed about stuff before that point, but it ended in a water park.  I remember walking into it from the side - they had no fence around it as I walked in, but there was a fence once I was inside - and going from one spot to another, and being told that some group was there and they had precendence in lines.  I eventually got to a low hill that led up to some of the higher water slides and some nice cliff-dive looking spots.  The cliff dive was my destination apparently.  MacCauly Culkin was in line going up behind me trying to talk to me about babies living in water parks (wtf?) but I thought he was dumb and ignored him.  As I got near the top there was a short line and I ended up standing with a small group of guys that were talking about how they were nervous about the jump.  So I acted all cool and told them to just keep their feet together and try not to let water shoot up their nose and they would be just fine.

Finally my turn came at the jump.  There were two lines and one of the guys I had talked to was to my left.  There were gates that the worker up there would open to allow the next two jump.  I guess it was supposed to give the people that jumped ahead of you time to swim clear.  The worker pulled a lever, and the left hand gate popped open, but mine was stuck.  The guy I talked to went up to the edge, looked over it, steeled himself, and jumped, all while the worker walked over to jiggle my gate.  He came back and pulled the lever again and it popped open this time, so I ran forward and jumped.  The worker tried to grab my arm, but didn't catch me, and I only realized why as I sailed out over the water, and then over the pavement.  And I hit thinking, "Oh, shit this is gonna suck."  And it did.  I hit and I died, and only after that did I wake up.

This isn't the first time I've fallen to my death in a dream.  The first time was a really tall building, so I had time to get past freaking out and think about how I was falling to my death before I hit.  In that one, too, I hit the ground and only after the shock of pain and then death did I wake up.

I hate dying in a dream...