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So I'm hard at work on the Brave New World chapter of my multi-star winning series on Civilization 5 achievements. However, I've run into a snag - Brave New World has some known bugs! My game crashed to desktop during an especially long attempt at some of the more challenging achievements, and my progress is blocked until they've been fixed.
At first I found a spoiler free explanation from the Electronic Dance. I was encouraged by Harbour Master's poetic description of it all. I was re-inflated, emboldened. Make no mistake - I play a crap ton of video games, so I'm thinking "I've got this... Round Two, it's on! "
Hot on the heels of the v4.74 patch which added the Witch, upgraded Wallbreakers, Battle Replays in chat, and a lot of other tweaks - SuperCell has announced a Clash of Clans birthday celebration. As part of the festivities, all players received an in-game message stating that you can boost all collectors for an entire week for only one gem each. Hopefully you've already been reaping the reward of boosted collectors - but if not, get in there and throw a boost party! These boosts are usually not the best deal unless you are in the middle of an intense raiding session and you've got tons of gems to spare (pronounced: your rich). Scraping together ten or so gems to boost all of your collectors is pretty easy though, and the payout is excellent.
So I mentioned before that Puzzle Craft was an alternative to Candy Crush Saga, but let me amend that - it is a great alternative. Basically everything is better about this game. Low frustration, no Facebook friend harassment, progression that feels meaningful instead of torturous grinding, and plenty of depth. In short, I love it. It saddens me greatly that even though the game received a "Best of 2012" from Apple, it still appears to only be getting a tiny fraction of the attention of Candy Crush Saga even though it is a better game in almost every possible way. I can only hope this love letter finds Ars Thenea Games well, and that they make enough money off this little piece of puzzling perfection to keep making awesome games.
I use Ubuntu on my Linux desktop and for the most part I'm reasonably happy with it. Mostly I run a browser, (Chrome or Firefox) a text editor, an IRC client, and an IM client on it. I hit very few situations where that's not enough. One key sticking point is running Netflix on Linux browsers, however. Netflix currently requires Microsoft's Silverlight plugin, which is (as you might expect) Windows only. However, it's possible to run Netflix on Linux, and with a bit of quick hacking, you can run practically any Windows-specific site on Linux with no issues.
So unlimited dragons in DragonVale? I guess that's a thing recently. It's fine with me, because honestly.. I don't like pressure breeding. The DragonVale Pepper Dragon fastest breeding combos are below:
I picked up Gunpoint for $6 during the Steam Summer Getaway Sale. I'd had my eye on it for some time, but perhaps by philosophy, osmosis, or radiation agent86ix has started to convince me to learn the tricks to save a few bucks. After all of the wallet abuse of the Summer Sale I've got a pretty good backlog to work through, but I couldn't help but crack this one open as soon as I had it. I didn't regret it.
I don't want to try to tell you what your kids should or shouldn't be exposed to in general. If you're OK with graphic violence, drug use, nudity, etc, in your kids' entertainment, then that's your choice. I had a friend once who was considering buying a Grand Theft Auto game for their 8 year old son. I told them the game was full of foul language, racial slurs, violence towards women, even drug use and bestiality. They seemed uninterested in whether or not I felt this was appropriate for children, and we just sort of stood there staring at each other, incredulous.
I use VirtualBox to use Ubuntu in a Windows host environment. It's not perfect, but it's free and it works fairly well. The one major issue I have is the audio in the Linux (Ubuntu) guest. Sometimes, especially after using RDP to log into the Windows host, the audio in the Ubuntu guest gets screwed up. I've found several workarounds and a potential fix for audio issues with Ubuntu guests under VirtualBox, so I thought I'd share.
I use Pandora on my Nexus 4 (Android 4.2, Jelly Bean) to listen to music on my way to work and on my way home. About a month ago they patched the Android client and kind of broke the "Are you still listening?" timeout.