Catch All and Catch Up

A few odds and ends that don't wuite need a full writeup but I think are worthy of attention and a couple quick notes.

First of all, Castalia House takes a quick look at Dwarf Fortress. I don't have much more experience with the game than they do, but have managed to arrive at a couple unpleasant fates for our poor delvers. I'll note that there's a total newb pack for Windows and MacOS that includes a launcher, a 3D viewer (Amorak Vision), alternate tilesets for the less ascii-inclined, and "Dwarf Therapist" to help you better allocate your dwarves based on their temperment, etc.

Good luck.

Over at the Space Gaming blog, Jeffro goes into what's wrong with a lot of modern writing holding forth as an example, Flatliners, a movie that has an amazing premise, and wastes it. Not for the reasons most critics put it down, though.

As entirely expected, the people who are all for renewable anything but people were all for trying out generating electrical power from solar roads. Anyone who's done logistics, electrical distribution, or even just observed what kind of things solar cells manage to power and put some thought into what roads entail would have figured out most of the problems involved. The TL;DR version is "nowhere near as efficient as a straight up solar plant" - which isn't that great either. Factor in power for traffic signals, reduced capacity due to dirt, dust, scratches, snow, etc., and transmission loss, and go figure.