Bob Hayes Online

An interesting Craigslist ad for any of my Denver-area bloggy/journo friends.

http://denver.craigslist.org/wri/1502872237.html

Eight wonderful and fulfilling years. I love you, honey.

One of the games I’ve played on Facebook is called Realm of Empires. It’s a quite involved game of village development and medieval combat. You start out with just one village and a few troops; from there you can conquer huge sections of the world, make alliances and treaties with your neighbors, and try and crown yourself king. (Gee, why would I find this game interesting?)

Positives: it’s a lot of fun to build up your villages and get them nice and strong, so that you can bully the local neutrals into signing on with your empire. The graphics are quite pretty without being disruptive or distracting. The game has a quest system that introduces you to all the game features and gives you bonus gold for learning how the game works – which means you rarely encounter a player who’s just completely clueless about how the game is supposed to work. Setting up your attacks is challenging.

Negatives: the game lacks some verisimilitude; you can support a village with troops from another village, but the supporting troops can’t be “localized” – the city that built a troop is that troop’s city, forevermore. This makes organizing your empire at higher levels somewhat challenging. The map doesn’t show troops in motion, which would be cool and would really bring the game more to life.

Most of the things I find I don’t like are things where the game could be better and cooler, though, not things where the game is bad. For example, it would be great if you could have profitable, quiet trade with your peaceful neighbors. As things stand, there isn’t much incentive to be friends with people other than to avoid having to fight them; being friendly just means you leave each other alone as the game exists. I’d also like to see more high fantasy elements, like court wizards (good on defense, boost village productivity) or higher levels of palace. But these are quibbles.

The game itself is quite fun, it’s easy to play in just a few minutes a day, and it’s free to start. You can buy servants to get access to some management tools but this isn’t necessary until you’re quite into the game, and there are lots of free offers you can do to get more servants if you don’t want to shell out the $5 or so you might need in a month to play the game at the fullest level. Recommended to anyone wanting an enjoyable building/fighting game with a medieval theme.

Here’s a screenshot of the area around my main complex of villages:

and here’s a shot of my army list, of a village about to become part of the Kingdom of Bob.

My wife and I ended up at the huge health care protest today. We hadn’t even known there was going to be an event (cut us some slack, it’s been busy) until I read in the paper (yes, I read a paper – I hope my 75 cents keeps the Post alive for another day or two) that the organizers of the event had a bomb threat yesterday. We decided to go, and it was very interesting.

Capitol police say about 1.5 million people were there; other estimates have topped 2 million. Honestly, that seems (very) high, but it’s notoriously difficult to get a good count when you’re in the middle of the crowd. I would have guessed a few hundred thousand – maybe a million on the high end. It was a very polite crowd, and from what I saw the (tiny) group of counterprotestors wasn’t abused. (OK, I did march along with them for a few moments shouting “I want free money! Free money now!”, but my wife made me come back. Spoilsport.)

99% of the crowd were people who have never been in a protest in their entire life. The crowd was older – lots and lots of vets and cornfed Midwestern types. Interestingly, the Mall was left quite clean when everyone had left – conservatives pick up their trash, I guess. The other half of the mall was reserved for a black family group having a huge “family reunion” and picnic – despite the rampant racism and black hatred, our 2 million didn’t go and beat up their hundred thousand or so. (Maybe the racists didn’t want to embarrass the black people marching with us.)

LOTS of signs, mostly handmade. Some organizations and media figures have been beating the drum for this apparently (I can’t stand Glenn Beck so we never watch his show) but everybody there we talked to had gotten themselves to DC, no astroturf that we could see beyond the scattering of pre-printed signs. I was absolutely shocked at the size of the crowd; we got onto the Metro to go into DC at Shady Grove, the northernmost red line stop, and the line for the farecards filled the entire lobby as a bunch of people who had never been to DC before tried to figure out the system. (It didn’t help that there are now two different kinds of farecards.) The whole Metro system was semi-overwhelmed by the numbers, but they did a great job keeping everybody moving and other than the crowds the transportation situation was quite smooth.

It’s hard to figure the impact of events like this. But if I was a moderate Democrat congressman on the fence, I think I would have just been pushed off. There are a lot more people out there who won’t stand for what they see as socialized medicine, than people had guessed.

Later we went to the National Gallery of Art and looked at the Spanish swords and armor display, which was pretty awesome. Armor-making by the gunpowder age had become a truly refined science, and they had some replica pieces made of stainless steel you could try on. Anyone who wants to see a photo of me clutching a mailed gauntlet to my chest or wearing a visored helmet should check here next week when I get home and get a chance to upload pictures.

I’m currently shopping for a gauntlet of my own.

Why, indeed. Someday there will be religion of gay rock-climbing Trek enthusiasts, and this video will be played each week at Sunday services.

Ann Althouse and her beau Meade have tied the knot, right here in beautiful Colorado (where the law permits people to conduct the ceremony themselves)! Well done, thou good and faithful bloggers.

Go, Mr. Simberg, go!

Just click on it.

Buzz Aldrin is apparently more energetic than I thought. He has a crackling editorial in the Post today on getting on with Mars colonization. Hear, hear!

We went to the Moon. (If you disagree, don’t bother to post your ‘argument’. Buzz is an old man, he doesn’t have the energy to go around punching *everybody*.)

It’s time to go back, although not in the same way. We’ve done the Christopher Columbus thing – now it’s time to do the John Smith thing.