Burrowowl

After a six-week hiatus, a new episode of Ergo Proxy has been translated into English. This one carries on with the recent trend of Proxy vs. Proxy battles to the death. As with Episode 14, Vincent’s opponent utilizes a rather unusual method of combat, putting our protagonist in a sitution in which he must reach 1,000,000 points in a quiz contest.

Radio Free Llael is a podcast produced rather in the spirit of Fell Calls, but instead of being run by a gaggle of wargamers, it is run by a group of roleplaying enthusiasts. At only two episodes, it is already shaping up to be the National Public Radio to the Fell Calls’ wacky sports talk. The tone is relatively mellow, and the hosts Thurston and Nick clearly get along well with each other and their guests very well. One thing that is clear from the first two episodes is that these folks aren’t afraid to break away from the canonical Iron Kingdoms, going so far as to incorporate airships into their upcoming Llaelese Resistance campaign.

Give it a try for some mellow, geeky fun.

Attention nerds: September 15th is World Firefox Day. This is the big day to get your name “immortalized” by talking some schleb into downloading a copy of Firefox. For the uninitiated, Firefox is the open-source web browser based off of Mozilla, the open-source version of Netscape. Netscape, if you don’t recall, is the browser people used to use before Internet Explorer conquered the world in a bloody coup. In the spirit of World Firefox Day, I submit to you my reasons everybody should use Firefox:

• Tabbed Browsing. You can’t get it from IE without installing Maxthon, which is free, or by upgrading to version 7. You don’t want to upgrade, that would be bad.
• Tabbed Browsing. You can’t get it from Opera. Scratch that, Opera does it.
• The Acid 2 test. Firefox fails the test better than IE does.
• Memory leaks are fun. You always wanted to consume over 100 megabytes of RAM just to have a five kilobyte webpage open, right?
• If you are one of the Macintosh holdouts, you really should use Firefox. You see, Microsoft stopped making new versions of IE, and Safari is quite possibly the most insidiously bad browsers ever conceived, so Firefox is one of your few decent options.
• Bill Gates is evil. Unless you’re a third-world kid dying from a treatable disease and he’s sending doctors and medicine to you. But that doesn’t count, he was wildly-successful through the 80′s and 90′s and is therefore the Antichrist.
• Firefox used to be Firebird. Firebird used to be Phoenix. This browser has more names than Nyarlathotep.

All that aside, I tend to use Firefox more than I use IE, and use Opera solely to test for compatibility issues. The reason for this is largely inertia. The Internet Explorer 7 beta is reasonably stable and does everything I need it to, but I’ve grown accustomed to clicking on the little orange fox in my quick-launch bar.

With the release of Five Fingers: Port of Deceipt, Privateer Press paints an interesting picture of an “evil city” for their campaign setting, the Iron Kingdoms. From other sourcebooks, we fans of the setting knew Five Fingers as a pirate haven on the border of Ord and Cygnar, a city with a dark and lawless reputation. Port of Deceit simultaneously confirms and dispels these notions.
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