Drew Burden

I run this game right now. I’ll admit, it doesn’t have a large player base as of yet.  At the most, we have 20 people playing and maybe four teams. If you are even remotely interested in text-based games, give this game a try.

WorldWars is an extremely old game, though the format has changed a few times each new version, the overall look and function of the game has stayed the same. It’s at least 10 years old, and has been through hell… but somehow survived. The original creator of WorldWars goes by the internet name “Phantom”. He brought this game into the world, and has repeatedly taken it out. He never left the game up and running for longer than four months at a time. Recently, he left for good. I have an old version of the game so I decided to put it online. However, the PHP code is encrypted. I have been able to run the game but it’s full of bugs. We’re able to keep an eye on players using the bugs, but we can’t fix them because the code is encrypted. The main reason we are leaving this game up is because I plan on developing a completely new version of WorldWars. This will be our code, our concepts, our game. We are adding routes to the game, new units, new constructions, new researches, new country names, etc. We are hoping that with this fresh version of WorldWars, that we will attract a large portion of gamers from all over the world.

However, for the moment we’re running this old, beat up, out of date version of WorldWars… and we need more people to sign up for it, and give it a go. This way, we can become known in the internet gaming community.

So to review, WorldWars is:

Text Based. (No 3D dazzle here, guys.)
Browser Game. (You don’t have to download anything, it opens right up.)
Runs on Ticks. (This is when the game updates. We usually do it every 30 minutes.)
Free. (No signup fee, no pay-to-play, but we do accept donations.)
Teams. (This is a group of players who have joined together to protect each other and reach the top.)
Alliances. (This is a group of teams that have joined together to take out rival or dangerous teams.)
5 Different Types of Units. (IN-Infantry, LD-Land, AR-Air, NV-Navy, BU-Building)
3 Different Types of Income. (Gold, Oil, and Titanium, all required for training units and constructing buildings.)

Most of this information was shamelessly stolen from my brother’s MySpace blog entry. He helps me run the game.

BANG. BANG. BANG.

The quick succession of loud beats on my front door caused me to bolt out of bed at 9:15 this morning, and scramble to get my pants on. I already knew who was at the door and what they wanted.

I opened the door and in front of me stood a Daviess County sheriff’s deputy. I didn’t get his name because I had neglected to put on my glasses but in that blurry soup of my vision he looked a bit like Dr. Phil. Call me crazy.

Anyway, he handed me a piece of paper and told me something I already knew… that I had to be in court on Friday. I basically have to tell the judge what happened when I managed to get myself attacked with a box cutter and beat down last week. Man, you never know what can happen when you refuse to give a guy money for drugs. I envy you people that don’t have dads in your lives.

Not really. I just got an email from a lady in Leighton, Alabama whose son shares a name with me. How awesome is that? If there’s anyone else who knows someone who shares a name, get them in touch! We can be an army of Drews… or something. Whatever.

Since this is the first time I’ve done this, I’ll just tell you that I’ll write a short paragraph followed by a link for more reading.

Okay, so if you read my blog, you know I’m not a big fan of Tom Cole (guess the party-OK) and the NRCC for obvious reasons, see my post “Another political BS-fest” for details. But now Tom Cole is stumping for Brett Guthrie (also guess the party) in Kentucky and said that Barack Obama will not help David Boswell in the U.S. House race. Uh… what? So you’re saying that a guy from Boswell’s own party running for president at the top of the ticket won’t help him win? Something about the pot calling the kettle black, what? Anyway, he spews a lot of BS, about which I may go deeper on later. - NRCC Chair sees Obama weighing down Boswell

I’m not as partisan as you think, really. I have a lot of respect for a lot of prominent Republicans, for example the likes of Chuck Hagel and Gen. Colin Powell, who, unless you’ve been under a rock you know endorsed Barack Obama yesterday. I’m not so concerned about his endorsement of Senator Obama as much as I was his passionate and driving denouncement of Islamophobia in the United States. On NBC’s Meet the Press with Tom Brokaw on Sunday, Gen. Powell expressed disappointment at his party’s continued shift to the right, running the Bill Ayers thing into the ground and dropping hints lying about Sen. Obama’s religion. He told the story about a U.S. soldier who died in Iraq who was a Muslim. You really must see the video to get the full effect. - Powell rejects Islamophobia

I voted for Governor Steve Beshear last year.

Not only is this a testament to how good of a job I thought he could do (and I still think he is doing), but the fact he’s in office shows that a lot of Kentuckians thought he was an improvement over his predecessor.

I think Governor Beshear has done a lot of great things in office, some of which were shot down by opposition, but great things nonetheless. I agree with the man on the issue of legalized gambling in Kentucky–we need it to help alleviate our budget shortfalls.

I do believe, however, that he is making a big mistake when it comes to his administration’s endeavor to seize control of 141 domain names belonging to some of the most popular Internet gambling sites out there. Just because someone has something and you can’t get it doesn’t mean you get to steal it. Forbes has an article about Judge Thomas WIngate refusing to drop the case and I can’t help but be worried.

The Internet is a global medium. We pioneered it and got it started here in the United States but it has a worldwide reach. Ergo, I believe that the Internet is international jurisdiction and the Commonwealth of Kentucky has no business messing with it. Domain names and the seizure thereof are on ICANN’s turf since, you know, they control the DNS. I’m hoping ICANN steps in and doesn’t let this happen. If a state government can seize someone’s domain name because they don’t like the site that’s running on it, what’s next? Will the state government next seize my domain name and that of any other blogger, as I suspect there are many, who have written things critical of the Beshear administration because they saw the exact same thing I see coming? If a state government can seize a domain name, and that precedent is established, the federal government may follow suit and perhaps even the Bush administration will start taking domain names of bloggers and other web sites that have been critical of the president and his cohorts. If this case is allowed to continue I fear it will escalate into a matter of First Amendment rights.

If you haven’t noticed yet, I am horrible at ending these things.

It seems to me like the McCain campaign is just descending to new levels when it comes to making their case for the presidency. I was looking through my Facebook news feed earlier, when Steve Metzger posted a link to an article on Politico. I was treated to an advertisement for the McCain campaign, and I will show it to you here, slightly modified by me:

I normally use pretty clean language in my blog posts, but WHAT THE HELL IS THIS?! From what I hear, the debate last night was nothing short of a circus, and the next day we’re seeing ads all over the internet about Joe the plumber? I know he’s just trying to make a point, but come on. This is being taken way too far. And just think, I was going to post something on my blog about how John McCain had class for correcting that lady who insisted Barack Obama was an Arab. I’m not even going to go into the Politico article, where Ben Smith talks about the CBS interview in which Joe Wurzelbacher (the plumber) expresses his doubt about Sen. Obama. Suspicions of him being a McCain operative aside, it’s sad to see people turned into political tools.

I know, I haven’t been up on the whole blogging thing. Go jump off a cliff.

Not really.

Anyway, since the last time I graced you all with writing, I have gotten my hands on a fresh phone. I can’t say new because it’s not new, but it’s something different. I now have the AT&T 8525, and it’s really not as exciting as it sounds. I can talk and text on it, that’s about it. The keyboard layout is different from the 8125 and it’s something I’m still trying to get used to.

Uh… I’m uncreative and can’t write to save my life. Nothing in my life is really worth reading about. I have to be prodded to post anything here.

Since I’m getting sick of us using DotNetNuke as a solve-all CMS system at work, I’m going to be playing around some. Don’t mind this blog looking like something totally different at times over the next few days.

The lazy remixer guy rides again. I have been a fan of Brad Sucks since April 2006 or so and at times I’ve been known to play around with the source to his albums. This past week, the second Brad Sucks CD, “Out of It“, was released unto the world and all was grand. Then came the source and me playing with it. I noticed that two of the tracks I had the source to had the same tempo and decided to see what I could do to twist them together. I slapped the drum track of “Understood by Your Dad” onto the rest of “Total Breakdown” and it fit perfectly. It’s almost like Brad himself had hidden two pieces of a puzzle in his album. The only roadblock was the fact that one song was longer than the other, so I had to improvise… normally I am very uncreative and remain so, which is why I don’t make truly awesome remixes. The result is on ccMixter and I call it “Misunderstanding a Total Breakdown”. I know it probably sucks.

Check it out.