OMGN: Nexus

Here are some horror oriented games that are available on the Internet:

Apocalypse End Times.

Cleveland After Dark.

The Necropolis.

The following is from the Grand Strategy Yahoo! News Group. It was posted by game creator Bryan Brunton:

I have updated the UI, database and game creation code to support this. You can now select if you want your turns on Weekdays Only on the Advanced tab of the Game Creation dialog.

One small proviso: the weekday only turn processing doesn’t work yet. The turn processor will still process turns on the weekends. I want to limit the fallout of any regressions to the UI as I haven’t updated it for some time. Also, updates to the turn processor can be tricky and dangerous so I’ll be thoroughly testing the new code for that.

On the plus side: if you do create Weekday Only games now, that functionality should be working in short order.

I also fixed a bug with the leader board where the pager for the Individual tab didn’t work.

Here’s something of interest that came in the email last year:

Obama, the Media, and the Legacy of the Swift Boat Veterans

The puzzle pieces are falling into place, and a chilling picture is emerging:

* Barack Obama’s mentor and long-time minister Jeremiah Wright called upon God to “damn America.” Wright also preached that America deserved the 9/11 attacks, and claimed that the US government created AIDS in order to kill black people.

* Obama worked closely for several years with the former Weather Underground bomber Bill Ayers. Ayers hosted the fundraiser that launched Obama’s political career with his wife Bernardine Dohrn, also a communist and a former terrorist.

* As an attorney in Illinois, Obama represented ACORN, the radical community organizing group that set the stage for the 2008 financial crisis by pressuring banks to make high-risk mortgage loans. Obama later sent millions of dollars to ACORN while working with Bill Ayers at the Chicago Annenberg Challenge. In 2007 Obama promised ACORN members that if elected, he would be “calling all of you in” during the post-election transition “to help us shape the agenda.” His presidential campaign paid the group more than $800,000 in 2008. ACORN is currently being investigated for election fraud in more than a dozen states.

* Obama’s primary financial backer in Chicago, political fixer Tony Rezko, was convicted of 16 felonies including fraud, money laundering and abetting bribery.

* Archived documents of the Marxist Chicago “New Party” show that Obama was a member in the 1990’s. His campaign had previously denied any connection.

* In 2006, Obama spent six days in Kenya campaigning for Marxist presidential candidate Raila Odinga. His Senate staff coordinated donations to Odinga’s campaign totaling nearly $1 million. Obama declared at numerous rallies that Kenyans “are now yearning for change.” Meanwhile, Odinga signed a declaration of understanding with Muslim leaders recognizing Islam as Kenya’s “only true religion.” After Odinga’s defeat, his thugs started riots that killed at least 1,000 people and destroyed or damaged 800 Christian churches. More than 50 people, mostly women and children, were burned to death in a single church while men with machetes attacked anyone who tried to escape. Kenya’s elected government was then forced to accept a “power-sharing” agreement with Odinga’s party.

* Obama has been praised by Fidel Castro, Daniel Ortega, and the terrorist group Hamas. Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan says Obama is “the Messiah.”

America’s “mainstream” media organizations have gone out of their way to ignore or dismiss these disturbing facts, protecting the flawed candidate they favor – a man who could not pass the background check required to obtain a basic security clearance.

Instead, they spend their time investigating the life of “Joe the Plumber,” to deflect attention away from Barack Obama’s revealing promise to “spread the wealth around.”

—

In 2004, the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth showed how to beat the media’s rigged game.

They took their testimony about John Kerry’s past directly to the public, bypassing the outraged old media “gatekeepers.” And the public found their charges to be credible.

A key reason for their success was the rise of a new American media. A host of bloggers, talk radio hosts and cable network interviewers stepped up to investigate the Swift Vets’ remarkable array of charges against Kerry. They did the real journalism that old media organizations had largely abandoned in their zeal to support the Democratic candidate.

The political movement the Swift Vets spearheaded was the key factor in Kerry’s defeat.

After failing to silence or discredit the veterans, the old media adopted the smear phrase “swift boating” to discourage others from following the Swift Vets’ example. Barack Obama also uses the term, to attack anyone who criticizes his actions and associations.

—

It was my privilege to work closely with the Swift Vets in 2004. I managed their web site at SwiftVets.com and investigated Kerry’s anti-US propaganda during the Vietnam War. My research was used in the bestseller Unfit for Command and in the devastating TV ad campaign. Afterwards, former Marine Tim Ziegler and I spent two years writing the complete inside story of the effort. The result is our new book, To Set The Record Straight: How Swift Boat Veterans, POWs And The New Media Defeated John Kerry.

It tells how an ad hoc collection of veterans and their supporters were able to deliver the explosive truth about John Kerry’s past to the public – despite relentless efforts by the Democratic Party and its media affiliates to silence them. And it tells the story of the long struggle of America’s much-maligned Vietnam veterans to make their way home.

To Set The Record Straight also covers the first great battles in the ongoing war between the old and new media. A chapter available online, Rather’s Ruin and the Rise of the Pajamahadeen, describes how the now-infamous CBS News attack on President Bush’s military service using fake National Guard documents was exposed by ordinary citizens.

National Review writes that To Set The Record Straight is “convincing” and “scholarly.”
Power Line says it “documents the most dramatic story of the 2004 campaign.” However, major bookselling chains such as Barnes & Noble are unwilling to stock it in their stores.

The 400-page hardcover version of the book is only available online. We are reducing the price from $29.95 to just $19.95 – less than the cost of the paperback at Amazon.

Click here to purchase To Set The Record Straight

If you care about politics, the media or the military, you’ll want to learn the real story of how veterans created a political movement that turned the 2004 election upside down.

The Swift Boat Veterans for Truth have disbanded, but their legacy continues. It lives on in the form of increased public respect for the honorable service of Vietnam veterans, tarnished for so many years by the misrepresentations of the old media and Hollywood. That legacy includes an important lesson that was overlooked back in 1971: “war crimes” allegations made against American troops by radical leftist agitators cannot be trusted.

In a time when the right to speak out is increasingly under attack, the story of the Swift Vets is an inspiring example of what ordinary Americans can do – when they are free.

Scott Swett
October 2008

SwiftVets.com
WinterSoldier.com
ToSetTheRecordStraight.com

One pretty interesting website is the Libertarian Webring that contains all sorts of links to interesting, libertarian oriented websites.

Greensseo services have announced its successful launch of seo services on this Monday. Though Greensseo services are new in the market we have a team of experts who are well experience in the field of seo. The company has introduced different SEO strategies to meet the optimization requirements of every person aspiring to optimize their website or blog to its full potential.
This new SEO service is designed to help businesses and individuals get their websites listed on search engines and directories as well as getting links to the site. Once this service is performed, people can find what they are looking for and will have an easier time locating a site that has been optimized. We are not among the companies who make blind promises and bluff people with their cheap techniques, while most companies promise number 1 position prior to taking up their services and achieve the same for a week or less than that. Greens SEO will achieve top positions for you and retain them as well; simultaneously great traffic will also be diverted to the website.

Our SEO experts help you in understanding the basics of online businesses and tell you the features that are required to be incorporated into your plan to attain top ranks in the search engines. If your website has a reader friendly content and is easily accessible on all popular search engines then there is nothing that will stop you from reaching top rankings on the search engines. If your website’s content has not been built using great keyword techniques, don’t panic our experts will give you a daily update on the changes required in the content of your website which in turn results in top-class search engine optimization for your website.

The SEO Services offered by this company presents a unique opportunity for you to efficiently and economically implement marketing plans rather than draining time and resources in mundane tasks requiring you to optimize your website. This service adds tremendous value to business professionals, entrepreneurs, corporates, as well as individuals. The services offered by Greensseo services are ethical, faithful, result oriented, time bound, honest and the best online solutions for Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

Our experts are very much versatile in performing maximum seo tactics like Directory submissions, social bookmarking, article submission, reciprocal linking, press releases, forum commenting, blog commenting and many more .

For more information about our Greensseo services and prices, our marketing experts are ready to contact you as well as to provide a pretty good seo solution. Please visit us at http://www.greensseo.com/

Originally, the free web based email service at MyWay was one of the best, if not the best of its kind. However, an ill-advised makeover has left it completely screwed up. For example, there are times when email deleted in one session shows up in the inbox the next time around.

And then there are times when just simply accessing the http://webmail.myway.com
part of the main MW website brings up this msg:

It looks like your account has been de-activated. As stated in our Terms of Service, My Way reserves the right to “terminate and/or delete accounts that have remained inactive for a period of ninety (90) or more days. In the event of a suspension or deletion of an email account, messages (whether sent, received, in draft form or archived) and address book entries will no longer be accessible.”

We apologize for any inconvenience this has caused. You may enter your email login and password to re-activate your account, but please note that emails and address book entries saved prior to de-activation will not be accessible. Please see our Terms of Service for further information regarding our Email Policy.

What’s really aggravating is that you get this msg before you even enter your handle/password.

Ever wanted to be able to access classic Star Trek comic strips for free? Well now you can!

There have been quite a few new movie reviews posted lately at OMGN’s sister website, FlickZone.

Here they are:

Young Guns

Gunshy

The Four Feathers

American Hot Wax

Chump Change

For the past few years, athletic boosters at Duke University have been waging a vendetta against sports writer Selena Roberts, formerly of the N.Y. Times and now of Sports Illustrated. Roberts was the columnist who more than other journalist, exposed the culture of privilege that athletes — particularly those who were from wealthy and powerful families — that existed at Duke. It was this culture that allowed athletes to literally get away with murder in their treatment of other students. Of all the jocks at Duke, there were none who were more prone to exploiting their privileges than the members of the Duke Men’s Lacrosse team.

Long before the big rape case at Duke broke out, the virtually all white lacrosse team had a well deserved reputation as a uniquely criminal squad whose members were often engaged in such antisocial behavior as urinating in public, intimidating other students, throwing wild parties to the detriment of the neighborhood and treating their neighbors like dirt and also engaging in crimes against members of the female gender as well as the ebony hued race.

Roberts wrote a series of columns that exposed this culture of evil privilege by the criminal jocks and Duke’s complicity in maintaining a cover up of it as opposed to cracking down on criminal jocks. For this, Roberts has incurred the hatred of the athletic boosters at Duke who view Roberts as, among other things, a traitoress to the white race.

Here’s a post from a forum that is devoted to the defense of the Duke jocks that shows this mentality all too well:

She is genetically inferior. Very ugly. She and people like her are just besides themselves with envy over those with genetically superior super DNA. Her underlying motivation to her work is to shed light on what she feels are the darker sides of these beautiful human being. She will never be one and therefore it is up to her to “let everyone know what “they” are really like”. She formulates her writing with plans that include bringing down people that are already flawed. She rales about the chinks in the armour of college lacrosse players and major league baseball heros. She is really pissed that these people are admired and copied. It is her calling to show us the “truth”. Her big problem is that nobody is buying the notion that it is “she” who we should be listening too. She has zero credibility in most circles. Whether her story is true or not nobody is moved. I can see her most nights crying herself to sleep as she sees all the hot chicks around all these guys. She looks like a wort on the ass of a donkey. Some of you may take offense to my take, but I believe that many underlying motivations in people have to do with wanting to _uck the prom queen, or get _ucked by the athletic hero.

Whatever. In any event, for a gal in her mid-40’s, Roberts is not too bad looking. Its just plain despicable that instead of engaging in an honest debate, the athletic boosters engage in this sort of tactics. Then again, given the athletic privilege that continues to exist at Duke where coeds continue to be raped by jocks and the university continues to engage in cover ups such as the cover up in the lacrosse case that was exposed by the news media, there really is not much that the boosters can do other than engaging in tactics straight from the sewer.

There is a fairly new News/Opinion website called The Stimulist . Its a pretty good website overall if you don’t mind its rabidly pro Obama aka “BHO” slant.

However, there is a problem with The Stimulist. It aims to be a comprehensive public affairs website, yet it is laced with all sorts of vulgarity that has no place on such an endeavor. For instance, there is a section of links interesting though trivial websites that has a vulgar heading to it.

What all this does is to cheapen The Stimulist and reduce the size of its audience. You would think that the creators of this website would want to make their creation a classy and widely read spot in cyberspace. Then again, there is a lot of poor thinking out there and this is but the latest example.

There is a new game on the block, Cosmic Supremacy and its pretty good looking. I’d play it myself if it were not for my aversion to download games.

Just when you thought that things could not get any worse at Space Merchant Realms, it has. SMR has just added the discredited Newbie Games from the original and long ago defunct Space Merchant. Newbie Games were shown to be a bad idea and their existence helped to speed up the demise of SM. Now it appears that the admins of SMR are determined to go down the fateful path of the original game.

Well SMR, its been nice knowing you.

It seems hard to believe, but Caissa’s Web aka the very first pay to play chess server when it debuted in 1995 is still around and its now a play for free website!

Here’s an interesting gaming website.

Here’s its news:

News
August 21, 2008
The server is having significant issues that are diffuicult to isolate. I am working on a solution, including changing servers if neccessary. The new setup sould be online by next week, which will hopefully resolve our stability issues.

July 11, 2008
Whew.. finally get my email from the site working again, and discover that Marbles has been locking up after the first game for weeks. I found the problem and have corrected it. Unfortunatly, this has not restored high scores, so I have removed all the links to high scores since they are pointless if they can’t be updted. I am looking towards a permanent solution for the website in the near future.

June 4, 2008
I still do not know what exactly is wrong with the server. I am attempting to mitigate the problem by automaticlaly restarting the server ever hour. This all began with a full hard drive on the server. Beyond that, I do not know what is causing the failures on the server. I may have more time this weekend to fully investigate.

June 1, 2008
As many have noticed, the website encountered some issues late Friday. I thought I’d had them taken care of last night, but apparently not. At the moment, the games should all be playable, however, highscores and personal preferences are not working. I will update once this is resolved.

Both the corrupt Mayor Daley and his pathetic underling Obama are doing everything they can to force the disaster known as the 2016 summer Olympics upon the people of Chicago. Thankfully, there is a major website that is dedicated to opposing this corrupt activity by the crooked politicians of Illinois aka Land of Evil.

According to the official blog for Pacific Gas & Electric, PG&E has contracted with a new start up to provide 200 megawatts of space based solar power starting around 2016.
According to Wikipedia, this should provide 150,000 homes with reliable renewable electric power.

Let’s all hope that this succeeds with flying colors.

With this post, OMGN Nexus is beck in action!

Likewise, so is our movie review website that has recently added reviews of the following movies:

American Hot Wax

Chump Change

The Strange Case of Hellish Nell is a great book about the strange but true case of Helen Duncan who was the only person to be prosecuted during World War II under the Witchcraft Act of 1735. Duncan was a medium or spiritualist who had a tendency to reveal state secrets during seances that suggested that she was on the side of the Nazis and had somehow corrupted folk in the British government to give her information that was supposed to be kept secret. However, the British government was unable to discover just how she was getting her information and the only way that British law enforcement could come up with to silence her was to bring her up on charges of witchcraft.

What were these secrets that the British government wanted kept out of Duncan’s seances? Ship movements including those related to the forthcoming invasion of France.

What specific secret that Duncan leaked during a seance sparked the British government’s action against her? The battleship HMS Barham had been sunk in the Mediterranean Sea and the British government withheld this information from the public for fear that it would damage public morale. However, during a seance, Duncan revealed that the Barham had been sunk. To this day it is unknown how Duncan came by this information and it seems unlikely that her naming the Barham as being sunk so soon after it was sunk could have been a coincidence.

In any event, The Strange Case of Hellish Nell is a great book about a bizarre subject.

Currently, Space Merchant Realms is offline. No hint of any offline activity was even so much as hinted at by the admins. However, this development does not come as a surprise to long time players who have seen how the admins/developers have taken a once popular game and have literally run it into the ground.

Originally an unauthorized ripoff of the defunct Space Merchant (SM), Space Merchant Realms (SMR) quickly gathered an impressive following during its beta period of Fall, 2001–Spring, 2002. At its height in 2004, it had nearly 3,000 players. It was more popular than any other game of its type other than TDZK. Its popularity led to SM creator Jonathan Manton giving SMR his blessings in 2004. Everything looked bright for SMR’s future.

However, there was a problem. There was an aggressively vocal faction in the playership that demanded radical changes be made to the game. It should come as no surprise to anyone familiar with online gaming forums that this faction consisted of the most aggressively homicidal players in the game. They saw SMR as being purely a wargame and demanded changes to turn it into a wargame. They wanted to turn SMR into a glorified shooting gallery and make it easier to kill off the more peaceful players who consisted of the bulk of the playership.

You would think that the SMR admins would have the backbone to stand up to these webboard warriors. You would be wrong and the decline and fall of SMR began in the summer of 2004. By the summer of 2006, changes that, among other things, devalued planetary defenses, led to most of the players leaving the game and its playership plummeted to less than 1,000 players. At the start of 2008, the playership had declined further to 500 and now it its current round, there are fewer than 200 players, many of whom are not active.

What kind of changes led to so many players becoming alienated? In the original SM, you could only get Combat Drones at either a Combat Accessories (CA) shop (which were scarce in the game) or at the HQ sector of the Ik’Thorn Galaxy and even then you had to be either an Ik’Thorn player or a player whose race was not at war with the Ik’Thorns. Mines & Scout Drones were only accessible at CA’s. This helped to slow down the progress of players and groups of players interested only in killing other players. Planetary construction consisted of only Turrets, Shield Generators & Combat Drone Hangars and the price for construction in terms of credits, resources and time of construction were reasonable. Now, in the increasingly deserted SMR, you can gain access to Combat Drones, Mines & Scout Drones at every racial HQ. This only serves to enable pure player killers to engage in wholesale death and destruction. Add in the fact that planetary construction now requires huge sums of credits, resources and huge numbers of hours for construction, and you have a game where players who want to engage in peaceful trading have little chance for survival.

Given the fact that most players in space trading strategy games are of the peaceful trader sort, and you can easily see why the vast majority of the original SM/SMR playership were alienated by these changes. Just about all of the good non-hunter players such as Omega Prime and just about everyone from the generally peaceful trader player group Omega Factor have quit SMR. Back in early 2000, the original SM had over 11,000 players and now its successor game has fewer than 200 players most of whom are no more than semi-active. Given the refusal of the admins to reconsider their actions, it appears that it is only a matter of time before the admins pull the plug on the game.

For all of us at OMGN, this is an especially sad development given how OMGN has run 55 News Posts about SMR , possibly more news postings than about any other game. Hopefully, the story of SMR will serve as a warning for future game admins who come under the pressure of those whose forum conduct mirror their aggressive game play. Perhaps this will serve as a silver lining for the death of a once good, if not great, game.

The Dark Knight is the single most misreviewed movie of this year (2008) thus far. All too many movie reviewers are pandering to what they believe their readers want to hear, rather than what they actually believe. As a result, what is actually a movie with a confusing plot and a tendency towards speechifying, especially in its last half hour, has been hailed as one of the greatest movies of the year, if not this decade thus far.

Why has The Dark Knight been so widely labeled a great movie by the critics? Basically because movie reviewers, particularly critics for print publications such as newspapers, have been pandering to what they believe that their readers want to hear. Since the conventional wisdom is that The Dark Knight will be a blockbuster, the critics want to get on the “right side” of the public and so they write these pandering reviews that overlook the problems with The Dark Knight.

Why are the critics engaging in this behavior? Newspapers are downsizing and dropping their in-house movie reviewers and are either replacing them with syndicated writers or not even running movie reviews at all. Casualties of the recent downsizing trend include Terry Lawson of the Detroit Free Press and Michael Wilmington of the Chicago Tribune. A big reason for this trend is the increasing belief that movie reviewers are irrelevant as far as the movie going public is concerned. Flicks denounced by the critics score big at the box office while films that win critical praise bomb out. As a result, the critics are praising movies that they think will attract huge crowds so that they can “prove” their relevancy and as a result, keep their jobs.

While a better movie overall than Batman Begins, The Dark Knight suffers from the same basic flaws as its prequel. The plot is poorly thought out and has several improbably moments such as the Joker being able to escape at least 3 different times and in hard to believe ways each time. The acting is average at best & the script is not much better than okay. If Heath Ledger were still alive, practically nobody would be singling out his performance as the Joker as being Oscar worthy. Ledger’s Joker is lame and inferior to Cesar Romero’s Joker from the mid-1960’s TV show Batman and the 1966 movie version of the same show. About the only saving grace for The Dark Knight is the fact that its first 2 hours is so fast paced that it flies by so much so that you would almost swear that substantially less time had elapsed. Too bad the last half hour is loaded with characters making speeches to each other and the like that causes the movie to suddenly drag.

Like Batman Begins before it, The Dark Knight is basically a perversion of the original Batman created by Bob Kane. As such, it should be avoided by all those who read and respected Batman in the comic books.

As for those pandering print movie reviewers, if all they can do is praise the movies that they think are going to become hits, and trash the flicks that they believe are going to bite the dust, then they richly deserve to become an endangered species, if not altogether extinct.