Played Half-life 2 recently...

It pretty much lives up to its billing in every way. Except the lack of warning about the linearity. Very nearly no deviation off the main line. No Advanced Degree (tm) needed for this game.

The gravity gun is pretty nifty. Unfortunately, you can't use it to grab and throw opponents until late in the game, which bites. What you CAN do that's interesting is use a 50-gal drum as a shield with the grav gun. The opponents are too stupid to realize what you're doing, and since they can't see you, they don't shoot. Mostly--eventually some of them smarten up and shoot the can out of your grip. You can use it to grab those flying attack-bots and fling them into a wall--that's nice. and slicing zombies with saw-blades--that is way cool.

There are more weapons that you find than you actually need. I didn't find the six-shooter particularly helpful. The shotgun was excellent, the machine gun ok, the rocket launcher is required for some things (incl ones you didn't expect). (actually, the six-shooter is good for those barnacle-things on various ceilings)

The biz about shooting helicopters: we lost a lot of choppers and fighter jets in Vietnam from casual machine-gun fire (give all the villagers machine guns and plenty of ammo, tell them when they hear a chopper or jet to run outside with the gun and just shoot up in the air--you'll end up shredding the flyers eventually, at very low cost). I should be able to bring down those helicopters gunships with any automatic weapon in addition to the rocket launcher. (Did you notice how much those flying things look like bugs?)

There's one spot late in the game where you have four snipers. The first two of them you can really just run past, so you should do so. The reason for this is that you may have a load of rockets (well, 3), and since you can use them to take out the snipers, you might be tempted. However: those first two aren't actually that dangerous. It's the second two snipers that are a problem, and you almost certainly have to have the rockets for them. Online walk-throughs say you can throw hand-grenades at the second two snipers--I absolutely could NOT do that, I got killed quick every time. You CAN hit them with the rockets--the trick is to realize that you can't really show yourself but just barely to where you can see the windows they're inside, and then remember how the rocket launcher works, because there isn't extra ammo around. If you stand up to where those two snipers can see you, you'll be dead quick. But if you crouch to where you can just barely see the top of the window, they can't see you yet, and you can rocket them both.

This game didn't really take me all that long to play, maybe two weeks of serious play time, during which my wife felt neglected :( Definitely worth the $20 I spent; at the moment, I'm not expecting to do any of the expansions. The gravity gun, however...need to see that elsewhere.

August: I went back and played again, after recovering my Steam login. Then I fired up the cheats opportunity, and the played the entire game (after about 3 levels), with the super gravity gun. game was MUCH more fun with that, and realizing that you can grab thrown hand-grenades mid-air and throw them back, in addition to being able to grab virtually any opponent...with one exception. I was not able to grab the ant-lion queens, reason not known, but since if you look at other parameters you can modify in the console, it's all heavy on the physics, they are probably weight-related.

Free online music

Interested in free music? It shouldn't take an Advanced Degree (tm) to figure out how to get good stuff without breaking the law. I want stuff to put on my iPod, to listen on the subway.

It really bugs me that there's so much reported tendency for music or movie piracy. Napster, etc. Of course this occurs because the market is being violated.

For comparison: you want the new CD by [whomever], it's $15, because people are used to paying that kind of price, from 20 years ago when the actual production cost was higher. Now...that production cost is near zero. 20 years ago LPs didn't cost nearly that much, even though the same monopolies existed. But it's still high, because there's no competition.

Example: if you want to buy a CD of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, you can get that for less than $5. Why the diff? Because the 5th is long out of copyright and into the public domain. Anyone can perform and record it. Many do, so there's actual competition, which keeps the cost low. Market forces at work.

So where the cost is high, it's because market violations (sanctioned monopoly) exist.

Don't want to pay that much? Find something else, don't pirate that one. Plenty of alternatives. Vote with your wallet.

Well, where should you look? MP3.com used to be a good place, until someone thought there was money to be made there, bought it, shut it down, and later re-opened with a lot of old stuff gone and prices that I thought weren't competitive.

My favorites are:

http://www.Besonic.com/, a German website, reborn a year or two ago, a year and some after a disastrous disk crash that wiped out eveything and their backups. Besonic has somewhat more traditional grouping/organization. I discovered this website by accident a few years ago, enough before the disaster that I was able to grab an interesting amount of stuff. Most of which was really weak on the ID3 tags, so I have a bunch of tunes with no info...and following their disk crash, no way for me to find out. You have to register to do downloads, but you don't get a big load of spam as a result, just the occasional email mentioning new things.

http://www.jamendo.com/, a Polish website (or maybe it's French), not nearly as much content, but some very nice stuff. Jamendo uses tag clouds as the grouping mechanism, it's weird getting used to. Downloads are via BitTorrent, no registration required. I'm listening to this stuff a lot right now, lots of nice work there. There's a lot of French stuff on here, but they aren't any better at rap than anyone else, which is to say, lau-zee.

Then do the right thing and send the artist some money, if you keep the stuff and listen to it. Nothing encourages the struggling artist like getting some cash :)


Both are highly recommended.

Update on Aug 3, 2007.

http://www.soundclick.com/ is also an excellent source. I had forgotten about this one...

Update on Oct 17, 2007.

found out about another one: Wolfgang's Vault, apparently this has many/most/all of Bill Graham's archive of recorded shows at the Fillmores, etc. OMG! You have got to check this out. There are some AMAZING shows on there: Genesis, Allman Bros, Derek & Dominos, Pink Floyd...most are only available for listening, but if you can rip an audio stream...