Captain Quail 6 - Humdrive (Aug. 15, 2013)

We're taking the strip in a pretty heavy Star Trek direction, if that wasn't obvious already, but Allison and I are both well-versed in general pop culture, especially pop culture with a Science Fiction bent. Humdrive is, in my mind, reminiscent of the Spacing Guild Navigators from Dune, but there's probably a bit of TNG's Data in there as well.  The Spice must flow! Humdrive is pretty advanced technology, although she's not quite showing it at the end of today's strip. If I were flying a spaceship full of birds, I would probably have trouble with glass surfaces myself.

I know I'm way late to the party here, but XCOM: Enemy Unknown is a pretty awesome game. I've always had a soft spot for top-down turn based strategy games, and for single-player squad based games. I thought Dawn of War II was the pinnacle of that type of game, until I played XCOM. Taking a game engine traditionally reserved for first-person shooters (the Unreal engine), and using it for a strategy game is part of the brilliance, and allows for great in-motion cinematics as you command your squad.

As I've recently come into some birthday money, and some of it is in the form of Amazon gift cards, I've been thinking about what I should get myself for my birthday; being a geek, naturally my thoughts turned to technology. I'm in this weird position though, where there's not any tech that I really want (at least not in the 'ooh, shiny!' sense). So I'm looking instead for tech things that will be actually helpful to my life, and coming up surprisingly short. The Google Chromecast comes closest, but I already have something that functions pretty well as a set-top box. I'm left in this weird position where I feel like some technological thing could help me in some way, but nothing I see seems good enough to spend my money on. Maybe there's an app for that.

Thanks,

Philip