Okay, so nothing really is happening to warrant a blog post but I’m going to write one anyway because the poor thing is feeling neglected! I’ve been doing a spot of programming in BlitzMax but haven’t blogged about it because the Bullet Mechanics site is going to be rebooted soon and there’s no point until that’s sorted (and programming posts here are just mirrored from there) and I’ve been giving some serious consideration to going Linux for my servers as long as I can find alternatives for a couple of odds and ends the current configuration uses a lot.

In “other news”, I’ve been following the latest Alternate Reality Game that Valve are running (the fans trying to crack it are using this wiki to pool their resources and there’s a timeline here that’s a good starting point) during the build up for Portal 2; these things are absolutely fascinating to me ever since I accidentally found the now defunct Jamie Kane game the BBC ran a few years back and I lost four or five hours reading through the forum posts just after the last Valve ARG which featured clues buried in a Steam update to Portal.

Valve and indeed the indies involved have really gone to town over the current game with clues arriving from emails, tweets and buried within the Potato Sack indie games bundle on Steam as glyphs, Braille, password protected archives containing pictures which in turn contain other data… my favourite to date (since the ARG is still ongoing at the time of writing) are the images dumped in the alpha channel of other images, that’s just genius! This thing must’ve taken bloody ages to come up with…