But it did until the most recent patch, so I expect that upon release Civ V will require a CD.

Hmm, have to disagree there... while I rather liked the two Renshai trilogies, the Bifrost Guardians was pretty crappy. In fact, enough elements turn up in both the Bifrost books and the first Renshai trilogy that I decided it was likely that the author wanted a second go at the cooler concepts in a better work.

Close. Talk TO Iolo and say "spam spam spam humbug" to access the cheat menu. :)

I play guitar, piano, sing, and compose and record music. And while I will agree that writing your own may be more rewarding, goddamn but I find Guitar Hero and its kin to be a hell of a lot of fun anyway!

I'll third the recommendation for White Hat.

I am, in fact, writing a 2d tile based game, similar to Exile or the early Ultimas, in JS. So far, so good. I may wind up screaming and giving up, but for now I think it's going to be doable.

The thing that is still "theoretical" isn't so much that black holes exist- it's pretty clear that objects with their gravitational influence on the universe exist- but whether they have all the properties that we ascribe to black holes. Most importantly, whether or not they are true singularities. The singularity, if it's there, is truly unobservable, hiding behind its event horizon. An object that is just extremely dense and massive would look identical to us from the outside as an object that is infinitely dense and massive. By current understanding of the nature of the universe and relativistic and QM theories, that level of "extremely" dense is impossible (it has to collapse further into a singularity)... but if those theories someday get revised, we may find that the black holes all over the universe are not actually the mathematically ill-behaved singularities we currently think they are.

The Book of the New Sun is one of those very few stories that I finished and then immediately turned back to page 1 to reread to see what I had missed. Genius.

Of course, the Hyperion Cantos is also a favorite, so people should go read both!