Ironically, from the Cracked.com comments sections:

1. A woman is suspected of sabotaging a charity event with feminism as her justification, even though the event supposedly aimed to support female developers.
2. A more or less reasonable group of people get upset about this, and make the issue somewhat known.
3. An ex decides to share information about this woman's sex life, which picks up popularity because of the aforementioned scandal.
4. A crazy guy builds a conspiracy from this sex life, which may have started with a kernel of truth, but quickly gets out of hand.
5. Misogynists pick up on this conspiracy and go nuts with it, attacking the woman in typical internet fashion.
6. News sites, always eager to paint things in black and white, ignore the concerns raised by the reasonable people and make the issue about feminism versus misogyny, grouping all people who don't praise the woman in the latter category.
7. The aforementioned reasonable people, having been lumped together with misogynists, become resentful of news websites who use the "feminism" debate to cover their refusal to address real issues.
8. Misogynists start backing up the reasonable people. The reasonable people don't notice, being too focused on their new enemies.
9. An unusually high number of comments, videos, and forums posts are deleted en masse for siding with "gamersgate", regardless of whether they fell into the reasonable or misogynist categories.
10. A portion of the reasonable people begin thinking there's maybe something to this whole "conspiracy" angle, and start becoming indistinguishable from the crazies.
11. Repeat steps 6, 7, 8, and 10 until the whole world's gone crazy and everybody is convinced that everybody else is a mis[ogyn/andr]ist and that there are absolutely no mis[andr/ogyn]ists on their "side".

Read more: http://www.cracked.com/blog/5-things-i-learned-as-internets-most-hated-person/#ixzz3DU3PU3aN

Greetings!

Today I would like to ask you guys some questions about strategy games.

1. What specific features of diplomacy do you traditionally like the most? I want you to be as specific as you can be. Which parts of diplomacy from any game do you like the most? What parts do you remember long after playing the most?

2. Looking back, how many turns do your favorite games last? This is important to know the specific number of turns the game in Question lasted. 

3. Consider all The 4X strategy games that you have ever played. How do you define what is a good strategy game or a bad one? To you what makes one strategy game good fand another one bad? Consider different memories you have of those games can you remember the parts that made you enjoy that game the most?

Thanks!

Forever now, I’ve been naming my PC’s “Frog-<Year purchased>”, Toad for my home machine and Turtle for my laptop and then benchmarking them.  My

Here’s a brief history of their Passmark scores:

The Founder's Vault has been updated with a lot of new screenshots as we start to get pretty close to announcement.

This week the team up of Stardock and Dallas based BonusXP was announced! We’re all very excited to work together on a new game that we think gamers are going to really like.

Little by little the pieces of our long-term strategy get announced.  Here’s a recap of what’s been going on:

2011

• Stardock sells its Impulse digital distribution platform to Gamestop

2012

• Stardock spins off its enterprise software unit into EdgeRunner
• Stardock builds a second game studio in Plymouth Michigan

2013

• Stardock and the development leads from Civilization V team up to form Oxide Games is founded to build a next-generation strategy game centric 3D engine
• Stardock and Civilization IV designer Soren Johnson along with the Civilization IV/V art leads team up to form Mohawk Games to develop an economic RTS called Offworld Trading Company
• Stardock acquires the trademark and publishing rights for the Star Control franchise (www.starcontrol.com)

2014

• Stardock hires Battle.net engineer, Adrian Luff to run Stardock Austin and build a next-generation Metagame platform.
• Stardock and the development team and designer of the Age of Empires series (BonusXP) team up on an unannounced strategy game
• [October: New Stardock PC 4X game announcement]
• [October: New Game Studio announcement soon]
• [Soon:  New Game Studio announcement soon]

2015

• New IP RTS game announcement
• New Stardock 4X 4X game released
• New IP game announcement
• Galactic Civilizations III release
• New IP game announcement

The nature of the team ups

From a game development point of view, the development, art, sound, music and design teams that were involved in Civilization, Civilization III, Civilization IV, Civilization V, Age of Empires series, Galactic Civilizations series, Sins of a Solar Empire series and more are all able to collaborate, support each other on everything from code review, design suggestions, gameplay feedback, art direction, etc.  

The next few years are going to be an amazing time to be a gamer!

My desktop has 3 monitors with lots and lots of windows.  On Windows 8, it gets really fatiguing picking out the active window.  That’s because Windows 8, unlike Windows 7, doesn’t have shadows.  It’s one of my biggest pet peeves with Windows 8 visually.

This wasn’t a problem with Windows 7 because each window had its own drop shadow which changed based on what was the active window. As a result, at a glance, you could pick out the active window.

To address this, Stardock, the makers of Start8, Fences, ObjectDock, Launch8, ModernMix, etc. has released ShadowsFX, a simple little program that simply adds shadows back. 

Users can pick from a series of shadows.  I find that a medium shadow works the best but your mileage may vary.

Stardock ShadowFX in action

To Download:

https://www.stardock.com/products/shadowfx

We are going to be lifting the NDA shortly on being able to talk about the game.  The only thing we'll ask is to not post screenshots or videos as we still have a lot of "programmer art" in there.

Stay tuned!

Greetings!

While Star Control is not officially announced, it's no secret we're working on it.

Here's a quick status report:

We are developing a prototype to start from using Oxide's Nitrous 3D engine.  The prototype is very similar Star Control 2 but with a mini story.

We hired comedy writer Chris Bucholz (Cracked.com) as the lead writer for the series.

We are evaluating/discussing/debating/arguing/eating (okay maybe not eating) the different aspects of what makes a Star Control game:

1. Exploration Game
2. Starship Battle Game
3. Ship Customization game
4. Planet Exploration Game
5. Trading Game
6. Adventure Game

These are all different components of what makes Star Control...Star Control.

None of this will be set in stone until we've hired a lead designer (which we haven't yet, we're interviewing).  While Derek and I would love to design a new Star Control game, the game is being developed by Stardock East (Towson Maryland) so the designer would need to be physically there for best results.  The team is made up of veterans from Big Huge Games, Firaxis and of course Stardock.  

First Summer with the chickens. They seem to be having a good time.  I’m late on harvesting honey though, too much time spent in the debugger.