I was perusing as usual in Google Reader and came across this interesting little tidbit –

Uploaded with plasq‘s Skitch!

The Terms of Use are fairly tame, and seem mostly concerned with traffic – please don’t “host” our article on your site and pretend it’s your news. I can imagine that this is a concern but hardly think that this is the way to go about it. There also seem to be implications for feed aggregators or shared feed sites like social|median…many such services have pages with some (though not all) of the content, and a place for comments by users of the service. I only glanced at the terms of use, but that seems to inch pretty close to their concept of “misuse” at first glance.

This is where attribution licenses are extremely worthwhile. Although I can understand an ad-driven blog-o-palooza being concerned about impressions, this seems a ham-handed way to go about it. I’ll update when I have more time to look at the Terms with my lawyerin’ goggles on.

In the meantime, your thoughts?

Jay is Games noted on Friday that, until Monday, the 27th, you can pick up Mystery Case Files: Ravenhearst for only 99 cents.

I’m not a gigantic fan of hidden object games, but the Mystery Case Files series makes a bigger effort than most at maintaining a cohesive narrative throughout the game. And, really, a dollar is the right kind of price in any event. If you try it and like the gameplay, you can Return to Ravenhearst when the title is released later this year…

Edit: Holy crows, I didn’t realize until I dinked around on the site some more that Big Fish is selling a bunch of older stuff for 50% off, in addition to the Ravenhearst sale. If you just use the coupon code “Octoberfest” at checkout you’ll get a great discount on the games on that page. If you sign up for the game club you can also get branded swag for buying the Oktoberfest games. I have to admit, the prospect of another coffee mug isn’t going to make me any more excited one way or the other, but the sale is a chance to get game club prices without actually signing up. Always a good thing.

So I was thinking – this whole notion of a salon of sorts. Why can’t we steal the momentum of the Portland Twitter Breakfast and make the “discussion of interesting things over coffee” into “discussion of interesting things over coffee and a variety of breakfast items”? We (well, three of us) are already having breakfast once a week – if we shrank it to every other week and slated topics, my work here is done, yes?

We’ll make the most anti-Rotary breakfast-eating organization ever. And once per quarter Brambercaseyo will show up, and it’ll be super big funz.

There aren’t very many sites out there with a ton of Mac content, but Big Fish Games seems to be making a concerted effort to bring a lot of casual gameplay to the platform with a minimum of fuss.

My current addiction is Governor of Poker, a Hold ‘em game that combines table skills with stake management, heads-up, tournament and cash games. You play a diminutive man or women who speaks softly and carries a big hat. In the game’s “quest mode,” you start with $300 and a dream, and by the end of the game (in theory) you own the entire state of Texas. The progression from dirt farmer to wagon-owning tycoon is very reminiscent of the old lemonade stand games, and is pretty dang fun (plus, duh, poker).

My only quibble is that I have yet to identify a marked difference in AI/computer play styles based on the difficulty level selection. The AI is fairly sophisticated (for example I have seen intelligent check-raises from computer opponents), but the starting hand standards never seem to get much better than “pretty dang loose.” You have to account for that in your own play style, but on the other hand, that’s probably excellent practice for all those charity casino nights or your Saturday game…

Thank heavens I’m free of my terrible Fairway Solitaire addiction, but now I’m afraid that Gov. of Poker will occupy just as much time and space…