Pulp Free

This post is almost as much for me as it is for the rest of my visitors (all three of you…). As I wandered of a wander across the Internet (as I do late at night) - I came across Chirag Mehta’s Web site. One thing lead to another and I started readying some of his older entries were he talked about the performance of his personal Web server being able to handle quite a bit of bandwidth (and some other similar type musings.) Essentially he hosted a java-based applet on his site called Falling Sands (which originally came from DOFI-Blog) and was getting quite a lot of hits. I’m all for traffic and I like the whole idea of performance on commodity hardware and cobbled together servers.

So this information about Falling Sands was out in December, 2005. Yeah - where was I? Can you image if I knew about this wonderful time waster two years ago - what my life would be like now? So here… You too can play now…

(This particular version I have here came from the Falling Sand Web site - there are a few varieties out there).

Over time I’m put a few of my favorite screen shots up (first one) as I lose even more sleep with this addiction. Need to know how to play? (This particular version doesn’t have the constant falling particles…)

"Falling Sand Game", also "World of Sand", (2005) is a Java applet first found on the Dofi Blog via Fark thread, later enlarged and rehosted by Chirag Mehta. The game has been popular on community link sites like Digg and Delicious and involves four main falling particles: sand, water, salt, and oil. Each of these particles have special properties that can be manipulated; among these include burning, desiccating, growing, eroding, and more. Along with these four, main particles are auxiliary environmental manipulators: Wall, Fire, Plant, Spout, Cera (or wax), ???, and Eraser. By putting these together, one can thoroughly enjoy the modeling and construction of very complex structures and systems. There is an additional special feature that can be turned on, off, or told to remain in place. This is called the namekuji. In Japanese, "namekuji" means slug, naturally for the properties of a slug when salt is poured onto it. Several different versions exist, varying from applets with zombies, or human bodies, that have their own unique properties to applets where auxiliary environmental manipulators have additional properties.