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The Road to Mordor: Figgy pudding
For those of us who celebrate the holidays, right now is an insanely busy time of the year. There are presents to be wrapped, eggnog to be nogged, and looks of annoyance to be thrown at the radio when the music station decides to play that Do They Know It's Christmas? song for the sixth time that hour. It also means that winter holidays are hitting most major MMOs, including our beloved Lord of the Rings Online. This year, the Yule Festival is marked by the addition of a whole new area -- Winter-home -- and players are already neck-deep in the quests, snowball fights and theatrical hilarity. Turbine's done a spectacular job this year infusing a lot more life and fun into the festivals, from the shrew stomping this past spring to the Haunted Burrow this fall. Winter-home is, in many ways, a perfect capstone to a terrific year for the game, and it's a pretty enjoyable event from what I've seen so far. So grab that cute Hobbit or Dwarf and join me as we travel to the merriment of Winter-home this week!
Google releases Books browser for iPhone
Despite the fact that the App Store is capturing everybody's attention, old-school (as in, about 8 months ago) mobile web apps are still worth checking out, too -- Andy Ihnatko reports that Google has put their Google Book Search web app in iPhone form, and the result is awesome: 1.5 million public-domain texts in a well-coded and clean reader all for completely free. Classics, you may be a video star, but you can't touch this.Ok, so no it doesn't have Classics' fun little page-turning or bookshelf-browsing graphics, nor Stanza's bookstore and eReader support, nor Bookshelf's linkup to Webscription.net -- but it is awesome, and completely free. To check it out, you just need to visit http://books.google.com/m on your iPhone or iPod touch (and you might as well bookmark it, because you never know when you'll want to read a little Shakespeare or Dickens).Update: Commenters note that you can add Google books to Stanza by entering the URL of the book. Not too shabby. Stanza is free [App Store link].
