Teh

Through THIS ARM!!

2009-06-30T01:11:00.000-07:00

I discovered The Last Days of FOXHOUND today. It's about a rag-tag band of misfits who wander through their assignments and, almost by coincidence, set themselves up to be the ~~Robot Masters~~ rogue special ops team that Solid Snake takes down in Metal Gear Solid.

Watching the pieces come together (the helicopter! the tank! the shirt!) is great if you can still remember how the game played out at this point, and it's a fun story on top of that.

It's also complete, for which I'm glad. Looks like it ran 100 comics a year for five years, and although it was fine at the reading-through-the-archives pace, I think it would have been too slow-moving for me at a twice-weekly update schedule.

Catching up with SF - Alternate Histories

2009-05-15T15:12:00.000-07:00

So I was reading this post on Charlie Stross' blog today. He mentioned a lot of interesting things, but I'm going to run with one that wasn't at all the point of the article:

The near future is a particularly dangerous time to write about, if you're an SF writer: if you get it wrong, people will mock you mercilessly when you get there.

I've never really seen it that way. Near-future SF (or really, any fiction set in the future) assumes a possible future and then tells a story there. If reality catches up with the date of the story, all that means is that what was once a story of a possible future is now a story of an alternate history.

The book 1984 is set in a 1984 where the UK had fallen into a totalitarian regime. We're 25 years past that now; is the book deserving of mockery because the events didn't happen? Of course not; today you can read it as an alternate history that branched off from reality in 1949 when the book was published.

Similarly, we're closing in on 2015, the year in which Back to the Future II was set. It's looking pretty unlikely that we'll have hoverboards and flying cars by then, but there have been great advances in other areas of tech that didn't appear in the movie. (Future McFly got unceremoniously fired via fax; in the real 2015 it would probably be by email.) Should we mock the movie? Well, yes, but not because it didn't correctly predict which research fields would be successful.

S4 League

2008-09-04T02:46:00.000-07:00

Discovered S4 League tonight. It's a fast-moving online brawler; you start with a sword and dual pistols, and you run around beating other players up.

It's a good time! We'll see what happens tomorrow when my free starter stuff vanishes. I, uh, spent all my prize winnings on clothes. >_> I'm not too worried though, there are a bunch of weapons to choose from, and if you go through the training to get the cert for using a weapon, they give you a 5-hour free version of it. So maybe tomorrow I'll be using the sniper rifle or cannon or something.

Beyond Good & Evil - $5 on Steam

2008-08-22T23:24:00.000-07:00

So here I am, getting updates for Steam so I can play Team Fortress 2, and one of the update notices is that Beyond Good & Evil is half price this weekend: only $5 USD.

Now, I already own a copy of this game, so I'm not going to go buy it again, but BG&E is up there in my personal top 5 games of all time. (Ico still holds #1, but I'm undecided whether Secret of Mana is above or below BG&E). So! I highly recommend that you pick it up and give it a play, and since it's on Steam, the activation energy should be pretty low for most of y'all.

Rogue tactics: How to beat an arms warrior in PvP

2008-06-15T23:35:00.000-07:00

Stay in stealth and wait for someone else to kill him. You can help out if you really want to, but it's a victory for you either way.

I invented a word!

2008-06-03T12:02:00.000-07:00

Mislexia, n.: A disability that involves incorrect usage of language.
Mislexic, adj.: Suffering from mislexia.

Son of Tales from the Internet

2008-06-02T18:52:00.000-07:00

From this thread:

Malygos, not the usual route we take w/ lore. Let's start shall we?

Ragnaros: Evil bastard had to kill him.
Nef: See Rag
Kel'Thuzad: See rag and nef

Now BC:

Vashj: Crazy naga withs snakes in her hair!
Kael'Thas: Went insane, have to kill him, went more insane, have to kill him again!
Zul'jin: Went insane, have to kill him!
Illidan: Went insane, and emo, have to kill him!
Kil'Jaeden: Evil bastard

And now we come to Malygos

HE WENT SANE, WE MUST KILL HIM!

Clever blizz, clever.

New website

2008-05-16T09:29:00.000-07:00

I finally gave in and started hosting my blog here at Blogger, because they won't let me use some of the advanced features as long as I'm using my own hosting space. Which is annoying, but whatever.

The main point of the move is the new and (mostly) awesome version of Teh Links over there. They're pulling from RSS feeds for the different sites to show when they were last updated, with the most recent ones at the top.

I say "(mostly)" because several sites don't have official feeds, like Schlock Mercenary and the others in Teh Static Links, or there are unofficial or third-party ones which tend to be rather lower in quality. For example, the Sinfest feed is an unofficial one which has the correct update times but gives a bad link.

Trade Agreements

2008-04-28T22:29:00.000-07:00

After abandoning several fortress sites due to location, inclement weather, overabundance of hippos or simple bad fortress planning, the dwarfs have founded the fortress of Ùstingish. (Roughly translated as "Breachedbodice" in the human tongue, the name was chosen by Adil Kodalåth, the Sheriff. It's rumored that she has somewhat loose morals.)

I discovered a neat thing today. You can view a list of the other civilizations in the area, which I knew; there are long lists of their leaders, trade agreements, and so on. I happened to take a look at the kobold civilization, who had inhabited a network of caves on the same map as Ùstingish, and had been demolished a few years back when an intrepid miner connected their caves up to the river.

Thraplaylbis, Kobold
Exports to Ùstingish: Petty Annoyance
Offerings from Ùstingish: Death

This was too awesome. I went over to look at the goblins. You know how well a fort's doing by the strength of the raids the goblins send at you, and I just had my first full ambush after a year or so of thieves and child-snatchers.

Abgozru Oxa, "The Tame Hell of Uncertainty", Goblin
Exports to Ùstingish: Terror
Offerings from Ùstingish: Vengeance

Pluralitas non est ponenda sine neccesitate

2008-04-16T18:09:00.000-07:00

A lesson is learned.

Here's a not-very hypothetical situation for you: there are widespread reports of two problems that are somewhat related. One problem is detected and fixed, without attempting to detect the second problem.

At some later time, attempts are made to detect the second problem in order to fix it. However, no sign of the problem can be found.

Which of the two following explanations is more likely?

The second problem is caused by some mysterious factor that is not present in your detection system, but which is otherwise widespread enough to generate so many reports.
The two problems had the same cause, so fixing the first problem also fixed the second problem.

Nonreproducible bugs

2008-04-16T16:26:00.001-07:00

Wheee, fun at work today. Part of my job involves developing and maintaining the backend for my company's website. We put out a new release of the main product last week, which involved also putting out a new version of the website backend.

Since we're at least moderately sensible here, we have a pretty thorough testing system, and everything passed (or was deemed minor enough to allow through) for the release. All well and good.

Today I get in to the office and there are a bunch of emails from the boss, who is out of town at a conference, promoting the new version and telling everyone to go download demos. Apparently, many people are having problems downloading our demo. Error messages about bad email addresses, can't access the download page, real obvious stuff. Stuff the test cases should have caught.

Actually, the test cases really should have caught the problem. But even now, I've spent all day trying to reproduce the bug, and everything still is working fine. I've tried all sorts of weird situations to try and get the page to fail, and it hasn't.

I'm now at the point where I just put in a bunch of logging code, uploaded a temporary version, and now I'm sitting around waiting for someone else to try to download a demo to see if they have problems.

Still Flying

2008-04-14T12:28:00.000-07:00

We played another session in our ongoing Serenity RPG this weekend. Several hours were spent hanging out in saloons, hanging out with drunk miners, shmoozing with small-town high society, gambling, and best of all, getting paid four times for the same job. (Captain Tagon would be proud.)

We were all very surprised at the end of the session when there was actual combat. We'd somehow managed to convince the townsfolk that we were trustworthy folks who could handle transporting the mine's payroll from the station to the bank... or at least that we weren't stupid enough to try to make off with it with an Alliance fleet in orbit. At any rate, while we were fighting off the desperados who were stupid enough to think they could get away with it, I noticed a mechanic that I like a lot.

First off, let's compare to D&D. In both systems, you've got a total amount of health, and there are two damage types: subdual/stun damage, and lethal/wound damage. If a character takes enough total damage of both types to fall below zero health then they fall unconscious, and if they take enough pure lethal damage then they're dying or dead.

In D&D, the vast majority of damage is lethal, and either attacks hit or they don't. So damage can be pretty spiky, and characters fall below zero pretty frequently. As a result, there's a safety mechanism: between 0 and -10 they're not dead, but rather bleeding to death, and they lose another point of health every turn.

In Serenity, the more accurate you are with your attacks, the more damage you inflict. This is already good - you can pick between having inaccurate weapons that do lots of damage, or accurate ones that make up for their low damage by getting lots of bonus damage from accuracy. (Daggers always sucked in D&D because of this - their damage is poor, there's no accuracy bonus, and you can't attack any faster than you could with a bigger weapon. The only reason to bring one is if you need to conceal your weapon, or to use as a throw-away ranged attack.)

The thing about the accuracy bonus damage is that it's 'basic damage', which is half wound and half stun. Since everyone's doing bonus damage this way, there's a lot more stun damage being thrown around than in D&D, so it's pretty common for people to be knocked out but not dead. Thus there's no -10 rule - you're dead if you go below 0 from wound damage, but you'll almost certainly have stopped fighting before then.

I was thinking about how hard it would be to adapt this for D&D, and basically gave up. You'd have to scale up the health of everything to make up for the fact that everyone's doing more damage, but by how much? A mid-level fighter with a greatsword can be rolling 2d6 + 9 or so for damage and regularly beat the AC of some enemies by 10 or more - so, what, a 50% health bonus? What about spellcasters, who tend to not have to overcome enemy armor but also aren't as accurate? Then there's magic missile, which always hits; how would that stay effective? Bump it up to 1d6 +1 per missile instead of 1d4 + 1?

Dwarven Disasters: Pvt. Etostîton's Dinner

2008-04-08T15:30:00.000-07:00

For those of you who hang out in Google Chat, you may have noticed my recent series of status messages along the lines of "Today's disaster: _______". This initially started because I'm the de facto sysadmin at my office (along with my normal programming job) and every day when I got in to work, something had gone wrong and I needed to fix it now now now.

Well, work got better, and at home I picked up Dwarf Fortress. I'd initially seen it referenced on /v/, which is a video game forum (sorta) that you're really better off not being linked to. Dwarf Fortress is a base-building game much like Dungeon Keeper, but the graphics are colored extended-ASCII drawn using OpenGL, with the option to use a sprite sheet for some specific images (eg. creatures). If you've ever played Nethack, imagine being given a handful of dwarves and being told to dig out the first 6 or so floors.

It's actually quite a lot like Nethack, in that things go wrong all the time and it's about managing the disasters. My Sheriff bled to death the other day, leaving his widow as the highest-ranking member of my military. My expert miner got himself killed in a disastrous structural collapse. (Note to future miners: it is a bad idea to mine out all the floor around you when there is nothing supporting the square you are standing on.)

And today, one of my unarmed fighters, Private Etostîton, brought his dinner to practice, left it out during his wrestling match, then promptly got punched out and is in bed resting. Nobody else is tidying up his dinner, because he'll want it when he gets up, I expect. Even though I've marked it as trash to be dumped into the nearby volcanic vent because it's started to rot and is giving off huge clouds of purple miasma that are making everyone miserable and can't be speeding up Etostîton's recovery.

Dreamblogging

2008-03-26T12:08:00.000-07:00

Just woke up from an incredibly lucid dream. I'm home sick from work, and I went back to bed after calling in.

I was wandering around the grounds of a college campus that was similar in a lot of ways to Tech. There were students everywhere, all occupied with their own activities - eating lunch, talking with friends, walking somewhere with purpose. A few guys were taking turns with a guitar and a mic.

I went into a tall building with a big open atrium as its first three or four floors. As I'm naturally attracted to roofs and basements, I found an elevator and went up to the top. The top was empty, small, had no view and was basically boring.

I spent a while searching the building for where I'd left my shoes. Eventually I turned them up near the musicians that were previously mentioned.

Shoes in hand (well, on feet), I headed back to the elevator and went up to the top floor (the seventh) of a blocky side-building. The elevator opened onto a cramped room with a wooden table in the middle of it, a couple of doors on the other side. The yellowing paint and occasional exposed pipes indicated that this was clearly a place where people actually got work done.

I went through one door into a hallway, and after five steps, alarms started going off. "Contamination!" yelled a skinny, lab-coated man behind me. He was standing at the door to his office, which I'd missed upon entering the hallway. Another researcher came down the hall and between the two of them, they ushered me back into the room with the table. They accepted my apologies with good nature.

From the other door came a man called Dr. Plum. I know this because he was large and wore a purple collared shirt under his lab coat. Also because he entered into a song and dance routine with the other researchers about himself and his great works. The room he'd came from was full of tiny computers. A device was wheeled in, which I was invited to observe; it was a metal post with one upright arm, and when turned on the space beneath the arm was filled with lights. It was a diagram, but before I could inspect it further, the Doctor began playing it like a harp.

At the end of it all he sat down at the table, invited me to take a seat on the other side, and asked me if I currently worked with a professor.

"I do," I replied, for I did in the dream. "I'm working with Dr. ____ in the history department." (The name was correct, but I don't remember it and it was unimportant.)

Dr. Plum's eyes twinkled with amusement. "And what do you have in common with the historians there?"

I sat and thought about it. I'm a programmer at heart, but- "I... know a lot of history."

Dr. Plum smiled, and I woke up.

"In the real world things are very different."

2008-03-10T00:25:00.000-07:00

So. Hi.

Anyhow.

I went down to Best Buy this morning, to see if I could pick up a copy of Smash Bros Brawl. There was a big line for it and I didn't have a lot of time, so instead I got an album which almost certainly now has the longest title of any album I own: Coheed and Cambria's Good Apollo, I'm Burning Star IV, Volume One: From Fear Through the Eyes of Madness. Mostly 'cause it's the album that has their song that's in Rock Band.

Now, I'm already a strong proponent of listening to music at max volume while driving down the freeway with all the windows open. This album is not going to cause me any troubles in this regard.

In somewhat related news, I need to go ahead and convert Final Fantasy VII: Voices of the Lifestream to a portable format so I can play Adrenalyne Kick at full volume in my car. It's a collab. piece between two remixers I've been keeping an eye on, Zircon and Big Giant Circles, as well as Liontamer, who I don't recognize but must be good if he was involved in Kick. It's got the mix of acoustic and electronica that I love so very much, and a synth-voice that actually sounds really good.

Lufguh Bird

2007-04-09T09:24:00.000-07:00

*ahem* ROFLMAO.

clunes, aio, maiores esse!

2007-04-06T13:01:00.000-07:00

This is some three years old now, but it's the first I've heard of it.

Behold: Magnae clunes mihi placent, nec possum de hac re mentiri.

Happy Birthday, Ondore!

2007-04-01T10:57:00.000-07:00

Internet people are internet

2007-03-18T22:51:00.000-07:00

There's just something about the kind of person who's usually attracted to playing a hunter in World of Warcraft. Conversation that started up out of the blue in a group I was in tonight:

Hunter1: 2 more months and im done with high school!!!!
H1: woot!
Hunter2: lol im 21 and still ain't graduate
H1: O.O
H2: mmorpgs made me drop out lol
H1: what
H2: multi media online role playing game
H2: what wow is
H2: lol
H1: lol
H1: wwowowowowowowowowowowow
Priest: "Massively Multiplayer Online RPG"
H2: i quit school to play eq back in the day
H2: still trying to figure out what school was useful for
H2: lol
Pr: You pay the bills how?
H1: lol
H2: mm dads a docter
H2: lol
H1: omg
H1: rich daddy >.<
H2: heart docter
Pr: So... you plan on never leaving your parents house. Well, that's one plan...
H2: when we got 6 floors hell no
H2: lol
H1: O.O
H1: ___
H2: o.o
Pr: Must be hell to clean. I pity your cleaning service.
H2: maids
H1: (_)
H2: :}
Pr: That's what I said.
Pr: Cleaning service.
H2: hehe
H1: can i move in with you
H2: if your female maybe lol
H2: jk
H1: LOL
H1: ok

Three Panel Soul

2007-03-05T10:41:00.000-08:00

Matt and Ian seem to have more or less finished their reboot of Mac Hall, and are putting comics out at Three Panel Soul.

New computer!

2006-12-09T22:18:00.000-08:00

My parents very kindly gave me a new computer as an early Christmas present, to take over the duties from my old computer, Boris. The new computer has been christened Jaeger and is fitting in well with the others.

Mail from the internets

2006-11-26T23:36:00.000-08:00

Just got home from Thanksgiving with my family on the East Coast, log into WoW, and find this in my mailbox:

"We have intercepted a chicken from [blatant RMT website address]. The chicken had a saw placed inside. If you recieved this device, you would be able to break free of your prison. Upon leaving, you might see your mother in the kitchen preparing a large turkey.

"You are to remain seated, enjoying your game. Under no circumstances shall you go to [RMT site] to re-request another chicken.

"Sincerely,
"Azerothian Police

"PS. He probably meant to send a turkey, but couldn't catch the elusive critter."

Computer internets

2006-11-26T07:39:00.000-08:00

Everythink is the working now, so I are back at theslicery.com. Continue businessing as usuals!

Fortune cookie

2006-11-17T15:32:00.000-08:00

It was alleged today that someone got "There's more to life than how much money you're making per hour" in a fortune cookie.

If it doesn't make any sense to you why I'm bothering to relay this, then you don't know the correct way to read fortune cookie fortunes.

News?

2006-11-17T10:21:00.000-08:00

I switched to the new blogger thing, and until I can sort out what's going on with not being able to access the http at theslicery.com, I'm going to be hanging out here at http://theslicery.blogger.com.

Also, I got a job, so I should get back to it now.