Teh

Game Review: Hydrophobia: Prophecy

2011-07-10T13:22:00.000-07:00

I'd heard some stuff about Hydrophobia: Prophecy, not that I could remember what any of that stuff was, but it was stuff! You know, stuff. It wasn't a game that I hadn't heard any stuff about, like Toki Tori was when I got it as part of the pre-Portal-2-Potato-Buntle. No sir, there was stuff that had been heard.

So anyway it was like three bucks as part of a Steam weekend sale, so I picked it up at some point. This weekend, I finally played it.

Here's a plot you may have heard before: a bunch of cultists attack during a big ceremony and steal an artifact that they plan to use for nefarious purposes. The unlikely protagonist at first just tries to survive the aftermath, but eventually decides to stop the cultists' evil plans. In the process, the protagonist is exposed to the artifact and gains mysterious powers that turn out to be necessary to save the world.

Despite using Fantasy RPG Template #2, it's a dystopian-future sci-fi set on a sinking boat.

Unresolved plot threads? Check.
Implausible final boss fight? Check.
Awkward controls that don't work correctly if you remap them? Check.
Total play time: 4 hours according to Steam, which admittedly runs on Valve Time but sounds about right.

Verdict: it's a decently competent tech demo for a watery physics engine. 5/10.

Vacation of delayed travel

2011-01-03T00:21:00.000-08:00

LAX -> LHR flight: Dec 22. Flights into Heathrow canceled due to snow, actually left on Dec 25.

LHR -> LAX flight: 3:15 PM. Airplane door failed to open, actually boarded 4:15. Inbound runway closed (weather again?) so inbound planes used outbound runway while we sat and waited. Actual liftoff time: 5pm.

LAX -> home: left airport terminal at 10pm. Car battery was dead, actually left parking lot 11:30pm.

Despite all that, had a great (if abbreviated) time in England visiting family. And now I'm back home!

Open Thread 1: Jury Duty

2010-08-31T20:47:00.000-07:00

Unexpected!

I had jury duty today. It was kind of different from last time!

The last time I did this, around two years ago, I got called in to the Supreme Court downtown, and in the first ten minutes my group was called and I was put on the jury for an attempted-murder case. Interesting stuff, seeing how the system works. So I was actually looking forward to doing it again.

This time they didn't even call me in on the first day. The second day (today) I did have to go in, but it was to the municipal court, which apparently mostly handles misdemeanors, and primarily traffic tickets at that. The staffers in charge of the pool of jury candidates said there were seven cases today, but apparently they were all uncontested or something because none of the groups got called and they let us go home at noon!

So I had a nice day of shopping (Valkyria Chronicles 2 came out today, as did Metroid: Other M, but I can't play the latter yet because I don't have RCA or composite ports on my monitor D: ), made an early dinner and had a nice couple of rounds of Starcraft 2 co-op with Z.

Dodge Boollet

2010-08-14T05:06:00.000-07:00

Ball cooldown = 0
Multi-jump limit = 999

Result:

Major, you've done it again!

2010-07-15T19:10:00.001-07:00

So I'm set up at a friend's house temporarily while I look for a new apartment. Good news: he has wireless internet set up, and it's pretty good. Bad news: my desktop doesn't have a wifi card.

Solution:

Yeah, my netbook's named Motoko, and on top of feeling brilliant for thinking up this solution in the first place, I'm also super happy that she's acting as an interface between two networks. You guys do know about Ghost in the Shell, right?

While we're talking about computer names, I should explain the other one; my gaming rig's named Jaeger, for the eponymous Sin Eater of FINDER: Sin Eater. I wish the early FINDER stuff was easier to... find, these days; other than that single book, I haven't been able to dig up any of the pre-web stuff. FINDER: Torch is online though, so go read it and then buy the Sin Eater book, you guys; I want Ms. McNeil to do as well out of web publishing as the Foglios have.

I made a thing!

2010-07-07T10:46:00.001-07:00

I've been planning this for a while, and finally here it is!

So what is it? Well, I had this idea when I was playing Persona 3: FES a couple years ago to write a blog for the protagonist, in character and with posts on the actual days matching the ingame calendar. I didn't do it at the time for various reasons; the game runs April 2009-2010, so the posts wouldn't have shown up for months, but mostly I just didn't have the idea until I was 70 hours in and I didn't want to start over.

I ended up not even finishing the game, making it to September-ish before my roommate moved out, taking the game and PS2 with him. I'd kind of lost interest by that point anyway.

Two years later...

Persona 3 Portable finally came out today, with the option of playing as a different protagonist, who has different dialog and social interactions because, well, she's a girl. I figured that and the fact that it's been a couple years since I played it would mean that it would be worth playing again. Supposedly they've also cut out a bunch of the timewasting cruft, so I'm hoping I can get all the way through it this time.

So I present to you: Alice in Tartarus, a blog by Alice Sakuraba as she transfers into Gekkoukan High School for the start of her junior year. No savescumming, and I don't know how the game ends, so here's hoping it has some literary merit...

It is, of course, spoilertacular.

That's Great, Guys...

2010-06-11T11:31:00.001-07:00

So apparently there's this new whiz-bang template designer that you can use on Blogger. Except when I tried it out, Noscript started popping up warnings about possible cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks.

A while back my bank sent me a survey. No sarcasm, it really was my bank. But they used a third-party surveying company to do it, and the URL looked like http://baconbank.supersurveys.net/survey?id=sdhaljksdhklajsdhklasdhkjas

All you designers out there, seriously, pay attention here:

Spend the time to understand the technology you're using, and don't use known hacking techniques to do cool things with your design. It doesn't matter that it makes it cooler! OTHER PEOPLE USE IT FOR HACKING. It makes me not trust you.

"Developers( Developers)*"

2010-06-02T19:57:00.001-07:00

Google search for "Developers Developers Developers.....". Graph is number of developers vs. log(number of results).

Yeah, I don't know what that is at 23.

Wakka and...

2010-02-03T00:32:00.000-08:00

I have a secret plan. It involves Getting Excited and Making Things.

More to come once I have some free time to throw at it. This weekend, maybe.

Wait, what?

2009-11-24T23:01:00.000-08:00

Incidentally, I find it moderately strange that I can go to a bookstore and pick up Real Books by Real Authors, then go and read their blog posts about Froot Loops, or society design for colony ships.

I find it entirely strange that I can make my own blog posts that contain links to theirs.

Tea, Earl Grey. Hot. Look at that, I did it again! Amazing.

I guess... I grew up with books just being things that were created in some parallel reality, entirely separated from mine except for like a hole for books to travel through. Authors, much like teachers, weren't really real people, with their own lives just like mine. Well okay, not just like mine because obviously they didn't have to spend all their time doing homework, jeez.

But now some of my friends are teachers, and they're just my friends, you know? We hang out and they complain about their coworkers and talk about their hopes and dreams. I guess it isn't a surprise that authors are real people too; maybe it's just the realization of "hey neat these guys have blogs. Wait a minute... I have a blog too!"

The Perils of Quality Literature

2009-11-24T22:33:00.000-08:00

The problem with books is that I read too darn fast.

I picked up The Revolution Business by Charles Stross and Zoe's Tale by John Scalzi on Sunday at around 10 AM. It's now 10:30 PM on Tuesday, and I've finished both.

I liked both! But if I made reading my full-time hobby, I'd need a LOT of books.

Given an infinite supply of enjoyable books, I blow through the average 300-400 page novel in roughly 4-5 hours. It just feels... inefficient, somehow. I mean, I'm paying $15 a month for my WoW subscription, and (at least until my work hours changed recently) I'll easily get 12 hours of raids a week out of that. I bought the Orange Box for $60 a year ago, and I'm still playing TF2 several hours a week. Compare to the books I bought, which were $8 for the paperback and $25 for the hardcover, and lasted three days between them.

It's not about the money; Code Monkey am paid decently, and if reading ever got to be too expensive I'd just visit one of them "library" thingies that old folks talk about. And if time per dollar was really the unit I used to quantify entertainment, well... I'd have more important things to worry about.

Still, it's kind of... "wow, that was good. Now what?"

Game Design: Difficulty

2009-11-15T14:07:00.000-08:00

I've been playing Dragon Age: Origins recently, and it's been really frustrating me. So I sat back and thought about what it is that's causing the problem, and how other games avoid it. I've also been playing Borderlands lately, and have been enjoying the gameplay there much more (although Borderlands has horrible, horrible UI), so I think it'll be a good comparison. There will be minor spoilers about certain encounter details, but none about plot.

Difficulty Curve

Borderlands introduces you to new game concepts one at a time, and runs you through a mini-tutorial each time, sometimes in the form of a quest. So it starts with "here is a guy to shoot" and works up to advanced concepts "don't run over enemies with 'Burster' in their name, they explode and do lots of damage to your car". Eventually you're dealing with lots of concepts all at once, and although it's challenging and sometimes you'll die a lot, it feels good because you generally know what you need to do and it always feels like it's possible to succeed. It's a little tedious going through the early areas the second, third, fourth time you do it (because like all Diablo-style games, making an alt of every class is encouraged just so you have a way of using all the cool loot you get), but on the whole it works pretty well.

Dragon Age's difficulty comes from fights that will kill you dead, without any warning that it's going to be a tougher fight than normal. The intro is actually pretty good about this; at one point there's a tower that you fight your way to the top of, and there's a big boss guy at the top who hits pretty hard. Challenging, but expected.

However, once you get into the free-exploring part of the game, the difficulty jumps around wildly and unpredictably. You get a choice of four towns to go to, and apparently I picked the wrong one the first time. I then spent three hours repeatedly dying while trying to defend villagers from a zombie horde, because the game assumed I would have a healer in my party by this point. There wasn't any meaning or lesson I was supposed to learn from this fight being so hard, other than maybe "villagers are suckers and you should let them die". I ended up loading an old save and heading to another town first, which was much much easier, a lot of fun, and gave me a very capable healer.

More recently, there was a coliseum-style fight. Five rounds, of which the first three were one-on-one and pretty trivial. The fourth round was 2v2, and I was allowed to pick one of a couple of plot NPCs, or one of my normal party members. I picked a plot NPC and we wiped the floor with them, even though I couldn't issue him commands.

So the fifth fight is versus four guys. I had the option to bring my entire normal party (total of 4 people including healer) or both the plot NPCs (total of 3 people including myself, the rogue). What have I been taught so far by the arena?

The fights are not hard, even with uncontrollable plot NPCs instead of normal party members.
Bringing plot NPCs is better, because of added plot.

So I picked the two NPCs and of course we died horribly. This wasn't challenge with a purpose, it wasn't interesting or fun or teaching me more about the game mechanics. It was just artificially difficult, and I quit in frustration because of.....

Death Penalty

The second thing Borderlands teaches you (after "this is what the four things on HUD mean") about is save points. These are represented by big antenna-looking things with a glowing red light on top that you can see from a distance. When you get close to one, it flashes an icon on your HUD to show that you're saving, and the light changes to green. Some also act as fast-travel hubs, although you learn about that later.

Any time you die in Borderlands, you get sent back to the last save point you passed, at full health and with all the loot you had. Most enemies that you killed will still be dead (although some trash does respawn), but by the time you get back to wherever you were, anything you didn't kill will have regenerated back to full. The cost of death comes down to the time to hike back, ammo you spent on enemies that regenerated, plus a nominal cash fee. Lesson: try to avoid death, but if you get in over your head, you can always hike back to town and restock on health kits before trying again.

When you die in Dragon Age, it's the standard ominous GAME OVER screen, and then a choice between "load last save", "load a specific save" and "quit". (Hint: if you provide your players an easy way to quit at the exact moment when they're frustrated because they died, they will frequently use it.) The main problem here is that, although there is an autosave feature, it isn't activated nearly often enough. In the case of the arena fight I mentioned above, the last autosave was when I zoned in to the arena antechamber, half an hour before I did the first fight, because there was a bunch of talking to the various fighters to do. Cost of death: 45 minutes of wasted time since the save, plus 15 minutes of tediously re-doing all the stuff again (since it's faster the second time). In this case I was actually lucky, because I'd manually saved just before the first fight, but I still decided to quit instead of reloading.

Please, designers: if you have an autosave feature, USE IT BEFORE HARD FIGHTS. One of the least enjoyable things you can do as a player is repeat easy content because you died on hard content.

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.

PAUSE

2006-08-23T05:07:00.000-07:00

Found this when reading through Raph Koster's blog. It is win.

23 WAR LFG!

2006-08-10T14:03:00.000-07:00

I added a new blog to my blogroll down on the left there.

It is titled Bannable Offenses.

If you've played any MMORPG, especially FFXI, go read it.

Actually, you know, go read it anyway.

Push buttons! Stuff happens!

2006-08-08T02:48:00.000-07:00

So I had a job interview today, which went pretty well I think. Should be hearing back one way or another within a week.

With that out of the way, I took the evening off and did the WoW thing. They've currently got the new version of the forums up in beta testing, and I discovered that the General forum there is a mystical thing from Bizarro World, where 95% of the posters are articulate and well-punctuated, and 5% are idiots.

Witness threads:
In which routes to the heart are discussed. (Link)

In which a legendary sword is put to many uses. The phrase "Silly fleshbags" is employed to good effect. Eventually, the obvious is stated. (Link)

In which rumors of the existence of life-sized nude statues of certain video game characters are discussed. The word 'heart' is used as a verb. Thrall is discovered to be located in Texas. (Link)

In which a long discussion about tanking and how it relates to paladins, druids, and warriors is had, and eventually slows to a halt because all of the salient points have been made. A shaman and warrior drop by to provide some perspective. The shaman agrees with the majority of the paladins' points. The warrior also agrees, and further explains why many protection warriors get defensive when the topic is raised. The paladins recognize the plight of the protection warrior and make some suggestions that would improve the situation for all parties involved. (Link)

In which a good idea devolves into hat. (Link)

Regarding Pirates

2006-07-25T05:29:00.000-07:00

This is all over the place at the moment. Although I still like the Monkey Island edition better.

Objection!

2006-07-25T04:18:00.000-07:00

Tonight, I discovered something wonderful. Although apparently I'm hardly the first to find it.

Bride of Tales from the General Forum

2006-06-06T07:24:00.000-07:00

Threads that win:

Where does all the money from the Auction House go?
The Baron's Mount
Yet another thread from th
Corehounds, looting, and haiku

Quote of the day is: Man, when I was level 5 I had to walk to Ratchet in the snow, uphill, both ways, with no shoes! You kids don't know how easy you have it these days. :|

I should really make these into a weekly thing, but that would require having more posts inbetween, such that it doesn't look like all I do is read the WoW general forum.

One tequila, two tequila, three tequila, FLOOR!

2006-05-19T06:51:00.000-07:00

Another link turned up during my rummagings through drawing tutorials today was Sea of Insanity. To quote from the blurb on the front page:

"Once, the gods of the Greeks were feared and respected. Once, they held the power to topple empires and shape the hearts of men. Once, merely looking upon the true face of a god could reduce a mortal to a cinder.

Those days are past."

Now, uh, it also says on the front page that "it is an online testimony to how the creative process can make really bizarre ideas seem like a good thing, providing the creator hasn't had enough sleep and may, in fact, get through an entire script before realizing they have a word processor open." This doesn't much get in the way of it being well drawn, brilliantly written (believable female characters! omg!) and a lot of fun.

Rival contender for title of this post was "I'm the token sane person in an insane world. I'm the freaking straight man."

Surprised (good), Surprised (bad)

2006-05-19T05:28:00.000-07:00

I rediscovered Eric Conveys an Emotion today while browsing around for drawing tutorials. It looks like he doesn't update it much these days, but that doesn't stop it from being ~~a valuable artistic resource~~ totally awesome.

Do I use the adjective 'awesome' too much? Maybe so. I blame L.A. and T. Rex.

Drawingses

2006-05-18T02:41:00.000-07:00

I found the stylus for my graphics tablet last night, and threw this together in a few hours. I've been practicing drawing more and more recently, just doing pencil or ballpoint pen sketches in a notebook filled with lined paper whenever I'm waiting for something to happen, and it really feels like I'm making progress - I'm able to put together basic sketches quickly, giving myself something to work on and improve. This isn't my cleanest piece ever, by any means, but for the time spent (four hours, most of that on the coloring and getting used to the GIMP), it's pretty good.

I could talk about what I like and don't like about it, but it really gets up my nose when other people self-critique, so I'll just say that I'm getting better at making the characters be part of their environment, and leave it at that.

Tales from the Mage Forum

2006-05-12T04:57:00.000-07:00

This blog isn't going to be entirely reduced to quotes from the World of Warcraft forums, I promise. I've got reviews for both Kingdom Hearts 2 (an 8) and Shadow Hearts: From the New World (a 3), but it's 5 AM and I really don't feel like doing them at the moment.

No, the topic for now is the mage forums. They're in disarray at the moment, but the short story is that the talent changes for mages in the upcoming 1.11 patch are rather good, actually. There are N groups of people posting at the moment, being as follows:

Mages arguing over how good, exactly, the changes are. (The Nit-pickers.)
Mages arguing that the changes aren't good enough. (The Unsatisfiable.)
PvP mages complaining that the things that improve PvE strength don't improve PvP strength as much, if at all. (PvP idiots.)
PvE mages complaining that the things that improve PvP strength don't improve PvE strength as much, if at all. (PvE idiots.)
Mages who haven't gotten the memo and who are still complaining about warlocks being #1 in raid damage.
Warlocks complaining that mages are going to have their raid damage improved.

The quote for today is in regards to a PvP idiot complaining that a talent that's mostly useful in PvE, mana reduction, was given added threat reduction.

"Get that MAGE!"
"Umm you sure man? He looks less threatening then he did before, almost 30% less. I am going to ninja the flag instead."

EDIT!: Man, there's a close contender for quote of the day. "'Magical Chest' is the female night elf racial ability. ¬¬" That one's really better out of context, actually.

Revenge of Tales from the General Forum

2006-05-07T02:21:00.000-07:00

I'm surprised this is still around, as I found it at least a month ago and the forums tend to eat old threads. But, sure enough the thread titled "Game balance (LIMERICK)" is still around.

My favorite?

"Shaman are weak", what a crock
Earthbind and Windfury rock
You'll get a review
So STFU
Until then self-rez and FROST SHOCK

Tales from the General Forum

2006-05-02T06:32:00.000-07:00

Continuing southwest along the copper vein of people spotting patterns in random numbers, we reach the aluminum cap that is Asheron's Call and the Wi-flag.

This is old news by now for people who followed AC, I'd guess, but since I never personally paid much attention to that MMO, the link made an interesting read. The short story is (in non-technical terms, since I know my mom reads this (Hi mom!)) that when you started up a new character in AC, that character got an unique ID that was essentially random. There was a bug in the code that meant that whoever had the lowest ID in a group would get attacked more often than the others in the group, and if you happened to have a really low number, you'd get attacked more often in every group you were in.

Why's it called a Wi-flag? Because there was a guy with a character named Wi who had phenomenally bad luck with getting attacked by things. It became a running gag in his guild, you know, the developers put in a thing where if you're Wi, you have bad luck. The story spread, and it became a long-running semi-myth: some characters were just unlucky. But of course, if you've got hundreds of thousands of people playing a game, there're bound to be some that just have strings of bad luck, and they tend not to remember the times when things go well for them. In the case of AC, though, there was actually a real thing in the code that was leading to this!

Tales from the General Forum

2006-05-02T04:13:00.000-07:00

"Of course, quantum mechanics tells us that is fact every mob always has all possible loot, in a superposition of states that doesn't collapse into a coherent item until observed; so it's actually generated by the first person to loot the corpse as a consequense of their observation, and the loot propagates backwards in time to the time when the random number generator algorithm was invented.

This is why it's important to use master loot."

-Karrion (Terenas)

Peanut Sauce Included

2006-04-04T04:20:00.000-07:00

From time to time I engage in what I call friend-of-a-friend browsing, usually for webcomics. The process works like this: Go to the links page of a website that you frequent. Click a link to somewhere you haven't been before. Go immediately to the links page of the new site you have found yourself at. Click something that looks interesting. An alternate version of this game is to use the first recommended link on either or both sites, should they be blog-like in nature, instead of picking something from the links page.

Today I discovered Wondermark by this process. It's now included in my comics list on the left of this page.

V for Vendetta

2006-03-21T18:14:00.000-08:00

I'm starting to get worried about grade inflation, because V for Vendetta is another 10. It's all sorts of awesome. Similar to how this and this are awesome. Go watch it.

I found my cellphone

2006-03-21T18:12:00.000-08:00

It was in the sofa.

Useful for playing guitar, at least

2006-03-14T15:06:00.001-08:00

Supposedly, many cartoon characters have four fingers because it's easier to animate, and it looks more right in some way. The Japanese, of course, have found ways to make their more-realistic five-fingered animated characters not have this same problem.

Some manga artists have taken this one step further.

Not Much of a Disguise

2006-03-13T14:49:00.000-08:00

Not only is there a 40ft statue of Optimus Prime in China, it has been there for years. From VGCats.

Overheard in Ironforge

2006-02-10T09:39:00.000-08:00

"I can't get no..... Stormwind Faction!"

Pull-only Distribution Systems

2006-02-08T17:09:00.000-08:00

There's been this recent thread over at Arcane Gazebo's page that is, in short, about the question "If there's a benevolent, omnipotent God, why is there suffering in the world?" (specifically, this thread.)

I haven't commented on it because I don't preach, and to make a meaningful comment on that thread I would have to go into depth about the nature of both evil and sin. I think there are some people who are good at preaching, and some people who are willing to listen to preaching, but I'm not the first and my friends aren't the second. I think what I think is right, but barging into a conversation among scientists and going "no, look, you're wrong because of X, Y, and Z, none of which are provable" is not a sensible thing to do.

Presumably, however, if you're reading my personal webpage (which this is), you're here because you're at least marginally interested in what I have to say about things. In which case, come talk to me in person about this, if you feel like it. I also don't do public speaking about faith - it's a personal matter for me.

EDIT: Re: "I think what I think is right". By this I don't mean "I am correct" but "I think I am correct". I have opinions on numerous things, and I'm sure I'm wrong with at least some of them. I'm willing to be convinced - actually, I'm happy to be convinced - that I'm wrong about things, because it means that I'm throwing out incorrect ideas and aquiring ones that are (maybe) more correct. I go into arguments assuming that I'm correct, but acknowledging that my assumption may be wrong. It's kind of a wierd stance, but I one that I wish more people adopted. I've had too many discussions where someone has stopped and said "Look, I don't want to argue about this," which I usually follow with "What? Why not? We're just getting to the interesting part! We disagree about this, let's find out which one of us is wrong! We can't both be right." If followed through, there are two possible resolutions: one (or both) of us were wrong, and we come to agree by the end, or we hit upon something that's unsolvable, and go "Oh, okay, it's because you like cats and I don't," or something.

Computer Dies; Doctors Blame Natural Causes

2006-01-27T14:57:00.000-08:00

The last of my working hard drives died last night. I've stolen my roommate's computer to write this while he's at work, but expect less posts until I get this fixed.

Less posts than usual, anyway.

Hairplane

2006-01-09T16:19:00.000-08:00

Well, I'm back safely in California, after a 10-hour flight of slightly above-average pleasantness. The bookstore at the airport was sort of small, and for all the authors I was interesting in reading, the only books they had were ones I'd read already. So I ended up watching a bunch of movies on the plane instead, and the fact that they were mostly very good (Corpse Bride is a 9, as is K-PAX. Brothers Grimm, which I only saw the second half of, got a 7 based on what I saw, but presumably certain die-hard Terry Gilliam fans I know will take that as a hearty recommendation anyway) combined with getting an unexpected bump up to a business class seat made up for the lack of a book.

As long as I'm doing rapid-fire reviews, I'll get some books out of the way: Thud! is a very solid Pratchett 8 (he's done better, but he's done worse too), Surprised by Joy is also an 8, and Woken Furies is an 8 that would be a 9 except that it didn't feel like it had direction for most of the book. It did in fact have a direction (saving itself from a 7 or worse), but it wasn't a direction I was aware of until the end. (No, it wasn't as bad in that regard as FFVIII, but what is?)

In other news, I appear to still have the spare set of keys for my parents' house.

Movie Reviews: King Kong

2005-12-27T15:11:00.000-08:00

This is going to completely mess up my rating system. The point of having a 10 in the scale is so that I can avoid using it when at all possible, and thus make it special when I can't help but use it. There aren't usually any movies that deserve a 10 in any given year, and it's not my fault that there are two this year.

King Kong
Category: Movies
Rating: 10

I don't have the right words to describe King Kong. Go see it for yourself.

Movie Reviews: Aeon Flux

2005-12-22T22:28:00.000-08:00

I'm decently happy with how the site looks now, though I'll likely tinker with it more as the days go by. But as long as I'm here, awake, and thinking about it, it's time to do a movie review. Some people try to give movies objective ratings, like they're some newspaper writer or something; I don't do that sort of thing. The ratings I'll be giving movies, games, or whatever are my entirely subjective opinion, and go from 0 to 10, where a 5 is neutral, 4 or less shows active disliking, 6 or more shows active liking. 10s and 0s will be rare, because those indicate that, in my opinion, it's unlikely that in the entirety of time, past and future, there is nothing that surpasses whatever it is I'm reviewing, for good or for bad. There may be equals, of course.

To give examples from movies I saw this year, Hitchhiker's Guide is a 6, Mr. and Mrs. Smith is a 7, Mirror Mask is a 9, Serenity is a 10. Mmm, Serenity.

For video games, I'll tell you the single 10 on my list and get it out of the way: Ico.

On with the review.

Aeon Flux
Category: Movies
Rating: 8

I try to avoid reading any detailed reviews of movies before going into them, so that I don't have expectations about what it's going to be like (or worse, spoilers about the plot). I do tend to go see movies based on recommendation though, which in this case was Joe saying, "Yeah, I want to go see it, it's this sci-fi talky action movie." And I agree: Aeon Flux is sci-fi talky action. Now, I like talky movies, and I like action movies; the only times I'll complain "less talking, more shooting!" or "less shooting, more talking!" is when the one I want less of is being done poorly. Aeon Flux falls into neither of these categories, as both the action scenes and the explanations for why the people are taking said actions are done well.

Descriptions of both the fighting and the talking will have to be vague, however, since I don't know how to describe choreography and I'm not going to spoil plot. I will say, however, that for neither category did I ever think, "Okay, that could never happen." The plot was plausible all the way through, and for example, when people got shot and lived, they were wounded for the rest of the movie. The lead character, Aeon Flux herself, did sort of forget some of her earlier wounds as time went on, but she's a trained assassin and presumably is used to working despite minor injuries.

Le Gasp

2005-12-22T20:37:00.000-08:00

So, hi. I'm visiting my parents for Christmas break, and since they live in England and I live in South California, there are a few things to readapt to. The time zone, for one, which is why I'm awake in the middle of the night rehauling my website.

I switched over to Blogger from Livejournal, mostly because it's free. Maybe I'll actually start writing posts again with the new system. Hope springs eternal, I guess.