Optimist Prime

Eratosthenes of Minecraft

2010-10-13T21:20:00.000-05:00

I wanted to recreate one of Eratosthenes' groundbreaking experiments in Minecraft - at least, as closely as I could. Minecraft's worlds aren't round, so I couldn't use the info gleaned from a deep well at noon to calculate the circumference of the world. Mostly, I was just curious if the sun in the game was the actual source of light, or just a nice cosmetic feature that accompanied the light of day.

So, taking a page from the history books, I dug a really deep well. Eratosthenes reasoned that if sunlight reached the bottom of a well in one city and did not do so in another city at the same time, the Earth must be round. It was one of the greatest discoveries in human history.

I reasoned that if the bottom of my pit got light before the sun was directly overhead, then the daylight in Minecraft did not come specifically from the sun, but was evenly distributed over the world based on elapsed time.

It was a discovery that had no impact on anything, and a hypothesis that could have been tested in any number of simpler ways. It does seem to confirm that light comes from directly above, regardless of the Blocksun's location. Huzzah, useless information! Now go read about Eratosthenes, he was an intellectual badass.

Minecraft II: The Floor is Made of Lava

2010-09-30T22:45:00.001-05:00

When last we met our intrepid hero, he was plummeting towards a fiery death at the whim of Roadkill and his deathplank. Cruel gravity also had a hand in things, but I mostly blame Roadkill. We all went down together, though, and into the lake of fire. It wasn't a ring of fire, per se, but it was definitely burning. I don't know why I just referenced a Johnny Cash song that I hate, but there you have it.

So we land in the lava, our avatars catch on fire, and...well, that's it. The invulnerability in Minecraft multiplayer detracts a bit from the drama. We hop about in the lava until we get to the edge, haul ourselves out, and wait for the flames to extinguish themselves.

Now we're kind of stuck here.

It seems that Roadkill hadn't really planned this far in his fiery fun ride - there was no way out of the pit. I don't even know how he dug it, but I suspect it involved dynamite. Lots and lots of dynamite. In any case, we were far underground in an unexplored cavern. We could have flown out (there's a cheat code for that), but that's not Minecraft. That's not manly. This is a game where you get your first building materials by punching trees.

So, armed only with our wits and our cheat-coded diamond pickaxes, we dug our way out. We dug for what seemed like ages. We passed zombie-like moaning in the walls (apparently monsters can become trapped in caverns?) and continued, undaunted. Roadkill made a joke that he sure hoped we didn't dig up into a lake. The universe heard him, and obliged.

We didn't dig into a lake. We dug into an underground river. Thanks, the universe.

While digging at an upwards angle is perhaps the most efficient way to escape from a cave in Minecraft, you have no way of telling what you're going to dig into. There's no core sampling in Minecraft, no GPR. So, you run the very real risk of breaking through the next layer of blocks and having your tunnel flooded by water or lava.

So we were all pushed backed down the passageway by the deluge, our precious torches being snuffed out as we washed by. Mamu and Roadkill just ended up some distance down the tunnel once the water had run its course. I, however, managed to get pushed into a deep pit, which was now a deep full of water. Always a good combination! I managed to swim up into a little alcove behind the waterfall. I'm still not sure why the water didn't fill it, too, but that's where I took the above screenshot and caught my breath.

I'm still not 100% certain how swimming works in Minecraft, but you definitely have a slowly draining oxygen bar. Eventually I managed to swim to the surface and onto a ledge, where I dug myself back to our main staircase. By the time I got there, Roadkill and Mamu had already reached the surface and gone back to their respective building projects. Thanks a lot, guys!

I'd say something about how sweet it was to see sunlight again, but it was dark when I emerged. So, sweet moonlight! Sweet, square, blocky moonlight!

I head back towards our skybridge, which is, in fact, easy to find. Mission accomplished, Uber-Landmarks! As day breaks, I start work on the dome above my house's third floor.

I wanted to go for a bit of an amphitheater look, hence the stone bleachers all around. You can sit right next to the glass and get a nice view of the surrounding terrain, even though glass in this game is kind of hard to see through (the thin lines artists use to indicate glass end up being pretty thick lines in 8-bit).

For reference, that chimney-like thing to the left of the above picture marks the build ceiling I mentioned last time. Hmm. The dome isn't going to be quite as grand an arching as I envisioned. I take a break from all the backbreaking click-labor and walk across the skybridge to Mamu's heathen altar.

It seems he's captured the magic of the Burning Fields. Roadkill tells me that this is achievable with simple flint and steel to start fires. Sure, I say. That makes sense. But it doesn't really explain the floating block of wood, forever engulfed by unconsuming fire. Ah well.

Heading back towards my house, I realize how quickly we've all acclimated to this life among the clouds. It doesn't even seem weird anymore, and now clouds are just something I have to wait to pass so I can get a clear screenshot. Well, that's a lie. It's still all pretty breathtaking. But just to hit home the fact of our altitude, I replace the bridge to my house with a glass walkway.

Aaaand I get the 8-bit vertigo again. Good job distinguishing fantasy from reality, brain. I glance up to see how my house is shaping up from the outside. It's looking a little top-heavy, to be honest.

I think the outer reaches of my top floor are now wider than the platform it's built on, but did that stop Frank Lloyd Wright? Probably not. I've never been to any of his houses, so I'm not sure. At least the randomly interspersed mossy rock doesn't look too bad. None of it's visible from the inside, because that wouldn't be classy. You have to stay classy when you're a kilometer or so above ground level. It's all that separates us from the birds.

At some point in all this, Hillary wanders over and tells me how nice the upper level would be for a library and reading room. How true! Now, if only there were a way to make block bookshelves...

Turns out there's a block for that! For whatever reason, one of the few stylized blocks in the game at the moment is a bookcase, so I install them in all the tasteful places of the room for Hillary. I add some torch pylons for lighting, and finally finish off the dome

It's not the domiest dome, but it's my dome. Home. Dome home? I'm rather proud of what I've wrought, with the (completely superfluous but grand-looking) support struts casting their shadows across the library floor.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is Minecraft. My next venture into the game will probably be the single-player mode, where you're not invincible and the night is full of monsters. What do you mean, there are consequences for falling from obscene heights in my aerial construction efforts? Stay tuned!

Minecraft

2010-09-29T21:53:00.001-05:00

I've become quite enamored with Minecraft, the current darling of the PC indie game scene. It's fairly difficult to describe the game, but at a very basic level it's Building Blocks: The Game, or perhaps Legos without the limitations of expensive plastic and gravity. It plugs directly into the part of your brain that planned elaborate snow forts or tree houses well beyond your 12 year-old self's means of construction. Minecraft helped me rediscover that the Quixotic Construction Lobe of my brain is still just as over-sized as when I was a child.

About a week ago, Minecraft had a free weekend as a result of some server authentication issues. Rather than keep paid users from playing his game, creator and good-hearted Swede Notch opened up Minecraft to all comers. So, a couple of friends and I decided to dive in and start a server so we could all build things together. As it turns out, none of us were the knock-the-other-kid's-blocks-over type, so we managed to coexist in beautiful, gravity-defying creativity.

As a caveat, I should state that our creations were achieved through "opping", which basically gave us the ability to spawn whatever building materials we desired. We still assembled everything by hand; we just didn't have to mine it all. Not quite as epic, but a lot more convenient. This entry will cover our first (real-world) night of building. This took many in-game days.

If you're not familiar with Minecraft, here's a bird's-eye view of our world:

You may notice the bridge spanning the valley in the center of the picture, or the speck on top of the tower rising in the distance. The bridge was from Roadkill (the speck) and another friend, while the tower was Roadkill's current construction project.

You may also notice that we're preposterously high in the air. In fact, we're above cloud level.

How did we get started building so high in the air that even Minecraft's retro graphics gave me vertigo? Well, before I started documenting our journeys, we were mostly mucking about in caves, looking for ore and seeing how deep the world went (answer: quite deep). Since it's easy to get lost in Minecraft, we wanted a way to mark certain locations, like the entrances to some more promising tunnels. One of the more effective ways is to build a really tall tower and stick a torch on top of it, so you can see it from a distance. Navigating 101, right?

As you can probably tell from the above picture, our landmark towers took on a life of their own. At present, Minecraft's physics are pretty limited. If you walk off a ledge, you'll fall - but if you build a bridge out into the firmament and then sever its connection to solid ground, it'll just stay there. No need for pylons or cantilevering, either - which is why my Uber-Landmark became the first pillar supporting a skybridge, and eventually of our own personal edifices.

This is our skybridge, after extensive modification. At first there were no railings, it was about three bricks wide, and clouds swept over it constantly. The clouds are still there (that's what the white rectangle is), but now we have a nice, broad, well-lit causeway. All the comforts of a real-world bridge, except for the part where the only things supporting it are a pair of structurally unsound pillars. This was the view from the third story of my house - the crenelated fort on the other end of the bridge is friend Mamu's dwelling. You can't tell from here, but it has a sacrificial altar. You know, for the heathens.

My abode would be just a little less sinister. I wanted a nice retreat with a swank dome on the top, but every house needs a good foundation. For mine, that would be the entire first story.

You see, the problem with Minecraft's clouds is that they aren't stopped by walls. Assuming that my small block-avatar wouldn't want his living room to be subject to constant cloud fly-bys, I constructed a set of sturdy, moss-covered pillars and a stately stairway to the second level.

Success! My abode would stay dry and unmolested by those pesky clouds. The high water vapor content even provides a logical basis for the mossy stone I used on the pillars. In reality I used mossy stone because I just really like moss, but don't tell anyone. I'd sound weird.

Night falls, and I notice that Roadkill's tower now rivals mine. This cannot be!

But he tells me that he's actually built the tower as high as it can physically go. Apparently, there's an invisible ceiling in Minecraft that you can't build above. So, he starts building out a platform similar to the one crafted by Mamu and me. He mumbles about secret plans and a "surprise." I think that building a tower of solid diamond, one of the rarest materials in the game, may have driven him mad. Only time will tell.

Returning to my house, I build a stairway up to the second story.

Stairs are fickle. Most of the time they can auto-detect which direction they should face, but sometimes they don't. But it should be a simple matter to remove it and try again, right?

Wrong! The misaligned Feng Shui or whatever also seems to make wrong-way stairs invincible. You can whack at one with an axe for minutes at a time and not get rid of it. Oh, sure, it'll break into its constituent wood-blocks. But then the stair piece pops back into existence, fully formed and mocking you! Why, stairs? WHY? Must I consign your tainted form to the Burning Fields, whose floating, ever-burning blocks of wood are created by another bug in this game's Alpha code?

Minecraft is still in Alpha, by the way - so hopefully such weirdness will be coded out. Except for the Burning Fields; those are pretty awesome.

At this point in the night, it's getting late. All the curves and high resolution of the real world are starting to look weird, so we prepare to close down for the night. Before we head out, though, Roadkill calls Mamu and me over to his personal Tower of Babel. Constructed of pure diamond and built as tall as physically possible, it resembles a diving board built for titans. We walk over, skirting the Burning Fields as we go.

Roadkill insists there's a surprise, but his tower looks fairly mundane from here. The ladder up is on the inside, so we crowd through the narrow doorway. I look up to find a tunnel to infinity.

We climb up, and I marvel at how effective such low-fi visuals can be. The climb is actually kind of disorienting, flanked as I am by identical walls and torches stretching out to the vanishing point.

Finally, though, we reach the top of the tower. All that's here is a narrow walkway that terminates, mid-air, in the darkness. It looks like we're walking the plank, but Roadkill says that all we need to do is walk off the end and "enjoy the ride." Ok, why not? Avatars in Minecraft multiplayer are invulnerable (in the current version), so what's the worst that could happen? We step off into the abyss.

Oh good. The floor is made of lava.

Wherein I was on a boat

2010-09-20T23:36:00.008-05:00

This past weekend, I had the privilege of going to a friend's lake house. It was my second time there, and this time I didn't even sound like a broken record complaining about how I hate my job! Because in the meantime, I acquired a different and much better job. So it was much more relaxing, as I wasn't dreading the coming of Monday (these days, Mondays are just distracted and end with Pub Trivia). Also, Hillary was there this time, which improves all things.

The weather was overcast for the first night, which sadly nixed our planned star cruise. Normally (I say that as if I've been there more than once before), you can turn off all the cabin's lights, take the pontoon boat out onto the lake, and get a spectacular view of the Milky Way. As a perpetual victim of light pollution, this still impresses me. Anyway, though we missed out on the stargazing, we did get to make a bonfire. I tormented a marshmallow before abandoning it to the furnace's depths, where it bloated into an Akira-esque tumorous horror. It was pretty great.

After a night sleeping in one of the squeakiest beds on Earth, we went a-boating, helping our friend's family haul their boats out of the water for the winter. Oh what travails, this nautical existence! Actually, we basically got to sit and be ferried across the lake a couple times and enjoy the scenery, which was wonderful.

You forget how nice it is to be out amongst trees after a couple years in the city, even one as relatively well treed as Minneapolis. I suppose I don't actually forget how nice it is; rather, it's simply always surprising how refreshing that burst of green and huge expanse of blue can be. Plus, you get to discover things like your phone's panorama mode, which is very impressive for a phone that can't zoom.

The remainder of that day was spent walking around the lake and making pizza. We also found several issues of Cosmo from the 1970s (worth clicking for full size), with such articles as "When You're Having an Affair and Feeling Fat":

This intrigued us, as flabbiness would seem to be low on your list of concerns if adultery is involved. Reading the article, we were still kind of confused - the writer seemed to use "affair" to refer to any kind of romantic engagement outside a committed relationship - whether or not marriage, or indeed any monogamy, was involved. Was "affair" the 70s version of "hooking up"? Was everyone at the time swinging so hard and so often that affairs were presumed and indulged by major magazines? That seems unlikely, and my mother has confirmed that "affair" meant the same thing back then as now. This remains a bit of a mystery. So, ladies, if you're feeling adulterous, a library with a good archive of trashy 70s magazines may be your best bet.

Amusingly,1970s women's magazine editors don't seem to have developed List technology. We found no mention of 458 Ways to Please Your Man, or 137 Signs That He's Cheating and You Should Stab Him With an Icepick, Girlfriend. Truly, those were simpler times.

Wonders of the Solar System

2010-09-15T21:33:00.004-05:00

Apparently, Nova is still running. I thought it had gone the way of most educational television, but apparently, it continues apace! Now I need to track that down and see if it's as fine a program as I remember it.

One program which I'm certain is as fine as I remember it (because I watched it about an hour ago) is Wonders of the Solar System. A product of wonderful cinematography and the ludicrously infectious enthusiasm of host Brian Cox have led me to endure the tyranny of scheduled cable broadcasting for several weeks in a row now, hoping to catch the one episode that I haven't seen yet.

Sadly, there are only five episodes (with a second series in the making), but they're worth watching if you want to learn about our solar system. The show is very accessible, and Brian Cox's obvious fascination with the world around him will give you those Science is Awesome chills that I haven't really felt since, well, Nova.

What? You don't get those chills? I admit, they've been kind of hard to come by since optimism in scientific process and space exploration took that mid-80s dip. But I promise, those chills are still out there, waiting to be discovered.

And failing all else, there's still auto-tuned Carl Sagan:

You got your Half Life 2 in my New Caprica

2009-02-14T14:13:00.002-06:00

Minus the acting, but it's still pretty cool. This was apparently made for under $500, and even has an HD option (bottom right).

Pretty awesome for a fan movie - I'll enjoy seeing what they do with the rest of it. I doubt there'll be any high drama, but it's fun to see their impression of how all that crowbar action would have gone down in real life.

Someday I'll post something substantial

2008-10-23T15:47:00.001-05:00

Until then...

Left 4 Dead Platform?

2008-10-16T13:33:00.002-05:00

So Left 4 Dead is now up for preorder on Steam. Problem is, I also own a 360 now, and the only person who I KNOW will be playing the game will be playing it on there. Are any of you guys planning on playing it, and if so, on what platform(s)?

Believe

2008-08-16T14:46:00.001-05:00

Jack Thompson Was Right

2008-07-18T12:56:00.005-05:00

Also, about to be disbarred.

2008-07-15T21:59:00.005-05:00

Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog.

Neil Patrick Harris. Nathan Fillion. Joss Whedon.

Singing.

Real-life Sentry Gun

2008-07-13T12:41:00.001-05:00

The FPS players' best friend now exists, in paintball form:

Found it on Kotaku.

Charles Guiteau hates Mondays

2008-07-07T20:23:00.009-05:00

Whew, it's been a while. I've been pretty busy - starting to look for a job for the fall (I have an app in with Game Informer, hoping to hear back from them soon), moving down to Illinois for July and getting ready to be up in Minneapolis come August. So, I haven't had a lot of time for writing. Also, I FINALLY (after I think 13 months of waiting) got into the Mythos beta, and have been getting into that over the last few days. I'll give a more comprehensive preview once I have a little more experience with it, but so far it's looking to be very, very exciting (and sadly, much more refined and enjoyable than Hellgate: London, which is by the same developer).

And a friends sent me to this site, which has such gems as this:

Edited 9/28/10, since Kate Beaton moved websites a while back and I'm too much of a newb to permalink. Also hah, Mythos. I'm glad you turned into Torchlight, eventually.

Important news

2008-05-29T03:11:00.001-05:00

Hans has something important to say, over here.

I never got past the first part with the spikes

2008-05-25T18:05:00.004-05:00

I haven't really felt like writing lately - I have, however, been reading way too many gaming news and analysis sites and been sucked into various games, including Bioshock, Everyday Shooter, Act Raiser, Dungeon Keeper 2, Shadow of the Colossus, Heroes of Might and Magic III, and probably others that I'm forgetting. I guess I'm at a schizophrenic point in my gaming.

Also, I stumbled upon JACT. It's an interesting and, as far as I can tell, legit service (I've screened it with every anti-malware tool I have, and have found nothing). Basically, you earn points for playing certain games (the list is about 300 titles), and then you can trade large numbers of those points in for games, accessories, &c. If any games you like are on its Supported list, you might want to give it a shot.

Internet Hype Machine, Part II

2008-05-11T20:14:00.003-05:00

Originally, this was going to be on the end of my last post, but upon realizing how long my ruminations on Shadow of the Colossus were, I decided that putting them in a separate post might make it a wee bit more visible.

I finally beat the original Starcraft, sans cheats, and have to agree with Todd that despite a few fun missions, the Protoss campaign drags a bit more than the others. There's a weird transition in the middle: the first chunk of the campaign gives you access to Zealots and Dragoons while your enemies having 90% of their tech tree available, and then the last few missions rapidly unlock your higher-tier units and you just stomp them with Carriers. Satisfying in the end, but with a bit of drudge that I wasn't expecting. Now I'm on to Brood Wars, and looking forward to that. For a 10 year-old game, it's still very fun and playable. The only things that have aged less than gracefully are the graphics and, to a lesser extent, the control interface. Those have been far surpassed by more modern RTS games.

Suffice it to say that Starcraft II is increasingly on my mind as I play through the original. There haven't been many updates at the main site recently, but 1Up.com did a nice week-long series on the upcoming sequel which can add some more grist to the Internet Hype Machine. Mill-chine? In any case they have some nice new information and more recent impressions, plus the amusing fact that Blizzard's pre-alpha build of Starcraft II is more stable and balance than most games' open betas. With WoW as a funding base, though, who's surprised?

In any case, the play-throughs of Starcraft and now, the original Fallout continue. My eyes burn at the graphics, but they've been worth it so far! And now, without any further ado, Space Pirates! (courtesy of 1Up's Worst Video Game Box Covers Ever feature):

Internet Hype Machine

2008-05-08T23:14:00.002-05:00

Some of you may remember my long-winded ruminations on Hellgate: London and how excited or disappointed I was at various times. Hellgate: London's biggest flaw was just how damned over-hyped it was - its other foibles and flaws pale in comparison to the damage the internet hype machine did. There's an interesting article over at The Escapist this week about it, if you care to peruse.

Hype is a two-edged Sword of Wounding +1 when it comes to games. Hellgate was hurt by it, but that doesn't have to be the way it is. I recently started playing Shadow of the Colossus, one of the several games that I bought even before Stella's old PS2 was even in the mail. All the hype that I can remember seeing (which for my experience is the only hype that matters) was word of mouth from friends and maybe one TV ad. In any case, I didn't really know what to expect, so I was actually able to be pleasantly surprised.

The plot is basic and can be summed up in a five-minute introductory cut scene. The story hasn't really evolved since I first gained control of Wander, the largely mute protagonist: he's traveled to a remote temple in order to bring a dead girl back to life, though you know pretty much nothing about the girl or why he wants to resurrect her. What you do know is that to do so, you have to defeat the sixteen titular titans and then maybe, maybe the Ominous Voice In the Ceiling that tells you all this will bring her back to life.

The gameplay hasn't revealed more of the story either. I've downed three so far, and after each victory dozens of shadowy tendrils erupt from the fallen colossus and impale Wander. You then wake up in the temple, the Voice gives an exceedingly cryptic hint about the next fight, and then you're on your way to the next colossus.

It doesn't sound like a lot to go on, but what it lacks in dialogue and direct narrative it more than makes up in atmosphere. The world is vast, and evokes a sense of place at least as well as World of Warcraft. It's actually had me hankering for WoW a little bit, but mostly from the sense that you're part of a contiguous world, uninterrupted by loading screens. So far I've ridden across desert, though a ravine and a forest, and swam through a lagoon to reach a gargantuan platform in the middle where the next fight awaited. The graphics back up this sense very well and the world is nearly seamless.

Furthering the sense of space is just how alone you feel: other than the colossi, I've seen exactly one animal in the entire game - the hawk from the intro cinematic occasionally flies by your vision. Besides that, it's just a boy and his horse. I found a small oasis where I dismounted to explore, and when I returned to Agro, he was grazing quietly and sipping from the pool. Agro's animations are beautiful, and when idle he actually does horse things - grazing, shaking off flies, wandering off a bit until you call him back. All of this conveys and odd sense of loneliness and sadness, which complements the fact that you're here by yourself for the sake of a dead girl.

The sadness is compounded by the battles, which make you feel like you're killing a part of the world. The colossi are the only things you fight, and the game is effectively sixteen boss battles with a break and some beautiful scenery in between. When you find the colossus you're hunting, you always see it wandering slowly through its habitat, almost waiting. I can't escape the fact that I'm the aggressor here, and the game does a very good job of making you oddly sympathetic towards the giant you've been sent to kill. I find their weak points with Wander's sun-sword and figure out how to use the environment and the very limited inventory (sword, bow, and the ability to climb) to reach these weak points and slay the colossus. It's pretty straight-forward gameplay, though the puzzle of each boss can be fairly tough. But when you find the weak points and plunge in your sword, my sense of accomplishment is tinged with sorrow as the colossus how and writhes in pain, trying to shake you off its back - and succeeding, if you don't have a good enough grip. Defeating one is always a muddled victory, partly due to the shadowy tendrils of impalement and mostly because you don't know quite how to feel about the means to your end.

The battles are paced so that you have to keep moving, but not so frantically that you can't enjoy the spectacle of the colossi themselves. The three I've seen so far have been absolutely majestic, each one very different and looking like a piece of scenery that stepped out of an Ansel Adams photograph. If I had to describe them succinctly I'd say that they look like Olmec Muppets, but somehow that doesn't detract from their massive grace. You can tell how much effort went into each of the colossi, and they still look fantastic, even three years after release.

So, if you have the patience for a somewhat slower-paced game with an emphasis on atmosphere and making the most out of simple gameplay elements, definitely give Shadow of the Colossus a try.

How I won a Big Hunk

2008-05-04T22:34:00.005-05:00

Having returned from Illinois and a glorious concert-going weekend just in time to get my ass to work (only SLIGHTLY late), I now get to sit here in all my zonked-out, road-weary glory and reminisce about the wonders of nerd rock.

Hillary and I got to the DG in time for Battlestar, and enjoyed that along with some pizza. This was followed by Iron Man, which was surprisingly excellent. It avoided most of the superhero movie pitfalls, like a lack of characterization, excessive and egregious fight scenes, and frequent lame-ness. Not all of the recent bout of superhero movies have these, but many do, and Iron Man actually dodged them all. It's got some damn fine acting, excellent humor (with only a little slapstick), and a surprisingly tight storyline. And when they do break out the fight scenes, they do it quite well. Definitely worth a viewing, even if you don't know shit about Iron Man, pretty much like myself. And if that's not enough, you get to see Jeff Bridges being bald, intense, and evil. Which is pretty awesome after you remember that he was The Dude.

Saturday, after the ritual consumption of sushi, Hillary, Hans and I went downtown to see Jonathan Coulton. It was even better than I expected. The opening band, which opened with the song, "Opening Band", was Paul and Storm, a surprisingly energetic and versatile pair of weirdos who pandered brilliantly to the crowd with lolcat and pirate references, among others. They also tossed candy bars with suggestive names into the audience for random things, one of which I won for yelling out a pseudo-pun. It's hard to explain, but it got a laugh and I won a Big Hunk, which I just braved a Google image search for:

I actually haven't eaten the thing yet, and now that I've seen what it looks like, I may have to think twice about that. But, freaky snacks aside (at least I didn't get the Pink Snowballs), Paul and Storm were damn good and appropriately quirky in their own way. Which, as it turns out, shouldn't have been surprising: they were half of DaVinci's Notebook. They gave us the Enormous Penis song, and now they've given me a great opening act as well. And now that I've written that sentence, who knows what kind of spam comments this blog is going to get.

Jonathan Coulton himself was superb, and played everything from Shop Vac to Flickr to re: Your Brains, complete with an audience-participation zombie chorus. The rampant "Arrrr!"-ing of the audience, prompted by one of Paul and Storm's songs, continued and even caused him to lose his composure, such as it was, a couple times. The audience was really energetic and he played to us well, and it felt like a real show. Also, he Rick-rolled us. He had this weird mix/synth board for Mr. Fancy Pants, and, well, one of the buttons was linked to "Never Gonna Give You Up." Auditory shenanigans ensued.

Describing it, as with any concert or really most things that I'm trying to encapsulate into a blog post, is damn hard without the energy of actually being there (and 2nd row center, no less). Hillary got some video, which she may post at some point. In any case, this concert is my pick

of the week.

Inspired griefing

2008-04-30T01:35:00.001-05:00

The real gems start up around 6 minutes in, when he starts using a door bug to trap people in their spawns until they can answer a trivia question.

I'll post something real one of these days.

...unless it's a farm

2008-04-28T22:45:00.001-05:00

Just one of the many hilarious Valve promos that make me wish I was any good at TF2.

Fear-mongering

2008-04-22T14:40:00.003-05:00

Apparently, Clinton's big into it these days (Hillary, not the good one). It's a pretty frightening article on some recent remarks and an oddly aggressive trend in her comments and campaign.

Loot waffle

2008-04-17T19:52:00.002-05:00

So, not a terribly large amount of anything happening lately, hence my inactive blog. I recently played through the expansion to C&C3, which was fun, considering the lore it filled in. Aside from some annoying crash bugs, not a bad game. Also, I'm in the midst of re-playing Starcraft, and finally trying to beat it without cheats. I think I got as far as the second-to-last Zerg level when I first played it (when I was what...13?), and then stalled out and just cheated through that and Brood Wars to see how the story turned out. So now, it is my mission to legitimately beat those before the sequel comes out. Knowing Blizzard, I'll have plenty of time.

Today, though, I got a pleasant surprise at work. Several weeks ago, someone had left a nice bookbag with a few books in it at at the waffle shop. And today, since it had been there so long, they were getting rid of it, and instead of let it get tossed, I noticed that it had some good science fiction books in there (including one author I've been meaning to read) and ended up taking the whole shebang. So, free books and free bag! Pretty damn good for a few hours' work.

This week will hold TWO new Battlestars for me, since I missed last week's episode thanks to Quiz Bowl Nationals. Our Div II team did win their division, though. At least we got a national championship out of missing Battlestar! So, that was fun. The tournament was down in St. Louis, which was a long-ass drive and a fairly uninteresting city. Washington University was very pretty, though, and the Gateway Arch looked pretty cool from our hotel room. Of course, between the weather and cramped schedule I never actually got to visit the monument itself, but it's not like I would've gone up in it anyway. The very concept of an "inclined elevator" gives me the heebie-jeebies.

Here's an article about a song by a gay guy

2008-04-10T17:21:00.001-05:00

NY Stadium Rickrolled. Also, they don't have internet memes in Britain - they have "daft crazes". I'm not sure which I like more.

Sonic charged with assault

2008-04-09T14:20:00.001-05:00

Only in New Zealand.

Oh, Blizzard

2008-04-01T04:28:00.004-05:00

Just in case anyone had forgotten to check, Blizzard's come out with another good crop of April Fool's postings on their website. There's the Atari classic Molten Core (with SOUND!), the new Bard Hero class (cue solo grinding joke; in retrospect it's like the game terminology was setup for one giant pun), and the brutal Tauren Marine. The last one actually has a full gameplay moovie, and it seems to have a full model and animation set, so maybe we'll get lucky and it'll show up as an easter egg in SC2. Or Blizzard could just have seen this as an opportunity to showcase their "bizarrely well-developed horticultural skills" and will leave it at that.

<3 Blizzard's puns.

Also, Muppets bloopers!

Hi-Tonic vs. Jiggle-Vision

2008-03-28T18:07:00.005-05:00

Aside from containing our favorite objectified video game ladies, it's a pretty amazing feat considering this was animated for free by someone named Montyoum. There appear to be at least two other major animations in his portfolio, which I'll have to check out next.

Season 4 is nigh

2008-03-22T04:20:00.006-05:00

Even if you know the series backwards and forwards, be sure to check out the 8 minute summary over at SciFi.com. It's pretty damn funny, and contains such gems as "Starbuck and Apollo like each other, so they beat each other up," and "the survivors form a rag-tag fleet following the Galactica through space, where cameras have a hard time keeping up." I laughed, verily.

And Season 3 is out on DVD. Yum. I know it's been done before, but seriously. I could watch this over and over because it is, almost without hyperbole, the coolest goddamn thing ever.

CRASH COURSE IN ADAMA AWESOMENESS:

The heady aroma of the blogosphere

2008-03-21T19:56:00.004-05:00

There's a week-long expose about Jack Thompson's Florida Bar misconduct trial going on over at Game Politics, and I've been reading some of the transcript excerpts. It's actually remarkably interesting, considering how dry most real-life courtrooms are. The coolest part has been seeing what Thompson himself is like in the courtroom (he's representing himself), when he's not sending snarky e-mails to game journalists or egging on the media's mind-bogglingly distorted view on gaming.

What surprised me the most is how he actually seems like a pretty good lawyer. He seems to know the rules and the talk (and, to some extent, when to break them) and comes off as anything but the inept boob most of us like to imagine him as. From the transcript (and frankly, from everything he's ever said that we've read about) he's really good at goading even other lawyers and judges, though the whole trial is pretty much about how that "skill" is coming back to bite him in the ass. His sparring with the judge(s) is pretty damn funny to read.

What I can't tell from the transcript, and what I'd really like to know, is just what the hell kind of conviction against video games he really has. Clearly it's a deep one; I can't believe that a balanced person would expend as much effort and subject himself to as much hatred and ridicule as Thompson does, just for publicity and self- aggrandizement. But at the same time, he seems much too calm (I'm speaking relatively, of course) and meticulous to be a flat-out lunatic on some crusade against the "demonic" influence of gaming. As far as I can tell he seems to see the gaming industry as an easy scapegoat for the broader cultural problem of violence (him and most of the media out there, unfortunately), but there's just this bizarre lack of sincerity that bothers me almost as much all all the bullshit invective he spews out. I really don't know what to make of it.

Dinosaurs: still awesome after all these years

2008-03-15T20:02:00.003-05:00

Does anyone else remember the Dino Riders? It was pure 8 year-old (or nostalgic 22 year-old, heh) bliss - I mean, how could you possibly mess up time-traveling armies putting lasers and armor plating on dinosaurs and fighting on prehistoric Earth? You really can't. Now, if they'd just make a (decent) video game out of it...

And yeah, sorry my reviews are so lengthy - it just takes me that long to get all (or enough) of my thoughts out.

Sins of a Solar Empire review

2008-03-13T00:46:00.002-05:00

A couple months ago, something (I think it was the short story collection, The New Space Opera that I picked up) started me off on a huge space/sci-fi kick. I started playing Homeworld: Cataclysm for the fourth or fifth time and actually finished it this time (much to my pleasure; I reviewed it here), played a week or so of EVE Online, and even tried out the original Galactic Civilizations to see if I like it any better than the sequel, which to me had somehow failed as a successor to Master of Orion II. Despite everyone and their mother seeming to love that game, I could never get into it or, apparently, its prequel.

Recently, my lust for space adventure is being slaked by been Sins of a Solar Empire. It bills itself as a "RT4X" game, melding the more traditional RTS with the typically turn-based "4X" games, including the aforementioned MoO2, the GalCiv games, and to a great extent, Sid Meier's Civ offerings. I remember how skeptical I was when I read the first preview of Sins and its plans to meld the strengths of 4X games with a real-time model, but somehow, they pulled it off, and they did a damn good job of it.

I'll get the technical bits out of the way first. The game's sound is pretty good; the sound effects range from classic pew pew lasers to one or two that I actually recognize from Starcraft (one unit makes me think I'm landing or lifting off Terran structures every time I click on it). Sins' unit voices range from the standard to the mildly hilarious - while the human TEC are your standard vocal fare, the voices of the sibilant-heavy Vasari are akin to classically campy insectoid or reptilian aliens from old sci-fi, which I think is exactly what the creators were going for, and it worked. The Vasari especially sound a bit absurd at times, but it's more charming than annoying. The music ranges from serene string tracks to war marches very suitable to the game's deliberately just-over-the-top feel. In a way, the music is the best part of Sins' sound, since it switches tracks based on what you're viewing and what's happening on-screen. The warlike songs come up when you're looking at a battle, and the calmer tracks start up as you view a peaceful planet, etc. It's a minor thing but it's a nice touch; I really hope that eventually they'll release a jukebox-type mod that will allow us to queue up our own music and tag them for context-appropriate playing, as the music just doesn't have the same punch after a few hours of playing.

The graphics and visuals are quite nice, I have to say. The planets, which can make or break a space game's visual appeal, look quite good, and while the default stars look less than stellar, they have a very nice effect to simulate the shifting of a star's corona. The interstellar backdrop to maps leaves a little to be desired, but not every space background can, or should, look like the ones from Homeworld. The ships generally look good, and each race has a distinct visual style that's pretty consistent across its ships. Nothing is jaw-droppingly beautiful (though several mods are making great strides towards high-rez textures), but this is actually the game's greatest graphical strength. The game's graphics can be scaled across a large range, making the game play quite smoothly even on older machines, including my own. Currently I'm finding a balance between mid-range graphics and the inevitable FPS lag that occurs during larger battles, but Sins' graphical scaling is a great feature.

I keep trying to come up with some way to fill in the blank so I can say "At heart, Sins is really a _______ game." But I can't really figure out which side of the RTS vs. 4X fence Sins sits on. As far as I can tell, it's a pretty genuine hybrid. Certain elements of the gameplay lean towards both design templates.

The fundamentals of gameplay will be familiar to anyone who's played a game in either genre, really. On most maps, you start with a single planet, a couple established mines (most astronomical entities have orbiting asteroids from which you can mine Crystal or Metal, the two non-Credit resources in Sins), and a frigate factory, which can make a few basic ship types. From this power base you expand your territory as you build up an ever-larger fleet, research new technologies, and tear holes in enemy ships with lasers, plasma bursts, and autocannons. That much is all pretty standard.

The interesting things begin to come out when you realize that on larger maps (and anything smaller than a one-star large map won't be very interesting after you get a halfway decent feel for the game), you're going to be dealing with potentially dozens of planets, multiple large fleets and defense garrisons, and upwards of half a dozen individual star systems. All in real time. It's extremely daunting, but Ironclad (Sins' developer) came up with a series of features that make it not just manageable, but easy.

The first of these, while arguably not directly a boon to UI friendliness, is the map setup. Each map is divided up in X number of star systems (the game makes the common mistake of labeling everything as a "solar system," a term which technically only applies to the one orbiting our own sun, but it's a very minor thing). Each star system is separate within the map, and can only be reached once certain technologies are researched. "Orbiting" each star are a number of planets, colonizeable asteroids, gas giants, wormholes, and other astronomical bodies. Each of these has a gravity well, where all the fighting and building and such occurs, and these are in turn connected by phase lanes. Phase lanes are the traversable paths between gravity wells, and they provide a kind of "terrain" (along with limited choke points) that keeps colonies from being entirely indefensible. The playing field is also effectively limited to a 2D plane; z-axis movement is quite possible but its strategic value is limited. While this removes a lot of tactical possibility, it also makes things easier to manage. Basically, the way the maps are set up keeps players from being overwhelmed by too may potential attack vectors and movement possibilities.

Another thing that keeps the player sane in the face of all this real-time responsibility is, simply put, the pacing of the game. Everything, from resource collection to research occurs at a fairly slow pace. Some might find this annoying, but it's necessary for the game to be playable. Even at its highest speed settings, ships can take several minutes to phase jump between planets, and for most ships moving across a gravity well can take equally as long (there's also the cool sidenote that ships moving toward a planet move faster than those moving away). Combat is similarly paced, with even a lopsided battle lasting several minutes. Primarily, what this means is that you could be upgrading several new colonies, ordering more frigates from your shipyards, and commanding two or three large fleet engagements at the same time, all without actually being too stressed about it. It does all add up, but compared to the micromanagement fests like Warcraft III, Sins is positively stately. A neat side-effect of the combat's pacing is that you can actually make an effective retreat. I've seriously never played an RTS before where this was reasonably possible, and god is it nice. If you're getting overwhelmed, you can usually hold out long enough to either run away or warp in some reinforcements. It actually makes it more strategic than tactical, which is a nice change of pace.

And when you can't quite keep up or don't want to spare the attention for a minor skirmish, the unit AI and autoattack/autocasting will handle it quite well. The autocasting deserves a special shout-out, far outdoing the feature's appearance in most other strategy games I can think of (and it's necessary, considering how many units have special abilities).

The two biggest reason Sins' large scale works are the zoom feature, and the Empire Tree. The zoom feature is pretty self-explanatory: via the mouse wheel or a trio of hotkeys, you can go from a close-up of a single ship to an overview of the entire star system. This is VITAL. You could easily play the entire game from the zoomed-out view, though that would hardly be as fun. The point is, you could. Conversely, you could also play the whole game from a fairly zoomed-in perspective, thanks to the Empire Tree. This transparent sidebar replaces the minimap most RTS's require to effectively represent the playing field. On it, your colonies, fleets, and points of engagement are all represented symbolically. You can select planets, issue orders to buildings and ships through it, and really do pretty much anything you would need to.

All these factors add up to a smooth, fun gameplay experience. If the game lacked any one of these features and UI innovations, the whole thing could buckle under its own ambition, but Ironclad pulled it off, and damn does it make me happy.

As a footnote, I should mention that the game doesn't have any campaign mode (it has a fully fleshed-out singleplayer mode, though). A lot of people, both reviewers and forum QQers, seem to think that this is a flaw. The developers basically said "this is not a standard RTS; no one's has every complained about Civilization or Master of Orion not having a campaign, why bitch now?" As much as I agree with this, though, a little part of me can't help but want a campaign storyline. I think that a big part of the call for a campaign is that Sins of a Solar Empire has a cast of surprisingly well fleshed-out races. Each is unique and has a lot more backstory and character than most 4X game races do. I think that I, and probably others as well, are reacting to this and a desire for more interesting story when they ask for an admittedly superfluous single-player campaign.

Best. Headline. Ever.

2008-03-05T15:02:00.001-06:00

I don't think ABC did it first, but this was the only stable version I could find of this amazing headline.

Moment of Silence, 10' Radius

2008-03-04T17:38:00.001-06:00

RIP, Gary Gygax.

On a more brief note...

2008-03-03T01:41:00.002-06:00

William Shatner's kidney stone turned out to be a house.

Hellgate: London retrospective

2008-03-02T19:40:00.004-06:00

Prior to its release, I'd been downright jubilant about Hellgate: London for a long time, and rambled on at great length. I had the Collector's Edition preordered long ahead of time, and even sprung for the Founder's offer (a lifetime online subscription) before I'd given the game a chance to prove itself one way or another. I'm not yet willing to say that that last part was a mistake, but I've definitely had second thoughts.

In a word, Hellgate is disappointing. In a few more words, it's disappointing and still remarkably fun, but unfortunately the thing that stuck with me the most after all my early, pre-beta fanboying and endless hours cruising the forums up to two years before the game came out, is that the game could and should have been so much more. I'm aware that I pretty much set myself up for this disappointment, but in a way that makes me all the more qualified to talk about it. In another way, it makes me less qualified, but we'll ignore that for the time being since all of three people will probably ever read this.

Hellgate: London promised to be Diablo 3, or at least its "spiritual successor," a term bandied about so often for classic games that all you can be really sure it means is "will be remarkably similar to..." Flagship Studies, of course, had a little more weight behind their claims than others, given that the core of their team was, in fact, the core of the Blizzard North teams and a slew of other qualified individuals. It looked like the perfect storm: practically the same people behind the game, an interesting new setting and set of conflicts, and the same addictive style of loot-based play that made every Carver Demon in Diablo II look like a tiny, shrill piñata. It sounded pretty much foolproof.

The problem with spiritual successors is that all too often, they don't change enough from the classic game to keep pace with modern expectation. I'm not even talking about graphics; I'm mostly referring to current, established user interface conventions, level design, and certain minimum expectations for what constitutes online play. While classic games by definition got lots of things right, certain aspects of gaming have unilaterally advanced for the better, and in Hellgate, many of these lessons weren't quite learned.

Hellgate: London's graphics are decent, and the support for DX10 will give them some longevity. Most of the enemies look quite good, as do most of the player models (excepting some gaps in the graphics between pieces of armor). For some reason, however, other players' characters can only be viewed with low-res textures, which at the moment prevents much of the showiness that makes gear acquisition in multiplayer games so compelling. The game's sound is solid, with good explosions, slashing noises, and decent music, though the latter falls into Half Life 2's trap of only playing sporadically and at seemingly random times.

Hellgate's gameplay is undoubtedly one of its strong points. It follows the same basic formula of Diablo: fairly simplistic hack 'n' slash combined with loot lust of the most basic and fulfilling sort. You kill large numbers of mildly-threatening beasties and wait for the satisfying sound of coins, gear, and magic items hitting the floor. Flagship Studios got this aspect pretty perfectly, as I see it. It hits some snags when bosses just take heinously long periods of time to kill, an issue endemic to hack 'n' slash games. Boss fights are made challenging mostly by giving them obscenely large health pools, health oceans, really, rather than by giving them any unique or interesting abilities that actually make them difficult, rather than just tedious, to kill. But the majority of the time, the enemies appear in droves and drop with pleasant alacrity, speeding your movement towards the all-important loot. In this respect, the interface has improved considerably over its predecessors: the WoW-like skill bar allows effective use of most of your skills without interrupting the action.

The only real bumps in Hellgate's gameplay come in the form of the mission-based minigames sprinkled throughout the storyline. These have you doing such things as manning an AA gun to shoot down a giant demonic airship, playing capture the grimoire, and using RTS-style controls to lead a squad of friendly soldiers to safety. All of these sound good in theory, and FSS's attempts to spice up the gameplay with a little variety is laudable. However, all of these minigames are plagued by flawed design. Shooting down the demonic dirigible takes little more than holding down the trigger for five minutes straight, capture the grimoire is needlessly easy, and the squad command game is needless difficult and has no explanation of the controls. Thankfully, these minigames are the exception to the gameplay, and are just a good idea, poorly shoehorned into an otherwise smooth game. In general, however, the gameplay-related aspects of Hellgate's UI have been vastly improved over older titles', right down to a button that just vacuums up all the loot around you. The gameplay can only be described as "classic" which, while it might have negative connotations for some, is a great boon for Hellgate. Yes, it sticks to a very old formula, but in regards to gameplay it added just the right amount of innovation to keep it fun and still flow smoothly.

The UI's friendliness is mostly confined to shooting and looting, however. Inventory Tetris is back with a vengeance, though the pain it causes is mitigated by the ability to break down any item into components (used for crafting) without having to go to town and back just to clear your bags. The break-down feature is a life-saver, considering the scads of loot you'll see, and is one of Hellgate's best innovations. The in-game cursor is unusually laggy (though only for the cursor itself, and thankfully not for aiming) and I've been unable to correct for it, which makes a lot of the repetetive gear- and NPC-related clicking a nuisance. The crafting and item upgrade screens still need lots of tweaking to make them more user-friendly, though recent patches have made some improvements in this area. NPC dialogue, if you bother to read it, has been parsed into far too many individual screens of conversation, for no apparent reason.

The UI for chatting was abysmal at launch, and is only slightly better now. The commands need to be streamlined and, like most games, should just take a page out of WoW's sterling chat interface. More fixes for the chat UI are coming in the next patch, however, and to be fair they'd have been fairly useless before this point because the need for them simply hasn't existed. Being able to hot-link an item description directly into chat doesn't mean a whole lot when there's no real player-driven economy to speak of. So the fact that both hot-linking and an escrow house will be introduced in the same patch is a sign of good planning, even if both of these features should have been available from the get-go.

Thankfully, FSS has been releasing patches fairly frequently that have made great strides towards fixing the bug-laden, feature-light game released last Halloween. System stability, connection and graphical errors, and lost items have mostly disappeared in recent patches, and the aforementioned escrow house and improved trade are slated for release in the near future, along with PvP and new adventure areas. Stonehenge has already hit the servers and added several new tilesets, enemies, and bosses to the game. While FSS may have released a premature game with many issues, they're certainly taking customer support and their promise of new content for subscribers seriously. While early subscriber content consisted only of annoying, inventory-clogging holidays items with no real use and little of the kitschy quality that makes Christmas in Orgrimmar bearable, they've so far put those aside in favor of more pressing and substantial bonuses for the subscriber base. Whether a long-term investment like the Founder's offer will be worth it remains to be seen, but despite the above criticisms, I'm actually pretty hopeful that the game will eventually blossom into a more worthy specimen of the Diablo style.

Unfortunately, the one single, most disappointing thing about Hellgate: London is effectively unpatchable. Gameplay issues and bugs can all be removed with a little time, and ignored with a little patience. But Hellgate: London built itself up on a gritty, despairing and truly post-apocalyptic vision of a future overrun with hellspawn, and then fell flat on its face. All of the pre-release media, from the excellent E3 videos to the fanfic and silly, if fun, comics, painted a grim picture of a culture reduced to despair and violence against terrible odds. It had the makings of a compelling, if somewhat formulaic, story, and solid narrative and atmosphere can save a game from many other failings. Hellgate had all the makings of that kind of mood and atmosphere, and it fell flat on its face.

Media about even the most dire of circumstances need to have some kind of comic relief, even just a tiny bit. This is necessary to keep things from becoming overwhelmingly dreary, and it also humanizes things to some extent. But somewhere in the design process, Flagship Studios decided that comic relief wasn't enough, and seems to have retooled every quest and NPC in the game for comic overload. Worse, most of it isn't even that funny. Thankfully, the main storyline quests are much more in keeping with what you'd expect in a scorched world on the brink of destruction. And while the side-quests are a nice addition to the Diablo model, the tedious grinding is replaced by annoying NPCs with out-of-place attitudes. Almost every NPC is either flippant, a hyperbolic coward, or curiously upbeat about their grueling task du jour. Aside from destroying any sense of enjoyable and expressive mood in the game, it's just completely illogical. Unless the Cabalists are putting something in the water, there's no reason that 80% of the NPCs literally jump for joy when you complete their missions. Their world is a scorched husk, their civilization lies in ruins, and in all likelihood their entire families are dead. Why the fuck is everyone jumping for joy?

Some of the humor is genuinely funny and welcome - there's an admittedly clever reference to Joss Whedon's Angel that I even missed the first time, and the Scottish Marksman whose mission dialogue is complete gibberish is reminiscent of the wit that brought us the "You know this because you are telepathic" quest text from WoW. But for the most part, the game's humor just shoots itself in the foot. Most of it's not funny, almost none of it is appropriate, and it's the top reason the game fell short of its potential. Instead of gritty you get goofy, and instead of distracting from other, less important flaws, it just accentuates them.

Contrary to what many have said, and to what the majority of this largely negative review may indicate, the game is entirely playable. It's not stellar, and parts of it are downright annoying. But the gameplay is dead-on, and a worthy successor to the level-grinding, loot-hoarding, horde-slaughtering hole in our brains previously filled by Diablo and its clones. Hellgate: London even does enough things differently and promises enough in the future that it's not simply a Diablo clone. Tragically, though, its atmosphere and the flavor of the plotline is forgettable enough that I played through the entire game listening to podcasts and didn't really miss anything. The converse of that statement is that it's easy and casual enough that you can get into an out of it quickly, and it's a fun thing to do while listening to podcasts or DVD commentaries.

When God gives you lemons, you find a new God

2008-02-29T03:32:00.002-06:00

and

I swear I'll post something constructive soon; probably a review of Hellgate, Sins of a Solar Empire, or Audiosurf, the latter of which is an excellent and entertaining $10 on Steam.

Jimmy Kimmel's Response:

2008-02-28T00:15:00.000-06:00

February is Demon History Month, says Washington Post apparently

2008-02-22T21:02:00.002-06:00

Have a look at this article quick, before they realize what the editors missed and change it. The review itself it fairly uninspiring and not exactly critical - I really enjoy the game and could come up with more criticisms than they did. Anywho, Hellgate is the reason I still haven't written my review of Sins of a Solar Empire - I want to play more before I review it, but I've been being sucked into Hellgate recently. So, maybe that'll get reviewed first.

Control the games WITH YOUR MIND!

2008-02-20T01:18:00.004-06:00

Emotiv, a neurotech firm, just came out with a headset that can read about 30 basic emotions and also contains a motion sensor, all for about $300. While that's not exactly cheap, just think a few years down the line when they develop games to actually integrate all these features. Screw /smiling at someone. You just think it, and it happens.

It might be an awful lot of effort to go towards a gaming controller (which they're actually marketing it as, or at least planning to), but it seems like they've just finally repackaged the medical tech into something for entertainment. Plus, you don't have to shave your head or gel your scalp for this one to work.

Also....

2008-02-14T01:41:00.001-06:00

I've found the Next Coolest Thing Ever:

That old-fashioned smell

2008-02-13T19:26:00.003-06:00

So, Sins of a Solar Empire came out about a week ago and I've been merrily sinking time into it ever since - I'll give a more full review after I've played a few more games and gotten a feel for all the races, but suffice to say that it is great. Think Homeworld meets Master of Orion 2.

But the collector's edition box got here today and boy does the manual smell good. I mean, it's informative and all, but mostly it just smells like Magic cards did back in the day. I freakin' love that smell.

Also this is my 100th post on el Bloggo the Blog, so that's kinda neat.

Dinosaur Comics

2008-01-30T23:51:00.000-06:00

Reading them at work can be dangerous, for their hilarity is unparalleled. Especially when cephalopods are involved.

Fun facts: "cephalopods" is not in blogger's dictionary, and I still hear all of T-Rex's dialogue in Hans' voice.

Red Alert 2

2008-01-28T03:52:00.000-06:00

I want to play it again, but it only ever starts the first time I run it after each install. I'm in compatibility mode, etc. but nothing seems to work, and the internet isn't yielding up an answer. Has anyone been able to run RA2 on XP?

The many faces of EVE Online

2008-01-27T21:47:00.001-06:00

Found an interesting article about how to put the strategy back in strategy games. Not sure how much of what he's suggesting could be put into an RTS before it turned into a civ- or social-management game like Civ IV, but he makes some interesting points about how one-dimensional and similar many RTS games are. I personally think that the model of victory by attrition needs to be questioned before quite such a sea change in RTS development is attempted. As much as I like them, the problem is the fact that probably 90% of RTS games are won by weight of numbers (assuming a slight troop mix) and not actual strategy OR tactics. That said, I come from a mostly single-player perspective on these, so until they get the AI up to a more adaptive level, I'm probably only getting about half the experience.

So despite my generally anti-MMO leanings at the moment I decided, about a week back, to give EVE Online another try. A little over a year ago I did the 14-day trial, and generally enjoyed it but wasn't enthused enough to start paying the subscription, and thusly my character was forever consigned to the bio-mass reprocessing station. Recently, however, I've been feeling an extreme affinity for sci-fi and space-based games and media: witness my recent glowing experience with Homeworld: Cataclysm and the resulting review on GGE). EVE had come highly recommended to me from several people, and the general concept - a starship-based, player-driven sandbox galaxy - sounded extremely appealing yet again, just as it did a year ago. And since I wasn't in the middle of researching for comps, I figured I might have a better time with it this time.

Basically, I did. The game is quite fun, and the sheer number of options for what to do with yourself is stunning. I did a little mining, a fair amount of combat, some team play and some soloing. I even moved all my ships over ten systems so I could be nearer the White Wolf Enterprises offices - a major impetus to start up again was hearing that White Wolf was teaming up with the makers of EVE and had an in-game corporation (guild). I was really fired up this time. But this afternoon, thinking about what awaited me a couple months of EVE-ing down the road, I just wasn't that jazzed.

What I wanted was something that would give a richer, more interactive experience than WoW while requiring less game time, or at least less structured game time (i.e. no raids). I figured that EVE would come with that, given that the main method of advancement is training up skills, a process which continues even while you're logged off (possibly the single best innovation in the game, and there are lots of them). But from what I saw, I'd still both need and want to spend lots of time mining or getting pirate bounties or PVPing my ass off, which is what this game seems to do best at. And at the moment, I'm not really sure I want that. It'd probably be fun and I'm almost positive that I'd freaking love it once I got past a certain point and moved out into 0.0 space (sectors with no NPC security, where literally anything goes; EVE's equivalent of end-game content).

But I really don't want to spend that month, or probably several months, getting skilled up and familiar enough with the intricacies of PVPing in an extremely unstructured world, just to spend the rest of my time in the game worrying about losing my ships at every turn. Because the game is VERY high-stakes for a game, and it encourages player piracy, skullduggery, and competition. This means that it also practically requires an active, supportive, and cohesive corporation to back you up, which is the part that appealed to me the most (other than the sweet spaceships, made all the more beautiful by the recent graphical redesign and upgrade).

So basically, EVE has lots of things I want from a game, and even more of what I want from an MMO. But ultimately, it's not what I want at the moment. It looks to be a fantastic game with more depth than you could scratch in a year, but I don't think that's for me right now. I have waaaay too many games on deck right now to get distracted with another open-ended MMO. So huzzah! I've resisted the temptation, for once, with the main thought in my mind that I want to play more games. I feel good. And slightly lame, since I'm blogging about this at such length, but hey. Like I've said before, I like to see myself write almost as much as Jack Thompson likes to hear himself litigate (unless he gets his contentious ass disbarred....we can only hope.

8 days until Sins of a Solar Empire...methinks this may quench my lust for epic space battles for a time.

In the Bearracks

2008-01-25T19:36:00.000-06:00

Though it long coveted the Russian's bear cavalry during WWII, Poland did have access to some of the very solid bear infantry. I can't believe this story is real, but it's amazing. I have no idea how a bunch of soldiers managed to domesticate a wild bear, but I can think of few things I'd rather have guarding me at night.

Ow, my childhood...

2008-01-25T07:08:00.001-06:00

But it's too goddamn funny.

Another neat thing to do with your Wii

2008-01-23T20:18:00.001-06:00

Last Blood

2008-01-22T22:44:00.000-06:00

Vampires have to save their food source - last group of humans on earth - from a planet full of zombies. Interesting concept and a good comic...read it, good sirs and ladies.

Let the games begin

2008-01-16T20:38:00.001-06:00

Well, I can officially take 22 five-year-olds in a fight, but I can't tackle one block of HTML in Blogger. By deduction, Blogger is made of at minimum, 23 five-year-olds. In any case, now that I'm certified as safe from more than a score of midgets (which is good, there are an unusual number of kids around the library tonight), I can safely review a couple of my recent freeware/browser game finds:

Battleships Forever: Easily the best of the free offerings I've come across so far, this is a top-down space strategy game. It has superb graphics (for freeware) and excellent gameplay. The look is quite stylized and almost wireframe, but not as rough-looking. The weapon and explosion effects are great, and seeing the ships split into their constituent chunks is immensely satisfying. The gameplay is a mix of standard RTS movement/attack with an emphasis on positioning - for instance, lots of ships have deflectors, which make certain parts of the ship completely invulnerable. So, you have to get behind it, or flank it, all while outpacing the ship's turn rate. The only flaw I'd say is that it actually goes a little too fast for a game with as much tactical depth as it has; I'd like a game speed bar. Still, I highly suggest this one.

Warning Forever: Neat little arcade-style game that was the stylistic inspiration for Battleships Forever. I got bored after a half dozen levels, but then I do with pretty much all arcade games. Warning Forever's neatest feature is the fact that each level is basically a progressively harder boss fight, with the catch that each level, the boss adapts to the way you beat the previous boss. Also, you have the option to change your ship's arc of fire, which is a very nice feature.

Really Rather Good Battles in Space: They're really rather not. Granted I only played the first three missions, but that's half the game and then I stopped out of a combination of boredom and frustration. The ship designs are kind of cool (they're weirdly organic), but as far as I can tell there are all of two kinds, and both of them would suck absolute ass in any approximation of a real space battle. There's the carrier, which has a few squads of fighters and bombers, and then there's the frigate, whose only purpose seems to be to fire ineffectually at the strike craft before being blown to pieces. Seriously. If you like carrier battles, and I mean if you have a serious fetish for them, you might get farther than me, but I kind of doubt it.

Endless Zombie Rampage: Not quite as solid a zombie slaughterfest as Boxhead, but good for a change of pace.

Flash Portal: This came to me highly recommended, but I just don't like it that much. The control scheme seems far more fickle than that of Portal itself, and when a flash game is harder to handle than a full-blown Valve-spawned FPS, something is wrong. Still, it's a good puzzle game and you guys would probably like it, especially if you don't have Portal.

Travian: My browser-based strategy game du jour, it's been good so far. Nothing revolutionary in form: you build up your village with warehouses, walls, markets, and soldiers as you expand your resourcing operation and defend against attacks. I managed to stumble into a pretty active alliance which definitely improves things. The mechanics do encourage cooperation though, with a lot of trading and mutual defense options. I'm on there as Blackfish on the 3x (triple speed) server, if anyone's curious.

Well, that's it for now...I'll save the rest for my next bloated post. Oh, there is one thing of note: I've been asked to stay on here at the library for another year. This requires some good old-fashioned pondering.

The Healing Begins

2008-01-15T21:55:00.000-06:00

So my poor waffle-based place of employment has been shut down since last Sunday, when the ceiling bubbled and proceeded to spill lots of dirty rain/snow water down in the kitchen. According to the owner (who's also my old professor - I enjoy having connections, even if they're just to the waffle industry), they'll probably be closed down for another month. Which isn't the best news for my bank account, though it does give me even more free time, not that I need it. Ah well. Every massive water leak has a silver lining. Or at least it does if its not your main source of income, and you're not financially invested in it. Unless that silvery color is mercury...hmm. Though mercury IS the sweetest of the transition metals.

But I digress. My life is largely unexciting, at least from a blogging perspective...I can only chill with Hillary and my friends and enjoy living quietly up here so much before it fails to be interesting to read about. For instance, I think it failed to be interesting to read about before I even started this post. So without further ado, I turn to probably the only interesting thing in this blog, my staple content....hard core nudity! By which I of course mean talking about games.

I can see in myself the signs of getting over the MMO syndrome, at least a little. I've recently beaten C&C3 which, while good, left me wanting more (which may be forthcoming with Tiberium), and I've started Gears of War and re-started (for probably the fourth time) Homeworld: Cataclysm, the only member of the Homeworld series so far that I haven't glomped onto with a child-like glee at first go. Each time I get about half a dozen missions in and then lose all my steam for some reason.

Part of me wants to blame the fact that it wasn't developed by Relic, the geniuses behind Homeworld, Homeworld 2, and Dawn of War. Then again, Barking Dog is apparently what turned into Rockstar Vancouver, the "respectable" arm of the company responsible for all the GTA nonsense. Additionally, it sounds like at least part of the Barking Dog crew is behind Sins of a Solar Empire, which has me even more excited than Homeworld 2. Cinematic capital ship battles with individual maps spanning across multiple star systems? Yes please (I just hope I can run it at any decent level of settings). So in any case, I'm giving Cataclysm another try. It's certainly aged pretty darn well from a visual standpoint, considering it's seven and a half years old at this point.

Can you tell I've been reading a lot of games' and developers' Wikipedia entries lately?

But it seems like the general lesson of the last couple weeks of getting out of a gaming funk is that lots of smaller, more easily accessible free games are the salve for my otherwise neurotic gamer at the moment. As Todd pointed out, the "problem" I may have with non-MMOs is that they end and then there's not anything ostensibly to show for it. As such, I'm a little leery of even starting them. So I've been playing old games and finishing off some ones I was in the middle of to show myself that I can still get enjoyment out of them. In terms of storyline this is amazingly true, especially with Okami. But I'm still a little reluctant to start into all the new content I've found.

But with the help of the good folks over at the Great Games Experiment and an absurd amount of time poring through pages of freeware, I've downloaded or bookmarked a good two dozen free games, or browser games, and a couple more sites that seem to want to be the Facebook for games. I've been able to delve into these a lot more readily since I have absolutely no investment in them, especially if a single round of play takes five or ten minutes. At the very least, they're free (which is always good).

So in the coming posts, I shall share with you the fruits of my free time! At the very least I can point you guys towards some good games, and maybe reviewing them will be an impetus to play more and get even further out of this funk, such as it is.

Contemplative, if long, musings on single-player gaming in the age of MMOs

2008-01-08T22:20:00.000-06:00

So I finally finished Okami. I started playing this back in...let's see. March. Well, comps sort of killed that, and then a summer of not having the PS2 hooked up to a TV. Then, WoW kind of ate all my gaming time. But I finally beat it!

All I can really say is, holy shit. Okami was amazing. It's one of the prettiest games I've ever played, but more importantly is has one of the best storylines and cast of characters that I've ever encountered, in a game or really anywhere short of a good book. The game's about 60 hours long, and there's a lot still left to do - I'm told it's very much like a Zelda game in that respect. But more importantly, the game consistently sent chills down my spine, and I have NEVER seen a more beautiful game, either in form or in spirit.

I wrote a little review for it over at the Great Games Experiment. The GGE was something I signed up to about ten months ago but never got into because of time constraints - I guess it's part game review and database site and part social networking tool. It's apparently in something of a recession at the moment because Garage Games, the people behind it, haven't been paying much attention to it in the last couple of months, but I see it as having a lot of potential. Hopefully they'll get back to supporting it at some point, but in the meanwhile there seems to be a small group of people who're sticking it out, so we're seeing what we can do to revitalize the community, if possible.

And speaking of revitalization....I'm in need of a bit of that myself. Only in terms of gaming, mind you. But now, after a couple weeks of being happily WoW-free, I've realized just what WoW has done to my gaming style. I still think that WoW is a great game, whether or not I want to devote the time to raiding and whether or not the damn thing spent the last two weeks of play time crashing every ten minutes because Blizzard can't keep its code straight. But WoW has done really weird things to the way I game, and I don't think I like it.

Basically, now whenever I spend more than an hour or two on a game that isn't WoW (or, for the sake of argument, any other MMO), I have this nagging feeling like I'm wasting my time. It even creeps into conscious thought sometimes. But like it or not, at the moment part of me seems to believe that if what I'm playing isn't contributing to some kind of perpetual, global world that everyone can see, it's less worthy of my free time or gaming efforts. Intellectually, I know this is absurd - I'd say that my most enjoyable gaming times came out of Okami, Homeworld, Half Life 2, and Dinopark Tycoon (when I was but a wee gamer lad). Those are the pretty much the peak of my gaming experiences, when I've felt most connected with the world, or the characters, or so damn engrossed that I can't put the game down.

And yet lately, I have a tough time picking up something like Okami, or getting back into God of War, or starting up Gears or War or anything like that. I've spent much of my time procrastinating, looking for a good browser-based multiplayer strategy game (which I am still looking for) or going through reviews of games I don't have and really shouldn't even bother looking at until I've finished more of those that I already have. That's when I realized that some part of me - the part that made me procrastinate - had come to dread gaming a little.

Dread it! It makes no sense at all, but there it is. Part of me was afraid to play games that weren't persistent, multiplayer grindfests where there was some kind of definite goal and reward, however probabilistically distant it was. Now I don't want to fall back on the popular pastime of WoW-bashing, because ultimately I still like the game, but when it stops being fun, even temporarily, what does it say about the genre (and about me, for that matter) that I can't just slip into some amazing single-player games that I've been waiting months to play?

Why is the variable-schedule reward schema of WoW so damned rewarding while the storytelling and characters of the game are, admittedly, about as deep as moderately-sized puddle? With Okami, which I can now safely consider my favorite game yet, I routinely get shivers up my spine from the story and character and music and raw visual beauty of the game, and yet it was tough sometimes to boot up the PS2 and just get going. Once I was playing there was no hesitation, but leading up to that....

So what is it that makes WoW so easy to pick up and come back to, to monopolize your freetime, even after you've stopped playing? Will this weird nagging complaint in the back of my mind ever shut up and let me get back to my old, free-flowing gaming self? I've always been very slightly neurotic, but this is a bit much.

This is "emotional"?

2008-01-07T18:18:00.000-06:00

Saw this being touted as a big news story : Hillary tears up.

I'm sorry, did anyone see any tears? Because I didn't. I did hear emotion creeping into her voice - ZOMG EMOTIONS! People do have them, you realize. She's definitely not my first choice, but it kind of pisses me off that some media are taking this and trying to insinuate that its shows feminine weakness or something like that.

Paris Hilton's Grandpa Rules

2007-12-27T20:19:00.001-06:00

Barron Hilton will donate 97% of his fortune to charity. Suck it, bimbo.

No intelligent thoughts for the moment, perhaps some reactions to new video games and other news stories soon, eh?

GLaDOS wishes you...

2007-12-21T21:17:00.000-06:00

...a Happy (HOLIDAY NAME HERE)!

Media tomfoolery continues

2007-12-20T16:21:00.000-06:00

You'd think they'd get bored with blaming 10-year-old-games on violent deaths caused by drunken dumbfucks. The affadavit apparently doesn't even state that they were imitating Mortal Kombat, just playing it at the time:

"There is no clarification whether "Mortal Combat" is the misspelt videogame title or a term for rough play. The affidavit describes the alleged wrestling moves in detail, but does not link them specifically to the fighting game."

And yet what did I see all over the news? Nothing but "Mortal Kombat Killing". I'd think I'd die of shock if the media ever looked at a case tangentially involving a video game in the basement and reported on it objectively.

Two Genres, Long Separated....

2007-12-20T00:10:00.000-06:00

...have finally been reunited. Torture porn and opera! Yes, we were all waiting with baited breath for the happy amalgamation of these two "art forms", and at last our perverted prayers to Eli Roth and the Pantheon of Sick Fucks and Assorted Tenors have been answered:

Repo: The Genetic Opera

Thanks to Hillary for the find! Normally I'd just be weirded out by this kind of thing and go off on a rant about how much I hate Saw and how torture porn is one form of media that actually DOES encourage violence, but something gave me pause. This thing is going to star both Sarah Brightman and Anthony Stewart Head. That's Giles, the stuffy but lovable British library/Watcher from Buffy the Vampire Slayer. And Sarah Brightman is a fairly well-known singer of operatic music. Neither of them really seemed like someone to star in something that looks like this, but hey. For all I know it could turn out to be the next Rocky Horror Picture show. Only it would have bloody dismemberment instead of sexual exploration, and an abundance of skimpy leather outfits instead of...well, ok. That'd be the same.

Technology AND Whimsy

2007-12-13T21:44:00.000-06:00

W00t made word of the year! Shenanigans ensue. Perhaps my favorite part of the article is this explanation of getting owned: " Some claim it is an acronym for the phrase 'We Owned Other Team' - meaning that the winning side comprehensively beat their opponents." I want a documentary narrated by a distinguished British man to tell me more about this fascinating world of comprehensive victory.

Weird moods

2007-12-10T16:46:00.000-06:00

I know that everyone gets into weird moods - odd emotional states seemingly unprompted or unrelated to one's surroundings. Some people will become sad or anxious for seemingly no reason. I do this sometimes. More often, it seems, I get bizarre urges to play certain types of computer games.

I've been on a huge space strategy game kick lately - like spending two entire nights looking for a good free online game that fit the bill (I'm currently trying Atorian; we'll see if its pace ever picks up). I'm still looking, so if anyone has suggestions for the browser-based or similar space/scifi game, please let me know. Oh and while I'm thinking of online games, I've been having a good time with Shogun Wars. It's very simplistic, but well-executed and fun. Not sure when the next season starts but it's still quite viable to join up now if you want; I'm on there as Blackfish.

I've also dug out a few older games in the process...I tried Haegemonia: Legions of Iron for the third time or so, and I just cannot get into it. I mean I knew from the get-go that the voice acting was beyond godawful; I could forgive that because it was made in Quebec. But it feels like 80% of my game time is spent leaning on the fast-forward button, waiting for techs to research or ships to build or something to HAPPEN, and this seems to go slowly even at the max 4x time compression the game provides. So, I think I'm done with that game, again. It's pretty, but it really does just fail.

So I picked up Galactic Civilizations (the first one) for $10 at Target a few days ago, and it's pretty fun so far. It has a really weird sense of humor, but so far I like it much more than the demo of GalCivII that I couldn't get into a few years ago. So that's most of what I'm playing right now, asides from the requisite WoW time and going rather slowly through HL2: Episode 2.

Oh! Good news from the Arctic front: Polar Bears May Not Be Fucked After All. Since polar bears appear to have survived (as a distinct species no less) at least one earlier and warmer period of global warming, there's at least a little hope for them. Of course, that only holds if we come out of this warming cycle without creating the runaway greenhouse effect that is the real threat.

So let's protect our polar buddies, because otherwise who will supply the armor-wearing, sentient ursine warriors voiced by Ian McKellan in upcoming movies based off fantastic fantasy trilogies? I'll have to post more about His Dark Materials (and specifically The Golden Compass) later; that deserves its own post. Suffice to say, Hillary and I are really looking forward to the movie, even if I've heard some rumors that they changed some key aspects of the books to bow a little to pressure from the Church. Pansies. Anyway, I'll probably review the movie after we've seen it.

And speaking of movies, Razor. Yarr. I don't want to say too much since I'm not sure who has and hasn't seen it yet, but I was pleased. There was one notably hokey part which kicked me out of the usual Battlestar mindset, but then I got back in and was happy with the rest of the movie. What did other people think? Certainly an ominous ending. And an amusing thing I noticed: the guy who played the Hybrid was the voice of the narrator and the Bentusi in the Homeworld games. That made me happy inside.

Finally, something I treated myself to online: the Valve store. I really couldn't pass up the chance to have an Aperture Science parking permit in my van, and "Dog is my Copilot" is also rather clever.

I promise not to wait a month and a half before my next post.

Portal!

2007-10-28T06:45:00.000-05:00

I just beat it. For a puzzle game, it has the best damned sense of pacing I've ever seen. I even found myself reveling in the jumping puzzles. Me! Enjoying a jumping puzzle! It's freaking unheard of. But I did, and then I was taunted by an hilariously insane AI as I blew her apart with her own rockets and finally got to the end credits, which has a song by Jonathan Coulton. That's the same Jonathan Coulton we discovered last year. I love when there are little connections like that.

It's so satisfying to actually complete a game - I haven't beaten a game entirely in way too long. It comes with the territory of playing an MMO and more open-ended games, but damn does it feel good to complete something.

Now, to complete the achievements....

Poor Blood Zombie

2007-10-27T22:05:00.000-05:00

So, as requested and because I love blabbering on and on about it, there's a lot more to say about Hellgate: London.

The first big issue is the subscription service. A lot of the community isn't happy with this. The question of subscription is actually why I took a long break from keeping up with the community over at Hellgate Guru - I loved it at first but after about six months, there wasn't a lot of new press releases left to discuss so everyone just started fixating on the subscription issue, which got old fast.

Basically, everyone who buys the game gets the full game. Full single-player mode, and the ability to play online on the same servers as everyone else. Basically, you get everything you did with Diablo II, except with supposedly better anti-cheating measures and not having to deal with Bnet. Online, though, is where the subscribers (Elites, I think is the term they're going to use) get extra goodies. For one, free players get only three character slots per account - kind of annoying since there are six classes with more slated for eventual release. Elite players get lots more, not sure how many. Elites also get slightly bigger bank spaces. Someone in the game is going to get communal stashes accessible by all their characters - whether this is going to be everyone or just subscribers is still up in the air, as far as I've read.

Beyond that stuff, I think most of the difference between free players and Elites comes from expanding content. HGL will have expanding content. Eventually they plan on introducing at least three new classes, upping the level cap, introducing new zones, new loot, etc., and only subscribers will have access to this. This seems to be the main advantage of paying monthly, along with "Elite gear", which will supposedly look cooler but not be functionally any better than what everyone else can get.

As far as I can tell, if you don't plan to play online, there's no reason to subscribe. Though if you never play online, it's unknown if you'll ever have access to the post-release content. There's talk of releasing it eventually in expansion-pack-esque products, but that's all hearsay at this point. It's also unknown what will happen if someone subscribes for a long time and then decides to stop for a while - we don't know if you'll lose access to some zones/gear/classes/whatever or not, so how they're going to handle that really needs to be clarified. I'd say this is their main weakness right now - more the vagueness of their subscription model rather than its existence.

The other beef people seem to be having is the level design and randomization - they complain that there isn't a lot of variety. Granted I didn't get to play the beta as long as others but I was actually pretty impressed with the random level generation and the variety of level terrain templates. It's not WoW, but it's about what you'd expect for a game set almost entirely within London - you've got your dank sewers, your dank catacombs, your burned-out cityscapes, and the occasional hell-rift (the walls in hell look phenomenal, by the way; it looks like hot lava cooled around bones and skulls that had been pressed into it). Then there are some great static zones, which I'm pretty sure are the same every time and aren't randomized.

These are the major set pieces of the game, and mirror actual sites in London - seeing the British Museum was really cool, even though I was being chased by Emperor G-something and his hordes of demonic Goro-impersonators. I think there are going to be some cathedral settings too, though I'm not sure which one they'll be modeled after. Anyway, the level randomization is well-executed as far as I can tell (except for one time where I got a map whose only tunnel to the next zone was blocked by a giant flaming subway car), and while you're not seeing the variety of tilesets as you would in a true MMO, the terrain is a lot more varied and interesting than in Diablo II, and I didn't even get to see past Act I in the beta.

So far, I'm extremely excited. I'm not hugely keen on the idea of spending $10/month to get all the eventual content the game will have to offer, but I have to say I like that there will be expanding content. Plus, when the devs post in the fan forums that people should play the game without subscribing for a few months before making the decision, I think they at least have a pretty good attitude about it.

Diversifying

2007-10-24T23:17:00.001-05:00

So for the last couple months, most of what I've been playing has been Command and Conquer 3 and the biggie, WoW. Together (mostly WoW, to be honest) they've eaten up most of my fairly ample gaming time. A little Okami here and there, and a nostalgia-filled play-through of Warcraft I & II, but not a whole lot of variety. That does seem like it's going to be changing.

Aside from starting to edge towards WoW-burnout and wanting to stave that off, there are far too many good titles to ignore. I broke down this afternoon and bought the Orange Box. I don't know why it's orange, but it has Portal and Episode 2. Portal has been recommended to me by more people than I can actually remember at this point, and anything that Yahtzee actually can't come up with an insult for is at least frightening and at most promising. Plus, I need to figure out what the hell all these references to cake and companion cubes are all about.

Which reminds me - anyone who'd like a copy of Half Life 2 and/or Episode 1, let me know - thanks to the Orange Box I, like Andy, now have a spare copy of each.

Heck, even C&C3 has me excited again - Generals may have been very far astray from the series to that point, but C&C3 brings it back and does a pretty good job with the storyline, enough that I'm actually excited to find out what happens next. It'll probably get shelved for a while after I beat the single-player campaign, but that's what happens with me and RTS games - I'm not much for multiplayer of that sort.

But the game I'm really excited about is Hellgate: London, the NDA for which has finally been lifted. I managed to get invited to the beta fairly late into it, unfortunately, and have by this point been invited six times, four times to the US one and twice to the EU version, so if anyone would like a beta key just let me know - only problem being that the servers go down on Friday. Anyway, I started off and I was a bit skeptical, what with somewhat disappointing performance on my machine and the fact that I'd given up waiting excitedly for this game almost a year ago, which was almost a year after I first got excited about it.

But I've been pleasantly surprised ever since. The gameplay is fast-paced and a very pleasant change from what I've been doing lately, plus it has the authentically capitalistic instant gratification of Diablo. Loot galore, and lots of shiny things to keep you occupied. There's even a crafting system in place to augment existing items and built new ones, all of which require a variety of items, which you obtain by breaking down unwanted items. And since I'm a packrat who loves collecting resources and reagents, hoarding all the runic shards and tech components has me extremely happy.

So normally I'd say you should all go out and try the demo, but I hear that it's actually worse than the beta and is quite crappy. The beta itself is still somewhat buggy. I don't know what's normal for a beta, but this seems pretty status-quo so I'm not exactly worried. Hopefully it'll be improved substantially in the next week before release, and I know that at least one big patch is on its way. I've already pre-ordered it and I'm still happy about that, now I just hope it gets here on time. It looks to be damn fun. So far it isn't perfect, but if you liked Diablo, you'll like this too. Ooh, plus, there's one class that plays best from a first-person point of view which is quite interesting. So at the moment: flawed but extremely fun and promising. If I'm allowed, I'll say more after the patch.

And good news, everyone! I get to stop bitching about the school not giving me benefits - starting January 1, I get more hours and benefits, which includes the ever-popular health insurance. Everything else in my life is pretty damn dandy too, so huzzah and good night to all!

Terry Jones!

2007-10-06T18:22:00.000-05:00

Last night I went up to the Cities to hear a talk about life in the Middle Ages by none other than Terry Jones. Now I like medieval history to begin with, and when it's presented a Monty Python member, it's even better. His history is also pretty good - most of his methodology seemed quite strong, and I'm willing to chalk the weak points up to the fact that he was limited to a 45-minute talk to a group that wasn't all history students or scholars.

He's a very engaging speaker with a hilarious slideshow, including a painting from the 14th century of someone reaching up through a crack in a platform and pulling down a magistrate's underwear. Hilariously uncharacteristic of Middle Ages art, though of course his point was that it wasn't all that uncharacteristic. Nor were people who lived in that time the benighted, ignorant rubes that we commonly think of them as (at least, not all of them). All in all, a very good and informative presentation. Plus, really damn funny.

Also they had a trio playing late medieval/early baroque songs, followed by a group of Gregorian chanters. I noticed that they all had little hard leather folders for music in their hands, but that they weren't open, so I hoped for the best. And after a few pretty well-done chants, they marched out, singing the song from Holy Grail, and hitting themselves in the face with their books. It was stupendous.

My most recent finds

2007-10-03T21:54:00.001-05:00

Someday, perhaps, I'll have more of my original material to post here (aside from my ramblings and Pirate Raid reviews, that is), but until then it's a good a venue as any for some of my recent Worthy Internet Specimens.

First is fullyramblomatic.com, a blog much like mine only funnier, filled with more content, and slightly cluttered with ads by Google. Also, it's written by an irate British man, which I only wish I could claim to be. From what I can tell his reviews are pretty dead-on: I haven't played all the games he's reviewed, though I still need to get to that Bioshock demo I have. They're all hilarious, though, and the one about Peggle at least is pretty much dead-on. Hillary and I played that for about three hours without really realizing it, and that was the DEMO. "Insincerely cute" is also the perfect descriptor for that game - it tries to hard to be plush and doe-eyed that it rounds the bend into boring plasticity.

My other find, brought to be me thanks to Hannah, is Brandon Bird. He's the creator of the famed Law and Order Coloring Book and that ever so amazing painting of Christopher Walken building Optimus Prime. All the nerd culture juxtaposed with classical allusions are only made better by the fact that he's actually pretty damn, good, and able to mimic several different classical and foreign styles. Plus, he has a drawing of Harrison Ford playing a Black Lotus. Win.

As we near the ends of Buffy and Angel, Hillary and I are running into more and more spoilers - extremely annoying spoilers. I also just read an article (while finding the above picture of Spike) that claims that he ruins Season 7 and is symptomatic of the bastardization of the show's entire unpopular-kids-as-heroes motif. I hope it's wrong. I also hope that most of the spoilers I read are wrong, but then they wouldn't be spoilers, would they.

And I don't normally talk about personal stuff on here but I think I will mention that Hillary and my one-year anniversary is coming up in a few days, because I'm just so damned happy about it! So there, take that my self-imposed blog-content limitations! Eat a happy anniversary, to us!

Nerd TV

2007-09-26T19:46:00.000-05:00

Nerds do seem to be becoming more and more mainstream. I'll just assume that my Carleton's Biggest Nerd win was the herald of a bright and new era of widespread nerdlery and move on.

Watched the first episode of the new Heroes season, and before that I was pleasantly surprised by Chuck, which is conveniently aired right before it. The premise is nothing super-original, but the execution of the nerd-becomes-pivotal-government-operative plot is actually pretty darn good. The supporting cast is also quite funny, and, more importantly, has Adam Baldwin. That's right. The main character is a nerd with a spy sort-of-girlfriend played by a Russian supermodel, and gets into a car chase with Jayne from Firefly. What more could you ask for?

The Heroes season opener was good - not terrifically exciting, but good and definitely a solid setup to some new stuff. Aside from some obvious Nissan product placement, I'm definitely looking forward to more superpowered actions. There are at least two new characters, Mexican it would seem. I have my theories about them, but I'll keep those to myself until everyone's seen it.

The space game I mentioned before progresses; I think the different cultures/empires and ships are the next step.

Apparently both Adam Baldwin and Nathan Fillion are in Halo 3? Wackiness. Still, nothing trumps Command and Conquer 3's cast.

Work, pirate raid, and a few projects

2007-09-19T22:33:00.000-05:00

Greetings from the library, where I sit at my desk and manage my multitude of matriculated minions. Actually there are only two of them, but at least I have minions. Being an Evening Supervisor is pretty relaxed, which is good; the only downside is that three times a night I have to go around the entire building and count the number of people, divvied up by various areas. It's for "usage statistics" or something frivolous and corporate like that. My theory is it's to keep me from doing nothing but sit at my desk and surf the intarwebs for six straight hours, so it might actually do me a favor. It's a decent amount of walking.

The search for a second job is still a big fat zilcho, though as usual I still have a few leads left to explore. I am taking it at a kind of leisurely pace, because let's face it - getting rejected 8+ times in a week would be kind of bad for the ego, even if it's just because most places don't seem to be hiring at the moment. I blame the economy, or something.

More shenanigans have been borne of WoW: one of our buddies was quitting for Tabula Rasa (which looks more interesting than it has any right to, from an I-can't-afford-it standpoint), so we gave him a farewell Pirate Raid. I think my writeup came out pretty well. There are even Pokémon jokes at the end, and overall it's at least marginally accessible to people who don't fritter their time away online excessively. It actually made one of my guildmates ask if I did this kind of a thing for a living. Nerd commentary? Please, be a real profession someday. Soon.

Another guildmate and I are in the early stages of designing a browser-based space strategy game. Think the Fleet Game, only with less nobody-wants-to-play-it-itude. And computer-based, like it would have needed to be. We're looking at a pretty standard planetary expansion model, with technology and ships and whatnot - nothing revolutionary, but a chance to take our own stab at the genre and for him to learn a new programming language (Ruby Rails, I think? Maybe just Ruby). I'm not going near that end of things. We're in the early design stages, but I'm pretty excited, so perhaps expect more about it in the future!

No beer reviews because my booklet from the event is at home. Maybe that'll be impetus to post again before another three weeks go by.

Verily, I have returned to the Inter-webs!

2007-08-27T17:20:00.000-05:00

Prithee, forgive my long and no doubt arduous truancy in furnishing mine blog with new articles for your purveyance! Good Sir Spudler anticipated my ambitions by a matter of hours and, in response, I hereby purvey to you, my kind audience, this next installment of this most humble serial. First, a moving picture!

And now, some actual content. I moved into my apartment in Northfield, MN about a week ago, and have been settling in. It's a bit weird to be finally entirely on my own, but I think I'm handling it pretty well, if a bit belatedly. I'm neither starving nor covered in my own filth, and scurvy is held at bay by fruits. I'm pretty sure bananas and grapes help stave that off, right? Anyway. The apartment is nice, if a bit slanty, and I've managed to procure a good internet connection. I got the entire 1.8gig Bioshock demo in under and hour. It was awesome.

I have, perhaps regrettably, been bitten by the WoW bug again and have gone back to playing. It's fun; Bronn the orc warrior is a satisfying character. Also, Reckless Ascension, our guild, is full of awesome people. We also do PVP raids on the Alliance capitals sometimes, and I took it upon myself to be an incredibly nerdy photojournalist at some of these raids.

The first was a spontaneous raid on Stormwind in response to a couple Alliance guys trying to bust into Orgrimmar: To Stormwind!

The second was a world tour on RA's first anniversary. We killed most of the Alliance towns in the world, a couple of them twice, and ended up actually killing both of the leaders in Darnassus. Sweet zombie jesus, I'm a nerd!

So a few night ago my old roommates (sans Cary, who is sadly in NY) and John and Hillary all came over and we watched the new TMNT movie. It was ok; they did a good job of developing the Leonardo/Raphael conflict, but did so at the expense of, well, anything interesting involving Michaelangelo or Donatello. The CG was cool, and it was fun enough, but it wasn't great.

What WAS wonderful was that after the movie, we managed to track down a lot of cartoons from when we were young. Full episodes! Online! What will the internet think of next? So we watched some Transformers, Battletech (in which the CG looked worse than MechWarrior 2, good lord), SwatKats, and most importantly, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

I had no idea how deeply this show was ingrained into my memory. I still knew all the voices subconsciously, somewhere, to the point that I felt like I'd heard each of them in other shows since then. For a couple of the voice actors that's almost certainly the case (I think one's in SwatKats, actually), but the deja-vu was uncanny. So we watched a couple episodes of that, got all nostalgic, drank some spiced mead (thank you, Brandon!) and then headed to bed. It was a grand night.

NEXT TIME, PROBABLY: That beer-tasting I went to about two months ago and meant to blog about!

Too much time on their hands

2007-07-16T18:22:00.001-05:00

Daft Hands:

This song rules, and whoever's doing the hands thing is pretty damn amazing.

Some day, maybe I'll make a substantive post. Oh, and C&C 3 rules.

My computer's on fire

2007-06-20T15:29:00.000-05:00

...or at least, it looks like it is.

The Most Amazing Physics Demo yet

I couldn't figure out a way to embed them, but the fire one's at the bottom. The others are all astounding as well; I have no idea how far off we are from these being implemented in real-time games, but I'm looking forward to it.

And to having to pay for a specific physics chip to make it function, but hey, them's the breaks.

Carleton's Biggest Nerd

2007-05-30T17:10:00.000-05:00

So, this term my college has been running a radio contest called "Carleton's Biggest Nerd." It's been a lot of fun, and I even got to do a battle rap! If you're reading my blog, then odds are you guys know how funny of a concept this is. The battle rap is towards the end of this podcast.

But, more importantly, we're down to the final round of the contest, and I'm one of the finalists! So, if any of you guys are bored/want to support me in a nerdly venture/wants to humor me, please go to this site and vote for me (Peter Berry/Optimist Rhyme)! You can vote once per hour, per computer. Voting ends this Friday the 1st at 10pm. Whoever's in the lead then wins!

Also, most of the episodes of Carleton's Biggest Nerd are pretty funny, and they should be archived on the KRLX site. Let me know if you want individual links to the nerdiness.

At the moment I'm engaged in a gritty back-and-forth battle with Jason Pipkin, who, though a ffine and upstanding guy, didn't know the name of Lord Zedd. That's about the worst I can say about him. So, spread the word to forums, to friends, to anyone you can annoy/amuse with this!

For encouragement, here's me as a Magic card:

/end publicity begging

Flight of the Conchords

2007-05-27T21:49:00.000-05:00

So, these are all shamelessly lifted from Hillary's blog, but they're pretty amazing, so I'm going to put it up here as well. First, a song aimed at the human-killing robot demographic:

And, though it's not as ridiculous as my nerdcore rap (towards the end of this podcast), here is a gangsta folk song by the same guys:

I have to say that Hiphopopotamus and Rhymenoceros are pretty much the best names ever, arguable better than Optimus Rhyme.

I've been more and more intrigued by the nerdcore genre ever since my recent brush with rapping. I found some free tracks over at Rhymetorrents, and while some aren't that good, some are pretty awesome, like "RPG (Rhymes of Phatness and Greatness)" and "Fuck the MPAA". There's a fair amount of mediocre stuff to weed through, but there's some fun stuff in the genre.

Also, the finals for Carleton's Biggest Nerd are tomorrow, I'll post info and links for that then!

SC2 Gameplay Demo

2007-05-26T13:54:00.000-05:00

Looks like the Protoss have some interesting new units - and it sounds like the whole game is getting more balanced - not that the first game wasn't balanced. Now it just looks like armor type vs. damage type will make a lot more of a difference, rather than just being able to mass Carriers or Hydras and roll all over everything. Basically it looks like most units will have some sort of a counter-unit in each of the other races - even against Siege Tanks! That's pretty damn exciting.

Also, with the new terrain-jumping features, turtling should be harder, and the whole thing should just be a lot faster-paced.

Also, the Mothership: This thing is ridiculous. First, it basically has a mobile, multi-barrel ion cannon. Then, the "time bomb" - it does bullet-time for any nearby enemy unit or for incoming fire; everything just stops short of hitting it. And then:

Yes, that's a black hole. 'Nuff said.

Heroes season finale

2007-05-22T01:13:00.000-05:00

Don't worry, no real spoilers here. I mostly just wanted to say that I was alternately disappointed and relieved at how non-cataclysmic it was. Also, was it me or was the dialogue even more ham-tastic than normal? Not that that's really a bad thing; Heroes is great at being ridiculously stylized and comic-y while still being amazing.

Anyway, mostly I just want to start a discussion in the comments area so as not to have any spoilers out here on the front page again.

It's About Time

2007-05-19T17:33:00.000-05:00

Hans beat me to it, but...yeah. It needs to be trumpeted.

You heard his name

2007-03-31T15:30:00.001-05:00

He's MC Rove!

Oh, Those Wacky Japanese! (Episode 372)

2007-03-22T22:34:00.000-05:00

So, thanks to Aryss over at the SV forums, I have expanded my knowledge as a religion major. I now know more about a Shinto festival previously unknown to me. It's the Kanamara Matsuri - and we all know what that means:

Festival of the Steel Phallus! Brought to you by the same religion that brought you that wolf game I just talked about.

Ookami da ne?

2007-03-19T23:11:00.000-05:00

So, someone has very clearly been raiding just about every video game fantasy I've had since I started gaming. And that someone is Capcom. I vaguely remember reading about this somewhere when it came out in the US, I think on PennyArcade maybe, but then I had placed it ruefully out of my mind because back then I thought I'd never own a PS2. Well, that is almost certainly going to change soon, and I randomly ran into a guy I hadn't talked to in a year or two this afternoon who reminded me of Okami's existence. I promptly started to drool in a Pavlovian response, and here's why.

You play a wolf. Who is the Japanese goddess Amaterasu. Who fights, not only by the various and sundry wolfy means of biting, scratching, and anime-jumping all around the screen, but also by painting. The whole game visuals are in a stylized version of medieval Japanese art, and one of the major ways to interact with the world is to use the paintbrush - a giant, time-stopping brush that can cleave enemies in twain, slice apart obstacles, and add color to the world. That's the objective; to return color and nature to the world.

So in summary, you play as a wolf-avatar who has to traverse a stylized medieval Japan to save nature. I. Cannot. Wait.

A Brave New World

2007-03-17T20:28:00.000-05:00

...of console gaming. Yes, yes, this isn't exactly a new field of entertainment for most of you, but it's not something I've ever really had a chance to experience. Until very, very recently, the extent of my console gaming consisted of:

-Playing on a first-gen Game Boy at a parents' friend's house
-watching a friend play some of Ocarina of Time
-Dead or Alive 2
-watching Josh play Metal Gear Solid 2
-getting my ass handed to me at Goldeneye
-playing on an SNES emulator occasionally

And that's seriously about it. Recently though, I've been playing more SNES games (Lost Vikings, ChronoTrigger, Donkey Kong Country) and getting into Final Fantasy Tactics. I'm enjoying it a lot. And now, it seems, my comp's going to need a major overhaul to get caught up with the next wave of games, thanks to Vista and PCI-express/DX10 advances. I'm sure this'll all be awesome and pretty-looking in about 2 years when the prices come down and the bugs get ironed out, but for now, I'm looking for an alternative.

So basically, I want you guys' advice on which system to get into - PS2 or Nintendo DS, or maybe both? Also, definitely game suggestions - I know a lot of the big-name ones, but there's probably a lot out there that I don't know about that you guys might, especially for the DS. So yes, talk about your favorite games, and let me know what I can look forward to! Plus, if you know anything to watch out for in my search for the new system, that would also be greatly appreciated - I heard something about the old non-"slim" PS2 not running some of the more recent games, thought I have a sneaking suspicion that was just a GameStop employee trying to make more money.

In the Immortal Words of Andy's AVP Character Lance:

2007-03-10T15:52:00.000-06:00

"Damn Brits."

Seriously, they need to watch more movies. This is pretty hubris-y.

UK Military awaits Skynet launch

Saw 300 two nights ago. Highly enjoyable, and excellent amounts of gore and wanton slaughter, plus some sweet shield walls. The characterization of all the "bad guys" as either deformed, gay, or both was kind of off-putting and made it a little too black-and-white (literally, in some cases) for my tastes, but overall you can overlook that pretty easy and just sit back and enjoy the ridiculous stylization of Thermopylae. It's definitely worth a big-screen view.

George Takei Responds

2007-03-05T22:18:00.000-06:00

Some very hurtful words have been put forth from (now ex-) NBA player Tim Hardaway. Now, we have a kind and eloquent eloquent PSA from George Takei, aka Mr. Sulu. Let it be known...

...George Takei is a fantastic human being.

Oh no! Battlestar Spoilers!

2007-03-05T19:47:00.000-06:00

Don't read this post if you have Sharingan.

RIP Kara Thrace

...she'll be back.

Planet B-Boy trailer.

2007-03-05T05:04:00.001-06:00

This is almost as cool as a movie about parkour. Damn, I wish I could make my body do that.

flOw

2007-02-27T20:08:00.000-06:00

My game discovery of the week, perhaps of the month, is flOw, for the PS3. "But Peter," you may ask with a quizzical look on your countenance, "you don't have a PS3." True. This minor inconvenience shall not stop me, however, as flOw can be played online. Give it a try.

I've yet to look through his entire thesis, but there's a hefty amount of philosophy behind flOw, created by Jenova Chen, who I was sad to learn had a real Chinese first name that didn't somehow magically preempt Sephiroth's mom by fifteen years or so. The concept is basically that if you plot Challenge vs. Ability, there's a middle ground (between boredom and frustration) in which games should seek to "flow," and the namesake game seeks that balance. So, it's pretty, it's fun, it's free, and it has the kind of academic and serious thought behind it that I'd like to see more of in the gaming world.

Coyote's Wager

2007-02-13T05:56:00.000-06:00

It's a bit long, but here's one of the stories I've written for my Short Stories class. I'm hoping the class gets me a bit more disciplined in terms of creative writing so I can make some more progress on Garou, but so far comps has been interfering. But now that the draft of that is in, I can rest for a while! And possibly write. Anyway, here are the fruits of my labor so far.

Coyote's Wager

2007-02-13T05:50:00.000-06:00

“So then, it’s agreed?” Coyote asked.

“Yesss,” hissed Snake. “We have a wager.” Somewhere deep in her coils, her rattle shook with anticipation.

“One day, eh?” Coyote shrugged. “You really think it’ll take that long? I mean, sure, you’re very confident about your venom and all. I know it’s your pride and joy. I hear your hissing, you thank the sun for it every day.” Coyote looked up to the hot, western sun overhead. “But the sun gave me gifts as well, and it seems to me like I’ll have cured myself within a few hours, and then, I get your rattler.” Coyote grinned, his teeth as white as the scales on Snake’s underbelly. “I’m looking forward to it.”

Snake’s eyes were as impassive as ever, black orbs as shiny as her scales. She began to move back and forth, her triangular head never breaking her stare at Coyote. “Enjoy your delusionsss. You won’t connive your way out of this bet, Coyote. I will win, and you will die. The people will forget you, and worship me as the one who laid low the crafty Coyote. A trickssster should never asssk to be bitten, fool.”

Coyote yelped as Snake suddenly stopped her seductive swaying and sunk her fangs deep into his neck. He was surprised; Snake was even faster than he’d thought. His reflexes told him to snap at the serpent, but the bet held him back. It was all part of the plan, he reminded himself. Snake let go and began uncoiling herself, sliding quickly away into the underbrush.

“Dammit!” Coyote yelled after Snake. “You didn’t say it was going to be in the neck!” He stumbled a bit, feeling the venom hit. The world swam before his eyes, and with great effort he lowered himself to the ground. Maybe, Coyote thought, this wasn’t such a good idea after all.
------
Max walked the length of the sharpened chain, making sure there were no twists in it. His last partner had missed a twist once, and the whole line had snapped. Max had fired him and hired his high school classmate Russell to fill in. Russell had shown himself to be careful about the job even if he didn’t seem to care about much else, but even so Max wasn’t going to take any chances. He crunched through the underbrush, ducking under gnarled pinyon pines and over prickly pear cacti that scratched at his boots. Finally he reached his tractor, snugged up the connection to the winch, and climbed up onto the tractor.

“You ready?” Max shouted across the lot. Russell gave him the thumbs up and climbed into his own tractor, tethered to Max’s by fifty feet of sharpened chain. Max gave the signal, and the two machines started moving forward, tearing through the underbrush and shearing off the scattered, scraggly trees at their stumps. The swath of destruction they left behind them would be cleared out later; Max just had to make sure they didn’t snag the chain on any rocks.

The tractors had cleared halfway across the lot when they reached a cluster of trees. The dry, gnarly pinyons were more troublesome than they looked, and the tractors strained to cut through the small copse. Finally, after nearly half an hour of backing up and taking swipe after swipe at the cluster of trees, they had all been shorn off or uprooted. The tractors pushed forward when something caught Max’s eye.

“Russell!” He shouted over the thrum of the diesel engines. Russell didn’t hear him. Max cut the ignition and stood up in his seat, waving his hat to the other driver. “Russell, stop yer damned engine!” Russell looked over, surprised, and stopped his tractor. Max started walking towards what he’d seen and met Russell in the middle of the chain, now swinging gently in place.

“Ho-lee sheet.” Russell looked down at the man lying face-down, just a few feet in front of the razor-sharp chain. “You got some good eyes on you there, I didn’t see anything.” Russell peered out from under the brim of his hat. “Weird place for a fella to be, don’t you think?”

Max glared at his partner, and knelt next to the man, looking him over. He wore a faded flannel shirt and stonewashed jeans, torn at the knees. The man’s skin was the same deep tan as Max’s, from long hours clearing brush in the hot Colorado sun. His face was hidden, pressed up against the gritty, dry earth. Not sure what to do, Max nudged him with the toe of his boot.

“You think he’s dead?” Russell did not look at all perturbed by this possibility.

“No, Russ,” Max sighed. “You can see him breathing.”

“Ah,” said Russell.

“I’m just not sure what to do with him…they always tell you that thing about how you’re not supposed to move someone if they’re injured, right? But I can see any marks on this guy, so…” Max trailed off, then shrugged at Russell and shook the man by his shoulders.

“Huhwasshappenin?” The man sputtered, pushing himself up and looking around in bewilderment. “Who’re you guys? Where am I? And what am I doing with dirt all over my face?” He brushed his hands over his face, knocking loose a cascade of dirt and pebbles from his bushy mustache.

“Easy there, mister,” Max said, backing away a few steps. “We just found you out here in the middle of the Kings’ property. Truth be told, we nearly cut you in half.” Max gestured back to the chain dangling a few feet from the man’s chest. “You alright?”

“Hmm, yes, I think so,” said the man. He brushed off the front of his shirt and jeans and twitched his mustache a few times, almost as if he were testing it out. “Yep, everything seems all right,” he nodded with an air of finality.

Max and Russell stared at him.

“Oh, how rude of me, fellas, I’m sorry. You might say the sun’s addled my brains a bit.” He stuck out his hand towards Max. “I’m Kai.”

Max shook his hand, looking slightly askance at the strange, very lean man who kept twitching his mustache at them. “My name’s Max, and this here is Russell.”

Russell stuck out his hand and shook the stranger’s. “Kai’s a weird name,” he said, pushing his hat back on his head.

“Japanese.” Kai bent down to touch his toes. He really was very skinny, Max thought. Almost undernourished. He wondered how long he had been stuck out here in the brush.

“You don’t look like any Japanese fella I’ve ever seen.” Russell scratched his head, then replaced his hat.

“Well, half-Japanese, actually,” said Kai. “My father was in the Navy, met my mom over there, and now I stand here before you.” Kai grinned, his big mouth showing brilliantly white teeth.

“Ah,” said Russell.

“How exactly did you get here, anyway?” Max crossed his arms. “This is private property, and you were out cold miles from the nearest county road. You’re lucky we found you before you got sunstroke or something. You don’t even have a hat, you must be parched.”

“Ah, nothing I’m not used to. I’m a wanderer, and the roads around here aren’t that interesting. I like taking the scenic route, if you follow me.” Max nodded slowly, and Russell continued to stare impassively. Kai continued. “So I was on a stroll through this fine property here when I got pretty light-headed. Then I think I remember lying down, and well, here we are!” Kai grinned again. “You don’t happen to have any water, do you? You were right about being parched.”

Max walked back to his tractor and tossed Kai a bottle of water from his pack. “Well, in any case, I think you should clear off the property before the Kings get back to check up on us. We need to clear three more chain-lengths before sundown, and that’s coming up fast.”

Kai took a long swig of water and smacked his lips together. “Thanks Max, that hit the spot.” He tossed the water back to Max, and stood with his hands clasped behind his head, surveying the scrubby land around them. “Tell you what, how about if I play scout for you folks, run ahead of the chain and check out that there aren’t any rocks or other vagrants such as myself hiding out there,” he winked. “Then do you think I could hitch a ride back to town with you? I’m still feeling a bit loopy, and I wouldn’t want to wake up again to a less alert crew of bushwhackers.”

“Well…” Max stalled by walking the water back to the tractor.

“C’mon,” Kai smiled. “I’ll buy you guys a round at the bar.”

“Better hurry then,” said Russell, moving to his tractor with a jump in his step. “It’s almost sundown.”
------

The pickup’s cab would have been cramped with three people, so Max asked Kai to ride in the back. The lean man nodded, hopped up into the pickup bed, and leaned with his back against the cab. The ride back to town was bumpy and dusty, but Max didn’t hear any complaints from their passenger. As dusk fell and Max switched on the truck’s headlights, Kai knocked on the rear window. “Russ, can you open that window?” Russell pulled his hat down over his eyes. “Dammit Russ, I’m trying to keep my eyes on the road. Damn near hit a deer last night.” Kai knocked again, and Russell just shrugged. Max sighed and twisted in his seat to open the sliding window. “What is it?”

“I’ve got a splitting headache, Max. Do you have any aspirin back here?”

Max looked back. Kai’s forehead was scrunched up, his eyes were closed, and he was grimacing in pain. “Yeah, yeah, in the box back there, top drawer. You all right? Sure you don’t have sunstroke after all?”

“Nah, nah, nothing a beer won’t cure, right?” Kai’s voice was accompanied by rummaging noises. “Ah, found it.” Max heard the rattling of a pill bottle, and Kai gulped down the pills. A few minutes later, he said, “Ah, thanks, that’s helping already. You have some interesting stuff in the box back here, Max. Nice Remington, and I appreciate a man who knows how to stock his toolbox.” The rummaging sound stopped, and Kai’s mustachioed face poked through the window. His brown eyes glinted in the cabin’s light. He held up a small glass vial filled with liquid. “What’s this for?”

Max glanced over his shoulder. “You be careful, that stuff’s expensive. It’s rattler anti-venom. It’s good to keep on hand, and can save you a limb if you’re far enough out from a doctor. Russ here was bit once, and all he’s got to show for it is a scar, thanks to that stuff.” Russell grunted from the passenger seat. Max smirked at his partner. “Anyway, that’s for rattlers and the like. My Remy’s for the other pests, mountain lions and coyotes and whatnot.”

“Coyotes, eh?” Kai’s head disappeared from the rear window. “You see them often?”

“More than I’d like, little bastards. If the wife packs me any meat, half the time I get back to the truck for lunch and find one of them munching on it. They’re quick though, most of ‘em get away before I can put a round into their thieving hide.”

“Is that so? They don’t sound that bad to me, just hungry.” There were more rummaging sounds, then a quiet snap of metal.

“You sure aren’t from around here, are you, Kai?” Max was focused on the darkened road.

“Nope. Like I said, just a wanderer.”
------
Max leaned heavily against the countertop, rubbing his eyes and stretching his legs from atop the barstool. Russell leaned with his back to the bar, elbows propped on the countertop, surveying the night’s turnout of girls. Russell’s eyes rested upon a tall brunette leaning over a pool table, lining up a shot and obviously showing off in her tight, stars-and-stripes-patterned shirt and cutoff jeans. He elbowed Max. “There’s one who doesn’t look like she’s taken.”

Max looked back over his shoulder at the one crowded pool table in the room of otherwise empty ones. “She’s got five guys around her, Russ. And they don’t look like they’re just there for a game of pool.”

“Yeah, but she’s beatin’ the pants off all of them.” Russell sounded slightly awed by this.

“Don’t they wish,” Max muttered.

“I bet she’s just waiting for someone to come along who can match her. Maybe that’s what she’s waiting for.”

“She probably just wants to play pool without being bothered, Russ.”

Russell ignored him. “Well, let’s see how she does against the Russ-inator!” He strutted off towards the table.

Max turned back to the bar. “Why can’t he be this enthusiastic on the job?” Max asked to no one in particular. He looked over to the men’s room, which Kai had disappeared into several minutes ago, complaining of another headache. He wondered if he should take the man to the hospital. Max sighed. “I need a drink.”

“What’ll you have, Max?” The bartender’s pockmarked face smiled down at him as he threw a towel over his shoulder and reached for a pint glass. “The usual?”

“Nah, I think I’ll spring for a Red Hook, Bill. Especially on account of this being on Kai’s dime tonight.” Max gestured vaguely towards the men’s room.
Bill poured a pint and slid it to Max. “Oh yeah, the scrawny guy you and Russ brought in? I don’t know, he didn’t exactly look like he was the type to make good on his tab, if you don’t mind my saying. You watch out for him, don’t let him stick you with anything.” Max nodded. “Kai, huh? Weird name.”

“He’s half-Japanese, apparently.” Max drained half the pint and heard a shout from over by the men’s room. He turned to see Kai apologizing to a large man. They had a brief argument, then Kai said something that seemed to calm down the larger man, who disappeared into the restroom.

Kai walked over, flashing his brilliant smile, and produced a fat wallet, seemingly out of nowhere. Max thought the ID picture on the back looked far too well-fed to be Kai, but forgot about it when the skinny man slapped a fresh-looking fifty-dollar bill down on the bar. “I see Max has already ordered. Barkeep, I’ll have the same for me, and another for Russell, who seems to be in dire need of rescue from an ass-kicking at the hands of that lovely lady.” Kai grabbed the two pints Bill rapidly poured, and headed over to the pool table.

“Well, better follow the excitement,” Max said to Bill, who nodded and went back to wiping down the bar. Max slid down off the barstool and towards the smoke-wreathed pool table, surrounded by anxious men milling about in the dim light. Something else was in the air as well, Max noticed, some dry, cool scent, almost lost in the heady stink of the men’s sweat. As the woman in the American flag shirt moved around the table towards him, lining up a shot, the smell got stronger, and Max heard a faint tinkling noise as the woman moved her hips slowly from side to side as she aimed and sank two striped balls into the table’s worn pockets. He saw a miniature rain-stick hanging from her belt.

She straightened up and turned towards Max, leaning on her pool cue. “See something you like, stranger?” She smirked, and Max frowned. When she said ‘see’ and ‘stranger,’ she said it with a low, seductive hiss. He knew she was mocking him.

“Not really,” he said, taking what he hoped was a nonchalant pull from his glass. The other men were grinning at him. A few laughed. “Nope, just looking at that rain stick. Odd thing to have.”

“Yes, well, the boys here think it’s my good luck charm.”

“Angelise hasn’t lost a game yet!” said one of the men, looking slightly smitten.

“Care to try your luck, stranger?” She walked towards Max, the rain stick tinkling.

“I don’t know about him, but I wouldn’t mind a game.” Kai slid smoothly between Max and Angelise. “In fact, would you like to make a wager on it?”

Angelise stopped sharply, and for a split second her beautiful smile dissolved into anger. Then, just a quickly, it was back to a blithe smile. “Sounds good to me. What did you have in mind?”

“How about this fifty against that rain stick of yours?”

Angelise smiled demurely. “That’s not worth fifty dollars. Here,” she reached into her pocket and pulled out a bill. “Fifty of my own.”

Kai shrugged, twitched his mustache, and laid his fifty down on the table next to hers. “Fair enough. You break. You’ll need the leg up.”

“Oh-ho-ho, we’ll see where that kind of talk gets you.”

The first game didn’t even last ten minutes. Angelise cleaned up, and took Kai’s fifty. Kai laid down another, and fifteen minutes later had earned his first fifty back. He bought the entire group shots of whiskey. Even Russell was entranced at this point, and he, Max, and the other men all huddled around the pool table, watching Angelise’s quick, solid strikes with the cue and Kai’s playful, roundabout way of sneaking around intervening balls and sinking only his own. The two dueled back and forth for at least a dozen games, no one could remember how many, and after each of Kai’s victories, he bought a round of shots. Angelise matched them round for round, and she and Kai seemed clear-headed and steady long after Max’s head had descended into a pleasant fuzziness.

Somewhere after midnight and at least six shots of Bill’s best whiskey for the congregation at the pool table, Angelise had run out of money.

“You want to keep playing?” asked Kai. “You can always back out.”

Angelise snorted. “You’re no better than I am, Kai,” she hissed.

“Is that so?” Kai laid another fifty on the table. “Then you won’t mind putting that rain stick of yours on the table, will you?”

Angelise glared, but hesitated. The cheering of the crowd around them seemed to eat at her pride, though, and she finally unclipped the rain stick from her belt. “Last game,” she said, sneering. “I break.” She leaned over the table, and the final game began.

As everyone stared intently at the clacking, rebounding balls on the table, the large man arose from his corner table and shuffled slowly up to the bar. Bill brought up his tab, and the large man reached into his pocket.

“Hey!” the large man shouted, stumbling a little as he turned to address the rest of the bar. “Where’sh my wallet!”

Everyone turned to look at the sudden outburst, the game momentarily forgotten. Russell chuckled a little, and then Angelise screamed. Through the haze of whiskey, Max saw Kai running out of the bar into the street, and slowly realized that the rain stick was gone from the table. The large man was shouting something about a scrawny pick-pocket, and Bill was yelling for them all to go catch the thief before he got away. Max found himself in the middle of the crowd, all trying to get out the door at once.

“Maxsh, we’ll try to catch him, you fire a warning shot to try an’ shtartle him or something,” Russell slurred. He turned and started lumbering down the street with the others. Max could make out the figure of Kai, sprinting down the street, his lean form blurring in the streetlights.

Max reached into the back of his truck and pulled out the Remington. Even drunk, his practiced fingers loaded the rifle smoothly. He cocked the gun, pointed the barrel towards the sky, and squeezed the trigger.

Nothing.

Max squinted at the gun in the glow of the streetlight. The firing pin had been snapped completely off.

“That son of a…”
------
Coyote grinned at Snake, who coiled protectively around her wounded tail. She hissed at him. “We never talked about bringing the humansss into thisss. I even had to follow you to that ssstinking place to make sssure you wouldn’t cheat. And you did,” she said, her powerful coils quivering with anger.

“Hardly,” said Coyote, holding up the rain stick and the empty glass vial. “The humans are fools, I admit, but they have some wonderful toys.” He turned the rain stick upside down, and Snake shrank back from the gentle tinkling noise, baring her fangs at Coyote. “Oh, don’t worry. I’ll give you a chance to win back your rattler. Some day.” Coyote turned and walked towards the rising sun, whistling happily as he shook his new rattle.

Research papers are hard, Part II

2007-01-25T01:41:00.000-06:00

So, I'm feeling loopy and inundated with medieval facts and personages:

Muslim Soldier: Allah Akbar!
Peter the Hermit: /spams Consecrate
Muslim Soldier: It's a twap!
Muslim Soldier begins to flee!
Urban II: /cast Mind Flay /yell LOL n00b lrn2pray

Research papers are hard

2007-01-24T19:18:00.000-06:00

So you don't get any actual content, just this new video. In America.

Game designers: retarded, or subversive?

2006-12-16T17:08:00.000-06:00

Seriously, who the hell names their alien antagonist the Kha'ak?

Back to basics

2006-12-15T16:34:00.000-06:00

Nothing but a burst of nerdy awesomeness and classical irony here...

Be sure to check out all the other vids by spiffworld, overall they're excellent, and even those non-gamer nerds out there should be able to appreciate the WoW videos, they're quite well done! And after that, check out the musician's website, replete with downloads aplenty. Especially Re: Your Brains and Furry Old Lobster. So. Good. Thanks to Hans and the EoE boards for finding these.

And in case you were looking for an odd mix of humor and abhorrent corporate behavior, here is your daily dose of irony.

Finally

2006-12-08T17:04:00.000-06:00

,

Also, Gizoogle. It's not as dirty as it sounds, it just translates sites into Ebonics or something. Like, if you do my blog through it, you get this. Bizarre.

Christmas break: More interesting than it sounds!

2006-12-07T13:21:00.000-06:00

So basically the reason for lack of recent posting is that, upon returning home for the holidays, there was pretty much nothing interesting to write about (with the exception of the below movie reviews)! Battlestar took a week's hiatus for Thanksgiving, our own Thanksgiving took a few days' hiatus due to illness, and since then my time has been consumed (quite pleasantly, I might add) by sleeping, eating, the Daily Show and Colbert Report, gaming, comps research, and hanging out with Poke, Hans, and the occasional Stella. So basically, all my time has been amply filled with amusing distractions, but none of it is particularly journal-worthy.

One thing that might merit mention is some new music...Hillary's infusion into my collection has been a superb addition, adding such instrumental oddities as Mogwai, Explosions in the Sky, Four Tet, and string versions of the Beatles and Coldplay songs. It's amazing how much Coldplay can be improved by focusing on the melody.

My most recent musical find is Myndflame. Sharp-eyed readers may note that yes, that is in fact one of the people involved in the Illegal Danish series. Yes. And did you notice how the music in those was good? Well, the Admiral played some of his other stuff over Teamspeak recently, and it's surprisingly good techno. So, for early Christmas, I picked up two of his albums, and I am not disappointed!

Battlestar has been catching some flak lately, from mid-season doldrums to accusations that the show is slowing down or losing quality. First, I think 90% of these accusations are unfounded (see an example of such foolishness, as discussed on Andy's blog). Secondly, and much more happily, fans of the show should listen to the Roundtable Podcast released last week. As a warning, it's 3 hours long, but that really only adds to it because you get to hear them becoming progressively more drunk on wine as the night goes on. It's an interesting look into the show, the actors behind it, and what they want out of the show. And Ronald D. Moore and other address precisely some of the issues others are worried about, especially with the show dragging on for too long. And if you've seen Firefly, listen for a familiar voice on the podcast.

I'm in ur space bubbles, transporting ur symbolism

2006-11-24T03:27:00.000-06:00

So, yes. Though the opinion of the group was split, think that The Fountain was an excellent movie. Perhaps a bit heavy-handed at times, but overall the symbolism was actually pretty subtle and beautiful. The fact that the whole thing was done without CGI still impresses me, though I can see how most of it was done. It gave it a very surreal feel to many parts, which is interesting given that it was probably more grounded in real images than it would have been with CGI. I can see how some people would be disappointed with it - it was not as...epic as the trailers made it look, but it's still incredibly artistic. And I think that to not enjoy the beauty and the story to at least some extent would only be possible if one had never known what love is like.

So, today (technically yesterday) was Thxgiving, and after that movie, I'm mostly just thankful that no one I know has brain cancer (knock on wood). There are many other things I'm thankful for, and as for the people I'm thankful for, you know who you are. I'll just leave it at that, because putting it in words always seems to cheapen it somewhat.

This year also marks the second year that Dad has made good use of my vacation insomnia...you know how most people get up really early to make it to all the good deals on Black Friday? Well I just stay up all night and then go out and buy things for cheap. This year, I'm waiting until Office Depot opens up at 6am and going to purchase some cheap Mp3 players and surge protectors/battery backup supplies. Exciting, I know. But, it gives me an excuse to stay up all night, blogging and gaming, and to feel nary a guilty twinge for it.

Oh, and since I realized that I only posted the textless version of this earlier, here is the second in the series:

Casino Royale, OR "Oh my god, I'm still cringing in empathic testicular pain"

2006-11-22T01:34:00.000-06:00

So, I'm home for the break - that's the next six weeks, for anyone keeping track. While much of it will probably be spent hibernating and doing research on medieval Spain so as to not have the worst winter term ever, I shall definitely be up for stuffs and/or things with folks in the DG area. Such as, movies! There's a small army of them that I want to see, and one has already been checked off the list, quite to my satisfaction.

THINGS I LEARNED FROM CASINO ROYALE:

-Parkour is even more impressive when done amidst explosions
-Half-blind asthmatics can be villains too!
-When detonating a bomb by remote, ensure that said bomb is not, in fact, attached to your own belt loop
-Wanton destruction in third-world countries is funny! Oh wait, our government already knew that
-Poker can be vaguely exciting under certain circumstances
-Venice, LOL

And finally, two reasons why I will never be able to sit in a wicker-bottom chair again:
1) I won't look as good at Daniel Craig while naked in one
2) SWEET MERCIFUL CHRIST, HOW CAN ONE MAN DO THAT TO ANOTHER?! I mean, yes, yes, torture's terrible, in any form. But what man sinks to the level of sack-tapping? That violates the Guy Code. Not cool, half-blind asthmatic bad guy. Not cool.

Ready, set, argue!

2006-11-09T21:41:00.000-06:00

So. I'm taking a class this term on Christian Approaches to Bioethics. It's damn interesting - seeing all the different viewpoints, from what many would term "batshit crazy" (Jehovah's Witnesses and Christian Scientists) to the more ostensibly reasonable Catholics, etc. Anywho.

My most recent paper was on "backdoor eugenics". Basically, we can now do early embryonic genetic testing that can detect a number of genetic defects, including Down Syndrome. The statistics are that around 92% of embryos shown to have these defects are aborted. Therefore, the author's argument went, this kind of testing and the resultant abortions demonstrate the de facto societal norm that some embryos are "worth" less than others, and that this kind of early genetic testing leads to a kind of eugenics through the back door.

While I was sorely tempted to entitle my paper "Backdoor Eugenics Sluts 9", it's actually a pretty interesting subject. And contentious! And after the excellent discussion after the rape-issue post, I'd really appreciate hearing you guy's views on this kind of thing.

So. Lots of heinous crimes have historically gone down in the name of bettering the human species via selectively getting it on. Can eugenics be a good thing? Is there a point where it's just or right to tell people that they can't have their own babies, even if those babies are going to come out with spina bifida or some other disorder I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy? Damned if I know. My paper couldn't cover all the various and sundry issues like overpopulation, issues of abortions in general vs. abortions for selective genetic reasons, and other concerns. So! Discuss!

But who will supply the jiggle-vision?!

2006-11-05T21:27:00.000-06:00

I discovered this completely by accident while reading a Something Awful review for Revenge of the Ninja, something I'm privileged enough to have had one of you guys goad me into buying for $3 at Blockbuster. The review is quite funny, but the real gem was at the end, wherein we discovered that this movie was being made.

SATAN! SATAN! Release date December 8th, 2006. We have a new quest.

Jumpin' the Base Star

2006-11-04T17:07:00.000-06:00

So, tried an Oberon Ale last night. It was quite good! Had excellent flavor, and went down pretty smoothly though at the same time had a little sharpness to it (not too much, though). It had the same kind of aftertaste as Old Rasputin Imperial Russian Stout, which I'm not a huge fan. With the Rasputin, though, it mostly went away after I actually poured the beer into a glass before drinking it; glasses, however, are sadly lacking in this room, so I'll have to try that later. EDIT AFTER SECOND BOTTLE: on a scale of seven, Oberon gets a 6.4! Thanks for the suggestion, guys. Glad I got this before it ran out of season.

Next up is the Two Hearted, I'll probably try that later tonight.

Let's see...not a huge amount of other stuff to report. Last night I went to the other pub in town, Froggy Bottoms. The theme is frog butts. It's bizarre place, but I think the drinks were cheaper than at the Contented Cow, and the atmosphere is still nice. We'll see if we go back there again.

And Battlestar! A very interesting episode, we had. So as I wrap up this post, here are three things we learned about the Cylons:

1) They can get infected with diseases. This has fun implications, let's see where they go with it next week.
2) There may actually be a logical reason why we haven't seen the other five models of Cylon. Ominous!
3) There is a new euphemism for having an orgasm: "jumping the base star". Man, that hybrid looked like she was having a good time.

Internets overload

2006-11-02T19:21:00.000-06:00

My research proposal got accepted! That means I have an excuse to do nothing for the rest of the night! Huzzah! So, in the spirit of too-many-video-clips lately...

He has a date with a jump rope, Cosby Bebop, and a strange crossover.

Finally,

I find your lack of motivation disturbing, Admiral.

2006-11-01T22:07:00.000-06:00

Yep. I'm supposed to be doing an essay, but so far I've accomplished the following instead of actually writing anything:

1) Devoured some delicious Indian food along with some Red Stripe beer, provided by the thoughtful roommate Cary. It's surprisingly not bad for having such a weird-looking bottle. Boo vague essay prompts. Hooray beer!

2) Stole some awesome links from Stella, including the dinosaur link below and the largest amount of Victorian attire you will ever see on a bird of prey.

3) Wiped the Orks clean from the face of the campaign planet. Orkses are, contrary to popular belief, frequently defeated in battle. Especially when you attack them with 1.4 hojillion kroot, several krootox, and pit your mega-unit against theirs. OMG WTF IT'S A DINOSAUR!

4) Brainstormed ideas for an article making fun of Che Guevara/white adolescents who <3 him. Last week some kid who's getting kicked out of school for a term (because he got caught dealing pot) ran an article that basically compared himself to Che. Since this is retarded, I feel compelled to make a retort.

5) Okay, time for essay. **shakes fist at the most vague essay question prompt I've ever seen**

Non-depressing things I've learned in the last week:

2006-10-31T18:41:00.000-06:00

1) Despite the beard, I am apparently still quite recognizeable as a zombie Steve Irwin, thanks to my stunningly cheap costume (even though I kind of look like a dead boy scout).

2) Nostalgia for old games is great for procrastinating/reliving your gaming console-less childhood; I myself have been playing through the old Marathon games of late. Bungie was responsible for some of the best old games (especially ones that could be played on the Mac), like Marathon, the Myth games, and the anime-style Oni (which I've yet to manage to beat thanks to those damndable ninjas!), before they got pwned by the industry, lost the rights to their best games, and fell to making nothing but Halo. Which, by the way, is a loose continuation of the Marathon story.

3) Knowledge of the Exalted world is, apparently, useful in some academic settings. I've had the "privelege" to take a class on Daoism this term, which sounded very interesting but has degenerated into most of the students just marvelling at how fucked up and self-contradictory most of the religion is. However, in discussing their mythology, I was able to bullshit my way through a class discussion having done only a tiny fraction of the reading and knowing a whole lot about the celestial hierarchy and celestial bureaucracy in Exalted. So thank you, White Wolf, for being cleverly derivative!

4) Pants are the devil.

Things I've learned in the last week:

2006-10-30T18:47:00.000-06:00

1) Campus cats are awesome to begin with; they're even more entertaining when one is drunk.

2) EDIT 10/31/06: Moved to next post to facilitate discussion.

3) Rape is bad. Sorry to bring the blog fun to a screeching halt, but yeah. I found out last week that one of my friends had been drugged and raped (by another student on campus) only a couple weeks prior, and have been struggling with this since. I've still barely wrapped my brain around it - I've helped with some of the sexual violence awareness campaigns/readings/events since, and there's been a fairly good response from the campus, who realize it is, in a somewhat unfortunate way, something that the students pretty much need to take care of themselves because by the time the deans/cops/authorities get involved, it's pretty much too late. So, I've been thinking about this a lot, though I'm not sure this is the best forum for airing those thoughts, so I'll just leave with the imperative to watch out for your friends. Watch out for strangers, for that matter. Do not allow sketchy shit to go down. This is probably less of an issue for people not attending lots of college parties, but yeah. There it is. Be safe.

Stuff and Nonsense!

2006-10-26T22:30:00.000-05:00

Hey! They stole my title!

In response, I attack the darkness:

So, during this afternoon's excessively long nap, I had a dream where I was, for some inexplicable reason, a member of the British Royal Family. We were vacationing in the beautiful golden cornfields of Iowa and, for some equally unknown reason, none of us had British accents. Anyway, one of our servants summoned the Jabberwocky, which took the form of a bright yellow couatl and led us on a merry chase through the cornfields. It was bizarre.

Thanks to Hans and some patented interweb genius, I've just frittered away the last hour or so watching

and

Dangerously entertaining.

All hands, brace for turbulence.

2006-10-24T18:40:00.000-05:00

BATTLESTAR SPOILERS: If you don't know what's going on, watch the damned episode already, you hippies!

Yeah, I wasn't quite sure what to expect when Adama said that. I figured they'd just be going into some heavy Cylon fire or something. But no. He meant turbulence.So. Yeah. I don't know if any other show out there could have pulled off what Battlestar just did. I mean, the rescue plan sounds, while very cool, kind of over-the-top. Something bad sci-fi would do. But damned if they didn't make it just about the coolest thing I've ever seen. It's not hokey, it's not contrived, and to some extent, it's pretty damned realistic and clever (assuming, of course, the existence of space-folding starships). I mean, how else do you get the flimsy little Vipers into the atmosphere without burning up? Jump the carrier into the atmosphere! Huzzah! I really have nothing more to say. I just wanted to rave about how sweet that scene was. Granted that was an incredible episode all-around - look at how much most of the characters have advanced now (especially Starbuck, Tigh, Gaeta, and Baltar in some weird way). The scene with Tigh and Ellen is one of the most powerful in the series so far...anyway. I'm done for now.

In other nerd news, Dawn of War: Dark Crusade is quite fun so far. I've only had a little time to play, but so far, the Tau rock hardxcore. We should get a game of that running at some point. Though in the meanwhile, it's funny to entrance my roommates with how gorgeously it let you blow stuff up.

Oh, so sadly I didn't get to watch the Battlestar episode on Friday (hence my delayed nerdgasm) due to an all-weekend quiz bowl tournament, which we dominated. The tournament was sweet though and it's one of the quirkier ones of the year; there were questions about, among other things, World of Warcraft-related internet fads (Lerooooy! and -50DKP came up), the GI Joe PSAs, and all kinds of anime. Hans, thank you for exposing me to all kinds of esoteric anime and related music - I got a whole lot of points in the Anime round just off of music and artists you and Stella gave me a long time ago. Good times.

Sorry there's not more interesting stuff to report - recent times have been dominated by the tournament, and plenty of homework - I have to revise my research proposal, and read more pages than are, I think, strictly allowed by the Geneva Conventions. Fortunately for my professors, we live in America (fuck yeah) where such trifles as anti-torture convetions are considered quaint, like that lamp in your grandma's house, or all the Matlock reruns she continually watches.