Category: video games

SK, Revisited

Interesting article on Slashdot at the moment concerning game addiction. The comments in particular are quite insightful. I’ll paste some of my favorites here, because I know most of you are lazy.

Where are the parents in all of this?

“Seriously.

His parents were frightened of him because, weighing more than 130kg, he was too strong for them to confront. Eventually they threatened to kick him out unless he enrolled for a month of therapy.

You’re the parents, you make the rules. Pull the plug, take the computer away, do something, anything. You’d probably hit the roof if you caught your kid with a joint, but when he wants to wrap himself up in computer games you just fucking sit there and let it happen. That shit pisses me off. I hope this clinic is working with parents too to make sure they can control their child’s behavior.”

Re: Where are the parents in all of this?

“Maybe when someone is deciding how to handle a problem with their own child, doing anything isn’t good enough? Maybe they want to do the right thing

It’s odd to me that some Slashdotters take “the parents should be responsible” to mean “the parents should do all parenting alone”. Parents are responsible for the behavior of their children, but if the behavior surpasses the parents ability to moderate/fix/heal, then why on earth should we mock the parents for seeking specialist help? Are we going to make fun of all youth counselors and child psychologists now because “You’re the parent, you make the rule?” Part of holding parents responsible for their own children should be allowing them access to the tools they need to do that job right.”

Re: wha?

“Most people hooked on, say, heroin are forced to keep taking it for more reasons than mere lack of willpower. Chemical addiction carries signifigant withdrawl side effects, some of which can be life threatening. Trust me, if you’ve ever known a real addict, you wouldn’t just sum up their addiction as “lack of willpower”.

People hooked on things that don’t carry an external chemical componant, or are only very mildly chemically addictive, don’t have that problem. Yes, addiction can be purely neurochemical, with nothing added to the system, but that isn’t anywhere near as signifigant. People can get hooked on gaming, gambling, sex, religion, TV, violence or minimally addictive food or drugs like caffine or marjuana. Their problem is lack of willpower. Other addicts have the far more serious issue of major chemical dependancy, breaking away from which really does require a detox clinic, or support groups, or any number of other external sources of intervention.

I’m not saying that psychological addiction isn’t real. It is. It’s just not on par with what a serious addict has to deal with. Saying “Real addiction is all about lack of willpower” lumps cokeheads into the same category as people hooked on poker. And the people running this clinic are essentially lumping game addiction into the same category as drug addiction; this isn’t fair to either the hooked gamers or the drug addicts.”

[on a side note, I love this guy’s sig – “Erotic is when you use a feather, exotic is when you use the whole chicken.”]

Re: wha?

“Eight years ago, my father had a brain aneurysm and stroke and I am his sole caregiver. I was 21 when it happened. I’ve mostly been stuck at home taking care of him for my entire 20s while I watched friends finish school, get married, have kids, etc. Between the area where I live and the limited ability I have to go out to enjoy life with my friends, I really started losing touch with society and became depressed.

In 2003, my best friend bought EQ at the urging of one of his co-workers. After two months of him nagging me incessantly to try it, against my better judgement, I did. Everything started out fine, him and I would log on for 2-3 hours a night to play together and that was it. About two months into it, him and I were asked to become officers in our guild. At the point you become an officer, you suddenly feel a whole lot more responsibility and you feel like you’re important – everyone in your guild counts on you. Not long after, I became our raid leader and, given the absence of the guild leader for a long period of time, people began to see me as the guild leader as well. Eight months in, I was tagged with the guild leadership officially. I now had seven officers and in the neighborhood of 120 guild members counting on me to be there. By now, I wasn’t playing 2-3 hours a day, I was playing 8-12 hours a day. It wasn’t reality, but it felt real enough – I was important to people and interacting with “society.” Along the way, I met a girl from the other side of the US and we had a fairly turbulent relationship(mostly due to her being bipolar), but we were in love and planned to get married. I knew that EQ was taking up my entire life, but my girlfriend was there and that’s how we spent time together from 3k miles apart and I was the engine the drove hundreds of cogs. At our peak, we had 1039 tagged toons.

This spring, my relationship of two years ended with her and at the same time, the officers staged a coup as the pressures from EQ’s death throes were mounting (yeah, EQ is dying, netcraft, server consolidations and mmogchart confirm it). About a month after I left the girl and my guild, I realized that I no longer had a reason to play and I simply logged off one night never to return again. That was three months ago last weekend.

For me, it wasn’t a game I was addicted to, it was all the social interaction, feeling important and spending time with my gf. After years of being depressed, it was nice to be somebody even if it didn’t mean anything in real life. After the way things ended, my biggest regret is that the things that helped me break that addiction didn’t happen earlier. Oddly enough, despite becoming “nothing” again, I haven’t been depressed and I find myself enjoying the mundane things in life that I neglected for 2.5 years. I still frequently think about EQ and some of the fun times I had in it, but I have no urge to play it anymore… and I deliberately avoid anything that might suck me into a similar situation again. In the meantime, I’m trying to rebuild my life even though I feel that I’m fighting an uphill struggle now at 29.

Our brains are an electro-chemical system and I would argue that the stimuli that make you feel important and good about yourself can be just as addicting as putting that cigarette up to your lips, especially when you and the rest of the world appear to have given up on each other. At 21, when you still have pretty much everything going for you and life hasn’t completely knocked every one of your plans for the future out of whack, it’s pretty easy to think idealistically about how everyone should be able to feel/be/do exactly like you.”

Why is your experience not ‘real life’?

“Why do people think it’s ‘not real’ if it’s conducted primarily on a computer?

Before Everquest existed, I ‘was somebody’ online – ran a guild on a MUD (although not as big as yours), and eventually even ended up running the MUD itself. There were definitely some stretches where I’d often spend 16 hours a day on the computer.

But I’ve also ‘been somebody’ in real life too. I have a real job with real responsibilities and most of the people I work with I have met once, or no times at all, and interact with almost entirely via computer. I’m also the president of one national non-profit organization with a few thousand members I never see, and run another business with 30,000 customers I don’t see either.

And I find that I often spend 16 hours a day on the computer.

Now, most people would consider my job, my non-profit, and my business to be ‘real life’, and I enjoy them. So why are people who enjoy spending 16 hours a day doing something else on the computer not doing ‘real life’? I really can’t think of anything that’s much different between the 16 hours a day I spend playing networked computer games and the 16 hours a day I spend doing various forms of (enjoyable) work. And while you may have felt compelled to play more everquest because people were depending on you, how is that any different than me feeling compelled to go to work for the same reason?

Computer games are certainly no less productive than the time I’ve spent shooting pool at the bar. But somehow going out and shooting pool at the bar is OK while playing games at home is not – why? Also, why is someone who spends 16 hours a day reading books and/or watching TV considered to be doing ‘real life’? All you’re trading is a networked screen with a non-networked screen or page.

Playing on the computer a lot, in and of itself, isn’t an addiction. It’s only natural that you’re going to do the things you enjoy doing as much as you can, and playing computer games isn’t any different than reading or anything else, except people who do those other activities want to pretend their life is more meaningful than computer gamers I guess.

People need to understand what an addiction really is. If you are COMPELLED to do something so much that it interferes with your ability to pay your rent, feed yourself, or maintain relationships that are important to you, that’s an addiction. If it consumes all of your free time, that’s just recreation. And I think it’s a tragedy to try and label someone an ‘addict’ just because of their prefered form of recreation.

Anyway, the time you spend on EQ was real life. And it wasn’t because you were ‘addicted’, it’s because you enjoyed it. Not playing anymore wasn’t an addiction-ending event; you just stopped enjoying playing so you stopped playing. Simple as that.”

Overreactive Parents

“I think for the most part it’s a result of overreactive parents, combined with what I like to call “baby sitter syndrome” (“Why won’t the public school teach my kids morals?!?! Why won’t the gov’t baby sit my kids?!?! Oh my, my kids are playing video games all the time, and I can’t turn it off because they cry and scream and make a scene! I need a Gaming Clinic/Baby sitter to fix my kids for me!”)

Disclaimer: I don’t have kids of my own so the above is probably warped by views of other people who don’t have kids of their own, not to mention stereotypes are rarely all-encompassing. Don’t take it too personally. I was, however, at one point a kid, and I did have parents (who restricted my video gaming and computer time) so I think I still have some things to say on the matter.

Gaming for me was a phase. I always have enjoyed a good game, but it’s not the same as it was when I was a kid. I would play games for hours on end, but now it seems my standards are higher or my attention span lower, because games don’t tend to “hook” me as often as they used to.

I still enjoy a good game of course, but I think I’m still largely “gamed out” from when I was a kid.”

Being a normal teenager is not a crime or a…

“Medical condition. Before the self obsessed BabyBoomers started raising children the majority of young boys didn’t have A.D.D.. This is all just one more “What about me!” from the BabyBoomer generation. “My kids aren’t perfect! Fix them!” This is coming from the people who invented, “Turn on. Tune in. Drop out.” “Free love” and your classic 1960’s 1970’s do it if it feels good self absorbed generation. As my hero George Carlin put it, “From cocaine to rogain”. “”These are perfectly decent kids whose lives have been taken over by an addiction,” said Mr Bakker, a former drug addict. “Some have given up school so they can play games. They have no friends. They don’t speak to their parents.”” Giving up school? Normal. No friends? Normal. Who didn’t feel isolated in high school? Not speaking to parents? Normal. Sounds like the kids aren’t watching TV all hours of the day and night and the new technology is frightening mummy.”

Game Addiction?

“We used to call this neurosis. The actual neurotic behavior isn’t really all that important. What is important is addressing the underlying causes, which often have little or nothing to do with the resulting behavior. This guy obviously has a problem, but obsessive gaming is just the symptom. He could equally well be compulsively plucking his eyebrows or watching TV.”

Mmmm…

Oblivion

[geek]

I’m finally taking the effort to talk about Oblivion. Yes, shoxxorz and awezorz.

Oblivion is a really, really weird game, in that it there are many comparisons that can be made with Fable. Not in the actual gameplay, but in the realm of it not exactly living up to expectations. What makes this weird is the fact that in all reality, Bethesda never lied and didn’t drop features left and right – Oblivion is what they said it would be. Yet, it still isn’t what they pumped it up to be.

Now, don’t get me wrong. Oblivion is a great game. However, contrary to my original thoughts, this really isn’t the best game ever made. It would almost certainly at first appear that way, until you really start to break the 50 and 60-hour barrier in terms of gameplay. Around that point, you start realizing that even though there’s gobs more to do, you don’t want to do it.

My favorite example is the environment. When we first saw Oblivion, we saw pictures of lush forests that truly are beautiful and well-made. Then we saw more. And more. By the time I started playing the game, I was already familiar with almost 90% of the game’s environment. Everything outside of the cities (and technically inside, too) is just green forest. Exploration simply isn’t fun – everything looks the same! Strangely enough, the dungeons and cities do not suffer the same fate, which is nice, however the entirity of the outside world (with very, very few exceptions) is just green, green, green.

On the note of exploration, Bethesda made an interesting trade-off with the ability to traverse the land – the cities themselves are insular, totally separated from the outside world. You cannot freely travel between the cities and the world, because of the required loading time, which is only triggered by entering through the gates. With several cities, I found obscure ways to scale the walls and jump outside of the city, at which point I found a totally untextured and decisively ugly world, devoid of buildings or people. I love exploiting games and all, but Oblivion was supposed to be about free-form playing, uninhibited action and exploration. That just don’t flow right. This is also probably why they removed the massive jumping and running spells that made Morrowind so fun to explore. You can’t jump 10,000 feet into the air. You can’t levitate. You’re stuck.

Beyond these issues, the another main problem lay in the myriad of quests you could do. Many of the quests, in general, were quite the same. With some very cool exceptions (entering a mage’s mind and solving puzzles, jumping into an artist’s painting to kill paint trolls), all of the guilds were just different variations of eachother, with minor exceptions. I didn’t do all of the quests, but, I did go quite far into the Fighter’s Guild, the Dark Brotherhood, the Blades, and finished all of the Thieve’s Guild quests. The Thieve’s Guild had an absolutely spectacular final mission that required you to sneak past veritable legions of powerful enemies at once, but such espionage was not to be found in many of the other quests.

My final complaint lies with the enemies. Variation was a strong issue here, as well as balance. I often avoided dungeons completely because most of them contained really creepy undead that I didn’t want to fight. I just don’t want to fight undead all the time. Outside the dungeons was a little better, but in general, I found myself meeting the same enemies regularly. Strength was a universal problem – later in the game, if you do not turn the difficulty down, you will not be strong enough to kill anything. This may have been fixed within the 1.1 patch, but, I do not believe so.

All that said, Oblivion is a great game. The leveling system is wonderful, as is the character creation all around. The world is totally immersive and responsive. The game improves upon tons of the issues of Morrowind and so much more – plus, the game is just really good looking. That’s all I can really put it at – Oblivion is just great.

For the Love of E3

Notable stuff from E3 (if you haven’t noticed, there haven’t been geek tags on stuff, there’s just too much geek stuff to label):

  • Halo 3. The trailer itself is fairly standard stuff – I thought the music was especially well done, the graphics were noteworthy, and the plot might actually be interesting this time. I’ve got a lot of brewing anger from Halo 2 that Halo 3 has to resolve, so I’m expecting the world from this.
  • Sony’s Press Conference. It sucked. It sucked hard. It was definitely the most disjointed of the three – they would jump from talking about the PSP to talking about PS3 games, back to more stuff on the PSP, then about their stupid song service, and back to PS3 games. I exaggerate not. I noticed a fundamental difference in speech – where Microsoft and Nintendo called the users “players” and “gamers”, Sony called them “consumers”. Sony obviously doesn’t care – especially in the fact that their console is essentially going to cost $600 bucks. I couldn’t really care less about their assimilation of the 360 and Wii controllers, though. That’s just smart tactics.
  • Nintendo’s Press Conference. The best of the three. Not a lot of specs or details, but they’ve proven the ability of the controller, which is exactly what they needed to do. The Zelda demo looked freaking awesome, freaking awesome enough for me to buy it at launch come this November.
  • Microsoft’s Press Conference. Surprisingly good, aside from Peter Moore’s incessant clapping and complete failure to maintain dignity as he got a tattoo for freaking GTA4. Who cares? It was cool for Halo 2, so why go through the trouble? Beyond that, there were a handful of possibly nifty games, but nothing spectacular. The whole idea of connexting the 360 and the PC, though, was cool. It’s definitely part of their anti-Mac and anti-Linux campaign, by setting down a “games for Windows” tagline, but, so long as they keep it otherwise open, it’s just gravy. I’m still not sure how I feel about Vista, but, we’ll see.

That’s pretty much it for the moment. Today may bring some interesting things, or it may not.

Hot Coffee v2.0

As many of you should know, yet another video game scandal has boiled over, before even the mighty Jack Thompson trounced upon it (although we’ve only got, at best, a week or so before someone puts him on TV again). Oblivion has been modded to include teh nudities and was subsequently rerated to mature, at the protest of Bethesda.

I’m not sure how I feel about this. The last scandal was pretty ridiculous – there’s no reason a game should be re-rated based on material not intended for inclusion within the game, but really, San Andreas should have been rated AO off the bat, with or without the Hot Coffee mod. In the end, though, it wasn’t Rockstar’s or Take Two’s fault that someone uncommented some code. They shouldn’t be blamed for that.

I don’t feel so generous with Bethesda. Maybe their whole “pay us two bucks for a model of a horse with armor” deal put me off but, it seems that this is entirely preventable. Oblivion is an extremely well made game (and yes, I will eventually do that review thing I was talking about ages ago), and it also happens to have an engine comparable to that of the Source engine in terms of flexibility. They made it to be modded, and because their game contains female characters with an obvious need for breasts in order to maintain realism, they should expect someone to go out and do this. No, it’s not their fault if someone does, but, whose fault is it if someone steals your car because you forgot to lock the door? Not yours, but you certainly aren’t getting much pity from me.

What I mean to say is, why didn’t Bethesda take some preventative measures? I see two options here. One involves making it harder to toy with the skins on the models – this would be the lesser solution, as it would be punishing all modders for the possible actions of one modder. The other would just be to ask any and all Oblivion mod databases to not host any nudity mods. Honestly, I’m positive every one of them would comply. It’s totally reasonable. But, Oblivion didn’t do that, and now Jack Thompson’s got fresh meat.

A minor point of speculation on my part begins here. The degree of complexity to the nudity mod seems to be disputed – many people are under the impression that it requires some complex retexturing of the basic models, but that does not seem to be the case. Equally many people have described a much simpler process, one possible within the Construction Set (the editing program for Oblivion). I should stress the fact that when I was cruising through the thousands of available mods, I saw at least five mods claiming to add nudity (ironic wording there – “add” nudity). It’s one thing if the mod is mildly complex, but I don’t think this is the case.

As for the rerating of the game to Mature, I think it’s stupid that it was rerated over a mod. It’s kind of like (using the car analogy again) blaming the car manufacturer for car theft (there are obvious cases in which this is reasonable, but, stick with me here). Oblivion probably should have been rated M anyways, though. As many have pointed out, you’re gonna find rotting corpses, on fire, hanging from the ceiling, with knocked over chairs below them. And once you get close enough, you can take the gold and meat out, complete with a squishing noise as you open and close the inventory! I’m no proponent of the idea that we should ban anyone below 18 from buying such horrid filth, but really, there’s stuff in the game that makes me cringe occasionally. Are breasts really worse than decapitated corpses and festering zombies?

I think the ESRB generally does an okay job of rating games, but I just hate to see them become pawns of the lesser forces in our country. It is an inevitability, of course, but one that I hate to see nonetheless.

Controlled Explosions

Sticking with the two-word titles, I’ve some interesting things to report. Apparantly wireless keyboards are, in fact, inferior. I’m typing on a different keyboard at the moment, so, any errors are obviously not my fault.

I hadn’t really noticed before, but when the gang came over (we dress in blue shirts and white khakis! we’re white! we make potato guns!), Nolan played some Stepmania. For those of you that do not know, Stepmania is akin to Guitar Hero or DDR, but on a keyboard, on a computer (any OS). I know all of you know what those are, so basically it’s just hitting arrows in time to music. The songs on SM are infinitely harder (and cooler) than anything you’ll find in DDR or Guitar Hero. To get an idea of how fast we’re talking, Nolan played songs at around 150-300 BPM (beats per minute). That’s not keystrokes, that’s beats. The notes come in time with the beats, so you’ll end up with anything between 1-20 keystrokes per second. I haven’t gotten near that good yet, so I hadn’t noticed that there was a cap to how many keys I could be pressing at any given second. When the game wasn’t keeping up with Nolan’s playing, we switched the keyboard out for a crappy corded one, and voila, things return to normal. While I was aware that wireless peripherals were indeed inferior in speed and precision, I had no idea that it was to such an extent.

I went to the farmer’s market for the first time on Saturday, and I think it’s enough to say that it wasn’t bad. If I had money, I’d have bought a loaf of cinnamon bread or something, but no, I had no such thing. Mowing has officially started, so, that shouldn’t be such a problem. Now I just need a job – I’m hoping Christopher will have room for two people. One can hope, right?

Oblivion, lol

[geek]

I am now taking a short break to give you some preliminary (after 30 or 40 hours of playing) thoughts on Oblivion. Eventually, I’d like to do a nice, extensive review with some of my personal favorite screenshots and whatnot, but for now, I just want to jot down some interesting things.

The first being, the graphics, and my computer’s rendering capability. I am ever so close to being able to max out the settings in every category. My main limitation lies in the speed and capacity of RAM. PC3200 is standard, but contains no capacity for overclocking, and combined with the mere 512MB (hopefully being rectified tomorrow), my computer is unhappy with Oblivion’s extensive use of textures.

I’ve been running the game at 1024×768, with HDR enabled, and all other settings set to maximum. Because Oblivion uses floating-point HDR (Half Life 2 and Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory use an “interlaced” version that is much closer to Bloom than true HDR), anti-aliasing is off by default. I have not yet tried forcing AA on, but judging from the performance I got with Bloom and 4xAA, I do not expect a strong display of computing prowess.

For those of you that do not know, HDR is a lighting system that attempts to simulate the intricacies of the eye – moving from dark areas to light areas results in greater brightness for a period of time, which is inversely true for the reverse situation (that is, moving from light to dark results in a very dark environment). However, the lack of native AA almost makes Bloom (what is generally referred to as the “cheap knockoff” of HDR) more preferable. I took some comparison shots which you can see here.

Anti-aliasing becomes a serious issue when I’m faced with large patches of grass. Much of Oblivion is covered with truly spectacular fields of grass that will make your computer commit seppuku if you are not properly prepared. I have not sufficiently played with the settings to rectify this situation, but that will come soon. Playing with the settings can be rather frustrating when you have to restard Oblivion for any kind of major settings changes.

As for the game, I can safely say this is the best game I’ve played in years. Is it the best game I’ve ever played? I don’t know, but it just might be. More to come later.

[/geek]

STARCRAFT LAN INFORMATION

Some of you know I’m doing a LAN party of sorts on the 31st, my birthday. I have some “official” details involving this, so listen up, y’all:

It’s gonna be on March 31st, which is a Friday, 19 days from now. Required items:

  • $5 dollars (I’ll need all of it)
  • Your Computer (please don’t bring anything less than 500 mhz, this isn’t a Smithsonian exhibit)
  • CAT5, ~20 ft length (NECESSARY)
  • Large blanket (explained later)

Other helpful but not necessary items:

  • A large hub/switch. Larger is MUCH better. Karel said he might have this covered, but, just in case, please bring one, if possible.
  • Starcraft (we can burn copies, but…)

I’m having issues with the limit of people that will be here. I had originally wanted to keep it at 8, but I will have to go to 10 for various reasons. 10 is pretty much the max, for a lot of reasons. Various information involving this:

  • Starcraft, the main game, only supports 8 people. This in itself is okay, as I’m willing to sit back and let other poeple play, but we obviously can’t go much higher than that.
  • Starcraft will be a mix of melee and custom games. I know a lot of the people coming aren’t good at melee, but a few of the people that are much prefer melee (I enjoy it a lot too), so I’ll do my best to make a balance.
  • Other games that are up in the air are Tribes 2, Warcraft III, and Quake 3, these are all possibilities. If you have ideas, LET ME KNOW SOON. Games must be at least 8 player, and fairly low performance.
  • We’ll be playing in my basement, not the attic, so space will be slightly tighter than in the attic, but I’m confident there will be room. This means that if it’s between bringing a laptop and a desktop, you really, really should bring a laptop.
  • I am not entirely sure how sleeping arrangements will work. I have one extra bed and one couch in the basement – most of the basement is unfurnished, so a lot of the space is no-go. We may have to stretch to the living room, which has three couches (let’s see, that’s 5 people covered thus far). This means a few people (assuming all 10 sleep over, which isn’t going to happen) will have to sleep on the floor. I have blankets and such, but, BE PREPARED. Bring a large blanket or something.

If you want to come, let me know, maybe we can work something out. Some of you may have noticed that this coincides with my birthday; please DON’T get me presents. PLEASE. It’s not a birthday party, it’s an excuse to have a LAN. If you really, really, really want to, fine, but there won’t be a ceremony or anything. You have your warning.

NO WAI!

Many things to report! The first of which, are my grades. They are good enough (I don’t know the GPA) to justify coming back, but I still have work to do. In fact, I have a programming project that’s now 3 days late that I need to finish for Monday.

So, the grades are like this:

English: B+ (one bad quiz and poor attendance)
US History: Pass
Math: Pass (bad homework, that’s because i have no calculator still, so i can’t do it)
APCS: A- (gonna fall with this next project)
Physics: B (i keep forgetting the homework! argh!)
CIM: B (poor attendance)
Digital: Pass (one bad test, keep forgetting homework, terrible attendence – it’s my first period class)
PE: A

Funny story with Digital – I walked in 30 minutes late one day and they had actually taken bets as to what time I’d get there. Mike was the winner with 8:20. When I say they took bets, Mr. Peters actually wrote down the bets on the board. The worst part is that the only scolding I got was from Mr. Briegle (read: he’s not even the teacher of that class). Digital has improved since like three people dropped the class a few weeks ago, though. Much, much improved.

I’ve basically been getting NO sleep. Generally around ten hours for every five days of school – this isn’t really because I’m playing games or whatever, it’s because I fall asleep when I get home for an hour or two (I’ve been walking home recently, so I get home at 4:00), and somewhere between two and three days a week I now have Judo. Keep in mind, this isn’t me complaining. I’m actually thoroughly enjoying finally taking on school and doing something with my time. I’ve pretty much adjusted to the sleep thing, and I’ve found I actually feel much better with 3 hours of sleep over 5 or 6. Moving on, though.

[semi-geek]

Several things have changed about my computer recently, which I think concerns each and every one of you. Firstly and most earth-shatteringly, I’ve switched to Opera. Opera, you ask? Opera was once the ad-laden alternative to Firefox, but has recently been purged of such foul inventions. Opera is, in general, significantly faster and less laden with “memory leaks” (I don’t care what you call them, Mozilla Foundation, if it sucks up 100 MB of my memory, it’s a memory leak). It’s, in general, just more awesome. It has some issues with AJAX/Flash, but it works just fine in general. The biggest selling point for me was that it played about 50% more YTMNDs natively than Firefox did.

The only unfortunate part is that the widget support (AKA extensions) isn’t as large as Firefox’s was. I’m using the 9.0 beta, which is the only version that supports widgets. The widgets themselves are more akin to the Konfabulator I once used, which is now called something else under Yahoo’s ownership.

[/semi-geek]

Other things I’ve gotten into? Last.fm is in there, which I had previously ignored for lack of knowledge of its radio-doodle. I’m now frantically trying to catch up with Zach and Paul in their track counts, which, considering my current Winamp stats, won’t take too long, but it will certainly take time. I cheated last night and left music on overnight (with the volume off, silly), but I probably won’t do that again. Note “probably”. Ahem.

[geek]

Most importantly, is the fact that the world will collapse in on itself with the arrival of Oblivion in a SINGLE WEEK! A SINGLE WEEK! AHAHA! I’ve not been this excited since the arrival of Halo 2! I scoured the internet for scans of the March 2006 OXM review of it (9.5 out of 10!), to no avail. Luckily, we get an early dismissal on the Thursday of that week, as well as a day off Friday. Truly, the heavens are aligning to accomodate the arrival of this magnificent piece of game.

To Cough, or to Sneeze.

That is the question.

I have spent the last three days in utter misery, with some kind of viral agent coursing through my veins. I cough so much that I can now no longer play Ninja Gaiden Black, because it excites me too much; I start coughing too much and subsequently can’t concentrate. The only time I’m not coughing is when I’m eating, and that’s right now. To think I’m missing Ski Club and Robotics for this.

I fear my return to school, with the piles of work I’ll surely have to do. More importantly is the ferocious and possibly hurtful words I will receive from teachers, concerning being absent for three days. You can take this to mean I will not be there tomorrow.

A few various things you should all know, via a bulleted list:

  • Robotics seasons started Monday, meaning I have to be there from 5-9 every weekday, and 9-5 on Saturdays. I will probably not go home in between the time school ends and Robotics begins. Wohoo for 13 hours in that blasted school.
  • I traded in Spartan for Mario Kart: Double Dash and Ninja Gaiden Black. The former is not as good as either of its predecessors, with the multiplayer being especially disappointing. The latter is absolutely amazing, and much more than I had hoped for. That’s all I’ll say about these for now.
  • I discovered these “Reese’s Pieces Peanut Butter Candies” that are basically Reese’s in M&M form. Highly delicious, although I haven’t really been able to enjoy them due to my non-stop sneezing and coughing.
  • I finished Season 4 of the Sopranos. I have also realized that absolutely none of you have even watched this show, ever, so I’ve decided to stop mentioning this fact.
  • Apparantly sleep inertia induces a state that is worse than being drunk. Sleep inertia, for those who don’t know, is the feeling you have in the morning, that most people rid themselves of with coffee or hot showers.

If this thing doesn’t get any better tomorrow, I’m seeing the doctor on Saturday. Ugh.

Yo! Banana Boy

I was gonna write something more than a paragraph, but I have to start the Physics soon to finish before midnight, and I want to get some F.E.A.R. in. Shut it.

I got home today and JonAthan (he’s back!) was downstairs with Brian. I wanted to play F.E.A.R., but the hockey would disturb my focus, so I pulled out the headphones, but when I handed them to JonAthan, he rebroke them (i glued the ears back to the frame, they’re so bootleg), and my already very tired mood was kind of sent further down. After giving him a “…” look, I went upstairs to find the superglue. I come back down, and Brian is doing his absolute best to break the headphones in more pieces, and was mostly succesful in doing so. I start glaring at him, but JonAthan starts prodding me with a wrapped present.

I now have a brand new pair of Altec Lansing (read: not Sony) headphones, very sturdy, with a mic (although at the moment I can’t get it to talk at any reasonable noise level). That kind of brought my day around. I have had an otherwise not good day.

Where should I work? I haven’t checked with Ian yet, ’cause I’m not sure I want a desk job (even if it’s better pay) after being in school for 6 or 7 hours. I mean, if nothing else comes around, I’ll go for it, but I was really up on the idea of being a busboy for Joe’s. Any ideas?

EDIT: I hear the school delay got approved. Hooray! Too bad I’ll only experience a year of it.

EDIT: Snap, today’s getting better. Pennsylvania judge owns ID!

Estuans Interius

I have never been more scared to play a game, ever. F.E.A.R. is just so scary. I’m not one for horror movies or games, ever. In fact, I really don’t like them (mostly because I don’t discount the existence of the unholy supernatural), not that I can’t sit through one without crying, but really. It probably stems from me picking up a copy of Resident Evil 2 my brother had brought home, and subsequently having nightmares for two weeks straight. I was seven years old, give me a break. It’s also why I won’t ordain my gamecube with a copy of Resident Evil 4.

[geek]

Like I was saying, F.E.A.R. is just insane. It’s scarier than Doom 3, but then again, Doom 3 wasn’t scary after an hour of playing it. I withstand the sheer fright that is this game because it’s just really fun and really cool. The gameplay is really good, it’s so satisfying, well balanced, plenty challenging, it’s just awesome. The literal pools of blood, exploding corpses, intermittent flashes of dead people and such are really scary, but the incredibly well done AI is so worth it. The AI, man. They run around you, they know the map, they hide behind stuff, they roll, they jump, they ambush, just so well designed. Wort.

Anyways. As some of you know, I discovered Ruby on Rails the other day, and got all excited by their demos, thinking I could easily start running this here blog completely on my server without using WordPress. I spent three hours ripping my hair out trying to just figure out what the documentation wanted from me, then realizing it was five years out of date, and nothing they told me to do would work. Beyond that, I learned that Ruby is really not a good language anyways – it doesn’t do anything that Perl or PHP can’t easily do alone. I was displeased. I’m trying to learn another language in addition to Java – C++ is the obvious first choice, but I don’t want to run it through Cygwin, and the Eclipse plugin is finnicky, but we’ll see. I’m thinking Perl or Python would be good to learn, but it’s not real important.

[/geek]

That snow day was indeed a blessing. I used it well, I think. Ben, Zach, and I went downtown (with some intermittent snowball fights, and falling down stairs) to go present shopping with money I didn’t have, which was fun in its own right. That wasn’t before playing a rousing game of Rise of Nations in which I reasserted my authority over Paul (after a shameful loss). This also wasn’t after an interesting birthday party at Paul house, which there are pictures for.

In important news, the Patriot Act got owned! I am pleased about this. Something I’ve kind of noticed, is that the media spins everything into party politics. The loss of the Patriot Act is somehow a loss for Republicans. I don’t get it. It means people didn’t like it, and that the majority has won, nothing else. Then again, I don’t care about politics enough to sit down and try and reason through why there’s always been two parties in our political system, and I’m not getting a degree in Political Science to find out. At least the act got shot down.

You Are SO Not Invited.

I’m surprised that up to this point, not a single person has noted the lack of explanation of the asterisk lying in wait in the header. Once upon a time, before what I dub the “Great Harddrive Failure of 2005” and the resulting “Dark Age of the Internet”, I had utilized this asterisk to note something of extreme importance. The issue here is that I have absolutely no idea what I had noted. I had originally planned to make a footer (the things that go below everything, thus why they are called footers, unless you’re a CommuNazi). Nonetheless, I am nauseated and disgusted by your skills of examination. So much so that both my eyes are filled with angst, also known as blood.

So, I woke up this morning to my eyes telling me “we hate you”. The meaning of this I didn’t understand until I started experiencing exponentially increasing aches in the area of my head, and by third period, I had been informed that both of my eyes were completely bloodshot. After confirming this fact via a quick run to the mirror, I took my first visit to the nurse’s office of the year, and slept rather peacefully for thirty minutes until my dad got me. The ride home was rather painful as the sun was out, and light to my head was the equivelant of mating in the manner of moose and rams (that is, to repeatedly bash your head against a hard object…not…the other things rams do…). After decorating the house a bit (i now have my silly mini tree in my room, it emits about 25 or 30W of happy), I again went to sleep, but not before playing a rousing game of Age of Empires II, which I’m sure most of you are familiar with. For those of you who aren’t, skip this next part.

[geek]

It’s amazing how poorly memory serves to accurately define a staple of my youth. The game is ridiculously easy – I remember finding the computer insanely hard to beat even on the moderate setting, but using the Goths (whose special unit is the Huskarl, that has like 15 piercing armor, costs like nothing, and can be created in less than 3 seconds) I’ve managed to completely own without even a question of my authority. I generally just create my entire army of 100 in less than two minutes, and sweep the entire map in one or two runs. Before I have the resources for the massive recruitment, I create only enough to defend my base as well as my ally’s. Whether this strategy would work in a real game, I don’t know.

I now have the yearning to play Starcraft again – if I get any minor amounts of money this Christmas, I’ll be certain to get the combo. It’s probably down to ten bucks these days.

[/geek]

Various things (no bulleted list here, i’m afraid):

My parents somehow miraculously got me signed up for Ski Club, past the deadline. This is a highly good thing, as such a proliforous amount of people were going this year (as opposed to last year), missing out on the fun would just be no good.

I’ve finally, after like three months, gotten back in touch with a few of the people from camp. Christina and I have sent a few back and forth, and I got in touch with Zach, although I have still left the entirity of Ohio behind. With time, I’ll get there, but for now, I’m a bum.

Things of humor (sorry, no bulleted list again):

If you check out Colette’s Xanga, you’ll see a post concerncing some silly face recognition software that compares your face (hur, hur) to that of a bunch of celebrities. I am proof that this thing is entirely broken. Just look. (grumble)

Two or three posts ago, I gave a little plug for Facebook, encouraging people to sign up. So, they did. I friended these people. And you know what happens? A pentagram, apparantly. My network of friends is one step away from symbolizing the devil. Ryan is the only thing stopping this. Insert fear here.

And finally, let’s have some good times. The next gen is here, and everybody is celebrating. If you don’t get that, I suggest you go watch four hours of press conferences from E3. Like me! I’ve been listening to the song from that thing for at least an hour now, it’s so good.

Now, because cliches are in, I am creating a new status: the conventions of standard English in the titles. As long as cliches are in, there will be a conventions status monitor, which I will create for your pleasure tomorrow. Images shall be included! As soon as cliches are out, however, the status of the conventions will be neither in, nor out. As you can see, the conventions are obviously in (read: capitalization, grammar, punctuation). Dance Katuragi, DANCE!

Lawyerizing

This calls for an entirely separate post. I’ve often wondered how Uwe Boll puts food on the table, but now there’s an answer.

Read this.

Here’s what I’m gathering from what comments on the article. It’s a huge financial fiasco, that Hollywood pulls on almost every movie, through Germany. Basically, investors turn a huge profit by investing in doomed ventures (Uwe Boll’s movies). How does this work?

Say you’re a rich dude, and your net income (profit) is 10 million dollars per year. According to German law, you are taxed on that 10 million, not the rest of your income. You may make 50 million, but if 40 million of that is losses, you are only taxed for 10 million. So, you put this extra 10 million into a movie like Alone in the Dark.

Now say you’re the company producing this piece of crap. You now have 10 million dollars invested into your movie. If you’re doing the movie 100% legitimately, this basically means that at the end of the process, you’ll give the investors a certain percentage of their investment back, based on how much money the movie makes. But if you’re Hollywood, you aren’t doing this legitimately. What do you do? You set up a tax shelter in Germany, where German investors give you money, before your movie has even begun. The advantage of this is that the investors can put their money into something completely tax-deductable, meaning instead of taking 15% hits in income taxes, they will take 5%, which ends up being in the millions as far as how much is saved.

There are dozens of other spins to add to the ball here, such as filming in several locations throughout the world to utilize other tax flaws, selling distribution rights, and all that jazz. However, the end product is a huge profit for every party involved. Take Tomb Raider. Ever hear that the budget for that piece of crap was $90 million? Did you know that the actual money required to make the movie was somewhere between $7-9 million? This, my friends, is why Peter Jackson feels compelled to sue New Line Cinema, for this very process of ‘cooking the books’. Brought to you by your friendly neighborhood team of lawyers.

I can’t sleep.

The Donut Inequality

[geek]

Today, my friends, is November 9. 11/9/04, a day that will live in infamy. One year ago, Halo 2 came out. I was there. At midnight. You all remember now, don’t you? Today, I recall the hype that I spewed over that single disc of C++. We’ll look back at the poem I wrote. Everything. It’s just going to be great, you know?

O Halo Two, how I love you,
you give me so many things to do!

With just a single DVD,
you unleash a world of glee!

Never straining the Front Side Bus,
for you were coded in C++!

Such an arsenal to explore,
with which to make war!

So many maps to inhabit,
awesome is what you emit!

Powered by a large Xbox,
you clearly rock my socks!

Halo Two, I kindly request of thee,
thy hand in marriage to me!

I remember Sam Miller getting up in front of my English class and reading that to everybody. I was too bashful to read it. Sadly enough, I admit that Halo 2 is not the best ever. It is not as good as Halo 1. Many of you out there agree, many don’t. But it was fun while it lasted.

Moving on, here’s a quick synopsis of what my time has been wasted upon the last week or so. Ben and Matt introduced me to a silly French game by the name of Dofus (doh foos, not do fuss, i think…anyone taking French out there?), which has been quite enjoyable. I won’t provide you with linkage, as a quick Google will provide you with the information you need. You need the exercise anyways.

[/geek]

My grades, dare I say, have reached a new level of suck. I’m desperately avoiding having the first ever D, or worst yet, F on my quarterly grade. Blast my foolishness, being late to school over 10 times. Ho ho.

I also feel that I need to address the accusation that this blog is closely related to slash. The official response is that this is not slash. You may quote me on that. Please do.

Lots of things are happening, more on what that means for your weekend, at 10.

EDIT: Irony. I was all pumped that Sam was gonna be here tomorrow, and was gonna edit this to say that. Not so.

Bickering About

Things have normalized, life is normal, things are good. The PSAT left me amused, I expected something difficult. The hardest part was doing the 38 questions in 30 minutes (I am slow, teh woe), which I managed to do. I only omitted 4 question, hooray me. I expect a good score.

For my college major I put down 303 – Computer Science. I was doing a little research on all the fields that I’ve been interested in, to find out that a lot of them were not quite what I’m looking for. Ideally, I’d like something that combines Software Engineering, Number Theory (those two combined equal Computer Science, basically), and an engineering science, like Physics, Astrophysics, or Biomedical. I was slightly disappointed by what wiki had to say about Biomedical engineering, but then again, the article wasn’t of great quality, so I’m doubting it was entirely accurate, but doing something that, say, involved designing the software for some hospital machine would be cool. I’ve always been kinda interested in physically healing people (dude, I play a Medic in BF2, a priest in WoW, you get the idea), but I can see that fading out or being disillusioned out of.

In any case, Computer Science is about as good as it gets right now, and so that’s what I put down. It’s fun planning out your life.

[geek]

A word about BF2, if I may. I was pretty excited to get it free with the video card, but my enthusiasm has been mildly curbed since. It has to be one of the most poorly coded games I’ve ever played. It crashes constantly, the graphics engine is grossly inefficient, the memory management is horrible, it has horrible glitches that are glaringly obvious and yet not fixed, and a lot of the gameplay is flawed. It’s kinda fun, but it’s a lot of pain for only a marginal amount of fun. The thing I hate most is the artillery. I honestly don’t think it has any good use. Your commander can call it in on any area viewed by a person on the team, but to be of use, enemies have to be there, and if there are enemies, there are friendlies. It teamkills almost as much as it kills. There are also other balancing issues that I don’t like (ex. if you’re on foot, all vehicles are going to murder you without fail, unless you’re an unsees anti-tank infantry, and the only vehicles I’ve ever seen do anything besides make for fast transportation are the tanks, helicoptors, and airplanes), and yet despite these I’ve had some fun playing it. The gameplay is dynamic enough to make it worth playing, anyways. If I had more memory and a faster harddrive, that would make it a little more worth playing.

[/geek]

Anyways, this homework isn’t getting done on its own.

It’s Beer!

I’ve known about these for a good year, but Zach and Paul reminded me of them recently. For your viewing pleasure.

One, Two, Three, Four!

These are in fact beer commercials, you are warned, for whatever reasons.

[WoW]

I’m up to level 26, making rather nice progress. I’ve been through the stockades and deadmines, and have yet to go through BFD. In true rip off style (because ripping off is in), here are some amusing screenshots.

Here we see a glitched gnoll, and 4 people all leveling their weapons by leaving their guys there for hours. Amusing. Even more amusing, was that I came back 5 minutes later to find them all naked. True story.

A classic joke.

Sometimes, immaturity is funny.

Zach has funny moments. This is one of them. This was queued from me saying “I can start making silk soon.”.

When LFGing goes wrong.

I have funny moments too. D:

Burned.

<3

[/WoW]

Church wasn’t as exciting as normal, since Greg wasn’t teaching Sunday School. The Mapes did it, and of all the topics to pick, they did evolution, which was minorly awkward. I kind of wanted to jump out and say “uh, no…” a lot, but, I can save it for another day. One thing that I didn’t get to comment on was their belief that God should be included in public school teachings. As much as I’d love for that to happen, I’m fully aware that other religions exist, and if we’re to be a fair country (and not a theocracy), it’s either everybody’s playing field or nobody’s. This plays in with my disagreement with ID beliefs, as well, fully bringing to mind the concept of the Flying Spaghetti Monster (do a google on it). Benjamin and I had a good few chuckles glancing back and forth at eachother, anyways.

So, plans for college. I might have mentioned it before, but hey, whatev. I’m pretty darn sure I’m off to TC3 after the good old high school is over, for two years, and then it’s off to RPI or RIT. What’s nifty is that the tech classes get me credits at TC3 and RIT (that is, if I pass the tests RIT gives out). Irony. The AP classes are less likely to earn me credits than the tech classes. We’re looking at a work ratio of 3:1. But the AP classes are cool, so it’s all good.

Off to homework. Woo.

You no take candle!

This so, so so isn’t ready, but I desperately want to post. I’ve been dreaming about it. I kid you not. This blog is wonderful to me. I love it dearly.

We’ll backtrack from here to then.

I’ve spent the past 3 days pretty much just playing World of Warcraft. I caved in and used Paul’s 10-day free trial, after which I will continue playing. At the moment, I’m a level 13 priest, and I’m thoroughly enjoying it. Very good game. But none of you have waited a month to hear about that.

Work has improved marginally. At this point, I’m basically getting paid to learn/do AutoCAD, which I shouldn’t be complaining about at all. It’s actually been a really good learning experience – I’ve learned how to mail all kinds of packages (I only knew how to mail letters before), stain wood, do stuff at the bank, lots of random things that are kind of useful for every day doings. It has a lot of boring moments though, mostly when I don’t have enough variety in my work. This last project in AutoCAD I’ve been doing has just shot my nerves – every day, something new changes or happens and I have to redo a lot of work. Frustrating, let me tell you. Thankfully, I’m not under any deadline, so nothings going to fail because of me. Actually, the project I’m working on right now is for a building that will be going up where Dominoe’s (that don’t look right O.o) used to be, next to the Gateway Center. It’s a pretty spiffy building. Maybe there’s an NDA on it or something, so I should probably be hush hush….

The only other significant thing in my daily life (e.g. that consumes time) is Jen, whom I still don’t like. She’s mostly house trained, but she’s still a puppy, and thus retains puppy-ness. How quaint.

In important news, Jonothan gets back from Iraq September 15th. He actually arrives back on the 5th (this Saturday), but has to stick around for a many number of days for whatever reason. I’m really looking forward to seeing him. I won’t be able to go down and meet him because it’s 10 days, but, whatev, I’ll see him soon. Before I got WoW, I was playing lots of Zelda (the gamecube version, which I will get to, and OoT), which brought back some great memories from our first Christmas here. We’d get up in the morning over break, grab some hot chocolate and all the blankets we could find, plop down in front of our little monitor and play for many hours. I can’t remember how we worked it out, we probably took turns or something, I dunno.

No word has come in on Christopher’s discharge (still). I’m hoping he’ll be here before Thanksgiving, at this point.

Let’s see….I’ve acquired a job with a cool old Russian dude. He’s a retired professor from Cornell, like 80 years old, so I help him out with gardening and stuff. It lasts basically indefinitely, which is how I’m going to be paying for WoW.

Zach lent me this CD from a band called Bloc Party – it is growing more, and more, and more on me. The lyrics SUCK, basically the same phrase (which was good the first time he said it) over and over (not so good the 8th time). However, the music is excellent, and my constant techno-listening (6 hours a day minimum, thanks to work), I can phase it out and listen to the good stuff.

And now, for the rants that have been brewing for a month.

I.D.

I can’t stand it.

I can tolerate a literal interpretation of Genesis, but the ID mindset has gone too far. For once, Bush has really ticked me off. As most of you know, I was once a big fan of him, but he’s servicing the “religious” right, giving them everything they want while he has time. I can’t stand it. Whether I’m a part of the people he’s blowing kisses towards or not, I don’t want the tax dollars I am now spending (I pay income tax now! Huzzah!) to go towards a movement to stick a “science” like ID in schools. A Slashdotter put it perfectly: Once the ID crowd are willing to say that the Intelligent Designer (God) is falsifiable, then and only then can ID be considered as a possibility. And I know well enough that it’s impossible for that to happen. Faith is the hope in things that cannot be seen, proven, or denied. As with most things that are written in the midst of emotion, I will probably regret a specific phrase or sentence which does not reflect what I mean. But we’ll see. Open fire.

The Gamecube Zelda.

It sucks.

It sucks majorly.

I could live with cell-shading. I could almost live with playing a child, with child-like characters in a child-like work. I could just about live with the sailing. But not. It sucks. I want the next version, which has been delayed until 2006.

Nintendo, if it isn’t good, I sincerely hope you go down in flames.

I wish you all well on this night. I will slowly improve the blog as I desire, but it’s readable, and that’s what matters at this point.

Packing is not Okay

I’m off to the gargantiomous family reunion tomorrow. The timing is unfortunate as the lawns will not be happy once I get back, and I’ll also probably miss a letter or two. On the bright side, we’re coming back with another dog, Season 4 of 24 will be done, and I’ll get to see Christopher. So, we’ll see.

[geek]

Those new maps came out for Halo 2 – I was quite disappointed. Gemini and Backwash are poorly designed, especially with the sword. It often turns into a game of “scramble for a nearby weapon in hopes that a combo-er or sword-er doesn’t see you in time. Backwash is just hard to see in, so you’re always surprised by the sword, and the one shotgun is impossible to find, since everything is leaned against trees, and there are trees everywhere. As such, I do not like those two levels. Relic, Terminal, and Elongation are good, especially Terminal.

[/geek]

Paul got me the absolute coolest song, ever. Amazingly enough, it’s French, a techno of sorts, it has the style of techno, at least. If you’ve seen Ocean’s 12, it’s from the scene with the laser field where Tolour is jumping around. Ocean’s 12, by the way, is possibly one of my favorite movies. Something about it, I can’t put my finger on it, is really, really awesome. I don’t know what it is, but I watched it 3 times yesterday, something about it really intruiges me.

I won’t be back till Tuesday night, so until then, farewell.

Left, Right, Cut, Back, Down! (O.o)

I have opened begun a post almost every day this week, and just, got distracted. What have I been doing, you ask? Well, I’ll tell you!

Tuesday I went to Crosswalk with Daniel, and afterwards went over to his house for a couple hours. Went to Bible Study, spilled strawberries RIGHT in my lap, embarrassing innuendo followed.

[geek]

The entire purpose of this week, the sole purpose, the only reason this week exists, was E3. I honestly did next to NOTHING this week but watch over 5 hours of press conferences, game demos, and trailers from E3. I stated that I was firm in my faith with the Xbox 360. I am here to tell you that it is not such any longer. The PS3, has by far outclassed the Xbox 360 in hardware, and if some of the rumors are true, games. The sheer power of the PS3 is astounding – they ran a full demo using the Unreal 3 engine flawlessly. The 360 definately can’t do that. However, the 360 carries multiple franchises I am attached to, and several upcoming games I am interested in. The deciding factor here? FFVII. Sony demonstrated a tech demo of astounding quality, of the first scene in FFVII. Rumor has it that the cutscene was a part of the remake. No announcements have been made thus far. Speaking of FFVII, Advent Children is scheduled for September 13th. w00tl4r.

Personally, I need to make myself an empirical comparison of the PS3 vs. the Xbox 360. More for me than you.

PS3:

      ++ Automatically a/b/g wi-fi enabled

 

      ++ Approximately 2x pure processing power w/Cell

 

      ++ Broadcasts up to 1080p

 

      ++ Comes in black, looks nice

 

      + Heavenly Sword

 

      ++ Final Fantasy

 

      + Killzone 2

 

      + Metal Gear Solid 4

 

      ++ Significantly more powerful GPU

 

      + Utilizes Blu-ray

 

    ++ Utilizes Unreal 3 Engine

— Akward controller!
— Fewer good franchises/hopeful games

Xbox 360:

      ++ Automatically online enabled w/Live (which is probably better than other online services)

 

      ++ Better controller

 

      + Blue Dragon

 

      + Comes w/remote?

 

      ++ Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion

 

      + Fable 2

 

      ++ Halo 3

 

      + Ninety-Nine Nights

 

    + Perfect Dark Zero

— Half as powerful on the proc side alone
— Less powerful GPU than the RSX
— Semi-ugly appearance

At the moment, PS3 looks to be ahead. We’ve got a few months until November. We’ll see. As a side note: Gothic III comes out this year, as well. I’ve posted a couple random movies I enjoyed on the server. And by the way, that Killzone 2 demo is not reflective of what the game is actually like. In most senses of the word, it’s not real-time.

Linkage

[/geek]

Other than that, I’ve watched another whole blob of movies. I finally got around to watching the two Harry Potter movies (the second and third). The third wasn’t too shabby, though the second kinda sucked. I also rewatched portions of Revolutions, for old time’s sake. I saw Episode III last night, which was refreshingly good. I liked it better than I, II, and IV, it was quite worth seeing.

Today, I cleaned the attic. I didn’t rearrange much (a few signs, some of the chairs), but I vacuumed it up, washed the windows, ping pong table, foosball table, and the snapple machine, and fixed some of the lights, and lastly replaced some of the tacks with nails. And fixed the fan’s positions. And spot-cleaned the carpet. Ahem.

And now I must make sure I wake up tomorrow, for church, as my parents will not be here.

Das War….ein Gutes Spiel! (O.o)

I just spent my entire day at Mike (Langenbacher)’s house. What was I doing, you ask? Not feeding ducks, to be sure. Our German class is doing this group (ours was Mike, Matt, Julia, Ryan, and myself) project for a book we read – paraphrase the movie in the form of a play, and you can do it in a movie. So, we did the movie thing. We shot the entire thing in about 5 hours (5:00 – 10:00), with about 9-10 minutes of actual footage. None of us actually memorized the lines – we’d shoot short sections (like 30 seconds) and just memorize right before. It was spiffy. I died about 5-6 times throughout the movie, which was thoroughly enjoyable. I hope Mike does a good job splicing it together, since I think it will turn out well if he does.
Various events worth noting:

  • I watched the Matrix Reloaded again Wednesday night. I’ve forgotten how cool some of the action scenes are – despite being a poor movie as far as the plot goes, I thoroughly enjoy the fight scenes and car chases.
  • I watched Black Hawk Down again Thursday night. I saw it a couple years ago, when I was in 6th grade. Another good action movie, a nice, realistic portayal of Rangers in action. I was unaware until watching some of the credits that Ridley Scott directed it. Man-points for him.
  • I may be getting my braces off Thursday. It depends on how much they like me. That same day, I will be taking the permit test.
  • I was cleaning out the car that will eventually be mine, (the green Ford Explorer in my driveway), and found much phat l00t throughout it. Jonothan never cleaned it out, so there’s all kinds of stuff about.
  • Benjamin and Nolan are spending the night tomorrow, as well as staying over pretty much all day. Their parents are out of town. Hopefully, Benjamin and I will be able to get this other box running on SuSE and have it serving all this stuff more reliably than it is on here.

Among the important events, Christopher will be coming to live with us (as in, in our house). He’ll be out of the military in a couple weeks, and pretty much has nowhere else to go, but home. His plans for the future are ambiguous, but he’s thinking about taking some courses to finish up his degree (he has at least 2-3 years worth in credit-hours from all kinds of random places). This is cool news.

[geek]

The Xbox 360 was unveiled about three days ago. If it holds up the Xbox tradition, this will be the hardware I’m getting. I don’t like Sony much at all – the PS3 is not appealing to me, even though I haven’t even seen the specifications or capabilities yet. The wiki on it is more extensive than anything the mainstream sites will give you. To sum it up, though, the Xbox 360 does everything and anything you want it to – it can handle media across the Live community and from external sources, like mp3 players, cameras, digital and video. It’s completely wireless enabled, so LAN parties no longer require hubs or cables, and the controllers are wireless. It has customizable plates, detachable 20 GB hd, it just, man, it looks sweet. The games are not worth speculating on – when they’re here, and they’re good, I’ll say something. But the list is nice – Fable 2, Halo 2, Perfect Dark Zero, Blue Dragon, Elder Scrolls IV, and Ghost Recon 3. It’s some crazy stuff. The graphics look incredible for all the games currently along in development. I don’t want to be a raving fanboy, but I hope I can save up enough for this thing. It’s sweet.

And Nintendo? The DS and Gamecube prevent me from trusting them until the deliver. I’m still hurt from the dissapointment of Project Dolphin. I remember the screenshots of the Zelda that was to be on the Dolphin. My heart ached for a long time.

[/geek]

Time to pick a movie to watch and clean up the room.

No Subscription Fee? (O.o)

I think I am officially done with the appearance changes. Now to get working on that profile…

Yesterday ended up being pretty rough. There were a number of things going on at once, none of which were helping the other. It’s been remedied now, but I lost a lot of sleep in the process.

One random thing: I got a “raise” from one of my mowing customers. Two extra dollars if I sweep the grass off the lawn. Considering this is a lawn which formerly payed 8 dollars for 40 minutes of work, and now pays 10 dollars for 45 minutes of work, this is good.

Scouts last night was kind of mediocre, mostly due to the new rules on our games of ultimate. The game becomes a lot less fun when you’re constantly told to hold back because of younger scouts not being able to keep up. I enjoy playing sports a lot, but it almost seems like the entire purpose is taken away when you can’t play to the best of your ability. I can understand holding back when facing a younger scout, but if I’m guarding some guy who’s bigger than me, how is aggressive guarding going to affect the other scouts? Gah.

Beyond that and the drama, there’s Guild Wars. I got the beta for it a while back, it was pretty mediocre then. It’s done now, and looks pretty darn good, but mostly because it has no subscription fee. The madness of an MMO with no fee is….maddeningly mad. As soon as I get payed by the customers, it’s mine. I haven’t played a good recent RPG in so long. I have high hopes.

It Is NOT Okay to Crackle (O.o)

I present to you…

my poem.

Halo Two, how I love thee,
You are a joy only I can see

Who knew the only one DVD
Could unlock so much glee?

You have so many guns to explore
Pistols, rockets, and snipers galore!

With thine battle rifle
With which none can trifle!

To you, Halo Two,
I can only say “I do”!

*bow*

I slept through two entire classes today. As in, I walked in, sat down, put my head on the desk and did not pull it back up until the class was over. I was tired. I kept waking up in the middle of the night (I was kinda cold, but not conscious enough when I kept waking up to get more covers). In case you didn’t know, I was at Benjamin’s Saturday and Sunday while Mom and Dad were in Boston, visiting the Luddy’s. I didn’t go for a number of reasons.

I had the weirdest dream ever last night, too.

Picture, if you will, a classy hotel, four-star. Very full. It is in the near future, but for some reason, the KGB is alive and thriving, armed in black suits, ties, and sunglasses, with pistols, and enough of them to occupy said hotel. This is where the dream starts off. The KGB enter and occupy the building, and people are evacuating. I’m just a spectator here, not an actual person.

So, the KGB storm the building and people are going nuts. They’re shooting random people down, but for the most part, standing around, looking cool. They only occupy the first floor, though. They just stood in the lobby. Meanwhile, people are going nuts everywhere else in the hotel packing up and evacuating. Meanwhile, there’s a serial killer, mildly reminiscent of somebody from Kill Bill, with a sword. In every room I observe, he’s under the bed, and there’s always two people on the bed. First instance: I think it’s Zach (it could have been paul, but I think it was Zach), and he’s talking in my general direction, I don’t know, but he gets stabbed and I think he falls out the window. Keep in mind, this is a dream, things are fuzzy. Switch to the next room. Spiderman and his friend, wearing a green mask are getting ready to go to bead. Spiderman is wearing his costume, but has yellow shorts on and his right arm is in a cast. His friend is kind of like the hulk. He’s really buff, and has the urge not to wear a shirt to showcase his manly abdominals. And he has a green mask on. So mask-man is laying on the bed and gets stabbed (from under the bed, I don’t know how mr. serial killer did that with a sword), and starts screaming, so Spiderman pulls out a pistol and puts 7 (yes, 7) shots into the bed, somehow misses the serial killer completely, and gets stabbed. There were a couple more rooms of stuff like that happening, with one person getting killed and the other vainly attempting to stop the killer, but that’s about it. Feel enlightened by my horrible dream.

Dreams that I remember are normally very, very vivid, but I often don’t write them down, and thus forget. I have a few dreams I wish I could remember. Oh well.

New maps came out today – they absolutely rock. Definately puts Halo 2 on the map for a long time.

The National Rice Crispie Convention (…)

By request, this post has been outfitted with colorful bold TITLESfor each section!.

Tuesday – Frisbee

An eventful two days, to be sure. Tuesday began with disorganized ultimate in Stewart Park. It was kind of hot out 70+ with humidity, so we spent most of the time sitting around on the swings and demonstrating our physical prowess to eachother. We strolled over to Purity and got some ice cream, and that was the day. Among those present were Gwen, NOT PAUL, Ben, NOT PAUL, Veda, NOT PAUL, Julia, NOT PAUL, Zach, NOT PAUL, Ryan, NOT PAUL, and Amy.

Paul was not there because he was a lazy, lazy bum.

Tuesday – Jared’s LAN

[complaining]

Julia (or rather, her dad) gave me a ride home, and as soon as I sat down at my computer, I get a message from Jared, asking if I could come to his LAN. “Hmmm,” I think to myself. This could be fun, but it’s short notice. I thought about it as I ate dinner (consisting of grilled lemon chicken w/bbq sauce, 1/2 baked potato w/sour cream and butter, and applesauce w/marshmallows). I figure, “Why not?” and after some troubles, make my way over there, by about 9:00. It started out ok – there was a healthily-sized group there, consisting of Ben, Zach, Justin B., Jared, John (the Montana one, don’t know his last name), Charlie (don’t actually know this guy), and Ben Lu. After an hour or so, things got boring. Ben Lu, John, and Jared just kind of played their Counterstrike mods all night, and I mean all night. That’s all they did. Charlie just played San Andreas all night. That’s all he did. We were going to play some Halo 2, but Charlie was not interested in doing anything, and Jared wouldn’t really do anything either. About this point, Zach’s parents arrive with the Xbox we thought we were going to use, but ended up not touching the entire night. It’s a 15/20 minute drive out here, so that’s not a small deal. Coincidentally, Ben gets a killer headache about then, and Jared won’t/can’t do anything for him (who doesn’t have aspirin in their house? no, really?). By this time it’s about midnight-ish, and they turn on this really bad and really loud rap. Nobody in the room likes rap. Nobody. Why was it on? I don’t know. But it was. Combine four computers, a one ps2, one xbox, loud rap, and you get one ridiculously loud and painfully annoying room. After 15 minutes of asking, and then telling them to turn it down, the rap goes away, but the boredom doesn’t. Ben and Zach are fed up and walk upstairs to go sleep on the livingroom floor with, just about nothing. I wander around hoping something will become available to do, but again, the only person even talking to me is Justin, and there’s nothing for us to do, so he sticks to playing Ominusha. After an hour, I give up, and join Ben and Zach in their discomfort. Ben went down once to look for more pillows and blankets (we only had two blankets and four pillows), and discovered four of them (the one not present being Justin) huddled around his computer searching for porn. Obviously mad, Ben takes his computer back upstairs with him, and we eventually get to sleep.

I wake up to Ben L, Jared, Charlie, and John jumping around my head. Why? Because they think it’s absolutely hilarious to do that at 6:00 in the morning. Ben made mention of them possibly being drunk (this is not a remote possibility, and I am not being sarcastic), but I was unable to confirm that. Having had 4 hours of sleep, this was not pleasant. What was even less pleasant? The only food suitable (opposite nasty cold pizza and mountain dew) in the house were bagels. Bagels are fine, but they do not sustain the body. They do not cleanse the pallet of a hard livingroom floor and an upset stomache. After sitting around for an hour and a half laughing at Ominusha as Justin played it, Zach’s mom picked us up and I was home by about 8:00 or 8:30.

[/complaining]

Wednesday – Power Outage

After getting a shower, I went back to sleep for a good 4 or 5 hours, and woke up about 2:00. I hopped onto the computer, and….bzzt. The power goes out. The transformer on the telephone pole down the street exploded (not in a fantastic display of pyrotechnics, but enough to set the telephone pole on fire, and make lots of smoke. The fire department showed up and blocked off the nearby streets, which was kind of amusing to watch cars drive up and wander off in another direction in a bewildered manner. The power did not come back on immediately, so boredom seeped in very fast. Luckily my dad got home an hour or so after the power went out, so we went off to his office so I could check up on his computers (he was having problems with firefox, and I wanted to do maintenence on his old computer that I will soon inherit). By about 5:30, we head out to Chinese Buffet to get some dinner. There was some kid at the table behind us who probably broke the world record for time spoken without ever stopping. He went on and on, about how his friends are crazy about Halo 2, how the Dreamcast was so great (that was hideous to my ears, his facts were so wrong..), his friends, man, I know way more about that child than I ever want to know.

Jonothan’s Exploits

We got home, and the power still wasn’t on. Jonothan called (on our cell phone) and that took up a good hour or two. He has some interesting stories. The prisoners at the base he’s working at are apparantly pretty crafty. They make gigantic slingshots out of the elastic bands in the suits they’re given, and actually have done major damage to the towers with the softball-size rocks they launch. They burn down their tents to get the wooden poles out of the structure and sharpen them to make spears. They stockpile hand-soap from the latrines and use it to light fires on just about anything. Eleven escaped through tunnels they dug under the walls (but were caught 12-hours later). It’s kind of surprising, really. Jonothan’s basically clashing with them on a daily basis, fighting off riots and uprisings. He’s also frustrated by some of the same beurocracy that Christopher faced. Because of what happened at Abu-Grep (grape? not sure..), all the commanding officers are scared of getting blamed or accused of prisoner abuse. This means they won’t let soldiers check any “holy items” the prisoners have – Q’uran, prayer mats, anything slightly religious is a no-go. Except, they keep finding that’s where the prisoners hide all their illegal items. They’ve accidentally knocked down Q’urans to find knives falling out of them, and bumped prayer mats to see more knives. It’s obvious they’re hiding it there, but they can’t do anything about it. Basically, they’re putting the prisoner’s lives before my brother’s. Very, very frustrating.

After our little chat, we waited another hour and the power came back (for a total of 6-7 hours without power). And here we are. I played some Halo 2 and have generally just cooled off from a very long string of events. I was going to write up some impressions on the ALU, as well as plans that my parents have for the weekend, but this is long enough already.

The Stranglehold Knot (O.o)

I slept in for a wonderful many hours today. It feels so good.

Greg did the external evidence of the Bible on Sunday. Good stuff, I say, although I knew a good bit of it (half-ish). Afterwards, Daniel trotted on over and we had a jolley olde time. We ran out and rented Kill Bill Vol. 1 and 2, and watched both, with some pizza and EXTREME!! ping pong thrown in between. The ping pong consisted of us standing on opposing benches, seperated by the picnic table, and wielding bats. The goal was to keep the ball in the air. Pretty extreme, I know.

Kill Bill was highly worth seeing, although I can certainly see why some don’t like it. The violence wasn’t all that bad, although I’m pretty used to that style of gore. I’m not really sure which one I liked more, though. My guess is Vol. 2, since the action sequences were of higher quality, and the story was a little easier to follow, but I can’t be totally sure. They were both pretty good.

After sitting on the couch for 3 hours and 45 minutes, we jumped on the computer to attempt trickery upon IM. For the most part, it worked. Gwen was probably the must gullible (and that’s saying a lot), I can definately say she never caught on. Pretty sad, I say.

I haven’t done much today besides play Gothic and Warcraft III. I just got back from Boy Scouts. I went with the intention to quit Boy Scouts, but, I’m not sure I have the heart to do it. It’s pretty fun, and if I ever have time, I’d wanna come back. I signed up for the rafting trip at the end of the month, which has been fun in the past.

And finally, the Halo 2 autoliveupdate came out today. I haven’t gotten to see it yet, but I’m gonna try and pull myself away from the computer in a few minutes. w00t!

EDIT:

New screens on the upcoming Halo 2 content!

Pure awesome.

It’s a Lighthouse! (O.o)

In regards to the previous post and the comments therein: take note of a few occurances that are worth noting.

  • I recanted my stance on the Day of Silence, as shown by the edit to the previous post. As usual, I did not remove my original words, so that I don’t forget what the situation was about, and so I can learn from it.
  • The entire debate on the comments was almost completely unrelated to the post. A number of people (I won’t say names, you can go read for yourself) decided my stance was in direct opposition of “gay rights”, per se. This is incorrect. Want to find out what I think? Ask me, don’t assume.
  • In general, online debate, especially over forums, can be pointless. This, I believe, is an exception. Why? We have a few intelligent participants here – more mature than the average teenager. There are obvious exceptions in there, but, they are not the real participants.

Continue debating as you like – I will only remove posts if necessary (and has been twice beore). I know a number of you want it to stop, simply because it will go nowhere – I, for one, find it enjoyable, and definately a learning experience.

As for things not involving this little debate, yesterday was Friday, and today is Spring Break. No, it is not Saturday. It is Spring Break. I went over to Ben’s house with Ben (duhhh), Zach, Paul, Ryan, and Matt. We stopped by Zach’s house to pick up Apples to Apples (i sincerely hope you’ve played that game), and proceeded to play through the entire stack of cards. A grand olde time was had, and Paul spent the night at my house. After owning him as SWITZERLAND, he left about an hour ago.

The only other thing worth noting is this. Reloaded, baby. It’s only funny if you’ve seen the original.

I hold no pity for IE.

[geek]

Also, there’s a Halo 2 autoupdateMonday. The things being changed and fixed include:

  • standby and dummying
  • stronger melee and grenades (i’ve been asking for this since the beginning!)
  • weakened magnum and SMG/Plasma Rifle combo
  • easier leveling (for more balanced games)
  • flag bouncing and wall-grabs
  • sword flying
  • auto-resolution games

Awesome, I say.

[/geek]