I don’t usually like to post blogs that are just a pointer to another internet address, to be dereferenced … ah, yes, anyway, but I’ve stopped by Something Awful a lot recently. I never used to go there, but I stumbled across the ROM Pit, and laughed my amble buttocks off. I’ve explored the Photoshop Phridays and other odds and ends. I particularly like those, or any image-manipulation joke.

I took part in something similar once, I created an altered version of a source image where there was a guy standing in the midground (thus having to mirror a part of that tree by the house and fill in some shadow detail) and also the boy hadn’t actually rammed the firehose in the girl’s back, that was an alteration too. And there was a water stream in the left that I totally excised (from the girl). For some reason it’s a popular image, this one Myspace account hotlinked to it for some reason. I was going to alter my selective filter to use the No-Hotlink-For-You image but I decided not to bother until my bandwidth starts to suffer, which will probably be never at my current monthly visitation rate.

Anyway, back to Something Awful. I’ve been browsing over some altered Choose Your Own Adventure book covers, and I laughed pretty hard at most of them. Then I saw this one, and I fell in love. Here it is, not hotlinked to avoid ire, the creator was one softbomb.

I am happy.

I just beat this game, so I thought I’d write up an entry on it. It was a game I actually had to beat myself, as there don’t appear to be any walkthroughs available online. Anyway, the background: It’s a PS2 game, given to me by Alicia for christmas. It’s a quasi-sequel to another game by the same people, where you drew up your own monsters and fought them RPG style. In this game, you can build up 3d creatures, create attacks (sort of, the game does a lot of autopilot of what you mean, but it does it well), and then fight the enemies hand to hand, adventure-zelda style. It has a basic health and attack power level up feature akin to Illusion of Gaia (for example). The experience is gathered in the form of ‘coins’ dropped by enemies on defeat, which dissapear after a while, which adds a bit of worry to the battles. They can also drop cards, which when taken allow you to become that enemy form whenever you want. There is a ‘capture’ ability which allows you to take on an enemy form without their card, but only for a short time.

The plot is very familiar, and could be summed up by just saying ‘Secret of Mana’. You are Prince Pixel (oh dear god how I hate ironically chosen names), who being a mischevious little boyish girlish boy (since he has the title prince, and has a male voice, I’m prepared to accept him as male) finds a secret passage into a basement where he takes a wand-like paintbrush accidentally uses it to break the seal on a demon who had been defeated ages before by the power of Graffiti (in Japan, it was called Scribble Kingdom I beleive, which is far more appropriate, but whatever). Anyway, a boxdog who was sealed as well to safeguard the demon seal becomes your sidekick, and you are both thrown clear while the big demon changes your kingdom into a weird mutated kid-toy of itself. The boxdog (who goes by the name as Pastel, ugh) has the most highpitched annoying voice I’ve heard in a video game in a long time, but you get used to it. Anyway, so your mission is to use the power of Graffiti (draw or capture other drawn creatures) and fight your way to the devil.

My progress through the game was slow, helped by having to start over after falling victim to the memory-card-half-in effect. I found it hard to get into the game, there was very little direction, which I suppose wasn’t needed since most of the game was very linear, but a map system might have made it feel a little more connected. The gameplay itself, I’m sad to say, was rediculously boring at times, especially near the beginning. It was just hack and slash the whole time, in an unending kiddy-woodland environment. There were indications as to the fake-ness of the world, like exposed wall edged with a corrogated cardboard texture, but it would have been more fun if it had been more overt, like bits of the scenery collapsing or something. Some bits were boring to tears, while other parts were really hard. The save system is mostly forgiving, if you die you go back to the last save point (they also restore your health if you approch them) and they are placed every few areas, including right before and right after major boss battles.

The bosses offered some interesting challenges, including one boss that had three roulette style areas that attacked you without mercy (with whatever attack it randomly chose) while the boss tore you to shreds. Luckly curtis was over and played my game, and after many many attempts finally beat him. He also created Mr. Jones, the ungodly four legged (nice shapely legs too) thing with a earwig pincer on it’s front, a head that wobbles about and three arms, armed with a wooden paddle, a club, and a sword. I tried my hand at a few creatures but I never saved them, I might try again now that I beat it (with Mr. Jones).

The funny thing about the bosses that I wasn’t really paying attention to at the time, is that by the end of the game you will have beaten 7 bosses, but there are only really 4 major worlds. The trick is that most of the time you have no idea which world you’re in, or where one begins or ends except for a nexus point that connects them for you. That’s sort of the problem, the areas just weren’t that memorable. The enemies, while numerous, could easily have been reduced into easy, annoying, and bloody hard categories. The bosses were amusing enough in their techniques.

The cutscenes, however, are hilarious, as the main characters is casually sarcastic most of the time to his boxdog (which turns out to girl, his age no less, which he totally fails to get off with) and there is another character, an evil demon, member of all these creatures who caused the problem in the first place. I swore it was supposed to be a she, it even has a girl voice, but it’s referred to by others as a He. Oh well, the He/She fights you occasionally to test you, and gives you advice on the other battles. Then at the end… well, I won’t ruin it for anyone (curtis).

Actually, one of those battles is where I found an interesting bug-like thing in the game, I was on a platform over death-fall areas fighting Him/Her, and I did a whirlwind attack where you sort of lose control of your direction. I knocked Him/Her over the edge, and I was about to wonder whether that counted as killing Him/Her, when I fell off the platform myself. Normally, when you fall off a platform, you lose a little health and get sent back to the door you entered the area from with all the enemies respawned, so I thought to myself “Crap, I’ll have to start over this battle at best with nearly no health, or start from the save point many screens back at worst, since I had a sliver left when I fell”. Oddly, a cutscene started to play, apparently I defeated the He/She, well, that’s nice. But then when it was over, I was on the platform again… but I couldn’t move… what? Couple seconds later, “Game Over”. I was dead, but it took the game a bit to understand this. Luckly, when I returned again from the savepoint, I had still won the battle according to the game, so I didn’t have to do it again. Anyway, I consider this a bug just due to the fact that most games don’t allow you to win if you die during the fight, which is annoying but sort of expected and works around some problems.

The final boss fight was actually a bit of a pain. I fought a stage one fight that I beat faily easily, but I had to fight it twice in a row, then I had to fight a new form another 3 times. I died during that fight, a few times, but I was permitted to start from that point on reincarnation. All the time with Mr. Jones, a very powerful custom creature. I found the game creatures to be nearly useless. Except for one I seemed to absolutely need. There’s a bit in the final level that I could not pass due to platforms being too far apart or too high from one to the next. None of the enemy cards I had were effective either. There were these deadly flying birds nearby, but it was nearly impossible to kill them without pushing them over the edge of the platforms to their death (despite the fact they can fly). I tried about a hundred times before I gave up and returned to an earlier area to finally get the card. Now, I had leveled up to the Wings component for custom creatures, but no matter what I did, I could never induce my custom guys to fly, they just sort of crawled along. When I finally got the bird and edited it’s attacks to see what the hell I had done wrong, apparently “Fly” was a technique aquired from that card… I have no idea what the hell the point of the wings are then. Maybe I hadn’t levelled up enough, I don’t know.

Anyway, the game is over for now. I don’t want to knock it in all that I said above, but the real point of this… PS2 program, is to create monsters and try them out. The game portion was sort of tacked on as the environment and reason that you have this ability at all. The magic is in the engine, it’s a pity I have little imagination (meanwhile curtis fell in love). I might try building a new creature now that I have all the bits (at least, I think I do). But now it’s time for sleep.

and then they found out it was the baby… *cough*

No, actually I’ve been watching a DVD box set, season one of Twin Peaks. I had never seen it before, and actually, my only exposure to it had been through the Simpsons. One episode Homer was reportedly watching it, and it showed a man dancing with a Unicorn under a tree with a traffic light under it… hmm, okaaay. And then there was the who shot Mr. Burns episode with Lisa and the backwards dream with the flaming cards (um, I’ll drive) which I knew from the commentary was a reference (or rather, blatant ripoff) of a scene in Twin Peaks… so my interest was somewhat, ah, peaked, as the show involved David Lynch, so I figured there would be some strangeness.

It is actually sort of a comedy that’s too good to be funny, heh. Well, it’s like a soap opera, where some of the plot elements are so nuts that it’s like a parody of soap operas, to the point that the characters in the show follow a soap opera in the show itself called Invitation to Love.

The whole show centers around an FBI agent trying to solve murder of Laura Palmer, who is as much of a saint as she is a devil. Homecoming queen, and druggie, english-tutor and whore. And of course, in the show there is the Very Obvious Person who you think did it, sort of like when we thought Snape from Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone was the evil factor in the story, since he was basically painted as such. Also, there seem to be any number of reasons for everyone else in the town to have killed anyone else (and they threaten each other daily) but not many motives in her death.

Unfortunately, the experience with the box set wasn’t great, for two reasons. There was no pilot episode included! There was a pilot, and it aired, and had the whole first part of the story, but there was some rights issue, so the first box set was released without it, what the hell? So the “first” episode has a “last time on Twin Peaks”, all the episodes do… I thought for the first one having that was an interesting narrative device, but no, there was a pilot, just not in the box set, alas.

Secondly, the second, and last season, doesn’t seem likely to ever make it to DVD. They apparently solved the murder (which in the first concept of the show, was going to be made unsolved forever) halfway through the season, and then no one watched anymore, so the show wrapped up in two seasons.

Fortunately, a movie was also made, called Fire Walk With Me, that is a prequel showing the last week or Laura Palmer’s life, and then her murder, revealing the killer. Since David Lynch was heavily involved with it, it is very very odd indeed, the series itself was less so. The movie also had frequent references to the dream seen in the second episode of the first season and which is the one the simpsons referenced. No burning cards, but most of the rest of it was there.

In fact, there’s a weird bit in that dream with Wiggam and Lisa where a shadow passes over the drapes. I always wondered what that was supposed to be.. a glitch, a reference?, something about Burns’ shooter? Turns out it was taken as seen from the dream sequence in Twin Peaks itself, of course, what it means there is even more baffling. The best I was able to come up with is that it’s sort of bird shaped, and a bird, oddly, does play an important role in the murder of Laura Palmer.

The show itself is pretty good, strange but not overly so (movie is another matter), has really nifty lounge music that reminded me of 7th Guest, and also, unfortunately, has a Dragon Ball approach to rising action, where it could take a season for one of the characters to build up the energy to release their attack

Anyway, so that’s another show that is in the public collective consciousness that I now have caught up on.

I’ve been reading a few blogs/journals on various kinds of usability. The alert box focuses on web usability, but a lot can be extracted an applied to computer in general. flow|state is seldom updated, but is pretty humourous, as is The Daily WTF which has a couple nuggets, usually in the form of amusing error popups that people have submitted.

All of which have made me pay attention a little bit more to usability in terms of computing, and now I have my own WTF moment to complain about. Here at work, we use a bug tracking system, I won’t name names, but it’s got some good points, and a whole lot of bad points. It has both a client agent, and a web based agent, but I never use the web based one since one would tend to time out all the damn time, so I stick with the client one.

I also have a mouse (quelle surprise) but it’s an optical mouse, which has the nasty habit of just sort of flinging the cursor where ever the hell it feels like putting it, luckily bounded by the screen itself. Of the four corners of the screen, I wonder which is the most dangerous, also think of a maximized application. Say, like bug tracking software, where I had a bug report all typed up, but I couldn’t submit it. I was waiting on a build, and waiting, and waiting, but I have to use the thing for other purposes, and as it’s a sort of crappy MDI app, I can manage it. So then my mouse picks a time when I’m just clicking to fling the mouse off to the top right of the screen, where my click was interpreted as a click on the close button. Gasp, if this had been the web version of the app, it would have just closed the window and I would have lost everything in my unsubmitted bug report.

But ho, I was saved by the application asking me if I wanted to Save the Bug, Discard the Bug, or Cancel. I clicked cancel, which has saved me from similar problems in Word, EditPad and virtually every other program I can think of. I guess the program interpreted my cancel as being “Cancel the closure of the child window”, but then it went ahead and closed the whole program anyway, so much for the child. There, thank you, no better than web based, glad it takes space on my hard drive.

If it would just start timing me out too, now that would be shiny.

No, the story itself isn’t worth 50 dollars, the story itself involves 50 dollars.

I’ve thought about this story recently, and I see that I don’t appear to have a record of it online already, which is odd. But anyway, here’s the best that I can remember the story right now. It is always a painful ordeal trying to reconcile conflicting memories of the past with friends, so I’ll say mine is definitive in all ways except in the ways that it isn’t.

Anyway, this occured many years ago, when I was in 1A in University, or actually, it was probably in my work term at Schneiders in between 1A and 1B. I was with 5 other friends, not all of whom I can recall, so I won’t bother giving a list. But I beleive there were six of us total, and also, I know most definitely we were at Mel’s, a diner in Waterloo.

We were there, in a booth, 3 on each side, eating an late (or very early morning) breakfast I beleive. I don’t know about anyone else, but I do recall seeing a strange man in a booth further back, but I didn’t pay him much mind, until he approached us. Given the noise, my position in the booth, and my general inability to pick a voice out of anything but silence, I couldn’t quite make out what he was saying. Then he put down six 50 dollar bills, one for each of us. And after some discussion afterwards, everyone putting together what they had heard (apparently I wasn’t the only one who had trouble understanding him) he had told us to find some person to give the money to, and gave a name (which actually had two derivations that I recall between us, and we later could find neither in phone books or the university directory). If we should fail to find the person, he said, we were to keep the money, as he said he knew we were poor university students. But, he also said, if we found this person, we should tell them the numbers 6, 3, 1, and that they would understand (my mind was disconnecting from this point). Finally, one of the things that came out of our notes on the encounter, was that he said that he didn’t like men for one reason or another, okay, jolly good.

He then left the restaurant, sort of shoo’ed away by a waiter. Who then told us to just take the money and not make a fuss about it. That last bit struck me as odd, it’s like he was trying to avoid a scene or something, when a scene in a half empty diner late at night is hardly devestating for them, hell, I’ve had friends vomit over their tables. The waiter then told us that he was in earlier, gave a waitress some really large tip (in the hundreds) and just not to worry about it and to stay calm, etc, etc.

Anyway, out of the six people, I am the last, as far as I know, to still have the fifty. One person I beleive gave theirs to charity some time later, another beleives they accidentally spent it thinking it was one of their own fifty’s. Mine is still in my wallet, like decoration, like the condom. I don’t know if I will ever get rid of it before it disintegrates, it’s a fixture.

As is this story.

I bought a USB Harddrive a while ago, during a boxing week sale from Futureshop’s online store. Got it last week but I haven’t really put it through its paces. I tried a couple dummy big files to check the speed, and it’s pretty swift, but I’m just not sure if I trust it. James had one that, if I recall, gave him some difficulty (stuff vanished if I recall correctly). My brother has one that had the dire warnings that if you turn it off or otherwise unplug it before telling windows of your strong desire to do so (strong because you may try to stop the device, and windows will think better of it and decide that, no, now is not the best time, so go away) then you risk losing all your data, the drive itself, windows (oddly) and half your worldly possessions. So what about power outtages, my computer has lived through those… does it affect external drives more or something, are the manufacturers just covering their… assets?

Which reminds me, have to find room on the UPS for the plug, crazyness. Had to pull out the lamp (which was just on a surge protected plug).

Anyway, the point of this litle entry was just something I noticed in the included quick-start guide (which is listed in the box as included, as is a driver CD… what I’m sure they meant to say was that the quick-start guide was a PDF on the CD which still and confusingly just says “Driver” on it. I know, easy to get those confused, anyway, in the area dealing with the simple backup utility provided:

For important data, every month at least ‘data check’ some files after Backup Task
completed.
If possible, it’s recommended to backup your important data to other media or device
as back up copy incase of failure or accident.

I see, the very device some people would have bought to back up their internal drives to is now recommending that people backup their backup. And also, it’s recommended to backup.. as back up. incase. of failure or accident. Well, I’m sold. And I’m sure when I buy my DLT units and carts that the manual will suggest that I should back up my data on stone blocks for safe keeping, but to keep them out of that acid rain. The stone block people will then suggest getting someone with a really good memory. Not that any ’serious’ corporate or small business users should back up onto USB drives as such, but I found it funny enough to ignore that opinion.

Anyway, not sure if I should trust the thing, but I figure it might hold some of my episodes before burning them off on DVD I do download lots of… things…. things to make us go…. we look for things. (Somewhere in Hong Kong, Curtis is feeling summoned by that reference) But I should probably break it in for some general backup purposes or some such, it’s a 160GB, and my two internal 120GB ones give me 400GB of what-the-hell-am-I-hoarding capacity. The fact is, I’m not sure. I mean, I have lots of episodes of things, but every time I check the size of some of the higher folders, I dunno, it’s like all the socks I lost over my lifetime have found their way onto my platters and are filling them up. I think I might need a good format soon enough, clear away the cruft.

I remember on my P2 when I had to reformat and install XP fresh after every reboot because of… something I never quite nailed down, man, that really teaches you what you need and what you don’t. I guess I hang onto stuff just because I haven’t suffered a recent catastrophic loss of data that makes me start fresh.

Fates: That is not a proposal.

This is a picture by azuzephre who I’m guessing is the same as this guy.

Anyway, I don’t know why I find this picture so fascinating, and also incredibly sad at the same time. Sort of reminds me of some situations of my own…, not that I’ve ever eaten someone’s intended gift, but it strikes a chord with me for some reason. Also, vaguely the sense of having tried, made an effort, for something, and also ruining it all by yourself. I dunno, a simple little picture, but for some reason I associate something with it.

I made you some tea…

Okay, this is kind of political… okay, really political, but whatever, I’ll risk it.

The Indian nation is now doing (always was but I just read the news story I’m talking about today) what China has been doing for a while (which I read about at the time a couple years ago). They are aborting female offspring in order to avoid the liability involved, and hopefully get the ’superior male specimen’ they so desperately want. This story relates how something like 10 million girls who should have been born… somehow aren’t in existence.

Is there anything more futile? I guess the pollution of our own environment is analogous, but at least you can imagine outcomes that are a little less dire, or maybe we’ll invent some new anti-pollution spray, or something. But slowly killing out a gender has to sound some alarm bells somewhere. I mean, if you’re going to kill a gender, absolutely determined to do it, then it’s got to be the male one, because at least the females have everything else needed to reproduce, science will likely (if not already) create synthetic germ cells that can be used. But killing off the women? What?

Okay, I can understand… in China, you need sons to work and support you in your old age… in India, girls cause dowries and that is expensive so it’s best not to be in that sitation at all. Yes, very good… so how can we solve these problems? By social change to make women as effective wage-earners as men? By making marriage a partnership instead of a weird-reverse-sale? Nope, let’s kill girls. (okay, I know I’m being simplistic, but that is one of my charming characteristics, or at least I’m so simplistic I’m willing to beleive it is charming)

Anyway, I just wish that we were isolated again, maybe as far along as sailing cargo ships perhaps, so the nations can’t interfere biologically on a grand scale. Then Darwin can come in, watch as these nations eventually reach their 100% male populations, watch them celebrate that they have finally reached their highest religion, ethical, financial, non-temptational potentials and have rid themselves of all the other things they attribute-to-women-just-because-they-can, and later, probably laughing quietly to himself, watch them die out in a generation.

Okay, I’ll stop ranting… but jeeze

Simply introduce to american producers.

Specifically the story of Red Dwarf USA… it was terrible what they did to it, and at least it failed before it was completely launched without going out on the air and besmirtching the british show’s name. I haven’t seen the pilot, only bits of it included in the Series V DVD of Red Dwarf, but the casting and the bits I saw were quite, quite awful.

But it’s funny to think of the reprocussions if the series had taken off:

There would have been no more Red Dwarf (Original) because Robert Llewellyn was reprising his role of Kryten in the US version and would have likely been unable to continue the British one.

The role of the pretty psychic home-assistant in Frasier would have gone to someone else, as Jane Leeves would have been busy playing Holly

Dax on Star Trek: DS9 might have been played by Nicole DeBoer the whole time (no, probably not) as Terry Farrell would have been playing the second incarnation of Cat (which, to me, seems the most insane of all)

Not sure why I found this interesting, probably because I was at least mildly interested in Frasier and DS9, and loved the “Real” Red Dwarf, so it’s fascinating to see how close it all came to being different.