Newton's Theories

Staying Alive in Boston

2008-05-02T11:16:00.000-07:00

Here's another advert spotted in the subway. The last one of these was remarkable just because of its sheer absurdity, but this one gives completely the wrong message to me.

The caption off to the side, which I couldn't get in the picture for fear of falling on to the subway line, happily declares "Good thing he has health insurance". So rather than being an encouragement to get health insurance so you don't end up paying more out of your taxes (which, while I'm on the subject, is a pretty stupid idea)... it says that it's a good thing because if you knock down one of those annoying cyclists with your giant monstrosity from Bloody Enormous Motors Ltd. with enough force to dent your number plate and front bumper, at least he can pay for the repairs to the remains of his knees and bicycle!

We've almost abandoned office now. The minute we managed to get someone to agree to buy our furniture in preparation for moving out on May the 16th, the building we work in decided to do something about the lifts, and sent all the office managers an email about how fantastic they were going to be. However, I came in from one of my 11 possible remaining visits to the sushi place across the road to find that they'd missed the point by several hundred thousand miles.

Rather than operating any more quickly, or having any of the grinding noises or worrying bouncing removed, the big change is that they have wood panelling on the sides. The change is comical - they've only stuck these bits of decorated plywood on to three of the walls, and left the scratched doors and intermittently working button panels completely intact (in the same state that they look like they've been since the Cold War). In fact, the only effect of this is to make the lifts slightly smaller - and also slightly heavier, so if the cable can't keep up this might just be enough to finish them off for good.

This illustrates quite a large reason why we're moving out. I don't think anyone here's going to survive for much longer.

Jam, pigs, banjos

2008-04-30T08:00:00.000-07:00

Last night we went to see Eddie Izzard perform at the Orpheum Theatre. He really hasn't changed much since his earlier standup years, though he does look completely different when he isn't in transvestite mode. I think it may have been the first live show of any description I've been to since seeing Iron Maiden in Glasgow about four years ago, which may have contributed to the way that it was oddly difficult to remember that I was actually there and not watching him on television.

He did mention the names "Jeff" and "Steve" several times (and putting up flags), so as far as I was concerned I got my money's worth immediately. Other topics covered included:

Crap Samaritans

Why nobody would vote for Jesus if he used his real name

German-Latin

Mac updates, and licence agreements that contain "We will shoot your grandmother out of a cannon"

Spartan sheep

Having to finish before "The Riches" starts

The creation of the planet - "How is it?" "Still on fire, Dad."

Problems with Noah's Ark

Instructing someone who put a purse onto the stage to "please set fire to it"

Giraffes communicating via charades

Life on Mercury

Bored appendices and why they're like Aliens

And so on. It was as hilarious as you'd expect, though the experience was only slightly marred by the theatre itself - I'm certain that it was originally built by dwarves, as there is literally no spare legroom at all. I am - and there's no way around this - as short as Richard Hammond, and it was uncomfortable for me to sit with my knees squashed up against the head of the woman in front for two hours, so I can't imagine what it would be like for anyone even slightly taller. Thankfully we were on the end of a row, so we had a bit more stretching room, but even so, if you go to this place you're guaranteed never to complain about another economy flight ever again.

Synthesis Externalization

2008-04-28T12:49:00.000-07:00

"Ooh, yes, I've finished all the backend stuff and I can get to work on seriously making the actual game now" is what I've been saying in virtually every entry on this for the last year and a half. But it never really stops - if MMF has one specific weakness it's its modularity, in the way that for the most part event lists are tied to frames, and the result of this if you change something in one game level you need to go and copy and paste it into all your others (not to mention keep track of which one has the most up to date list that you want to synchronize). But this weekend I've been trying to make things easier for myself in that respect.

You really need to plan a game of any decent size from the beginning if you want to finish it within your lifetime, and Crystal Towers 2 has gone through a lot of changes that would have been much easier to cope with if they were in from the start, so I'm performing a great refactoring to speed up the rest of the game and this time really have something I can just add on to. Initially, the game relied on itself for its data - abilities, items that monsters could drop, and so on - with a couple of external plain text rules files for things that I wanted to be able to change easily, like the missions for each individual level. That was fine at first, but as the game began to balloon up beyond all proportions that I ever imagined it to have, I started an Excel spreadsheet detailing all the data in the game as well. And as I realized I kept having to replay the game to keep track of where I expected the player to be in terms of progress at each point, I then wrote a Java solver that used yet another version of the data in the game to tell me the possible "moves" from each position (with a completion of a level or gaining of a new item counting as a "move"). So up until last week, I had to keep four copies of the game's data up to date with each other, with only a slight link between two of them offering any sort of intelligent reuse of information. This is what we in the computer science world call "a nightmare".

It was actually when looking at the external rules files for Civilization II that I realized how stupid my current situation was, and decided that I'd better do something about it. I had previously thought to myself that it would be nice to read all the game data in from the spreadsheet that I was using to stop myself going insane rather than having to copy it all in manually afterwards, but I had dismissed that as being too insecure a way of doing things and I didn't know if MMF's database connection object could read Excel files without Microsoft's additional gubbins installed. But those Civ 2 rules files gave me an alternative idea - I was fairly confident that somebody in the world must have put together a way of reading Excel files from Java, so I could get that copy of the data into my solver fairly easily, and once I'd got that, I could get Java to write out the rules files itself to be read by the game.

So this is roughly the alternative communication between files that I have going on now - everything is connected and sourced from the same place instead of having each part hovering around looking lost. Thanks to a bit of planning ahead when I converted the save files over to a better system, I also have the option of encrypting the data and making it uneditable while still allowing the game to load it (which will be very important for the online scorecard system) - this happens through a separate MMF translation application. The parts of the game that used rules files already have been easy to convert, as all I've had to do is write a translator in Java to gather them from the database and put them in a form that the game can use. There have also been parts that relied directly on data in the game, which were more difficult to convert as I had to come up with ways to externalize them.

For example, one of the biggest problems I had with the old system was the list of items that each enemy could drop. I had initially written it so that each enemy detected when it was about to be destroyed, picked a random number and dropped an item based on a list of hard-coded chances. With the new system, it instead leaves behind a "SynthCreator" object, gives it its name, and allows a global function to take care of the rest. This function performs the dice roll, looks for any entries in the "drop" rules file that match the name it's been given, and creates a dropped item accordingly. The whole process is so much simpler, even if it did take a weekend to convert everything over to using the new and much easier way - all I need to do now when an adversary is destroyed is create one object and start the function. While I was at it I also externalized the damage that different damage types cause to each monster type, the amount they take off your own health when you blunder in to one, and so on.

Changes like these, along with trying to move everything possible into the global event editor (which I was wary of as it was rather unstable in earlier releases of MMF, but it seems to be absolutely fine so far) make the events of each level much simpler to understand and work with, as they just need their own unique events rather than a copy of the ones that are used throughout the game. So this time, I really am confident that it's taking shape.

It helps that the graphics I have from Jay Frudy are fantastic, too. I'll put a video up at some point to save you reading all that.

Crystal Towers 2 - New Bernard

2008-04-24T18:36:00.000-07:00

As I haven't updated on this in over two months now, you might have thought I'd forgotten about it - but I haven't! My creativity for it seems to come in bursts, and while it's still a much larger project than I ever intended it to be, I've finally got down to planning out a definite list of collectable abilities. Even putting a cap on those is a large step in working towards something that's finishable.

The really exciting news is that I've secured a new graphics artist. He's the same one who worked with me on Special Agent a couple of years ago - the fact that everyone else who has offered to do the graphics for this game so far has gone into severe depression shortly after starting hasn't discouraged him at all! And as a result, Bernard has had an overhaul. I can't quite express how exciting it is to have something this much more animated compared to the original sprite - it really brings the game to life instantly.

On my end, a lot of work recently has gone into the planning side, which is sometimes dull but necessary. Previously, I had four separate things to update - my plan spreadsheet, Java solver, rules files and the game itself. This was naturally terrible. However, after getting an Excel parser working in Java the other day (which was triumphant until I remembered I use OpenOffice), I have the Java solver getting almost all its data from the plan spreadsheet itself. Now, if I can think of a way to get enemy drop rates read from an external file, I just need to write a similar parser to write out rules files from the spreadsheet as well.

In short, I must be mad. There are times when I wonder why Whitney married someone who does this kind of thing in his spare time.

Music News: Michael Kiske Goes Even Madder

2008-04-20T20:34:00.000-07:00

While looking up The Song That Makes You Want To Kill Yourself on Youtube again (as thanks indirectly to Whitney's encouragement I have accidentally learned how to play it), I was surprised to see that Michael Kiske had released a new solo album. It's called Past in Different Ways, and even though it lives up to its name, it's the strangest one yet.

For those who don't know his history, I should explain - despite being one of the initial successful lineup of Helloween, Michael Kiske had the unfortunate situation of hating metal even though he was something of an iconic voice in it. So after he tried to turn the band into a Beatles-style pop group with songs like the one I linked above, they kicked him out and got an emergency vocalist to bring them back again. Meanwhile, Kiske himself decided to become James Blunt and released a lot of acoustic pastelly music while wearing a daft hat. (I have tried, unsuccessfully so far, to get Whitney into his new albums just for the sheer irony of it.) Though his alleged hate of metal hasn't stopped him from making guest apperances with virtually everybody else anyway.

And on this new album - as I realized while I scanned down the track listing, and is hinted at by the title - he's taken the old songs that he wrote for Helloween and reworked them as he wanted them to be. Mellow. Compare A Little Time (original version) and the new alternate-alternate version to get a summary of the level of surrealism that we're dealing with here.

Noitu Love 2: Devolution

2008-04-19T20:59:00.000-07:00

しまた!

I realize that I'm slightly late in reporting this and everyone with an interest probably already knows, but Noitu Love 2: Devolution was released today. Written by Konjak, it's one of the best-looking MMF-produced games I've ever seen.

Like I said previously, it's also unusual in not being freeware, and costs $20 to download - the price is a little higher than I was expecting, but I wouldn't say it wasn't worth it. I haven't bought it myself yet, but that isn't the reason - it's because I was finally inspired to carry on with a bit more of Crystal Towers 2 today and starting to play this would immediately remove all hope of progress again.

As I've also mentioned, if you're at all interested in seeing what the independent game community is capable of now, at least download and try out the demo. It's been extended since the last time I linked to it!

Download the second demo

Good Things

2008-04-14T14:31:00.000-07:00

There was a Scottish couple on the train in to work today. That might not sound remarkable in itself - I didn't even talk to them, just stood and listened to the familiar accents, but it was strange how comforting it was to hear voices like that again, even if the woman did sound like Lorraine Kelly. When you're somewhere you feel foreign even after close to two years, things that would normally be unremarkable stick out greatly.

But even though I continually go on about America and how nobody told me it would be this different or strange or full of Americans, I was thinking last night about just how much I had to appreciate - I've got a good job doing something I enjoy, with good people (and the 10:30am start helps too), and overall we live very well for a couple straight out of university if we put aside the $35,000 debt as a technicality. The SAAS will soon no doubt be asking me for more money because I gave them £1000 last year and the coverage of payments for that must be running out by now, but that will probably be taken care of because we're moving out of the office in May and I might find myself with a pay rise because of the reduced cost of rent (reduced by $6,000 a month, actually).

Last week had a landmark day - it was the first day of the year where it was warm enough not to bother taking a jacket to work. I have two separate jackets - the giant Antarctic explorer one that everyone knew me for in university, and a leather one that I've had since third year of school. And the weather has been hovering around the leather jacket stage for a while, but it seems that it's beginning to be bright and sunny again - which is just as well seeing as my leather jacket is beginning to fall to pieces. It's rather worrying that I've never had it relined since I got it second-hand ten years ago, but also rather worrying that I don't seem to have grown at all since ten years ago either.

The bright weather does have one disadvantage, and that's that Clipboard Force 1001 will soon come out to convince everyone to give them all their money again, but you can't have everything.

Now spell CHZO

2008-04-12T10:06:00.000-07:00

For someone who's experienced three years of Andrew Melville Hall and has been living in Boston for another two I like to consider myself reasonably mentally healthy. So once in a while it would be nice to have a dream that wasn't a traumatic distorted version of reality. Along with the genuinely disturbing ones that I don't want to recall at the moment, I've experienced things like mind-controlling fruit, loose eyes and night-long adventures that are just inexplicable.

Last night, the dream once again took place in my parents' house. I happen to know that somewhere in the house's basement there is an ancient Speak 'n' Spell - one of those bright red things with the terrifying attempts at voice synthesis that sounds like someone who's been smoking shredded tin foil since he was born. It was probably in my dream because I was reminded about Homestar Runner by yesterday, where it and similar artefacts of technology featured quite regularly.

In the dream, the device had somehow contracted a virus (who knows how. Perhaps it was airborne) and we had to find it before it did whatever the virus told it to do. After a search taking some unspecific amount of time, I walked into the downstairs bathroom and saw it propped up on the shelf at the back. And as I approached it, it started itself up and spoke, ensuring that I woke up with a start at 6am:

"Two... one... the Tall Man will come to kill you while you sleep."

I'm almost annoyed

2008-04-11T19:20:00.000-07:00

I know that to a lot of people the sort of Firefox/general open source community seems like a terrifying place full of anti-corporate zealots with smelly beards, but in the end there's a very good reason for its existence. Today at work I spent four hours researching, experimenting and working around Internet Explorer bugs, on a new part of our system to allow people to select the members of teams that would vote on changes to a document. And as everyone who doesn't use it is making one six-billionth of my life easier, I thought I'd guilt trip people into converting over in case there's anyone reading this that still uses the abomination.

This is an entirely selfish thing - I'm ignoring the way that virtually every other browser is at least marginally faster than IE, free to download and more customizable (and in Firefox's case, leaks memory like a colander, but that's not as much of a disadvantage as you might think) because everyone's been told that already, and just concentrating on the advantage to me. And I'm not sure of the average technical Internet knowledge of my friends list, but I'll try not to talk down to anyone, provided that they haven't scrolled well away from this post by now.

The idea of the new form was simple (or so I thought). Our property-editing summary page gives you lists of the current people assigned to each team. From there, you can click "Edit team" to pop a window open where you can transfer more people into the team or take others out, then click "Submit", whereupon it'll close again, transferring the new contents of the "Selected" box into the original one. Dead easy (or it would be if most of Javascript didn't look like $A().$('${sel2}');).

But my problem (from Internet Explorer's point of view) was that I was using a rather handy way of telling web forms what to do called DOM, or Document Object Model. This lets you treat each part of a web page like individual objects, adding, deleting and editing them as you need. And for the most part, Microsoft is fine with you doing that, but on some computers (it doesn't even have the decency to be a consistent problem) you won't be able to move things between objects on different windows, and you'll get an error message saying "No such interface supported", which is naturally about as helpful as a water pistol in the Towering Inferno.

The way to fix this is apparently to re-register a couple of DLLs that may or may not be installed incorrectly, but you can hardly ask people to do that if they're the type that struggle with copy and pasting. Instead, I learned that Microsoft knew about their slight shortcomings in the field of sensible ways to handle webpages and had introduced a hackish fix - a made-up "innerHTML" property of each object on the page that you can use to directly edit the -type tags that you'll see if you go to View/Page Source up on your menu bar. So the solution was obviously (though slightly inconveniently) to write the bits that needed to be transferred into the page manually and stick them in like that.

Except... not only do they have a workaround to do something that everyone else has managed, they didn't get the workaround right either. Somewhere, it contains a bug that means that items in a select box may or may not be written correctly, and this rendered it pretty much useless for my purposes. In the end I resorted to detecting if someone was using IE, then building an array of arrays of strings that could hold everything I needed on the page, passing the whole thing under the table to the parent page through Javascript where IE couldn't mess it up and then cobbling together some items there from the collected data. Meanwhile, everything else can happily do it in about a hundred fewer lines.

Of course, the really frustrating thing is that our clients will never see this. Neither do most people who use IE and can't understand what everyone's complaining about. But it's the scourge of web developers everywhere for the reasons I've outlined above and more. So can you not do me a favour and download something else instead anyway? It'll take a minute of your time and I think you'll find it's rather better for other reasons, too. I don't even much care what you switch to - just as long as you realize that there's no reason on Earth to use IE7 unless you are actually being forced at gunpoint. Remember, like I said before you stopped reading this - everyone that switches over is making my existence just a tiny bit less stressful.

There, that should do it.

Sweet Cuppin' Cakes

2008-04-08T19:41:00.000-07:00

Good news, bad news

2008-04-05T13:15:00.000-07:00

Doctor Who comes back today	:)
We'll probably only see a slightly cut-down version on BBC America at some point in the next three years	:(
So I'm getting it off BitTorrent instead	:)
Catherine Tate's going to be in it	:(
She might not be as annoying as she usually is	:)
But the odds of that are pretty slim	:(
At least Steven Moffat is writing a lot of it this time	:)
So is Russell T Davies	:(

Update: AHH DEMENTED MARSHMALLOW CHILDREN

April Fools

2008-04-04T19:54:00.000-07:00

It was Whitney who mentioned this to me last year, but April Fools' Day has somehow become something that I associate with the Internet more than real life now. When I was younger my sole imaginative idea was to creep downstairs early in the morning and swap all the plastic bags inside the cereal boxes round. Everyone expected it after a year or two, but that didn't stop me.

However, the rise of the Internet has allowed misinformation to be spread further and to more and more gullible people at an enormous rate. This year, everyone will have seen the video of flying penguins produced by the BBC. Another that stuck out in my mind was the Daily WTF reporting that it was changing its name to the Daily WTH, which a worrying number of agonizingly self-important readers believed. There was quite a good one from Apple that not many people saw, and the usual flood of links that trick people into watching "Never Gonna Give You Up" by Rick Astley for some reason.

And unlike my cereal trick, I've never been able to think of anything good for the new Internet April fools. In fact, I'm surprised that out of the large amount of time I've been spewing collections of words onto the Internet through this journal, I've never even mentioned the day before. A good April 1st story needs to be something utterly absurd while still being somehow believable, so I'm not sure how that would be significantly different from my life in general at the moment.

Noitu Love 2: Devolution - Demo released

2008-03-29T20:49:00.000-07:00

RUN SPIN JUMP HIT THINGS GO FASTER AAARGH

Well I never. Really, even if you normally skip over Click game posts - if you read one of them, read this one.

The demo of Noitu Love 2: Devolution by Konjak (Joakim Sandberg) was released at the end of this week. For all the versatility I claim of MMF, I do seem to talk about platform games an awful lot - this one is still a side-scroller, but the gameplay style really is unique. It follows in the footsteps of Noitu Love and the Army of Grinning Darns from a couple of years ago, which was a NES-style beat-em-up that was impressive but never really grabbed me, largely because I was rubbish at it. But this one is a lot more accessible.

A tutorial is provided to describe roughly what you'll be doing. Control is via both keyboard and mouse, with an onscreen crosshair to aim and arrow keys to move around. You can click once to run up to the enemy and attack, hold the mouse button to grab, right-click to place a shield, or double-tap in one of three directions to boost or perform a whirly special move.

But none of that actually prepares you for the game itself - with the features like physics and hardware acceleration that have been added to MMF over the last few months, the games produced in it are getting more and more impressive, and I can promise you that I have never seen a Click game with anywhere near this sense of pace before. In fact, the only thing I can think of that it really compares to is Gunstar Heroes. Nothing ever slows down - it's even more manic than the average episode of Banzai. You have to blaze through a new mass of enemies at every step, hardly touching the ground for minutes on end, all the time encouraged to "GO! KEEP GOING!" by a flashing display at the bottom of the screen. If you're at all interested in playing it I recommend you do that before reading the rest of this, so that the surprise moments aren't spoiled.

It starts off with a wonderful use of misdirection. You begin in an office building like in the first game and therefore think it's going to be a pleasant enemy-bashing stroll, but before you've taken even a couple of steps, a giant helicopter pops up outside and shoots out the window. It then continues to chase you as you zoom along the floor, with chairs, desks and entire bookcases flying out in all directions. Jumping out a window, you land in the park where the rest of the level takes place, and have to alternately go through the mass of lesser robots and avoid attacks from the pursuing helicopter. Eventually you do get to destroy it, only to then be put up against a screen-high boat on tank wheels.

By the second stage you're bashing enemies pouring in from both sides and rocks from above while a slab of masonry scrapes and crumbles down a tower, and when you eventually reach the bottom you're immediately put up against a scythe-twirling spectre right out of Devil May Cry. And this is where the demo comes to an all too premature end. I'm really looking forward to seeing more of this - it's the kind of thing that isn't just good as far as independent PC game standards go, and really could be on something like the DS, especially with the dual controls.

Now, to something that's a tricky issue in the community, and something that I'm sure the author knows will raise a lot of argument... it's not going to be freeware. The price has yet to be decided, but honestly, seeing the amount of work that's gone into this game and how it feels to play, asking for a bit of cash for it isn't misplaced. I promise I was actually shaking after having to rip myself out of the game quickly after it nearly caused me to miss my subway station, having had to concentrate just from the sheer pace of it. And the passenger next to me even enthusiastically asked me what the name of the game was so he could download it himself - that's never happened with any independent game before.

Play it, for goodness' sake. If only to see just what the independent game-making community can do with MMF now. Once again I'm proud to be part of it, even if things like this do tend to make my own efforts pale a bit in comparison.

How to make the Chzo Mythos even scarier

2008-03-28T05:10:00.000-07:00

Even though the Internet should by now be the most impressive information exchange system yet known, we all know by now that it plays host to a miscellany of horrifying things and people. And I don't just mean the places where record-breaking thickness runs rampant - it also gives the opportunity for far too many overly loud people to voice their stupid opinions.

The world of fanfiction is responsible for a fair amount of this, because even though the trend of the Internet moved more towards audio and video recently, writing is still the largest direct window into what you're thinking. And as I've just discovered it completely by accident, I really would like to know what the writer was thinking when he came up with this chapter in what seems to be an epic.

Like I've said before, I'm not against freedom of expression but there are some things that you're just not meant to touch. I'm not going to say what the above horror is because it's interesting how it seems to come off in layers if you read it - it begins normally enough, then you'll realize what it actually is at the bottom of the first page and it'll seem like merely a terrible idea for a crossover. But then it'll keep piling in more and more unexpected characters from increasingly unlikely places until you snap under the strain.

(In case you can't tell, work's rather slow today.)

ZZT - Where are they now?

2008-03-26T08:24:00.000-07:00

Being one of the last survivors of the ZZT community not to have drifted off into insanity, I am immeasurably fascinated with ZUltimate. It's a wiki that was set up about a year after I ran off after deciding I could no longer understand the community, and documents the people it attracted and the arcane in-jokes they built up over 15 years. Picking through it is like some sort of twisted electronic archaeology, uncovering layer upon layer of its unique form of organized madness and trying to translate it into something understandable. This is a decent example of the hive mind sort of mentality of it all - I don't know what it is about an ASCII-based game creation system that attracts these people in particular, but the minds in this place are truly unique.

I'll start with the obvious. I was slightly surprised to discover last year that Chase Bramlage murdered his girlfriend. (I should mention that no-one knows for certain what happened, either of the event itself or the outcome of his trial, but all signs so far seem to point to him being incredibly guilty.) It could be because I never really talked to him very closely during my time there because as far as I remember I was only intermittently in the forums and chatroom, but somehow this doesn't even seem very unusual. It's probably better to move swiftly on from this...

Less disturbingly, in general, quite a few members of the community tend to be associated with a variety of colourful (sometimes quite psychedelic, actually) substances. In fact I seem to recall that last time I poked my head into the chatroom one of the people there was in the process of having his door battered down by an irate dealer, but I could be remembering that wrongly. Drac0, for example, is now allegedly quite into his crystal meth, but with the amount of sense his games made before that habit started I don't think you'd really notice.

Mooseka went for a different approach, as out of all the substances he could have been caught taking, someone walked in on him when he was busily trying to ingest nutmeg via his nose. And then decided to tell the community in general about this, ensuring he would be mocked mercilessly for generations to come. I don't think that even this matches the sheer inspiration of burstroc, though. It seems that after a considerable amount of usually relatively harmless cannabis, he somehow believed himself to be Blat Hoople and proclaimed himself the President of Water.

By the way, if any of this is making any sense then I'm not telling it right. Even the less dangerously mental people sometimes had their moments - the ZZT community is one of the areas in which my usually good memory fails me, so I have no idea what I thought of all these people at the time, but I think that Wildkarrdex might have been someone that fell into that category. He did, after all, give a glowing review to one of my own little productions saying it was "nowhere near as bad as I thought it would be", and made a cameo appearance in another. I don't remember him being an administrator at any point, but according to the article, he was:

He used this position to spend his time reading everyone's private messages, and changing forum names into German translations of Twin Peaks episode titles. Administrative privileges were eventually removed when he added a word filter changing the letter e to something like "mumumumumumumumumumu", rendering the forums utterly unusable (but in this author's opinion, substantially improved).

And as for me... all things considered, I think I got off lightly. In fact I never really considered myself one of the in-crowd, not really understanding the mentality that a lot of the community shared, and it was enough of a surprise to discover that someone had honoured me with my own page that wasn't even particularly damning. I am still in contact with a couple of people in the community, but a completely different set of people from the ones I knew when I was still in it (who, yes, all right, are , , until recently who now goes to the same university I went to, and someone from the forums who occasionally pops up on my journal telling me to come back). And let's be honest, that's an improvement too.

One significant thing to be born from the community was created by Misteroo, who after several years around the ZZT and Megazeux boards reached such an advanced state of mental decay that he managed to produce the Arfenhouse series. (I have to confess that I actually wrote the rest of this post more than a year ago, never got round to putting it up, and everything you've read up until now was just an attempt to make it relevant again.) In the old days we were happy shouting things like "GREEN IS EVIL" and "OOF MON WHERE'S ME PIE" at each other over the forums, but from that chaos and disorder came... well, more chaos and disorder, actually, but packaged up neatly in the form of this series.

If you're not familiar with them, they're a series of Flash cartoons that allegedly involve someone called Joseph who is trapped in a dodgy Flash animation. Most of the storyline, or at least what's coherent of it, involve the Housemaster (who happens to be a slice of bread with some MS-Painted limbs around it) and the other inhabitants of the Arfenhouse - the heads of a dog, a cat and blue sphere named Woogy - being harrassed by a malevolent yellow ball with eyes on it called Billy. Though to be honest what actually happens in any of the animations bears very little resemblance to this plot outline. Subtitles are provided in something resembling the Dadaist language of FishIg. In a way it's quite an accurate model of what the ZZT forums would look like if they were somehow physical - a thought that is frightening indeed.

Let's be clear. You will not get this. Or this. I don't understand most of it. It will appear as a string of gibberish to the uninitiated, and a marginally more coherent string of gibberish to those who were in the community at the time I was standing around at the sidelines trying to make sense of it. My entire introduction to the Internet consisted of said gibberish.

I really miss it sometimes.

Mio Mao Mio Mao

2008-03-24T18:47:00.000-07:00

Every time I mention anything I watched growing up, I seem to have to say it with the special disclaimer that I wasn't actually brought up on milk laced with LSD and what I'm remembering is verifiably real. Therefore, I should mention now that this isn't actually something I grew up with at all - instead, I saw five minutes of it at about 6:30 in the morning about fifteen years ago, and so unique was its dementia that it's remained burned into my brain ever since.

It's a claymation short from Italy called Mio (and) Mao. On the surface it's simply a programme about two stop-motion plasticine kittens, Mio (the white one) and Mao (the red one. Appropriately). I vaguely knew even at the time I saw it that Mao was the name of someone from China who was a bit dodgy, even though I didn't exactly know the details. But getting back to the video - these are no ordinary kittens, instead they're sort of mutant T-1000 kittens from the future. Nothing moves in a way that you would expect - things twist, morph and grow extra limbs when needed, and the titular characters themselves transform into Slinky-type tubes that turn end over end, unroll, turn into balls and bounce, flatten and reconstitute themselves, combine, separate, and do anything other than walk to get from one end of the garden to the other. It's absolutely incredible to watch no matter what age you are.

This one's quite good as well - it has a spider that morphs into bits of random mathematics. It's the cutest thing you'll see all week, apart from possibly a duck with tragically miscounted legs.

It's not often clear exactly what's going on - there's absolutely no dialogue, and apart from their signature cat/communist dictator noises all communication is in a strange sort of gibberish language that sounds like the sound man swallowed a few helium balloons and an entire bag of sugar and then recorded the best bits of the result. It seems some of the later episodes were broadcast on Channel 5 with an attempt at a translation over the top, but I think that takes away from the nonsensical flow of it.

It's rather nice to have it confirmed that I wasn't imagining this whole thing after all, and I rather miss when television could be as charmingly bizarre as this - that era still produced people who nearly grew up all right. I should also warn you that if you watch any of the videos that bloody tune will be stuck in your head for the next week. Oh, too late.

The Thing That Should Not Be

2008-03-21T17:17:00.000-07:00

A sudden flurry of emails from LJ signalled that I'd just had my fourth accepted post on . This one is little more than a link, but it's much funnier than the last one because it doesn't involve me.

And judging from the comments so far I may have actually increased the sales of the abomination of nature quite dramatically. So everyone's happy.

Invisible Gear Solid

2008-03-20T08:08:00.000-07:00

Progress through Metal Gear?! Solid 3 has been pretty slow so far. I had meant to carry on with it while Whitney was away, but somehow never got around to it during the week and then decided to wait for her to return again to continue together. And I'm still not sure where to place it in terms of how good it is versus the previous two games in the series.

I think the only bit that Whitney really hasn't liked is the scene just after you meet up with EVA, where Snake is finally handed a gun that doesn't fall apart within five minutes. He spends an inordinate amount of time absolutely ejaculating* over it, drawing attention to all its modifications such as balancing the grip, relining the barrel, extending the trigger, moving the flint-gaskets and filing down the cockflaps. So he's clearly meant to be a bit of a gun nut, but this is probably an advantage when you're stuck somewhere in Russia and about to spend hours in the jungle fighting a group of leftovers from the X-Men.

Similarly, his way of dealing with bosses so far is mostly by boring them to death. During the first two or three encounters with Not-Revolver-Yet Ocelot, rather than getting to any sort of armed conflict he just goes over exactly what he's doing wrong until he runs away like a big girl's blouse (or is hit in the face with a motorbike). Once you finally get to fight him, he's alternately gushing over how exciting reloading feels and pinging bullets off rocks at you like the Riviera Kid from Red Dwarf. With the addition of snakes biting at your ankles, I'm certain that the fight is much harder than anything I experienced this early on in the first two games.

In fact, the whole game seems a lot harder. Taking away the radar was a brave move, and I'm not sure how I feel about it - the nearest thing you get is a motion sensor and the ability to move the camera around a bit more, but it's hardly a replacement for knowing where each enemy's field of vision is all the time. It seems that you have to rely on luck while poking your nose around a corner or making a run for it into the next area, hoping that a guard you missed won't spot you.

And I miss the presence of guards most of the time, because I'm at a particular disadvantage here. Colourblindness normally only stops me playing very puzzle-oriented games that rely solely on colour such as Puzzle Fighter (I'm very pleased when puzzle game designers are thoughtful enough to give some other distinction to the playing pieces as well). But camouflage is a major theme of this game - in the previous ones I could at least see what I was trying to shoot at, but honestly, this entire game is green and brown, and the guards that are meant to be difficult to see for people with normal vision might as well be totally invisible to me. So Whitney has to be my eyes during the outdoor sections and tells me where to aim.

Despite that fairly major obstacle, at the moment we've just defeated our first unlikely Hideo Kojima villain - this one's The Pain, who is a large man who's covered in bees! and can get them to somehow form various deadly weapons while vomiting explosive hornets at you. He was actually quite a lot easier than most of the game we've gone through so far, because unlike everything else, I could see him.

* NB. This is a perfectly legitimate use of the term

Korma fried rice

2008-03-13T17:07:00.000-07:00

I think I might have just invented korma fried rice by accident. If you're interested, this is done by attempting to reheat a previously successful chicken korma (the real kind, no tomatoes) by throwing the whole thing, rice and all, into a frying pan, and getting the amount of liquid wrong so that a vague yellow mass comes out ten minutes later. It tastes reasonable, though while it's far from my worst invented meal, I'll probably just order in pizza tomorrow.

The IRS sent us an important-looking letter with all kinds of red boxes on the front today, and I was afraid that it was going to be about fining us one squillion dollars for missing out one field of our tax return form. But after tearing off no less than three perforated strips that secured its contents, it turned out to be a standard letter about how much money we would be getting in the Economic Stimulus Act. (This is a plan that the government thought up a while ago that involves paying out up to $1,200 of their money per household in the hope that people will immediately spend it and help the economy. Apparently this makes sense in George Bush v2.0's head, though I can't help but feel he could have provided a better boost to the economy by resigning a few months early.

Apart from that and otherworldly invasions, nothing much has happened in the flat while Whitney's been away so far. I have been trying to play the guitar for at least some meaningful amount of time per night, and I've found that it's amazing how with a bit of practice your fingers can suddenly fall into place on barre chords after ages of them seeming totally impossible. I am getting rather sick of Canon in D, though.

I have joined Ultimate Guitar's forums in the hope of learning something new from being around other players, but so far it appears to be full of Kryptonite. However, it does instead spur the feeling that if illiterate marijuana-addled American teenagers can do this, then so can I.

The perils of an overactive imagination

2008-03-11T17:25:00.000-07:00

But not, as you'll see, an overactive drawing ability. No game series should make you afraid of the dark all over again.

On my own again

2008-03-10T14:40:00.000-07:00

Last Saturday, in a torrential downpour, Whitney left to visit her parents in California over her spring holiday. This leaves me alone in the flat for just over a week. Already the flat seems strangely quiet, which I could probably view as a positive thing if I had any drive to do anything at the moment. However, I've already been enjoying the freedom of playing music without headphones, and even got a couple of songs finished that I'd been meaning to do for ages the other day. I could even connect my guitar up to the real amp instead of using the software one for a while if I wasn't afraid of subjecting anyone in the rooms around me to the hideous noise that I produce with it.

Some people (not least my own mum) have expressed doubt that I'm able to survive unsupervised for much more than four hours, and judging by my past record of cooking I think that's a view you could forgive. However, this time I have been saved by the way that out of nowhere at the beginning of the year somebody offered to send me about half a cow through the post, and Whitney took up the offer for Valentine's Day, leaving us with a freezer packed with boxes of meat from various parts of a variety of farmyard animals. So that's already formed part of my diet this weekend, and with some carefully-planned easy meals for the week ahead, I think I can get through this time without any real disasters.

And the latest kind of cornflakes in my continuous cereal challenge is Special K (strawberry variety). It's all terribly exciting.

The price of health

2008-03-05T08:40:00.000-08:00

Have you any idea of the cost (with dental insurance) of getting your wisdom teeth out? It's $931. As if there weren't going to be enough painful extractions on that day. We have the bank balance to cover it easily (although it might shoot, stuff and hang over the mantelpiece any plans we had for a holiday later in the year), but it often seems that this country's government and health system has done nothing but rake more and more money out of me since I started applying to be allowed to set foot in it.

Now 's comment on the last post becomes much more relevant, as I naively thought that having both medical and dental insurance would be enough to bring it down to a reasonable figure. However, despite the surprise cost, I am still leaning towards being convinced that there is good reason to have them out now, as Dr Fine's opinion was more along the lines of "Get it done here, go to the surgeon in MGH, wherever you like, but whatever you do, get them out". Apparently I could also wait until my entire head becomes infected and then claim it under the medical insurance, but I'd rather do this soon than risk them getting worse and having to endure even more physical pain than necessary.

Overall that visit to the dentist last week didn't go as well as I'd hoped.

My rebellious teeth

2008-03-04T13:17:00.000-08:00

My first visit to what I had begun to mentally call the castle of Doctor Terrible took place this afternoon - I've opened a new entry tag to record the development of this new storyline that life has thrown at me. In reality it's a nice enough basement suite, clean and quiet and only slightly funeral-home-like. Dr Fine is a little older than I expected, but nice in a pushy sort of way (but everyone in Boston is pushy, so it averages out to just being nice).

After filling out the obligatory confusing mess of an insurance and consent form while listening to the gentle call of high-pitched drilling noises, I was led through to a dental-looking room where he asked if I was from New Jersey (apparently the accent is very similar) and poked around in my mouth a little. After that, he immediately said that we'd better 'relocate' and distractedly led me down the corridor. I was half-expecting to be taken to a small dungeon somewhere, but instead I was shown to a tiny room with an X-ray lightbox and desk.

The consultation that followed was calm but not fantastic. Essentially, my wisdom teeth are all partially impacted, infected, extruded or exploded, and from just taking one look in my mouth he was surprised that I wasn't in complete agony because of any one of them. To look on the bright side, not being in agony even though my wisdom teeth are having such a hard time is probably a good thing - we must be more resilient in Britain. Still, he made it clear that they had to come out as soon as possible to prevent future catastrophe, and that process would involve a considerable amount of pain and swelling. Apparently there's also the very, very rare possibility that removing wisdom teeth will sever a nerve running along the jaw, but apparently Massachusetts General Hospital are rather good at repairing those.

So I had to read through and sign an absolutely terrifying sheet saying that I understood the risks of surgery and the possible problems (because as he says, America has too many lawyers in it), and I've been sent home with a leaflet called "Impacted wisdom teeth" illustrated on the cover by a large and happy third molar at a crazy diagonal angle. Now I just have to wait for a phone call from somebody from the office so I can arrange to get them removed from my head, and I'm sitting at home on the sofa eating chocolate biscuits while I still can.

MGS and CSI

2008-03-03T20:57:00.000-08:00

My life tends to go through a set of stages in a cyclical pattern - sometimes I'll have extended periods when I'm in the mood for writing, musicianship or game-building (and you can tell which one I'm in by the relative number of posts I make to this journal or various other forums around the Internet). At the moment, after a brief spurt of activity on CT2, I think I'm slowing down again and am getting into the mood for creating... nothing in particular. But this isn't necessarily a bad thing, because it allows me to have some actual free time instead.

I don't know what all that nonsense was about above, but the point is that Whitney and I were in Gamestop the other day to pick out a couple of PS2 titles after it hasn't had much activity for a while. Now that the next generation of consoles are becoming this generation, it's not uncommon to find at least a couple of gems in the second-hand bin, and on this occasion I found Metal Gear Solid 3 for $10. Meanwhile, Whitney picked up a CSI game, which I promise you is called "Three dimensions of murder", from the other end of the store - a surprisingly quick visit.

America has a slightly ELSPA-like rating system for games (in that it's separate from the film classifications) in the ESRB ratings. And the people in Gamestop ask for my ID whenever I buy anything in the "M" category. Do I still look six years younger than I am? I know I'm short, but I even had a rubbish beard last time it happened. In addition, this time the woman at the till cheerily told us that they had a seven-day return policy, specifically in case we wanted to bring back CSI after playing more than five minutes of it. That's what I call thoughtful service.

When we got home from our other tasks of the day, Whitney's CSI game went on first. And, indeed, first impressions were that it was an abomination. It could be vaguely described as something that might have come out of point and click adventures if anyone did them any more, but with said pointer stuck in the centre of the screen and first-person shooter controls added instead. I have enough difficulty with FPS controls through dual analog sticks, and I think Whitney finds it totally impossible to point in the right direction half the time.

The game consists of going from location to location via a dull overlong control-explaining loading screen that looks like something that would have been stuck on a demo in a hurry, clicking on things and then using appropriate equipment to gather evidence (you're guided by a vague likeness of someone from the TV version during this, so that you don't attempt to do things like pick up blood using tweezers). After floating around bumping into everything and clicking on them, you then go back to the lab, where the 3D engine wheezes and puffs as it strains to show more than ten objects on the screen at once as you spin round looking for the right bit of equipment to piece together, pull apart or compare the things you've grabbed from the crime scene.

It's not fantastic by any means, but it seemed oddly interesting after a while, if only to see what incriminating things you'd find in new locations as you gathered likely addresses. Games based on TV programmes don't tend to work very well (I have difficult imagining how even Knightmare could be done decently) and there's only so much you can do with a format like this. Dull adventuring, then, to sum up, but we're unsure whether to return it just yet, and I think that's just about the highest praise you can give it.

I had a brief go at Metal Gear Solid 3 in the evening - this was something that had completely passed me by when it was released, and I'd only played the demo of it before. And I say I played it "briefly", but the actual game time on my save is two hours in - Hideo Kojima is known for his long cutscenes, but so far this game's been virtually nothing but them. I'm unsure how I feel about the lack of a radar in favour of a camouflage system and ability to look round a bit further than before - it would certainly required a change in tactics if it would let you actually play the game long enough to work anything out.

Even though it's cutscene-saturated, though, you have to admit they're good (when they're not just half-hour-long radio conversations, anyway). I particularly liked the introduction of not-Revolver-yet Ocelot and his Red Dwarf-style automatic pistol ricochet shooting. But I'm not sure if it's just because I'm older now or the token supervillains really are more ridiculous this time, but it really does seem from the introduction section that we're going to be fighting the X-Men (complete with a creepy hornet-summoner, an old man with bulgey eyes and someone who I've chosen to christen General Electric).

So far we've just gone through the start of what I thought was the game, then in true Kojima style it ripped us out of that and put us in a different one, so I don't actually know what it's about yet and will have to update this as soon as something interesting happens.

Old Emails (it's as exciting as it sounds)

2008-02-29T12:46:00.000-08:00

Somewhere in the depths of my Internet past, there's a Hotmail account that went unused and unchecked for about a year. Even though I used to retrieve emails from three different accounts in Thunderbird, I was forced to stop when Microsoft shot themselves in several of their own feet and disallowed all outside access to their accounts by anyone (not just new accounts as before). And their brave attempt to become the most patently useless email provider in the world was a success, because GMail was coming up at that point and everyone was beginning to realize that it was miles better, so many people left. And since then I've been trying to switch every Internet identity of mine over to "DavidN" and point them to my far more usable GMail account.

Yesterday, though, I finally discovered a workaround (not that I'd been searching all that hard before) - I'd used Thunderbird successfully for a while until it suddenly stopped working with Hotmail, but it seems that if you're using the WebMail plugin with the Hotmail extension, and you put your port number up above 1024 and switch to either "WebDav" or "New" as a way of retrieval, then you can magically access your Hotmail inbox again (not the sent messages, but let's not hope too much from battling with Microsoft).

And what came tumbling into my inbox was a year worth of spam that I had been quite enjoying not getting. Most of it was DeVry university offering me a useless degree - one of which was been going to be sent in 2009. The others are for unspeakable things in both English and a variety of foreign languages.

The rare cases were the ones that people meant to send to me. I had set up a "vacation reply" on my Hotmail account ages ago telling people to send things to my GMail account instead because that one was never checked any more, but either nobody listened to that or it just never worked anyway. The majority of them were from GameFAQs, because in my great refactoring I never bothered to update anything I wrote for that site with my new email - nobody ever contacted me about anything anyway until I wasn't checking it any more.

There was one from a forum member asking me about my maps for Unreal Tournament. When I wrote the tutorial for UnrealEd, it was at a point when I'd never seen a decent complete beginner guide (though the Unreal Wiki came along shortly afterwards and was a lot better), and my maps weren't exactly stellar, but I had a look for them all the same and linked him to what I could salvage from what I'd uploaded to Nali City years ago.

I didn't answer any of the others because they're too old to bother with, but they were all questions or suggestions about what to add to the guide - somebody mentioned some details about the barrel-on-wobbly-bridge section of Tombi, where I'd detailed painstaking instructions on exactly where to stamp on the bridge to tilt each section so that the barrel rolled all the way down to the river. He pointed out, quite rightly, that you could just push it.

Finally, there were a couple asking about the silliest-named game in the world, Syphon Filter - the first guide I ever wrote, and the only reason it's significant is that it details how to get past a common game bug that nobody else had worked out at the time. ( is also good at this - see this giant summary of what went wrong in Hexen II.) One of them was asking about putting tags on crates, which does tend to confuse a few people. But the other one was an email saying that the sender's son had been stuck on the first level for "close to a year". As far as I could tell, he could get into the bar that contains the first objective, then couldn't find the "communications array", which is a laptop sitting in plain view on a table with a giant arrow saying "Communications array" pointing to it. I think the only help I could have offered there was to advise her son to get a new hobby.

Vs. the Dentist

2008-02-28T09:30:00.000-08:00

I'm honestly trying to think up something entertaining to say about Tuesday morning, but I'm not coming up with anything to make it sound less hideous than it really was. After ages of trying to forget about it, I had finally made an appointment at the dentist - the first time at an American dentist and my first visit to any dentist since Reading Week in my last year of university just over two years ago.

They're nice enough about it. I had heard great things about this dentist (some of them verging on disturbingly enthusiastic, actually) and it was a less frightening experience than the dentist I used to go to in Scotland, but after two years of being blissfully unaware of any problems I might be having, throwing the following at me came as a shock.

The first thing they discovered, to cut a long story short, is that my mouth is the wrong shape. After irradiating my entire head with the 180-degree X-ray scanner thing and taking a first look inside my mouth, the hygienist's first comment was that I have unusual extra bones in my mouth. My last dentist never mentioned anything like that, so maybe it's normal there and we really are a different species in Britain. She also described the usual buildup of nasty things I have around my gums, but said that most people clean them to a lower standard than they do in America - refraining just short (as I'd been afraid of when I arrived) of mentioning my vampiric British teeth and how they weren't anywhere near artificial-looking enough to be American. Instead, she said we would just have to be "very thorough", bringing over a tray of things that looked like miniature hacksaws.

I don't think you've experienced true psychological torture until you've had to lie still with sharp things poking around in your mouth while the entire discography of the Spice Girls plays in the background. I was stuck there for at least half an hour while she went over my mouth with instruments of varying size and hideousness, and eventually finished off by rubbing a bit of what looked and felt like cheese wire between them all. After that had finished, the dentist came through to have another look at my freakish mouth - he was bursting with enthusiasm and was telling me about the time when his uncle was involved in a car chase, but I've never been quite sure what to do when dentists talk to you while your mouth is clamped open and you're strapped to a chair, only able to make vague dribbly noises in response to anything that's said.

I'm now told that dentists in America say this all the time, but I was told that it would be 100% recommended to have my wisdom teeth extracted. Even though I'm not feeling any pain from them at all at the moment, the trouble with them lies in my wrong-shaped mouth and half of most of them are actually growing into my skull. As a result of that, a couple of other teeth around the wrongly-pointed ones might become infected, and they already have a few holes in them that I'm going to have to get fixed next fortnight. A week before that, I'm going to see an oral surgeon about my wayward wisdom teeth, and if he decides they need to come out, I will need to schedule an appointment for skull-cutting surgery followed by a few days of excruciating pain in my calendar.

Teeth are so badly designed.

Stupid things to do with "Wish I Had An Angel"

2008-02-26T05:12:00.000-08:00

Just a few years ago, nobody knew what power metal was at all apart from a few people in Europe (and if one more person asks if I listen to Rammstein when I mention that most of my music comes from Germany I'm going to throttle them). But certain little subsections of it have crept into popularity, and it's now likely that a lot of people will have heard of bands like Sonata Arctica, Dragonforce and Nightwish.

The trouble with becoming popular is that your increasingly rabid fanbase can give you a bad reputation as a whole (e.g. Nobuo Uematsu, most Squaresoft games). A practice among particularly manic listeners that's become fairly common thanks to Youtube is making "anime(/animated) music videos" of films or games set to music. Sometimes they can fit - one of the most overdone is Kingdom Hearts to Sonata Arctica's 'Kingdom for a Heart' due to the quite unbelievable appropriateness of the title, but usually it doesn't matter how stretched or non-existent the link is between them.

As Nightwish's "Wish I Had An Angel" is what I'd hazard as one of the most popular songs in the entire genre - possibly because it combines harsh and smooth vocals as well as a power metal sound and an almost Europop-like beat - it's now been attached to a variety of unlikely things. Such as:

Alone in the Dark (I should probably point out that this is actually the official one, but it easily qualifies as a stupid thing due to being written by Uwe Boll)

Final Fantasy VII

Brother Bear

Doom (the film)

Final Fantasy VIII

The Sims

Sailor Moon

Dragonball Z

Final Fantasy IX

The Lion King

Harry Potter

Final Fantasy X

Final Fantasy X-2

Starlight Express

Rammstein

Kingdom Hearts again

An entire tribute to Tails or Miles or whatever his name is now

Just put up to double speed

Lip-syncing it through your silly hair

And an entirely nonsensical custom-made 3D rendered film!

Oh, and as I mentioned KH AMVs before, putting it to Modern Talking's 'Witchqueen of Eldorado' has to have a mention. That one's going to be difficult to beat.

Internet pecking order

2008-02-25T09:04:00.000-08:00

Normal, rational human beings

↓

People with Livejournals

↓

People with Myspace accounts

↓

People who post on GameFAQs

↓

People who post on GameFAQs (not on the Classic Gaming board)

↓

People who post on the IMDB boards

↓

Other sentient beings

↓

Half of the people on Daily WTF

↓

The other half of the people on Daily WTF

↓

People who comment on Newgrounds

↓

Urban Dictionary contributors

↓

Worms

↓

Single-cell life forms

↓

People who comment on Youtube videos

↓

Jack Thompson

Let me know if I've missed anyone out.

Crystal Towers 2 - Behind the scenes

2008-02-21T17:27:00.000-08:00

This is appalling, I'm sitting here proudly writing a Java-based solver to find solution paths through my own game, while sustaining myself by eating a pile of crisps directly off my desk. It's only a couple of steps from here to Linux and a Dustbuster.

Frosted Flakes Gold

2008-02-17T13:50:00.000-08:00

If in the unlikely event that through reading this journal you've begun to care about me or my life, you may know that one of the things that I struggle with in America is the lack of Crunchy Nut, the breakfast cereal of choice that is totally unavailable without having to actually arrange imports of it from my parents' house ourselves. Every attempt to find something similar when I started living here failed. However, a couple of weeks ago Kelloggs brought out Frosted Flakes Gold, which sounded tantalizingly close - after a trip to the supermarket I've just come into possession of a packet and will try it out, in as live an experience as Livejournal allows.

As you'd expect, the box is coloured shiny gold, and it's also one of the toughest cereal boxes I have ever encountered. It's marketed as a healthier alternative to the original Frosted Flakes, and I'm sure I've worked off at least a few calories trying to prize it open.

Initial impressions are... surprising, to be honest - as soon as I opened it a strong sweet smell hit me, like the smell of Scotch tablet when it's in the molten proto-tablet stage. The look of it is also quite odd - the flakes are pale and much greyer than normal, looking perhaps like Special K. On putting one in your mouth you're hit by a sort of honey explosion that gradually subsides, but they remain stuck to your teeth like all decent breakfast cereals should. Time to dive in and actually pour in milk to taste them properly.

I've got to admit that these are almost entirely unlike Crunchy Nut. The honey is much more obvious and gives them an honestly rather medicinal taste. However, it's important that - almost uniquely among whole-grain corn cereals - they're not utterly revolting, and probably something I would choose to have for breakfast.

So I'm still going to have to put another phone order in with my parents, but they're not going to be relegated to the back of the cupboard until they turn to dust either. Probably the most successful in the search so far even though they're nothing like what I expected them to be.

grows funny creatures

2008-02-16T19:45:00.000-08:00

SPTHWAP!

A few months ago, happened to mention a series of horror games by Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw on his journal, and shortly afterwards a post of my own appeared detailing how absurdly traumatic they were. For some reason this account convinced a number of other people to download them too - which was pleasing, because horror games have this immense viral appeal to them in that you want to convince people to play them too to prove that you're not a colossal wimp and that they do indeed cause normal people to sleep with the light on for a week. In a continuation of this saga, today I sent off for the special editions of the series and I've been playing through them again.

The second time through, they're not too bad - the "director's commentary" is interesting, describing his influences and thoughts on his own game, and the extras like this are very welcome. But the biggest thing is that, even without Yahtzee's constant comments about how rubbish the game is or how rubbish the players were at said game, I can't believe I didn't realize how hilarious the possessed captain's death (where you have to whack him into the suspiciously exposed reactor) in 7 Days was before. Just listen to it - it's a lonely futuristic engine sound and tense piano, cut short by a loud noise best described as "spthwap", like Eddie Izzard's 'sword' sound effect.

I'm still not looking forward to Sunday, even though there's apparently a warning given in the special edition before you're suddenly killed. And I'm also a bit apprehensive about 6 Days because apparently there's an illusion scene in it that I didn't get but did.

You should still play them, you know.

Bonesaw

2008-02-14T17:53:00.000-08:00

Nowhere near as horrifying as the name sounds at first, Bonesaw is a side scrolling platformer/sort of beat-em-up crossover written by Kyle Pulver (Xerus) - I think it's his first project of this scale, and it's an impressive release. It's also a relief to have it finished, because I was one of the testers for quite a while last year and I know it suffered a lot of unfortunate glitches just before it was released today (as everything does).

The title comes from a team at Clarkson University in New York who play a sport involving Americans zooming about on ice and beating each other with sticks, and while the "sport" bit of that doesn't feature in the game, the beating up is a major aspect of gameplay. (Their nickname comes from something to do with harnessing the power of Randy Savage, but I won't go into the details here.) You make your way through a variety of environments pummeling hockey players from St Lawrence along with fire-breathing onions, giant penguins, and most anything else that gets in your way, either with your bare hands or a variety of sporting equipment.

The game's graphics are relatively simple but gel together well into a consistent, almost Kirby-like style, and the soundtrack is provided by Josh Whelchel, who has really become a standout musician in the Click community in the last few years. His chippy background music reminds me quite strongly of Epic Games' titles in the 90s when Robert A Allen worked with them.

What I really like about the game is that it feels so reactive - everything has some measure of physics applied to it, and you won't find any typical platform game enemies that wander mindlessly back and forth until you jump on them (such as in, for example, mine). Enemies are thrown back by your attacks, can be pushed off ledges and will jump around to chase you, and there are whole sections involving trying to coax bouncing balls or imminently-exploding bombs into the right place. And it's pretty massive - I think there are well over 30 levels, each with multiple 'acts' or sections, and even after that's over you can go back and find Golden Pucks to get yourself access to an even harder section.

It's properly difficult, too - the levels themselves aren't too bad as long as you avoid the deadly sudden-death drops, but the bosses will hold you up for a while. It took me ages to even get past the first one, but importantly, it was the right sort of frustrating difficulty that got me to have "one more go" until I eventually worked out how to effectively damage and defeat it. And if you don't feel like doing that, there's also always the option of going back and charging up your Bonesaw so that you can go in and deplete all their health pretty much instantly, but you do end up feeling a bit of a cheat.

Download Bonesaw here!

Somewhere out on the Internet

2008-02-13T18:44:00.000-08:00

For a long time, there's been this sort of unwritten agreement between two Internet subcultures as to what they will and won't touch. On one side, there's the furry fandom which tarnishes things we grew up with like the Sonic series, the majority of the Disney films and anything and everything else animated and anthropomorphic. And on the other side, the community of slash writers takes care of just about every other film or storyline involving one or more men, including Lord of the Rings, Torchwood, and countless others. (I'm well aware this is a bit of a weird introduction, but keep going, it gets even better.)

I could cope with that situation, but at the beginning of the week I was appalled to find out that a number of these individuals had turned their attention to power metal as well. I have seen many horrors of the Internet and haven't been overly fazed - let's be honest, you could rightly say I'm part of several of them - but there was a boundary line in my head, and this crosses it, smashes it to bits and reverses over it with a tractor. The introduction on the description page invites you into this new area of expression that features "love, loss, hope, insecurity, frustration, joy, addiction, disappointment, ego, failure, success" as well as the entire membership of Iron Maiden, Helloween, Rammstein and Marilyn Manson (among many others) in a gigantic slash mega-bender. I have not explored this area of the site any further.

But as if that wasn't enough, you'll be thrilled to hear that a significant number of these writers have been published in a number of collections and stand-alone novels. They have four individual categories for various levels of creepiness and insanity, but in reality all but two of the books have the tag "slash" and involves members of German bands talking in surprisingly English accents and eventually violating each other. One of the full-length ones involves Kai Hansen being kidnapped by aliens from Uranus, and the page shows an excerpt where he has to pretend he's homosexual to avoid a potentially appendage-endangering situation. I had to use a cache link for that because it mysteriously disappeared in between the time I saw it and the time I wrote this up. Maybe they're hiding.

This post has been unusually damning, I know, and normally, I'm all for people doing what they enjoy as long as they're being good to each other and not posting lolcats. But my difficulty here is that I can't get past the fact that taking anyone else's real, non-consenting and unaware personality and moulding it to your own will seems a bit... wrong. To stand against what must be a common thought, there's a quotation from the California Supreme Court displayed at the bottom of each page on this site. "Surely, the range of free expression would be meaningfully reduced if prominent persons in the present and recent past were forbidden topics for the imaginations of authors of fiction." And it did make me stop and think for a bit... but in this case I'd rather not know any more of what the imaginations of these authors of fiction have come up with.

The lesser of two evils

2008-02-12T09:01:00.000-08:00

I couldn't help noticing that somebody has let that ghastly Ann Coulter creature on television again (well, I say "somebody" - it was FOX News, naturally), but what she has to say this time is surprising - apparently she'll support Hillary Clinton over John McCain if the two are running against each other because McCain doesn't hate gay people or non-Christians enough, or something like that. Nobody is sure what goes on in this woman's head, but if she doesn't like the Republican candidate then it's fair to say that he must be doing something right. I'm hoping that this means that the surprising number of Americans who listen to her will go for the Democratic side of the final presidential race, but equally it'll probably turn off those who are in possession of all their faculties of reason.

I don't have the right to vote in America yet because I'm too foreign, but the rest of them have a chance to get the place back to being a country again instead of a sort of international joke - naturally I'd love it if Obama won this time, but because the country doesn't have a stellar record of electing a suitable leader I'm trying to remain optimistic about the other two. Hillary's campaign has been... a bit dodgy so far, but at least her husband did something decent to the economy, and even if people go for Iraqi-bashing McCain instead, anything's uphill from where they are now. But that much was obvious already. When you have three candidates and all their individual merits are overshadowed by the way that they couldn't possibly be as bad as the last one, something is wrong.

Just nine months until it's over - looking on the bright side, it's actually flown past and most of the world is still here. Let's not do that again.

Clickteam at the TCEA

2008-02-11T08:09:00.000-08:00

An interview with Jeff of Clickteam has appeared on an educational blog after the Texas Computer Education Association conference. Educational software is where Clickteam seem to be having the most success and most of the interview concentrates on that, though it also features a couple of commercial games developed using their software such as Robotopia. (There's a small mention given to the online score table. Guess who wrote that.)

No matter whether you're interested in the content, though, you have to respect him for having an entry on Metal Archives. Going from being the guitarist of a thrash metal band to IT and marketing is an interesting career line.

Crystal Towers 2 - Vertical Platforms

2008-02-09T08:51:00.000-08:00

often mentions that his iPod has developed a strange sense of appropriateness in its song choice depending on mood or location. And it seems that my iTunes has become similarly self-aware - putting on As Long As I Fall while I was yet again struggling to get vertical platforms working can only be attributed to malice. After hearing the line "I don't hit the ground" while watching your character sail right through your carefully constructed detector you aren't sure whether to laugh or cry.

But after a lot of frustration this week, and even more whiteboard note-taking (Whitney got me a whiteboard for Christmas, and it was fantastic, because I'm miswired like that) I think I might have just got them working. Nearly.

I was always pretty fascinated by the state of whiteboards in the CS department after someone had been working on something for ages. Presumably every fragment of information on them is in some way useful, but altogether they always look like unorthodox impressionist paintings born from too many packs of Wine Gums.

Anyway, the real point of this overambitious week is that I now have a grand unified Platform object that can move horizontally, vertically or any direction in between. Have a look at the practical demonstration - graphics are very much temporary, but it shows the kind of thing that can be done, starting off with dull simple left-right movement but gradually introducing more elements such as vertical movement and movement by sine waves for swinging platforms.

Vertical platforms sound simple in themselves, but it took ages to get these working at all - with plain horizontal movement you only need to worry about moving left and right in the same way as walking normally, but if the player is to be moved vertically, you've got to work against the gravity that you've written and build in support for that. And as much as you know I like MMF2, there's something very wrong with its detection of collisions of objects that have moved during fastloops - the whole thing works by looking at one invisible detector underneath the player and another one on top of the platform, seeing whether they match when the player is moving down and while the platform is moving in any direction. But as collision detection was so erratic I had to switch over to looking at the positions of each object instead and decide whether they were overlapping based on that information.

Another problem was that as I was moving detectors and objects around so much on each frame, it became very difficult to keep track of where objects actually were during it, no matter how much I put into debug information during the loops. (MMF2 provides a debugger for examining each frame, which helps a bit, but it's actions before drawing a frame that I was worried about this time). So in the end, I made it up to the player object to decide whether it was on a moving platform or not - that's what the "OnVert" property that's still in the text at the top right of the screen is for. When a platform is told to move, it checks whether the player is over it first and sets the OnVert property to its own ID value before doing so, and this is later used to decide whether to allow gravity to affect the player or not.

The trigonometric movement of the platforms is done by giving each individual platform a "Type", and writing a special-case set of pixels to move horizontally and vertically for each of them (I finally had to remember differentiation again to work out how the swinging ones should move). I might be able to simplify it a bit by putting another couple of values on the platforms to specify where they should move to on the next frame, and let the game work out the actual distances itself from there.

Frankly I'm very surprised that you've read this far.

New videos and interviews

2008-02-07T08:57:00.000-08:00

That's enough attempting politics - back to music again. Both Helloween and Gamma Ray have released new albums and the videos that come with them fairly recently (it was towards the end of last year, actually, but like I've said before America gets to know about these things much later than everybody else and I am failing catastrophically at keeping up).

To sum up, the video for As Long as I Fall by Helloween is utterly ridiculous. Not surprising from the band who brought you Limozeen in Space, but this actually looks a bit more like a Rhapsody video with a slightly higher budget in places. The band views are all right, very Metallica-like in that they're standing on a rock pillar that slowly crumbles away like a game of Kurushi even though it's surprisingly intact by the end of it. Instead, it's the daft Mortal Kombat-style adventure in between them that's the worst bit - what does any of it mean? I've no idea what the fat little devil is, either. I love the brief air-piano shot near the end, though. As for the song, it sounds slightly like Helloween are trying to become a pop group again, but with rather more success than what happened the last time Michael Kiske convinced them to go in that direction.

Similarly, the opener from Land of the Free II, unusual in being a direct sequel to an album that was released over ten years ago, is happy and enjoyable, and much more positive than anything Gamma Ray had to offer on Majestic - so it sounds like they've done what they intended and made a return to their old style between the times they were a political band and a sci-fi band. As for the video, well, on the one hand it's good that they now have a producer who has upgraded from using Windows Movie Maker and MS Paint, but on the other, I have to admit that this one's in very bad taste. I understand the point they're trying to make - freedom and liberty and the end of oppression and America and everything else they're usually on about - but the whole thing looks just a bit too bloody and Clockwork Orange for me to comfortably watch it.

The only real disadvantage with the band, I find, is that as much as he's respected as the driving force behind just about the entirety of the power metal universe, Kai Hansen does have a nasty habit of stealing other people's songs.

Also of interest are the two interviews with the bands that SPV did - Kai of Gamma Ray and Weiki and Andi from Helloween are interviewed by a loud prat with an American accent and all the charm, wit and subtlety of Timmy Mallett, and they appear comparably bemused by him throughout. Frankly I didn't expect Andi to have as deep a voice as he does in the video, and for the most part they're both rather understated, although there's quite an interesting explanation of where the idea of the song came from.

Quite apart from the hat he's taken to wearing that makes him look worryingly hip-hop, one of the most surprising things in Kai Hansen's interview is how he says that he's been listening to a lot of Dragonforce recently and is impressed by where they've got to. I also think it's impressive that a power metal band has got so much recognition, particularly in America, but why did it have to be them?

In fact, if I can finish on this unrelated side note, I've finally worked out what I don't like about them. It seems that most of the bands I listen to enjoy power metal because, well, it's a bit of a laugh. Dragonforce seem to be going for the younger System of a Down-type audience and teaching them that it's instead about being 3xtr3m3 with 4tt1tud3, and I'd like them a lot more if they stopped with the image of being the fastest band aliii-eee-ive and just enjoyed themselves more. Or took themselves less seriously, or something like that. I don't know.

Super Mega Ultra Tuesday

2008-02-06T08:05:00.000-08:00

According to Google yesterday, I was the eleventh person in the world to use the term "super mega ultra Tuesday", but by the time I got to putting this up I'd dropped to 46th place. However, if it had been "super ultra mega Tuesday" instead that would have been even more painfully unoriginal, with 207 results as I write this. Anyway.

Super (and possibly both Mega and Ultra) Tuesday was yesterday, the day when most of the American states submit their votes for who they want to represent the two political sides in the upcoming Presidential election. The race that everyone is really interested in is between Obama and Clinton, and neither of them have come out ahead - Obama seems to be favoured by more states overall but Hillary is getting the more important ones (it's the delegates that actually count and each state has a different way of calculating how to use those depending on how everyone else votes). It seems that many people think that nominating Hillary would be putting Bill back in the White House, but you have to admit he did a decent job of it a decade ago (as long as he's kept locked up or supervised at all times).

On the Republican side, John McCain is coming out well ahead with about three times as many delegates as either of his competitors. The rest of the people I live with in Massachusetts went for Mormon nutter Mitt Romney, partially because he was our governor until recently but primarily because they're idiots. Apparently he thinks he's "going all the way to the White House", which would be a bit of a sorry outlook for the rest of us, but he's not really in with a chance now, so that's all right. The trouble with Conservatism is that it tends to drive people mad - it even made one man have an affair with Edwina Currie, so clearly has devastating effects on the mind.

Having said that, at this point I honestly wouldn't mind McCain as president, because he seems too old and out of touch to be able to do any real damage, or at least, not on the same scale as the last one. But the trouble with whoever gets nominated into the White House this time, no matter whether it's the first black/woman/zombie president, history is primarily going to remember them as "not Bush". And while that's a good achievement in itself, it's not really something to be remembered for.

Silent Force - Walk the Earth

2008-02-05T09:08:00.000-08:00

Doesn't this look rather like the cover for The Fourth Legacy?

It's been absolutely ages since I actually listened to any new music. Recently I've been more involved in activities that don't lend themselves to a musical backdrop - namely transferring my songs to GP5s and failing to play along with them on the guitar. Combined with that, my music-buying tactic used to consist of wandering into music stores as I passed them and picking up anything I didn't have that I was interested in - but that's not really an option here because my entire existence is in the flat, in the office and on an underground line in between (not even mentioning the fact that European metal is even more difficult to find in America than it is in Britain). But I think it was that put an end to that by giving me Silent Force's Walk the Earth for Christmas.

When I've talked about albums recently I've gone through them track-by-track, but I know that this is a rather long-winded way to do it, and this type of review was discouraged by Metal Archives (or Encyclopaedia Metallum if you want to be quite agonizingly pompous), deeming them 'unprofessional'. An album is definitely a complete experience in itself - just working out the arrangement of songs is a difficult process, involving decisions like which moods, themes and speeds of songs go together or should be separated, and even length comes into the equation as well when you decide where to put your ten-minuters (the fourth and last tracks being my personal choice most of the time) - but in the end you're going to enjoy or dislike each individual song on its own merit. However, I've realized that at least one good reason for not going down to such an involved level is that invariably, as soon as you submit a review saying which songs you like and dislike, your opinion of all of them will completely change.

But I don't really have any standout songs at the moment, because in general, I have to admit that Silent Force's latest effort seems a little... flat, so far. There are a couple of different points that I find myself wanting to hear again, but I haven't yet identified anything truly amazing. In comparison, their last album Worlds Apart had some blindingly great songs and some absolute duffers - Ride the Storm was epic, Hold On plodded, No One Lives Forever was all right with a disappointing chorus, Heroes had so much power and energy behind it that it made you want to go and bomb the pants off Afghanistan even if you were normally relatively sane, and so on.

American power metal vocalists tend to be 'smoother' in sound than the Europeans, who have a harder, scratchier edge to their singing styles. DC Cooper, who has not yet emerged from the 80s, has as good a voice as ever and has even learned how to pronounce more than just the vowels. However, I'm honestly not sure if this is a good thing. I don't know if it's just being able to hear the lyrics better and therefore being unable to ignore them, but I think they've taken a definite downward turn in quality from the previous album - Worlds Apart had lyrics that made no sense, but Walk the Earth has lyrics that make no sense but are still recognizable as not very good.

If I was going to pick out standout moments, I'd say that Man and Machine has a good pre-chorus before duffing up the real one, DC's voice (does this man have a real name or just two initials?) on Walk the Earth itself is amazing, The King of Fools and Running Through the Fire are fast-paced and very enjoyable, but that's about it. In From the Dark is also good until the seemingly random chord changes near the end. However, according to the rules I laid out above, it's bound to become one of my favourite albums ever as soon as I hit this Submit button.

Report on Superbowl 42

2008-02-03T19:37:00.000-08:00

Well, I didn't understand any of that.

The Underside - second preview

2008-01-31T14:11:00.000-08:00

Arthur Lee has released another preview version of The Underside, a side-scrolling platform adventure. I've mentioned the game before a few times here as something that I have very high hopes for - Arthur Lee, let's be honest, doesn't get on with a lot of people in the Click community, but you have to admit he's got a very professional-looking game here. He's good at getting the intangible charm and character in sprites that make things look so special.

And what's really impressive about this release is that it includes the wonderfully-named Almighty Paintbrush, which is even at this stage a pretty complete world editor for the game. This is possible because most of the game is externalized into little script files, sprite sheets and level layouts - by modifying any of these it's possible to create your own adventure using the game's engine, making it one of the most fully modifiable games in the Click community next to Knytt Stories. A mod loader is included, but I couldn't get it to run and just overlaid the files myself. Two of them are included in the preview.

There have been many jokes about how similar the game looks to Cave Story, though those are wearing a bit thin now, and so is the frankly slightly schizophrenic defence by the author. It's never been a secret where the inspiration came from, though, and to be honest I don't see the problem with it - this might be the nearest thing we get to a sequel, and if it promotes the use of Click software by being a great example of what you can do with it while it's at it, all the better. In the end, the similarity is going to be an advantage, because even if it's labelled a "Cave Story creator"... that, to me, sounds like a pretty fantastic idea. Who knows, if the language and tile editor is simple enough to pick up, it might even become a new ZZT of sorts. But without the community - they can keep that.

The Underside preview 2

Crystal Towers 2 - Menu Makeover

2008-01-27T18:58:00.000-08:00

After a long period of inactivity, I've revived Crystal Towers 2 and over the past week I've been working to get the interface looking a bit less hideous. Most importantly I've thrown out the OCR Extended A font that I initially thought looked "retro" but have recently reassessed as "ugly", and replaced it with some alternative more acceptable fonts. I've also been using the Text Blitter object a bit to include bitmap fonts, but it's doubtful that you actually care about this, so here's a video.

That shows the player setup and tutorial, as well as a bit of what I have of the online scorecard system - the idea is that you'll be able to upload data from computers within the game and then visit a site and compare your progress against others. I know that the sooner I find a video codec that doesn't mangle pixel art the better, but you can just about read it if you squint a bit.

Moment of Truth

2008-01-25T08:00:00.000-08:00

All last month: "I can't believe they're doing this, it's revolting."

All last week: "It looks like you're plumbing new depths of television now."

This evening: "Well, I'll watch it anyway, just in case."

Obviously as a direct result of the writer's strike that suddenly eliminated what little worthwhile American television there was, Moment of Truth is the latest "quiz" programme to appear on FOX - Television for Idiots. And I'm saying "quiz" with that irritating air-quotes action because there isn't one - the premise of the programme is that a contender, wired to a lie detector, answers increasingly personal and/or embarrassing yes/no questions for unlikely amounts of money, while people related to them (those who would be most shocked to hear the answers to some of the questions such as "Have you ever used the Internet to flirt with other women since getting married?") look on. You can decide to stop after each question, but after a question is asked you must answer it, and if you're caught lying then you're booted off instantly. Simple.

Before I continue, I must mention we can't blame America entirely for this. The TV company Endemol used to put the Netherlands firmly in the lead position of having some of the most consistently bad television in the world* and therefore the programmes that people were most eager to export - their latest worldwide example is Deal or No Deal. But against all odds it's Colombia that has come up with something duller, because even a full hour of somebody picking random numbers is more captivating than this (though over here they attempt to spruce Deal or No Deal up a bit by featuring twenty supermodels wearing very little in an attempt to extend the average American attention span).

If we examine the rules for a moment, which doesn't take long - from your point of view (and this is the only real decision-making moment in the whole affair) there is no point in lying. If you tell the truth, everyone knows Awful Secret #94 and you continue. If you lie, you're detected lying, you miss out on the cash, and everyone with the slightest sliver of a sense of deduction by elimination knows Awful Secret #94 anyway. There's no sense of skill or tactics to it. There's no challenge. There isn't even a game, to be honest. You've got to say "yes" fifteen times or give up halfway through if you don't feel like humiliating yourself any further (or filing a divorce if you've just admitted to anything particularly incriminating). The programme has actually been taken off air in some countries after one woman was arrested after exposing certain truths, but then I wouldn't have expected "Did you murder your late husband in order to get his life insurance money?" to have come up as a random question either.

I rather miss the era when TV games were actually enjoyable instead of relying on ridiculously overblown tension, and had some sort of challenge to them (at this point even any sort of game at all would be nice). Nostalgia is kinder to everything, but I don't think that it's just the rose-tinted spectacles that make things like The Crystal Maze look inexorably ace by comparison. And, of course, some things go without saying.

* Apart from MTV

Nationwide

2008-01-24T10:33:00.000-08:00

Thanks to the eleventh wonder of the world, Youtube (placed after the Internet, Barack Obama and Crunchy Nut corn flakes), I've just rediscovered something that I hadn't seen in years. It's a set of adverts that Nationwide, the largest British building society, thought up in the early 90s. And they're so strange that I had been beginning to think that they only existed as a figment of my imagination - they're characterized by everything moving in a demented stop-motion fashion, rather like Jacob's Ladder with added cheerful music in the background. Apparently they're based on Bob Dylan's Subterranean Homesick Blues, but not realizing that at the time, I thought they just looked like the dreams you would have after swallowing an entire bag of sugar before bed. They come in three varieties:

Home is the one that I remembered, with the walking postbox, garden gnome and rearranging letters on the garden gates.

Saver isn't much better, featuring among other things a set of walking bagpipes. The best bit, though, is the office chair that slides all the way in from the foreground.

Business is probably the best experience as a whole, starting off with a normal enough scene but gradually getting more and more demented, finishing with waltzing tables, siren-screaming violins, and naturally, a bathtub on wheels.

I can't really make any more commentary than that - they have to be seen to be believed, and then you'll probably never forget them.

Overenthusiastic search spiders

2008-01-19T21:23:00.000-08:00

Look who's listed on ZoomInfo as a surveying officer for Buckinghamshire County Council.

Well, I thought it was funny. I'm particularly intrigued that they appear to have an email address for him.

Knytt Stories again

2008-01-18T15:53:00.000-08:00

Knytt Stories has just been named as the top freeware game of 2007 by Gamasutra. Like I've mentioned before, Nifflas is one of the most well-known independent developers to use Clickteam's software, and this is a further step towards people taking it seriously as a way to create very competent games.

It should be added that a lot of work went into the game from the community in general, in tileset drawing and in some cases writing custom extensions to make the game possible. My entry on Mobygames now shows me as being part of it, even though I was only involved tangentially. It credits me with working on Hellgate London as well for some reason, but I'm not going to argue with it.

Bob III

2008-01-16T12:08:00.000-08:00

Christmas saw a new addition to our family in the form of Bob III - who, despite the name, is apparently female like all other Macs. Bob the First was Whitney's old laptop, which was followed by Bob Reborn when the hard drive eventually gave out and had to be sent off to Apple to be replaced, so this is the latest in their lineage. (Curiously, my old laptop was also called Bob because I got it from my dad and the hard drive had that volume label. You know you're meant for each other when you own laptops with matching names.)

Whitney is a Mac and I'm a PC. This is something that's been known ever since we met each other, and causes its own difficulties. Not between us, most of the time - just that it's rather difficult to get our computers to talk to each other, because both of them think that they're too good for the other. More specifically I'd guess that it's because Windows is just awful at networking to anything that isn't itself, but moving on... I have never been a fan of OS X, because of its unfamiliar layout, I don't see the point of the Dock, and I'm a firm believer that making right-click more inconvenient to get to and renaming it isn't the same as simplifying it away.

But this thing is very nice. First of all, you ought to see the size of the thing - it's a 24-inch monitor with the entire workings of the computer mounted behind it and is about the size of my two monitors combined. It stands in the corner of the desk area of the kitchen, looming over the chair but in an entirely nice and friendly way. When you turn it on for the first time, you get the smiling Mac logo and are guided very nicely through the setup. It then takes a photograph of you to use as its default user icon, which came as something of a surprise and made it look rather more self-aware than I'm comfortable with - even now I get the uneasy feeling that it's watching me whenever I'm in the room.

I know that Macs are regarded as one of the most expensive examples of style over substance the world has ever known (and the "expensive" part is right - do you have any idea how much its memory costs?), but it's got a lot of style. The backup utility exemplifies it. In Windows, you open a window called System Restore, click through a calendar and select a day you want to go back to. On the Mac, you start up the Time Machine, the desktop drops away, and you're suddenly flying through a starfield approaching a distant nebula. I was half-expecting the Star Wars fanfare to start up. Then you zoom through a front-to-back display of folder windows, look through the one that looks the most likely, select it and are returned back to Earth again with the restored folder. See what I mean?

Apple's image is largely based on gimmicks like this, but I haven't seen gimmicks done quite that well before. And it's true that the Mac operating system does get some more basic functional things right as well. Installing a program works just how it should in theory - drag an icon out to install a program, drag it to the bin to uninstall it. Everything is entirely self-contained (helped by the way that Mac applications are actually folders in disguise) and has no outside references to search through when anything goes wrong. Although dragging a disk to the bin means "eject" rather than "format disk" as I'd expect, but that's a separate issue.

And there's the fact that you get a remote control with it and can scroll through your music and films from the other side of the room through Front Row and its flamboyant zoom/flip/rotate menu. It's exactly what people in 1980 thought the computers of the future were going to be like, and while it doesn't add to the functionality, you have to admit that it looks good.

There is one last thing. It's rather clever, excruciatingly smug, and is a perfect demonstration of the reason that Windows and Mac users don't get on with each other. Do you know what the default icon is when you connect a Windows computer to the network?

Keyboard adventures

2008-01-15T08:03:00.000-08:00

Keyboards go through a lot of punishment in their lives. Since my current keyboard replaced the useless one that came with my PC and needed a ton of pressure on each key just to register anything, it's been having a tough time - mostly because of my habit of eating breakfast at my desk and spilling incrementally large quantities of sausage and egg into it. As we were moving the PC about last week we decided that it was now revolting enough to consider cleaning it out. However, this is normally a dull process involving cleaning between and under each key with an awkward implement fashioned from a cotton bud and paperclip. Not being a normal person by any stretch of the imagination, I instead opted to use the dishwasher.

Now, a lot of people think this is a mad idea - electronics and medium to large amounts of water have rarely got on well together. But if you can get inside it and strip out all the sensitive bits, it's all just plastic. (The page about this I first looked at described just throwing the whole thing in, but I felt that this approach was a bit too stupid even for me.) So we got the screwdrivers out and set about dissembling it.

Click to see more, if you're that sort of person.

I honestly didn't know what the inside of a keyboard would look like - I thought it would be a set of little switches fixed to the back and all wired to the cable. In reality the layout is as confusing as the phenomenally awkward computer cases that I keep buying. Once you've undone twelve screws and finally got into the thing, you find a multitude of metal plates and plastic cushioning - the photo was actually taken so that we would have a hope of getting it back together once the process was complete. The first step was to get the cable out so I could get rid of the rest, and this had to be done by forcing three different connectors through the tiny hole in the back of the case - Whitney did this herself as she's far more confident at bashing electronics around a bit than I am.

The photo shows it with that cable off - the circuit board in the bottom right is for the Num Lock, Caps Lock and other LEDs, and most of the rest is taken up by a large sheet of pressure-sensitive film and contacts. Underneath that is the layer of cushion that presses on the contacts when you hit the keys, and with that off, you're left with just the rack of keys at the front. With everything neatly laid out on the table, we put the two halves of the stripped keyboard into the dishwasher along with the usual stuff, turned it on and went to do something else.

The next step was drying it out - even with the dishwasher's drying period some moisture had been left on the keyboard's many crevices, so we blasted it with a hairdryer for a while before I felt confident enough to piece it back together. The difficulty with this part was that even though I had specifically remembered that the cable attached to the top then the bottom half of the keyboard, I was completely unable to remember where it did so - a problem that was only solved through process of elimination as I put the other screws back in. This is where taking the photo slightly earlier would have come in useful. Nevertheless, we got it plugged in and switched on eventually. As I've said before, as long as you know how to put things back together the way they were, there's little danger of destroying them.

Which is why I was worried to discover that it was completely buggered. Everything still felt fine on the surface, but I'd lost the use of most of the bottom row of keys. For a while, it looked like I would have to plug in the old keyboard, but after leaving it open overnight to dry out completely, and spending a frustrating morning putting in every single one of those tiny little screws, it worked perfectly again. Whether it was because of some moisture or due to me not exactly following the original way that the cable comes into the keyboard I don't know (it's like a Chinese metal puzzle, needing to be looped back under itself once it's plugged in to three different places), but it's a relief to have it back - and sparkling clean, as well.

So a final word of advice - if you're thinking of doing this, then it's probably easier to just get the acetone and cotton buds out instead. But if you've got a cheap keyboard and an electronics shop just down the road, there's no harm in trying it.

Challenge and fighting and fighting and challenge

2008-01-12T17:01:00.000-08:00

Seriously.

It's always nice to find MMF2 games "in the wild", as it were - the program doesn't have nearly the recognition that it deserves, and when somebody else on one of the many boards I visit points out a game that was made with it, it feels like another step towards people actually knowing what it is. We do have our poster-boy Nifflas who makes wonderfully atmospheric games that admittedly aren't to everyone's taste, and the release of The Underside at some indeterminate point in the future will probably help out a lot, if only for the "It's Cave Story", "no it isn't", "yes it is" arguing that's already been going on for some months.

Anyway. Somebody called Kayin Nasaki has used MMF2 to open the gates of digital hell and has written "I Wanna Be The Guy" (no relation to Strong Bad) - a platform game that is deliberately unfair and impossibly hard. Naturally this has made it immensely popular, and his demented creativity in trying to create overwhelming opposition at every turn is most impressive. Even the first screen contains a rotten trick within another rotten trick that I had to look up the walkthrough on Youtube just to get past. I am currently very proud to have made it to the third screen.

Have a look at this if your life has been a bit too nice recently

Additionally, I'm going to attempt to start writing a bit more about Clickteam-related news and my work with them (as loose as that term is seeing as it's been about half a year since I did any writing for them) under its own tag, because I know a couple of people from the forum read this and I might even be able to drum up some interest if I go on about it for long enough.

Scotland

2008-01-09T10:55:00.000-08:00

In truth it felt very strange to be back in Scotland after nearly a year away. The two weeks that we spend in Inverurie (formerly Inverury, Nrurin and Inbhir Uraidh) were the longest that I'd been there since July 2006 when I left to spend an awful weekend in London. At that time I hadn't really realized that I wouldn't really be back permanently for the foreseeable future, and just a couple of years before I left, I had no idea what I would be doing with my life. I've very little idea how it all happened. But this isn't going to be a panicked entry about suddenly realizing I'm living three thousand miles away from the nearest Tesco sandwich (something that still hits me for just a moment at least once a week) - I'll save that for later.

Everything was almost the same, but a little unfamiliar. I'm still the only one who knows how to work the various bits and pieces connected up to the TV. My room (which I really shouldn't call my room any more, because it isn't, but it's difficult to let go of these things) still has the same furniture and miscellaneous items of junk in it, only most of it is in bits. The heating manages to maintain Arctic temperatures despite the new double-glazing (although this is probably just because we're used to living on the second floor and having all the heating from the flat below ours). The house windows, as a result of the previously mentioned point, are no longer blue. The house is still in a charming state of disrepair, the new characteristic being that the front door doesn't open unless you twist it in just the right direction. And the family are much the same except a hideous sort of mullet monster seems to have attached itself to 's head. All my siblings are in Melville now. And I'm not.

We walked down the high street a few times, with my mum reassuring me that everything was as I left it while pointing to all the shops and going "That's closed... that's new... the furniture shop's gone... they're being taken over, they're selling the shop, that's gone, that's gone too..." Normal, gradual changes like this seem very large when you haven't been around to see them, but at least they haven't done what they used to do when I was in university and build a new roundabout every time my back was turned.

The visit to Scotland was also an opportunity to visit some friends that we hadn't seen for a while. I don't know if this is a common thing, but the group of people from school that I stayed in touch with after university was almost entirely exclusive from the group that I actually hung around with while inside it (that group formed a band, released an album and then went off to do engineering in Aberdeen).

The only large trip that we went on while there was to Inverness to see Don, who I can't refer to by Livejournal name because he's deleted his. Driving seemed to come naturally back to me after never having driven any considerable distance for two years, without ever stalling or being on the wrong side of the road despite the Fiesta's brake pads feeling like someone had cut gingerbread men out of them. We were headed for the hotel where Don works (which thanks to him we got at the staff rate, thanks very much) - it only took us about an hour and a half to navigate the insane three-lane head-on traffic road that leads there, and we spent a while wandering round a department store in Inverness before coming back to have dinner.

Probably because of being Scottish, I firmly prefer real and inelegant food rather than soup in a tower and rabbits stuffed with pigeons stuffed with quails, but dinner there was actually very nice and only faintly ridiculous. Their only real lapse was the weird sort of broccoli sandcastle that Whitney was given. Even though it's the only food that I actually have a moral objection to, I tried pate de fois gras for the first time because it came with my steak, and I am pleased to inform you that it's absolutely revolting. Not quite as bad, however, as when I realized later on that we hadn't been given any toothpaste and instead opted to brush my teeth with the little bottle of lavender body soap.

If you were just skimming your Friends page, I bet this got your attention.

Back in Inverurie, we also saw some of the older family friends. As usual I was employed to fix the chronically ill computer of one of my neighbours, but I only got halfway through doing that before wanting to format the whole thing and start again. We also saw most of the old church group at the Hosiehoosie - a name which made Whitney laugh hysterically for almost a constant half hour. This prompted us to produce this diagram of what a wild Hosiehoosie might look like. (I'm not sure how large it is, why its mouth is in its leg, or whether that's a trunk or an extra leg growing out of its nose, but maybe it's the actual ingredient of Scotch pies.)

Speaking of food - korma. We went to the Indian restaurant at the end of the High Street, lacking the inclination (and available flat) to go down to St Andrews and get to Jahangir, but I would go so far as to say that the one in Inverurie was just as good. Perhaps, though, that's because thanks to America I'm now used to ordering korma and getting an exploding tomato soup rather than the coconut-based mild sauce it's clearly supposed to be. Ironic that one of the things I most miss about Scotland was in fact Indian, but we also made sure we paid a visit to the chip shop.

I needed an actual break, as opposed to the Thanksgiving week where we were constantly visiting grandmothers, zooming up the length of California, cutting down the builders and arguing with the tree. And after the luggage problem, that's exactly what this was - it's surprising how quickly days go past when you're not really doing anything with them.

Jetlag works better going West, as well - I'm now up at 6:30 each morning and working on some of the large array of music software and hardware that I got for Christmas until I leave for work at the new earlier time of half past nine, ensuring that I'm the first coder in the office by a decent hour.

Gladiators!

2008-01-07T14:22:00.000-08:00

I have about two weeks of past holiday to write about, but before I do that, I bet you'd like to hear about a bunch of sweaty men beating each other up with gigantic cotton buds first. Yesterday we watched the return of (American) Gladiators, which is a bit of 90s television that I'd sort of missed without realizing it.

Each Saturday when I was in school, we'd watch the British version with my uncle (my parents were unsurprisingly never much into it). I had only ever seen a couple of episodes of the old American version, but it was strange seeing how low-rent it was - the British one had spectacular events like swinging from a burning pendulum in Birmingham Indoor Arena and plummeting six million feet onto a crash mat if you slipped, but the American one looked rather like something filmed in a school gym as a joke. The update, though, has fixed that by being so completely overblown that it becomes hysterical - the character roster at the start was clearly thought up by someone who had played rather too much UT3. And it definitely wants to be a programme from the early nineties - it even has Hulk Hogan presenting it. In fact, I don't think I've ever seen anything so comfortable with its own cheesiness. Apart from Hammerfall, of course.

The games were pretty much how I remembered them, though because this is American TV, the whole thing is sped up a bit. Admittedly this is probably a good thing - I remember a couple of events that went on for far too long before, and they've been shortened or livened up a bit here, with most events being different for the male and female competitors so that you don't watch the same thing four times. The amount of conversation is also minimal - each competitor has the chance to spout some ridiculous overconfident clichés before each game, but this just makes it all the more satisfying when they are inevitably minced.

The new series opened with Powerball, which was one of the games that I felt was a bit overplayed, but perhaps just because of not seeing it for fifteen years, it wasn't as bad this time. The monotony of it was also broken by the fact that one of the women bent her knee in the wrong direction shortly after it started, taking her out of the competition instantly.

Joust was another of the old games that featured (which was called Duel in Britain, with "Joust" being a different game involving bizarre rotating bucking horse-things), and was pretty much the same, though the crash mat for all games that involved falling from great heights has been replaced with a water pool - this will probably result in slightly fewer broken necks. And naturally, they weren't always put up against Shadow the boggle-eyed steroid abuser, either. I don't think I'd seen Earthquake or Hit and Run (which really should have been called Bridge of Death) before, though - involving sumo-wrestling on a shaking platform and running over a bridge while dodging hundred-pound swinging weights, Galaxy Quest-style, respectively.

And the trademark final, the Eliminator, is familiar without being the same. As far as I remember. it involves a wall climb, then a new swimming section under (and I'm not joking) a wall of fire, and a net climb while soaked and heavy. This is followed by those hand-bike things that looked totally impossible, the balance beams from near the end of the 90s version, a climb up the Pyramid, and an overhead slide back down. Finally, ropes are now provided on the new steeper Travelator (something that I have only just now learned how to spell), but after seeing the state of excruciating pain and exhaustion most competitors are in by this point, it's not difficult to see why.

To sum up, it's exactly the same muscle-bound daftness that your parents didn't want you to watch fifteen years ago, and something I'll be watching just for the memory of it all. The referee is significantly less Scottish than ours, though.

Zzzz

2008-01-05T15:52:00.000-08:00

I did try to write more over the holidays, but somehow there was never time even though we were never actually doing anything. This will probably become one of those situations where I cheat the LJ system and write about things in the past and then go back to move their dates around.

To summarize, we're back in Boston now, KLM did not lose our bags this time, and I'm exhausted.

Oh, happy new year, by the way. Now I'm going to have to get used to writing '2008' on everything, and I'd only just got used to putting '2007'.

Information

2007-12-27T10:17:00.000-08:00

Information. The Christmas special (or series 4 episode 0) of Doctor Who was on Christmas evening. Information. It didn't look anywhere near as much like an episode of Power Rangers as last time. Information. I was actually rather frightened that the Heavenly Host would be a rework of the Weeping Angels from "Blink", but despite the similar appearance they really weren't anywhere near as good. Information. Getting them to talk like this all the time was all right at first, and was a rather drawn-out setup for what was eventually a funny line, but keeping it going after that was just irritating, as you can see. Information. Russell T Davies seems to be good at doing this to viewers, especially in that frankly stupid Max Headroom Whateverhisnameis death scene. Information. I'd rather like Steven Moffat to write more, because he came up with the Empty Child and Weeping Angels and apparently still hasn't been allowed to use the idea that he really thinks is frightening. Information. He's got three episodes in the coming series, so things might be a bit better. Information. Information. INFORMATION. Who are you? The new number two. Who is number one? You are number six. I am not a number! I am a free man! Bwahahahaha. Bzz, thump.

On the first day of Christmas KLM gave to me...

2007-12-26T19:15:00.000-08:00

...some luggage that had been sitting in the airport since it arrived on Monday but had had all the tags ripped off it, so nobody thought to give it a second look when it was abandoned in the corner of the courier office and we eventually had to send a party to the airport to get it off their hands. They're getting a bundle of receipts from us to make up for our emergency Tesco clothes shopping. The incompetent idiots. Merry Christmas!

Flight Into Terror

2007-12-23T13:37:00.000-08:00

I hate planes. It's something that I've been realizing over the last couple of years after they started becoming a regular feature and problem in my life - before that I had got over my fear of flying at 16 when we travelled by plane to Germany, and I had had no problem with occasionally flying before then. Not even when I spent ten or eleven hours on them flying to California, because at least that was a special event that didn't happen very often. Now, Whitney and I live three thousand miles away from both our families, exactly in the middle between the West coast of America and the Northeast coast of Scotland, and the only way to see either of them is to endure seven or so hours of airborne unpleasantness.

Our journey this Christmas involved going from Boston Logan to Amsterdam Schipol, and then on to Aberdeen Dyce (-With-Death Every Time You Land Here) from there. We were flying with KLM operated by Northwest Airlines, which I was only informed were known as "Northworst" well after we had to phone them up and convince them to seat us together instead of at opposite ends of the plane. Our first flight was at 7pm, and the trip was eventually to end at what would be 5am for us the next day.

To be fair to it, the longest leg over the Atlantic wasn't bad at all as far as flights go. I had loaded up my laptop with Lucasarts games beforehand, and we spent the time playing Curse of Monkey Island, or at least what I could remember of how to complete it because I'm otherwise useless at point and click adventures. And Ratatouille was on, which I hadn't seen before and completely destroys my idea that 3D animation can never have as much charm and character as traditionally drawn artwork.

After seven or so hours of that, we landed in Schipol, and it was there that I began to break down. After a seven-hour flight in a cramped seat breathing air already breathed in by everyone else and in a timeless vortex suspended between night and day (perhaps this is going a bit far), doing it again for any length of time seems like a worse idea than just swimming the English Channel and taking the train up. And it's made worse by Schipol's bizarre security. Instead of one large secure area with the gates behind it, each gate has its own individual security station that comes complete with a massive queue in front of it. After you've trudged to the scanner and had your belongings inspected like some sort of criminal, you turn the corner only to realize that you're trapped in a glass box with no escape route and more people piling in behind you. After a while, a pair of gates at the other end open, and much like a livestock market, the passengers are herded into a tunnel and down to the plane.

And I sat down, closed my eyes for a moment and suddenly realized that we were in the air. I've never slept through a takeoff before, and I thought that it would be a fairly difficult thing to do, but the exhaustion of the day made me achieve something that I never thought possible. But the disadvantage of letting yourself fall asleep is the awful feeling you get when your sleep is cut short, and I felt mildly to critically ill throughout descent (a feeling that wasn't helped by the captain announcing that the runway was a bit shorter than they'd expected so they'd have to slam on the brakes). After landing in wind and rain and going through customs, the journey was finally at an end.

At least, it would have been if KLM hadn't lost both of our bags. We waited at the luggage carousel for a while, with Whitney getting increasingly worried about the lack of bright red holdalls and suitcases coming round. I said not to worry because of the large group of people still waiting, and it was at that moment that the luggage people turned off the lights and went home. It wasn't just our bags that they'd lost - they'd failed to forward the luggage belonging to everyone with a connecting flight.

Now we're sitting at home watching the Top Gear presenters night, and I'm wearing the pair of jogging trousers that I've had on for thirty-six hours along with a dressing gown and "Thing 2" T-shirt scavenged from the bottom of a drawer. Whitney's been out to Tesco already and has returned with some rather decent inexpensive clothing (something that America has in very short supply, by the way). Also among the missing items are a few Christmas presents that we have to wrap, and rather importantly, my levothyroxine pills. The only effect of missing them for a couple of days will be to make me a little more tired and irritable, but at this point I doubt you'd be able to tell.

Heavy Metal Christmas

2007-12-22T07:55:00.000-08:00

I haven't been terribly good at updating this recently, because work has been increasingly mental as we had to get three separate customizations of our software finished for three different legs of the company that we sort-of-now-work for. And this isn't going to be an informative entry either, because soon we're packing up our bags and going to Scotland.

A couple of years ago (but I honestly thought it was just last year), for a Christmas music special I brought you an offensively manic J-pop version of "Let It Snow". To balance that out, here are some unusual versions of Deck The Halls/Joy to the World and Little Drummer Boy by Matt Smith (ace). Unfortunately his band is called Theocracy and he's from Georgia, which most anyone would agree is a combination that indicates worrying madness.

And if you're not in the mood for Christmas music, you could always listen to Skeletor Goes to Mars instead.

Forever

2007-12-18T19:19:00.000-08:00

I just genuinely had to check whether I'd fallen asleep for half a year and woken up on the first of April. But I haven't, and it looks like something unthinkable has happened. They might just be... close to... well, finishing it.

The thought is genuinely beyond my comprehension. I have an issue of PC Gamer from 1998 with a "near-finished" preview of that. Tune in tomorrow at noon where we'll discover just how far and wide 3DRealms' server has exploded from the entire world hitting it at once.

MMORPGs in disguise

2007-12-17T19:14:00.000-08:00

It had to happen eventually. I had avoided them for so long, but as of last week, thanks to so many people on the Clickteam chatroom playing this, I have finally been bitten by the MMORPG ferret. This caught me by surprise because this is an RPG disguised as something else - it's Nexon Kartrider, which is what I'd politely describe as being "inspired" by Mario Kart (but it's still not quite as much of a ripoff as the blatantly plagiarized Crash Team Racing). So as it's just a racing game, everything's OK.

I should warn you in advance that it's impossibly cutesy and manages to be even more bubbly than Windows XP, but if you can get past that without being sick, it's easy to see that it's clearly an RPG underneath. It starts off in the tutorial mode, where you're shown the basic controls (left turns you left, right turns you right, hooray) along with the difficult-to-master "drifting" technique that you'll waste hours of time on before realizing it's mostly faster to just hold Up. Then you're left to run riot, either going straight into the multiplayer mode or trying to complete certain scenarios first.

The scenarios are well worth doing because they give you a decent amount of cash and "RP" (experience points, or "Race Points", possibly). I say "scenarios", but the game's still in the beta stage and there's only one of them at the moment - it tells, in rather broken English, the story of somebody with a rugby ball for a head called Dao who one day wants to become a championship kart driver by using his weird disembodied eyebrows and habit of ending most sentences with a tilde for some reason. It's played out in a visual style that's frankly worryingly similar to Strong Bad's Japanese cartoon, though the game is actually Korean - it's strange how as a country (or rather two countries) they got into online games so much.

Sooner or later you're nudged in the direction of multiplayer, either through your own choice or through scenario missions that tell you to practice your driving against other players. This is where things start to get interesting. The disadvantage with the game, as with all MMORPGs, is that you're forced to compete with semi-literate American skateboarder types. The advantage, as with all MMORPGs, is that you can beat them. After a while, anyway - you're only allowed on the lower skill level "channels" at first, and have to get a sense of where to be cautious and where to zoom ahead holding both middle fingers up behind you before you start to get significant amounts of experience from finishing in a respectable place. More experience gives you access to the higher-level channels, more driving tutorials for advanced techniques, more scenario missions which reward you with experience, and the whole unstoppable cycle continues until you realize you've been playing it for eight hours and everyone else has gone to bed.

There are several different game modes. You can opt to play individually or in teams - the team mode gives you slightly fewer points overall, but might be more lucrative if you get into a good team even though you're rubbish. More importantly, you can either play Speed mode or Item mode. Speed is a pure race - there's nothing but you and other drivers, and your position in the race is determined by your ability to pick the right spots to slide round corners and use your limited boosts wisely (or, failing that, your ability to swerve in front of other faster players and get them to crash into your cheating backside). Item Mode, just like Mario Kart, gives you the standard array of banana skins, water bombs and various other items of warfare with which to irritate the other players. Most of them have the effect of slowing them down to a halt several different ways so that you can cruise past them while they wave their fists at you Dick Dastardly-style, but there are a couple of more interesting ones like the Magnet which can be used to give you a great advantage if you fire it just at the nanosecond where you can see the race leader ahead of you on a long straight.

You'd think that the monotony of it would be a problem after a while (there are, at a guess, about fifteen tracks, five of which are decent) but it isn't - it's the promise of the ever-closer Level Up and, after a few of those, the next "Glove Colour" to show off to people that come with them that make it addictive. Not to mention that with just a couple more first places you might have enough money to buy the new kart that you've had your eye on. MMORPGs represent a world in which what our parents taught us to ignore now matters the most - material gain and being measured by no more than a number. I'd recommend that you create an account and download it yourself, but obviously you're above that level. Aren't you?

Unbelievabili-T

2007-12-13T09:29:00.000-08:00

This morning, two of the trains on the line I take to work managed to excel themselves beyond all expectations and hit each other. So after taking the Green Line as far as the underground section starts, where we were moved to another train that got two stations before giving up as well, and being redirected to a shuttle bus that eventually weaved its way through traffic to Park Street, I decided to give up and go home. Particularly as there's meant to be a bit of snow this afternoon and they've never been very good at dealing with that either.

And Charlie was looking as optimistic about it as ever.

I'll write about something more interesting than trains soon, honest.

Insani-T

2007-12-07T12:33:00.000-08:00

I know that you're going to think I'm a bit sad, but I've been recording the train arrival times at Park Street on my way home from work for the last couple of months, for the benefit of those awful bigheads on the community (and please remind me to edit this bit out before I cross-post this there). Basically, the Green Line is split off into four sections designated by letter, and everyone thinks that their train is always the last to arrive. So I've been putting this together to see what really happens - as you'll be able to see, my travel time back from work is fairly arbitrary, so hopefully this will give a decent impression of train times across the evening. My train is the C-line.

Date									Arrived	Left At	Waiting
26 Sept 2007	B	D	E	C					19:00	19:08	00:08
x:fmla="=A2+1">27 Sept 2007	D	B	D	D	E	C			18:45	18:58	00:13
x:fmla="=A3+1">28 Sept 2007	C								19:11	19:12	00:01
01 October 2007	B	D	B	C					18:56	19:03	00:07
x:fmla="=A5+1">02 October 2007	D	C							18:52	18:55	00:03
04 October 2007	D	B	C						19:20	19:26	00:06
x:fmla="=A7+1">05 October 2007
06 October 2007	B	D	C						19:07	19:13	00:06
09 October 2007	C								18:55	18:56	00:01
x:fmla="=A10+1">10 October 2007	E	B	C						19:10	19:13	00:03
11 October 2007	B	D	C						19:22	19:26	00:04
12 October 2007
15 October 2007	B	E	C						19:03	19:05	00:02
16 October 2007	C								18:59	19:12	00:13
17 October 2007	E	C							19:15	19:18	00:03
18 October 2007	B	D	E	C					19:25	19:31	00:06
19 October 2007	B	D	E	B	C				19:36	19:42	00:06
22 October 2007	C								19:06	19:07	00:01
23 October 2007	D	E	D	B	C				18:53	18:58	00:05
24 October 2007	C								19:08	19:11	00:03
25 October 2007	D	D	B	C					19:20	19:26	00:06
26 October 2007	D	B	E	C					20:04	20:12	00:08
29 October 2007	B	C							19:20	19:24	00:04
31 October 2007	D	C							17:24	17:28	00:04
01 November 2007	B	E	D	C					19:26	19:32	00:06
02 November 2007	D	C							19:22	19:27	00:05
05 November 2007	C								21:18	21:21	00:03
06 November 2007	B	D	B	C					19:11	19:18	00:07
07 November 2007	C								19:05	19:05	00:00
08 November 2007	C								18:49	18:50	00:01
09 November 2007	B	C							19:33	19:40	00:07
10 November 2007	B	C							19:36	19:38	00:02
13 November 2007
14 November 2007	B	D	B	B	E	D	D	C	18:49	19:00	00:11
15 November 2007	D	B	C						18:15	18:20	00:05
27 November 2007	C								18:37	18:39	00:02
28 November 2007	D	C							19:19	19:22	00:03
29 November 2007	E	B	D	B	C				19:15	19:22	00:07
30 November 2007	C								19:02	19:03	00:01
03 December 2007	C								20:13	20:13	00:00
04 December 2007	E	B	C						19:58	20:06	00:08
05 December 2007	B	E	C						19:01	19:04	00:03
06 December 2007	D	B	E	C					19:18	19:21	00:03

I apologize for the utter abominability of the table HTML, but Excel spits it out like that and it's rather difficult to go through and correct. Basically, from this lot, several things are apparent...

The rotation of trains is actually remarkably fair - 32 times out of 40, none of the other trains arrived twice while I was waiting.

Similarly, C arrived first 11 times out of 40. That seems fair enough to me.

Everyone thinks the B train arrives more than the others, and this seems to be right (it arrived first 14 times out of 40) - this is logical because that line has a stop every four inches and it takes hours to get to the other end. It's not a huge difference, though - both C and D are close behind with 11 first arrivals each.

The E-train passengers are the ones who should be annoyed, as their train arrived first only four times so far, and has never arrived twice while I've been waiting.

The longest I've ever been waiting was 13 minutes, during the times when the train is stuffed with people in red shirts going to watch the baseball, and the average wait for me is just under five minutes.

So in conclusion, we've really nothing to complain about. Apart from those three mysterious gaps you see in the table - those are the times when the red line train failed completely and I never got to Park Street at all. (Once because of a small fire in a bin, the second time because of a "police investigation" at Kendall, and the third time because I just couldn't stand it any more.)

But we've now reached winter again, and I'm anticipating the T having as many problems with a millimetre-thick layer of snow on the line and some slight dampness as they did last year. I'll make sure to keep this going and see if there's as much of a difference as I think. Of course, they try to reassure us that everything is all right in their adverts (this one from a billboard a couple of years ago).

It could be just me, but I don't think that they noticed the tone that I get from that advert - doesn't it seem that the model is actually trying to hold back laughter at looking at the claim that the T's winter schedule is in any way reliable? Additionally, the train is on the right hand line, which means that it's actually leaving rather than arriving (something all too common in the mornings when five trains limp past in the wrong direction for you before the first one you saw comes back). The rather large chasm between this and what actually happens was enough to convince people that the MBTA were in fact living in an alternate reali-T.

If you friend this community I'll stop going on about it

2007-12-03T16:18:00.000-08:00

There's a new article on that might interest anyone who was as traumatized by Sierra-style adventure games as I was. And still am.

Overdone meme #94

2007-11-30T20:12:00.000-08:00

What's in your copy-paste buffer at the moment? Hit Comment, hit Ctrl+V and submit the resulting gibberish to me. Just if you feel like it. I found this on a Google search for myself (shut up) and the results are often entertaining. And probably entirely fabricated.

If you're wondering, mine contains "Darkpaw". I don't know why, either.

Are you prepared to fly on a magic carpet?

2007-11-28T21:01:00.000-08:00

I think that the recent downtime on FA (three completely separate issues within half an hour of fixing each other at last count) has driven one of the forum admins insane.

Just a theory.

I'll get you, Ben Croshaw

2007-11-28T12:09:00.000-08:00

NOTE: The cutscenes in this game are VERY gory and bloody, so this game is not for the squeamish. Alternatively, you could read the walkthrough before you play the game, so you won't be surprised.

I can't begin to describe how little of the mood of the game this shows.

All things considered, I should probably have heeded that warning. I had known about the 5 days a stranger series (or, as it actually seems to be called, the Chzo Mythos) for a while, but when mentioned that they had been created by Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw of Zero Punctuation (who is very funny in a Marcus Brigstocke kind of way) it got my interest up enough to play it. And I have now been severely traumatized by an innocent-looking point and click adventure game.

The first in the series isn't too bad on the nerves. It's a bit tense at the same "ooh, this is a bit strange" level of most episodes of Doctor Who (i.e. those not written by Steven Moffat) but isn't likely to generate nightmares. You start off as a cat-burglar planning to loot an old mansion. Little does he know, however, that it's actually a DOOM HOUSE that is possessed by the ghost of what will later become known as John DeFoe - who takes the form of people when they touch an idol kept in the living room and gets them to kill others while wearing a welding mask and apron. And the warning on the download is slightly misplaced, as there are a couple of deaths, a body at the bottom of a swimming pool and a small amount of blood, but nothing like the wanton carnage that you're asked to prepare for.

This is a bit more like it.

Then I moved on to 7 Days A Skeptic. Unusually for a direct sequel, this game is set four hundred years after the original and on a spacecraft, which led me to believe that it would be entirely different from the first game. I was wrong. Shortly after the game begins, the crew recover John DeFoe's remains, which were shot into space shortly after the events of 5 Days A Stranger, and roughly the same thing starts happening to them. One of Yahtzee's favourite tactics, it seems, is to show your characters having nightmares. He's done this four times so far in the series, and the annoying thing is that I have not seen a single one of them coming.

The first part that really got me was just after the obligatory section where the hero is accused of the murders and locked up. In the middle of your protests, the possessed body of the captain wanders in behind your captor, breaks her neck and sets you free. Through some frantic clicking, you eventually force the monster into the cell where you were trapped and close it up. And then you wander off to warn the others. Except I went the wrong way, into the maintenance decks by mistake. Realizing my error, I turned around, opened the door and he appeared right in front of me. A scream and a shock cut to my character being strangled, and it was Game Over.

Once Whitney had peeled me off the ceiling, I somewhat foolishly decided that I would be able to continue, after looking up a guide to tell me exactly how to avoid things like that happening. But Yahtzee hits you with three things in a row. After the encounter with the possessed captain, the others decide that it's probably a good idea to escape, and go to sleep while the only available pod is refuelled. (Quite why an emergency escape pod needs a few hours to warm up is never really explained adequately.) In the morning, unsurprisingly, only two of the three remaining crew members turn up. Your character goes down to investigate the doctor's room, and finds what can only be described as a slaughterhouse, with a stitched-together torso abomination on the floor and spare limbs neatly arranged on the bunk bed. You would think that the similar scenes in Silent Hill would have been worse than this, but there's something about the clear pixelled artwork here that disturbs me immensely.

So after seeing that, you grab the key, run out of there as fast as possible, get back to the escape pod, open it up to discover that it is no longer there and are sucked out into space. I died here, and as my last save was before I went into the doctor's room, I decided I'd better stop. Then checked around the flat before going to bed in case anything was just around the corner with a machete.

However, I decided to face my fear and play it again on the way to work today. Passing all those scenes quickly, I got very near to the end, knew exactly what I had to do, approached the door to the captain's room, and the Welder burst out of it and stabbed me to death in much the same way as the captain had earlier. I'm not playing it again.

Recovering from Holiday

2007-11-26T13:09:00.000-08:00

I have somehow survived the Thanksgiving week, and I'm now working at home taking a break to get over the holiday. I finally got to see again during the last day we were there, which was just about the only span of more than an hour that I had to myself over the past week and a half, but it was slightly marred by the nagging thought that I would soon have to get on a plane for six hours overnight. Daytime flights seem to waste more time, but there's something about knowing that you won't really be able to sleep with any degree of comfort for at least 24 hours that makes flying at night seem a dreadful idea starting the day before it happens.

So when the time finally came in the evening, we packed the van, climbed in and began reversing out of the driveway, whereupon the car instead shot forwards and demolished the garage door, which was a bit of a surprise. After some attacking it with a hammer and some pliers to get it back into a reasonable shape, it was eventually straight enough to close again and the journey went ahead otherwise as normal. My time waiting for the flight was spent wandering the entire length of the airport in search of Vitamin Water, which was eventually found in the shop opposite where we were sitting in two of its most revolting flavours.

Despite being overnight, the flight back was rather more comfortable than the flight there. This is largely due to my small, yellow and slightly illegal friend Temazepam - with its aid, I was able to go into a hypnotic sleep for about four hours, during which I unfortunately experienced the aural illusion of Dragonforce's entire first album being played in my right ear. I can't describe to you how nice a feeling it is when you wake up from a half-asleep stupor, half your hands numb from lying on them because the only comfortable sleeping position is slumped forwards dead on the tray table, look at the monitor and see your plane landing.

However, I won't be able to experience that in Britain, because temazepam is a class B drug there and I'll have to once again attempt to sleep unaided on the plane in a month. I can't understand why it's one of the most abused prescription drugs, as all it does is send you to sleep, with some unpleasant side effects such as memory loss, motor impairment, headache, muscle weakness and memory loss. The jetlag has hit me in full force today, but strangely, throughout yesterday I found myself perfectly alert, able to play the guitar rather better than I had previously and didn't experience any of the confusing hallucinogenic side effects of temazepam at all. Then I swallowed the television and went to bed.

On holiday - Part 5

2007-11-24T13:37:00.000-08:00

Whitney's family have very strict and unbendable traditions for Thanksgiving (the day that the British give thanks that several boats pushed off and gave the rest of them some more room). It begins with a potato and egg breakfast, followed by a film, then a board game, then a traditional dinner of... seafood stew. Because they're vegetarians, you see.

This year, after altogether far too much debate about the subject because there really weren't any good Thanksgiving films out this year (whatever a good Thanksgiving film is), we went to see Hitman. Now, it's true that I share my dad's taste for really stupid films (Independence Day, Van Helsing, Mortal Kombat, and so on) but I genuinely think that the reviews for this film have been rather harsh. I would actually go so far as to say that it's the best game to film conversion so far, although let's be honest, competition in this field is not fierce. And I haven't played the game for more than about ten minutes over at Craig's when we were in sixth year of school, so I don't really know anything.

I had only been aware of Timothy the Oliphaunt since Die Hard 4, in which he was rubbish. But here he somehow works, because much like Roger Moore he is only capable of one expression - that of mild annoyance - and that translates rather well into being totally emotionless. The plot involves Scottish Bloke, English Bloke and Russian Bloke attempting to find Agent 47 as he performs various hits, but beyond that is not incredibly coherent. And it's not as if he would be very difficult to trace. "Tall. Bald. Barcode on head." It's true that the film is just one gunfight after another, but you couldn't expect any more, really.

The board games came out next, and in a variation on the traditional theme, they were both DVD-video games (something that I hadn't seen since the likes of Atmosfear about fifteen years ago). These were Scene-It and Jeopardy.

On a technical level, I was quite impressed with the Jeopardy game. It uses three infra-red "buzzer" units which communicate via IR to a large battery powered "game unit" that doesn't appear to contain anything at all, which passes on signals to the DVD player via an IR transmitter that is velcroed to the DVD player's IR receiver. Understand that? Keep going, it gets better. I'm not certain of the memory on DVD systems - I had thought that they were just flowchart-style menus with very little room for actual variables, but this keeps score and keeps track of subjects chosen from a six-by-six grid throughout the game.

However, where it falls down is how they've chosen to ask the questions. The only quiz game that did it competently was Trivial Pursuit on the Commodore 64, which was brave enough to rely entirely on the judgement of the other players to decide whether you'd got a question right or not, which was perfect - otherwise you're working with parsing hundreds of multiple possibilities and deciding whether a misspelling is close enough. This goes for having multiple-choice answers - and while that's not disastrous in itself, the possible answers they've chosen make even the difficult questions extremely easy. For example:

This composer wrote Eine Kleine Nachtmusik. What is...
a) Mozart
b) Beans
c) An abdominal muscle

Osiris was the Egyptian god of this.
a) The afterlife
b) Biscuits
c) Hairdos

So the best way to win the game became the "Stab furiously at the buzzer until it recognizes you" tactic, followed by ticking the obvious answer. Although there were a few bombs in it where you were supposed to know the height of a dam in Kazakhstan or the like. The other disadvantage to this game is that when we opened the DVD player drawer it was no longer there, and said player is now out on the table with the disc presumably lodged in its innards until someone can find whatever star-shaped tool is needed to unpick the insane star-shaped screws on the sides.

Scene-It is actually much better - it has a far simpler DVD system than Jeopardy did (and I'm glad I've got that out the way, because it's an incredibly awkward word to spell), relying on just a menu to select different categories from, from which questions are chosen at random. And the correctness of an answer is decided by the other players, with tie-breaker questions also provided. It's a quiz about films, which I don't really know much about (see opinion of Hitman, above) but has enough observation-type questions to make sure that pretty much everyone has a chance.

Then there's the meal in which everyone eats far too much, then bed, followed by tree-hunting the next day. I may write something about that, but seeing as I'll be on another six-hour flight within twelve hours my capacity for writing entertainingly is not fantastic.

Back from Los Angeles

2007-11-20T19:31:00.000-08:00

By the way, I should probably mention that all the entries I'm going to post over the next couple of days are from the past - I've spent a few days at Whitney's grandmother's house without Internet, and it's amazing how isolated it makes you feel when you normally rely on it so much for communication. So I'm going to get around to answering any emails (which I need to do, at great length) soon.

On holiday - Part 4

2007-11-20T16:26:00.000-08:00

Today, I got up (not through choice) at about 6am in worry about the coming car journey. Scavenging the house for food again, I found some fat-free milk and half a decaying sandwich from yesterday. Then, at about half past nine, we set off - six people in the car, Whitney and I relegated to the back seat as something approaching cargo because nobody else can fit there, and four hundred miles ahead of us.

I don't think that I've ever had a car journey that lasted more than about two hours since my family used to drive all the way down Britain to catch the ferry over to Germany, but strangely, it didn't really feel that long. Californian roads have a strange speed limit that is something like the average between the actual posted speed limit and whatever everyone is actually doing, unless an obvious unmarked police car is nearby in which case everyone goes as slow as possible. So, at a more or less constant 80 miles an hour, the distance flew past. This journey is something that Whitney's family do quite regularly, but I wouldn't care to experience it again if I can possibly help it.

This is the route.

Now we're finally at Whitney's parents' house, where they're constantly stressed about their increasingly stupid builders - they're having their bedroom rearranged, and this involves moving a couple of other walls around. Whitney's cupboard has moved across the room and everything is coated in a thick layer of dust that we've just about got through. We'll have about two days with nothing incredibly hectic on the horizon, then a trip to get a Christmas tree, which the brothers are always incredibly picky about (it absolutely must be an inch above arm's length to be the right height for the ceiling) and involves a lot of struggling and falling over. This would be a strong contender for the most stressful holiday ever if my own family hadn't insisted on going down to St Andrews most years when I was in primary school and packing six people into a caravan.

On holiday - Part 3

2007-11-19T09:22:00.000-08:00

Good morning grass, good morning coconuts. After some confusion as to the plans last night, Whitney and her parents have run off to Disneyland leaving me and rest of the Geriatrics Club behind (Cameron has twisted his ankle, Drew has a cold, and I am slowly going mad and can't cope with lack of proper Scottish food such as meat, fat and gristle). The trouble is that in a house owned by someone who survives entirely on yoghurt drinks, there isn't really any actual food - I did attempt to scavenge some breakfast from upstairs, but I can't recall quite how many years the Cheerios I found were out of date.

It appears that we're going to spend the day watching the worst television in the world - at the moment Jerry Springer is on and has a lot of people with silly accents standing around forgetting their scripted lines and occasionally hitting each other with chairs, but not quite enough for it to be entertaining. And then there's four straight hours of Home Improvement.

Added at 6pm: In the middle of the Transformers film. Send help.

Life in the city, living in L.A.

2007-11-18T17:54:00.000-08:00

I've just realized several things. I'm in Los Angeles, surrounded by rather obscene wealth. Somehow, this has made me realize even more that nothing is the same as it is in Britain - the Scotch pies I used to like from Fisher and Donaldson are unknown (in fact someone had to ask me what "pie 'n' chips" were the other week - I was unable to begin explaining it to someone who had no idea of the concept). Nobody here understands what cricket is, and I've no idea about the rules of most American sports - American football in particular seems like a large-scale violent version of Backgammon. And I'm constantly lamenting how rubbish American television is compared to what I miss in Britain, particularly now the writer's strike is set to eliminate all the virtually identical police dramas that fight off all the virtually identical vote-off-by-week reality programmes.

In other words, I've become the Sherrif of Huddersfield.

On holiday - Part 2

2007-11-18T08:55:00.000-08:00

I think it's fair to say that nobody in the family was particularly enthusiastic to go to a cocktail party for the over-80s, but it wasn't too bad an experience - in particular, it featured the most expensive-looking buffet that I am likely to see in my entire life, and we all stuffed ourselves with the gigantic pile of sashimi.

And today, we went down to an all-you-can-eat brunch buffet, where everyone made themselves ill and then had to suffer the indignity of the Toilet Attendant. This is something I haven't experienced before - he hangs around outside the cubicles, sprays your hands with soap when you approach, hands you some paper towels and then expects a tip for it. I can't describe to you just how incredibly awkward it is.

One of the advantages of Whitney's grandmother's house is having a pool outside, and we swam during the evening, with me discovering that I can now just about manage twice my official badged swimming length - five metres. Never really having learned to swim is quite embarrassing at this stage, seeing as if you fell into the water while dead you would probably float five metres faster that I can swim it.

Tomorrow we were going to go to Disneyland, but nobody feels up to it any more. We might even drive up back to Whitney's parents' house instead. Five and a half hours on the road - you couldn't drive anywhere near that length in Scotland, you'd fall into the sea. And I wouldn't be able to swim.

On holiday - Part 1

2007-11-17T18:11:00.000-08:00

I feel like I've just been transported back in time about three centuries. At the moment I'm sitting in Whitney's grandmother's house, in a room that many years ago used to be her mother's bedroom and still looks like part of the set of Blackadder the Third. We're here for a few days to go to the other grandmother's 80th birthday before we drive up the road to the Bay Area to spend the rest of the week.

The six-hour flight over was undoubtedly not the most horrendous experience of my life, partly because I had prepared myself by putting several tons of British TV onto the iPod I got from them last Christmas. I used not to mind flying that much after getting over a fear of it that lasted until I was about sixteen, but now that I've flown so regularly between various parts of America and Britain I've become aware of just how dull the whole experience always is. My work laptop is now unable to help because its two batteries are almost entirely shot and have a combined capacity of about 11% of what they originally had. So I sat watching Father Ted, while Whitney's brother slowly slumped further and further into the aisle, scaring many small children.

Then something that only happens in films happened - one of the air-hostesses came on the loudspeaker and asked if there were any doctors on board, because we had a passenger with a medical emergency. This was followed by a lot of running about with defibrillators (which no matter how serious their use, is still a ridiculous word that sounds like something out of a Roald Dahl book). His condition undoubtedly helped our flight land faster, because we came in very sharp and there were ambulance crews waiting for our arrival. However, he walked off by himself when they came to get him, so he wasn't as dead as they thought.

Long Beach Airport looks like what could politely be described as a concentration camp. I thought that Aberdeen's airport was small, but this is just a tiny hut surrounded by some planes - even the baggage carousels are relegated to outside the building, next to a tall fence with loops of barbed wire across the top and tannoys mounted on every spiked fence post. After we grabbed our bags I was half-expecting some Daleks to turn up and escort us off, but Whitney's parents picked us up before they could arrive.

And now my internal clock is hopelessly confused, I'm falling asleep in the middle of the day, have no idea what anyone is saying or what's going on - so things are pretty much normal. Time to go to the cocktail party.

23

2007-11-15T17:11:00.000-08:00

I don't know if I ever mentioned this here before, but around the end of school and the end of university, I was convinced that the number 23 was following me around. Several significant dates in my life added up in some way to 23, I had locker number 23 in the Purdie building, I found one morning that someone had stuck a "23p" label to my doorframe, and so on. Yes, exactly like that film, so mentioning this would probably have had a greater impact if I'd mentioned it years ago. I was shocked enough to discover that that was what it was about yesterday. And now I am 23, so either it's going to be very good or utterly terrible.

As it happens, today I was honoured with the entirely new experience of receiving absolutely no presents on my birthday. Work was hectic (and because of the wonder of the Internet, still continues to be hectic, seeing as I'm sitting on the sofa with the laptop and debugging things from home) because catastrophic faults in the system always emerge 24 hours before we send it off to the client, and the weather outside was drearier than Scotland has ever managed, so it was quite hilariously gloomy all round. Still, let's look on the bright side - tomorrow I'll have a six-hour flight, followed by a cocktail party for the over 80s the next day, then a six-hour drive through a featureless barren desert to get to Whitney's parents' house.

Happy birthday, . Happy birthday, Glenn Barry from Kamelot. Happy birthday, Mrs Hill who was my teacher in fifth year of primary school. Happy birthday, me.

Eternally fighting, but carried side by side

2007-11-13T07:57:00.000-08:00

I'm making steady progress on the guitar after nearly two weeks at it, and can play a significant amount of Iron Maiden's worst song, The Angel and the Gambler (which Steve Harris must have written to make up for some sort of A-chord deficiency). Watcher in the Sky was also quite simple once I realized that I was playing it from the wrong end. In fact, a lot of things that you'd think to be very difficult are actually reasonably easy once you've tied your fingers into the right knot, but currently I'm stuck on attempting the B minor chord, which is like a miniature version of Twister.

I'm also surprised that after however many years of its existence nobody has invented a way to denote rhythm in tablature yet - that's a pretty major deficiency for a musical notation. As it is, most writers of the ones I've downloaded just put a fairly arbitrary amount of spaces in between each note and hope that you've already heard what you're trying to play enough times to emulate it.

I finally created an account at last.fm last week, too, though at the moment I can't recall why. I let it upload my recent playlist just before realizing there were a lot of hideously embarrassing things from DDR on there, and have pieced together a playlist of some favourite bands, but haven't got around to linking my account to anybody else as yet. I've noticed that if something goes wrong with the online radio, you get the information page for a prog/death metal band from Spain called "Undefined" (which could hardly have been a better way of getting recognition if they'd thought it up intentionally). And while looking around the default links from my account's charts, something leapt out at me on the page for the jazz pianist David Newton...

I wrote that. Fair enough, it's got a grand total of one play worldwide, it's there because of the system's inability to differentiate between songwriters with the same name, and is naturally unavailable on the site itself - but I have a song on last.fm!

Oh dear

2007-11-07T11:33:00.000-08:00

I know that finding yourself laughing at code is a sure sign that you should book yourself into the nearest mental institution as soon as possible, but I had to save this quite frankly incredible offering from the Java forums here. This leaves me in the uncomfortable position of either posting something that will appear as gibberish or having to explain its utter hilarity from my viewpoint, but I'll just hope that people will understand its quite astounding uselessness.

package javaapplication3;
import java.io.*;
public class Main {
    
         public Main() {
      }
    
         public static void main(String[] args)throws IOException
      {
           int count=0;
          String w= "today is a short day";
          for(int m=0 ; m<w.length()-1 ; m++)
          {
       
 
           count++;
             }
          System.out.println(count);
     
      }
    
}

As one of the regulars said: "This has to be the best example of reaching one's left hand around one's backside to scratch one's right ear (and not even quite reach it) that I've ever seen. Classic!"

One Year

2007-11-06T12:53:00.000-08:00

I've now been working here for exactly one year - and it doesn't actually feel anywhere near that long, let me tell you. Maybe it's because I no longer have the handy year-by-year separation that you go through in virtually every other year of your life before finally having to get a real job.

Since arriving on the first day and going straight into C# for the first time on a plugin that someone had half-written and then abandoned, I've been moved up to sitting where the lead consultant used to be, working on the main system that we develop, and being in some way responsible for documents involving complex safety procedures for a rather large petroleum company. (So if half of America disappears under a giant oil slick in the next year - sorry, my fault.)

And even after all this time, I keep on discovering new things buried away in the heart of the system. One of the highlights recently was the comment that read //Probably don't want to do this, but the real question of the day is what on earth a Cacodemon is doing hiding in our install of a set of wiki software under the name "dummy.gif".

The Continuing Quest for a Decent Korma

2007-11-03T19:23:00.000-07:00

Korma became one of my favourite meals in fourth year of university, just in time before I moved to America where it can't be found anywhere. If you haven't heard of it, it's a nicely mild curry made with coconuts and occasionally cashew nuts as well. Indian restaurants in America sometimes have something that they call "Korma" on the menu, but it usually fails to resemble anything that I've previously experienced.

The "Coconut chicken korma" that I ordered tonight sounded promising, but after the Night Owl delivery man had braved the icy winds and storm outside to deliver it, what I found inside the bag was a small tub that contained a tomato-flavoured thermonuclear device. I did attempt to re-engineer the stuff by boiling it up with some cream and a spoonful of coconut sorbet, but I was totally unable to get it to calm down to something I could comfortably cope with, spooned out the chicken pieces, and detonated the rest of the liquid in a controlled environment. I think I'm going to have to accept that Indian restaurants here just haven't got the hang of it.

Additionally, why did no-one inform me that Top Gear was back on again? I've got three whole episodes downloading now and another one about to become available on Sunday.

E A D G B E

2007-11-02T09:59:00.000-07:00

This morning I did what no human being in possession of all their faculties of reason has done before, and sent a praising comment to the MBTA. My journey home was interrupted last night by someone who had clearly not watched Robbie (see yesterday) and had distributed themselves over a wide area of the rails near Kent Street, preventing the train's progress until the police and fire crew had finished cleaning/mopping up. And the driver of the train I was on, rather than providing the endless stream of "We will be moving momentarily" that I've experienced before, told us exactly what was going on, what we were waiting for and gave us the option of leaving immediately if we didn't want to wait. Which I did, and walked home, beating the train to Brandon Hall by five seconds.

But what's really exciting is that a couple of days ago, Whitney ceremonially paid for a guitar for me. It's an early birthday present/slightly late Christmas present, and I hope to finally get around to learning how to play more than a few bars of a few songs like I've been saying I will for the last four years - an ambition previously made difficult by my guitar being three thousand miles away. It's a Johnson strat copy, which was recommended to me by Rockin' Bob (which is a fantastic name for a guitar shop, and right across the road from work) as a good cheap starter. So I've been following an online lesson - and along with an increasingly steady performance of the chromatic scale that is slowly driving Whitney mad, I've covered six chords, which already puts me above the ability of Fred Durst. The only disadvantage is that the lessons I'm going through have me playing a significant amount of decidedly pickup-truck-driver music.

I might be starting off at a bit of an advantage, though, because one of the instructions on the fourth lesson of the beginner's tutorial I downloaded reads (and I'm paraphrasing a bit, but I promise you this is what it says): "To hold the guitar correctly, place the body on your leg with the neck parallel to the ground. If there aren't any strings under your right hand, turn the guitar over." Perhaps the lessons are a bit lower-level than I thought.

Scaring them straight

2007-11-01T09:26:00.000-07:00

Some weeks are just difficult, and this is one of them. Here are some horrifying videos that you might recognize if you grew up in the UK at the same time I did.

The community has been sitting dormant in my Friends list for ages. (The name comes from an old preschool TV programme with Fred Harris (or Chocabloke) about... a yellow machine with a weird bass voice, I think, but it's impossible to describe most programmes I watched growing up without sounding as if I've taken a decent quantity of hallucinogenic drugs, so this tangent is stopping here.) I was very pleased that someone finally posted something in it in celebration of Halloween yesterday, but rather horrified to find out what it was.

In the 1970s, the BBC saw fit to create a number of "public information films" to show to pupils to prevent them from doing anything too deadly. They did this by inciting severe trauma unequalled by any horror film that has ever been written, and showing them in schools well into the 80s. Each of them started out with a selection of happy but rather stupid children, who were then killed off in various ways throughout the film as a result of being unable to recognize the dangers of farm equipment, railways, crawling into ovens, holding lit fireworks, and so on. The one behind the link above is "Apaches", which was one I had never actually been shown even though we lived in an area that was surrounded by farmland. I've only watched bits of it, but it seems to be about as grim as I would expect.

The one that I do remember is Robbie, which was responsible for me being terrified of trains for a length of time that lasts pretty much up to "now". This was actually designed as a less graphic alternative to an earlier film called The Finishing Line involving a series of deadly sports-day style games played on a railway track, clearly written by someone with a mind rivalling the Jigsaw Killer. (NB. I have not watched the film behind that link, and if I were you I wouldn't either.) Anyway, Robbie was more traditional and straightforward, involving just crossing a railway line carelessly. There were numerous versions of it, and I'm certain that the one seen by the author of that Wikipedia article had been sanitized somehow, because I distinctly remember having to watch as an oncoming train approached and cut the titular character into about twelve bits.

Building Sites Bite is another one that sounds familiar but I can't actually remember watching, probably because I had my eyes closed throughout its duration. This video's token dimwit was called Ronald, and involved (not surprisingly) killing him off in a building site. Except it had a unique twist - after he died, other characters in the film would resurrect him each time and send him back to experience multiple deaths such as burning, burial, drowning, explosion, incineration, and a whole host of other things. A bit like Dante's eighth circle of hell. And all accompanied by a Knightmare "Life force draining, team" style heartbeat sound whenever it was recommended that people who wanted to keep their sanity should close their eyes.

And in the small amount of investigation I did into the minds behind these films, I found that one of the writers (the man responsible for "Apaches") also starred in a Doctor Who story called "The Reign of Terror". How appropriate.

Upset stomach, upsetting Americans

2007-10-30T10:42:00.000-07:00

A while ago, I joined a community for people in and around Boston (sensibly titled ) in the hope that it would let me know more about the city in which I have somehow come to live (and to provide more to read on my Friends page when nobody updates). Unfortunately, all it's taught me so far is that everyone here is very loud, very stupid and/or very rude. I've been meaning to take it off for a while, but when it occasionally throws up gems like this it's difficult not to want to see the reaction.

You can get a pretty good idea of the attitudes of most of its members by just looking at the rules: "Snark is okay! This is b0st0n. We are cynical and sarcastic. Deal." Translated out of the bizarrely abbreviated way in which most Americans speak, this seems to say "We're a shower of insufferable bastards and if you don't like it, that's your problem." A take on life that many people may also say applies to the entire country.

As you can probably tell I'm not in a particularly good mood at the moment, because I'm lying in bed off sick from work due to a touch of some sort of stomach flu. In fact "a touch" is something of an understatement - I thought I had had stomachache before, but it had never previously felt like being stabbed in the stomach from both directions while the fattest xenomorph in the world forced its way out of my navel sideways. I hope it's not something that I ate that caused it, because I only had a filled bagel last night, and scrambled-egging myself to death would be one of the most embarrassing ways to go ever.

Crystal Towers 2 - First Boss

2007-10-29T08:02:00.000-07:00

Well, I have to say that I'm beginning to regret not buying a whole lot of furniture last Spring. But at least Boston's decisive win against Colorado in the World Series (which doesn't actually invite competition from more than one country) means that there won't be any massive crowds of people in red shirts during my commute home in the next while. It's almost enough to get you to start caring about baseball - I'm only vaguely aware that it's nice that a team that previously seemed to be totally useless have won twice in such quick succession.

For carefully thought out attention-getting reasons, I'm going to stop putting Crystal Towers 2 progress posts exclusively in its own journal and include them here under a tag instead (I'll backdate them when I shovel over the rest). To give the best impression of what the game looks like to date, I have hit a new low and posted a video on YouTube.

This video shows a weekend's work on the first boss of the game, which I finally sat down and wrote after weeks of not doing anything. Most of the graphics are yet to be drawn, but it shows what the general gameplay of it will be like, and I'm rather pleased with the result. Bosses are very difficult things to program, needing a complex attack pattern based on several different states and branches, but I think this is the most competent one that I've done yet. The only bit of this one I'm not totally happy with is the large length of time that it spends just sitting on the ceiling if you destroy all the bouncing bombs quickly, so I might have to think of something to do there.

You can also see two transparent areas on the left and right of the playfield, which restore the magic points you have available. Usually you restore your magic in-game by picking up white vials, but this situation needs something to allow you to rapidly get back to full magic and back to attacking again, but I don't want them to make it too easy (particularly as you can also use magic to heal yourself, and if you have an inexhaustible supply the boss becomes impossible to lose to). I could either disable curative spells or make them affect the boss as well so that there's a disadvantage to using them. I may replace the restoring fields with one "magic field" that floats from left to right, then reduce the hit points of the boss a bit to balance things out.

The eventual goal of the game is to find eight instruments and restore music to the Music Castle (an idea that I only noticed I'd stolen from Zelda well into making the game). The instrument carried by each boss is random, and as luck would have it, on that attempt I got the only one I hadn't drawn. The name of the instrument is chosen at random, too, which explains the strange names that appear at the end of the video.

I'm an exceedingly large cake

2007-10-25T17:09:00.000-07:00

! This.

(NB. To everyone else - This will probably make no sense)

(NB2. To everyone not in Britain - This will probably make even less sense than that)

Actually, additionally - since when has Livejournal had these HTML previews? I'm sure they weren't there when I was at work, so it must have been about an hour at most.

Pomposi-T

2007-10-16T18:41:00.000-07:00

Dear The MBTA,

Over the past two weeks, my evening commute on the T has taken up to 45 minutes longer than usual. During this time I have been routinely trapped in broken-down trains with the doors locked, either in stations or in darkened tunnels with no means of escape, with no information other than that a "disabled train" is stuck ahead of us and that we will be moving "momentarily". (This use, while I'm on the subject, is wrong - a grammar refresher for your drivers might be in order.) Having seen most of a train's occupants having to force their way out of a train and band together in refugee groups to organize taxis to Park Street, I wouldn't describe your treatment of paying passengers as anything short of appalling. The contempt that you are showing to them by assaulting them with the new tidal wave of advertising that you've dubbed "T Radio" - simultaneously going back on your agreement with the subway performers - is similarly despicable.

I would discontinue my use of your comically inept service, but this isn't an option for me because the Green and Red lines remain my only way of getting from one side of the city to the other (the buses being mostly immobile in Boston traffic even if they somehow manage to stick to the correct route). I can only respectfully request a refund of my subway pass for the month of October, as your trains are only occasionally capable of actual movement and therefore I can no longer consider them a mode of transport.

No regards
DavidN.

Did I let them off too lightly?

Resident Evil 4

2007-10-15T07:56:00.000-07:00

We've started playing Resident Evil 4 now. I had never played an RE game before getting it, but and said it was good, so I was confident enough to buy it without any further knowledge of what it was like.

It stars an American agent called Leon, who looks only slightly like he's in Duran Duran. The story so far involves investigating a small village in Spain in connection with the kidnapping of the President's daughter, because the Europeans are up to no good as usual. On arrival with some police officers with outrageous accents, Leon wanders towards the village, goes into a hut and asks the inhabitant for directions. And gets a knife in the face. And seeing as this is Spain and not Glasgow, he realizes that something's not quite right.

This is where the issue of the controls arises. At first, they feel absolutely dreadful - to give you some idea of what it looks like at the start, Leon takes up a large proportion of the front left of the screen, making it feel a bit like a first person shooter with your own head blocking most of the view. He seems to run diagonally forwards meaning you have to aim a bit to the left of where you're expecting to go, and aiming your weapon is a matter of accidentally shooting the sky, then the ground, then eventually hitting where you were intending to shoot.

But after a couple of practice fights (and largely due to a side mission early on which involves finding and shooting some blue medallions scattered around the place) things suddenly and inexplicably seem to work. You get used to where you're pointing, what you can see, and how to aim without taking out a large portion of the floor and ceiling first. When you're not running around and shooting, there are brief set-piece sections that resemble rhythm action games, having to press buttons at the right times to dodge Indiana Jones-style boulders and harpoon an undead version of Moby Dick.

So far, most of the game feels rather like playing a Simon Pegg film. You spend your time getting Leon to commando-roll out of ridiculously high windows or perform superhuman leaps off towers, kicking zombies in the head until they explode or alternatively shotgunning them in the chest while they're carrying lit dynamite, causing them to fall over and then explode. Even though it's said to be "survival horror" I'm not finding it particularly frightening (unlike Silent Hill, which terrifies me to pieces). You've often got more than enough firepower to deal with the hordes of the undead coming your way, with the only exception so far being the man with the sack on his head like the scarecrows out of Doctor Who, who is intent on chainsawing your head off and refuses to die, or re-die, or whatever it is that Spanish zombies do.

Again unlike Silent Hill, the enemies you face drop useful items such as suspicious health-restoring herbs or extra ammunition. Quite a lot of the time, they leave behind little treasure chests, which doesn't make much sense unless they're zombie pirates. I had wondered at first what money would even be used for in a game like this, but that was answered at the beginning of the second stage where a dodgy man with an even dodgier accent turns up with a coatful of lethal weapons that you can buy from him. This eventually becomes central to the game, getting different upgrades and weapons by using your money rather than having a small fixed set of weapons like in Silent Hill, and trying to stuff them all in your attache case Tetris-style.

I should say, finally, that I don't like escort missions in games. In fact, no one in the world likes escort missions - they always involve trying to protect a particularly dim individual or vehicle that trundles along merrily ignoring all the obvious orc/alien/Soviet/chav/Greenpeace ambushes in its way, trying desperately to clear a path ahead of it and then looking back only to realize that it's been squashed by a falling snooker table in your absence. And after the first couple of sections to where we've played so far in RE4, the game seems to be one giant escort mission as you try and get the President's daughter out of the village. But she's intelligent enough to duck out of the way of your gunfire, doesn't go off on ridiculous failed-pathfinding routes around the other side of the map, and you can even tell her to stay behind for a moment while you busily exterminate the zombies and clear a path. Overall, even the escorting seems to work. And that's probably one of the highest compliments that you can give to a game.

From life's RPG log - Part 2

2007-10-13T12:41:00.000-07:00

Well, some people found the first one of these funny. I also plan to make a real entry out of this, because last night was a real adventure (the kind that makes you want to kill people).

> DavidN has arrived in Davis Square Station.
> Waiting...
> Waiting...
> Train arrives.
> Train defends itself with Broken down and going out of service!
> DavidN almost attacks Train.
> DavidN finds Driver instead.
> Driver is found to be clueless.
> Waiting...
> Train begins to move.
> Train is stuck just after the station.
> Another train arrives.
> Another train is stuck just before the station.
> DavidN rolls against Judgement.
> DavidN's Judgement is Really Catastrophically Dreadful.
> DavidN takes train home anyway.
> Train has arrived at Porter Square.
> Train has left Porter Square.
> Train has arrived at Harvard Square.
> Train has left Harvard Square.
> Train has arrived at Central Square.
> Waiting...
> Train has left Central Square.
> Train has actually stopped one carriage away from Central Square.
> Waiting...
> Driver attacks with misuse of the phrase "we will be moving momentarily"!
> Waiting...
> Waiting...
> Waiting...
> Driver attacks with misuse of the phrase "we will be moving momentarily" again!
> DavidN attacks Doors.
> Doors are impervious to damage.
> DavidN moves stealthily down the carriage towards the emergency intercom.
> DavidN is spotted!
> DavidN initiates Passenger Uprising!
> Passengers demand to be let out of their steel prison and get a mode of transport that moves.
> Driver gets permission to back up.
> Train is defeated.
> Doors open.
> The party has moved to Central Square - Above Ground.
> DavidN hails taxi!
> Hail unsuccessful!
> DavidN hails taxi!
> Hail unsuccessful!
> DavidN encounters Seth.
> Seth joins the party.
> Seth hails taxi!
> Hail unsuccessful!
> The party encounters Graeme, Laura and Jen.
> Graeme, Laura and Jen have joined the party.
> The party heads for Kendall on foot.
> Graeme hails taxi!
> Hail successful!
> Laura and Jen have left the party.
> The party has moved via taxi over the Longfellow Bridge.
> Graeme has left the party.
> The party has moved via taxi to Boylston.
> Seth leaves the party.
> DavidN attempts to board train.
> Doors attack!
> DavidN is hit for 50 damage!
> DavidN's normal commute recommences at nine o-fscking-three in the evening.
> MBTA loses ability "Legitimate Mode of Transport".
> DavidN loses ability "Self-Control".
> DavidN finally gets home and orders a decently large pizza.
> DavidN attacks Pizza.
> Pizza is defeated.
> So is DavidN.

You're in trouble if your hit points don't bubble

2007-10-12T07:54:00.000-07:00

First of all, are Roysters still around? There's no indication of the above advert line ever having existed and I'm starting to think I just imagined it. And I'm quite looking forward to having meat-flavoured crisps again when I come back to Scotland for Christmas (tickets booked today) - American crisps are very different and come in gigantic bags rather than a large plastic packet with child packets inside them.

You're also in trouble if you go off on that much of a tangent before you even start your point, which is this - after just about a hundred and thirty hours, we have completed Final Fantasy 12. The final boss isn't difficult at all if you've spent any amount of time on the hunting side quest - true, he has three different forms compared to FFX's almost ludicrous anticlimax, but he's nowhere near as difficult as even the low end of the top hunts.

The strangest thing that even after playing it, I'm still not certain if it even had a main character - it's a bit like FF6 in that respect. Apparently they had the characters worked out for a while but switched between who was meant to have the focus, and it shows. Throughout the FF series starting from 7, you had one character that you considered as the "player" and almost always had in your party. However, these characters have got less and less leader-like throughout the series - in FFX the point of the story is that you were clueless about the world you'd suddenly been thrown into along with Tidus. In FFXII, you have Vaan alone in your party for a good portion of the beginning, and he's the one that you control in town areas, but once the plot starts up he never really plays more than a sort of Arthur Dent dragged-along-by-accident role.

The other thing that stands out is the difficulty. Gradually the games have been getting easier over time, with FFX in particular being a bit of a joke. This one isn't as easy as that (you're likely to see the Game Over message in more than two places), and for the most part they've balanced out the lenient way you can swap people in and out of your party at will with enemies to match your abilities. But there are a couple of sticking points. For the optional megabosses (the replacements to the infamous Omega Weapon of FF8 and so on), they've gone for testing not so much your ability as your patience with ridiculous endurance matches against things ranging from eight to fifty million hit points. I didn't bother with the top two of those as I thought by that stage that there were better things I could be doing in the evenings, like catching up with the sleep I lost while fighting all the others.

And to counteract the inflated hit points of the enemies, there's almost too much of a reliance on advantageous spells, after them being almost too underplayed before - in previous games, you had to spend an entire turn for each spell, but in this, you can have them continually cast and ready before you encounter anything. That means that there's no reason not to have them on all the time (Bubble, which doubles your hit points, is particularly vital during the last stages and it feels more something that's a disadvantage when it's off rather than advantageous when it's on).

The ending, though, is as amazing as you'd expect from Square, and genuinely nail-biting at a point where you've spent over a hundred hours with the characters. You genuinely just want it to be over and for them to make it out alive, while there's a tense inappropriately comical air when the token British smeghead Balthier moans about how it's always up to him to save everyone. Although the game wasn't afraid to laugh at itself in several other places - if you talk to one of the people next to the Rabanastre gates quite near the end of the game, he'll start talking to you about all the "spoony bards" coming through. The several days worth of time we spent playing it was definitely worth it even though the series has been going a bit strange.

This is the last post about Final Fantasy 12, I promise. Now on to Resident Evil 4.

Prisoner of the Red Line

2007-10-11T08:16:00.000-07:00

"Attention passengers. This is a test of the public address system. This is only a test."

That message was being looped over the speakers at Park Street with a one minute pause in between, calling us for attention in exactly the same way as it says when a train is about to arrive, but then telling us to pay no attention to the message. Additionally, I've heard that the MBTA are experimenting with piping appalling music into the underground stations in an effort to break the will of their imprisoned passengers and prevent further uprisings. If this is just the beginning, I predict that we'll be seeing several Michael Douglas-type rampages taking place in Boston soon. Most of them by me.

In addition to that, one elderly gentleman sitting next to me noticed my exasperation at the continual non-messages and started reminiscing about the time they'd found a bomb in Alewife station and delayed everything for two hours. Once I replied to that, the same thing that happens when I talk to anyone in this country happened, and soon he was off about his distant relatives in Scotland. The train was arriving at this point, and it seemed rude to wander away to another carriage, so in what was perhaps karma coming back from last week, I found myself stuck with the Boston One-Man Boring People To Death team.

There really was no escape as he bounced from Scotland to immigration to the Iraq War to American history to road-building techniques and back, and his way of shouting over the noise of the train meant that most other passengers in the carriage were watching us as I nodded and "mm'hmm"ed my way through the tidal wave of gibberish that lasted all the way to Davis Square.

Defending against the onslaught wasn't my immediate concern, though. That was the fact that I still had several pages of ZZ Studios up on my computer and had rather been relying on the time on the Red Line to sanitize my Internet history before work. Always plan ahead for this kind of thing.

Four Thousand Words About Me

2007-10-07T08:08:00.000-07:00

Once upon a time, there was a meme going round that invited you to post a comment and receive a list of some of your interests to explain. I did this twice, getting lists from both and . As if the doubly long list (with a couple of overlaps) wasn't enough, when I'm interested in something it's very difficult to get me to stop talking about it, and what was meant to be a quick meme turned into this monster of an entry, with a list of explanations and thoughts in almost alphabetical order. I hope some of it's interesting, and that you don't notice my criminal overuse of parentheses too much.

Albion

This is a German science fiction RPG from the beginning of the CD-ROM era that's always been rather special to me. I wrote a lengthy post about it for (which needs more contributors, by the way - have a read of it), and I'm going to copy and paste blatantly from that to describe it.

The game begins as a huge mining ship arrives at an unexplored planet, with the plan to pull it to pieces and ship it back to Earth to replace its natural resources. A pair of Germans (Thomas and Rainer - a partnership of names dangerously close to the membership of Modern Talking) venture out in a scouter to inspect the desert world, something goes awfully wrong, and they're forced to crash-land - where after waking up, they discover that the planet is not a lifeless desert as they had thought but home to an intelligent race of vaguely catlike creatures, the Iskai. One feature of the game that was amazing for the time was that you don't just interact with them directly as the storyline dictates - you can go up and talk to anyone at all and learn about their job, life history or anything else about their society. A wide variety of topics come up - diet, the way they grow their buildings from plants, laws and traditions, their biology, sexuality, anything.

About half the storyline is taken up by trying to find the landing site of the mining ship and exploring the world. During the course of this, thanks to the massive amount of thought that's gone into writing about this other race, you gradually discover more about the planet, getting to know its places and people, and in a way, falling in love with it. Stop laughing, I'm serious. Then, halfway through the game, the storyline suddenly turns around with a catastrophic twist, and asks you to save it from disaster. By the stage the real plot emerges, you've learned enough about the world to genuinely care what happens to it. And there's something about the way it does that, as annoying as the combat and vague as the game is, that has an enormous charm to it - something that not many games have ever achieved. It's available for download here.

Black Books

This was a series that started in 2001, I think, on Channel 4, and was unique among the channel's output at the time in that it was actually funny. In fact, in hindsight I would call it one of the best comedies that British TV has ever come up with. This is mostly thanks to the critical mass of eccentricity produced by Dylan Moran and Bill Bailey. Graham Linehan, who wrote Father Ted (see below) was one of the original writers, and his surrealism is very recognizable for the first few episodes, but the programme managed just as well without him for the next couple of series even if it waned slightly at the end.

TV Links has all of the episodes. If you've never heard of it, I'd recommend watching "Cooking the Books", "Grapes of Wrath", "The Entertainer" and "Elephants and Hens", but it's very difficult to choose between them.

Father Ted

And this is what Graham Linehan was doing a few years before Black Books. In a similar setting to all his programmes, it involves several men and a woman of varying degrees of social incompetence - this time a group of priests that have been sent to an Irish island because of being considered unsuitable for anywhere else (Ted because he stole money from a charity, Dougal for being... braindead, at best, and Jack for being a mad old man who sits in the corner and shouts "Feck", "Drink" and "Girls" in strict rotation). But it's difficult to explain it without making it sound too simple. Even though I've seen some episodes of it too many times - the "Plague" episode with the rabbits is particularly overplayed - there are some moments in it that still never fail to make me laugh. Unfortunately Dermot Morgan died of a heart attack the day after the third series finished, so only about twenty episodes were ever made. However, Graham Linehan never seems to let his programmes go on for long.

A video of the programme was part of the "British Culture Box" that I kept in my room in second year to introduce Americans to British programmes, and I think it was always one of the highlights. (No one ever understood Knightmare unless they'd watched it growing up.)

I should mention that I'm still confused by Graham Linehan's latest effort, The IT Crowd. It's a programme that I really want to work as it's meant to appeal to people like me, but it just doesn't gel together anywhere near as memorably as the above two series. The actual storylines of the episodes have decent ideas, but the dialogue is often dreadfully written and atrociously overacted. You can hear some of his trademark surreality coming out, but it sounds forced, like someone trying desperately to be him ("A bus was shouted at"). The second series has been mildly better than the first, but I still think that it's definitely the worst thing that Graham Linehan has ever done. (However, saying that isn't really saying much compared to most of Channel 4's other content).

And the "nice screensaver" line was funny.

Clickteam

The company that made the Multimedia Fusion series of graphics-based authoring tools. (Or just "game creators" if you don't want to dress it up.) I've worked for them in the past, doing some tutorials for the Learning Resources section of their site, and am about to take part in the Java conversion of their runtime. Even though I honestly believe that MMF is the best of these programs available at the moment, they've still not achieved much more than a cult following and moderate success as an educational software company. Hopefully with the new interest generated by developments like hardware acceleration and the potential to export MMF-made programs to multiple platforms, they'll be able to achieve the recognition that I believe they deserve.

Clickteam's site, which I failed to include in the text, is here.

DDR

Not the former East Germany, you understand, but the Japanese rhythm action game with the same initials. It was one of the first rhythm action games to gain popular recognition, even though the competing "Pump" series was actually thought of first. It involves stepping - "dancing" would be stretching the term beyond all reasonable use - on four panels arranged in a cross shape to the beat of manic J-pop (or, if you play the Euromix version, cheesy Euro-pop instead). And I don't care how stupid you might look doing it - it's fantastic fun. The introduction of this game to the student union games room is probably the only reason that I wasn't spherical by the end of third year of university, and it's started to become part of exercise programs, too - classes based around the game have started for it (and importantly, this is somewhere other than Japan).

Unfortunately I didn't get the chance to play it much at all in fourth year and am very out of practice - I could fairly comfortably pass nine-foot rated songs before, but now I struggle on the sixes and sevens without dying. It's a bit embarrassing to explain, but it gets worse, because of the forty-two possible interests that the two of them could have picked, the next one on both lists was...

Furry

So thanks a lot to both of you for trying to get me to talk about it. This is one of the most awkward and difficult to define terms on the entire Internet (and, by the way, I'm surprised you haven't heard of it if you've spent more than an hour on it). I know that there are several people even on my own friends list who will come in and offer several hundred ways in which my definition is wrong. The reason for that is that it's a cover-all term - it stems from a generation of people who were strangely overattracted to characters like the Cadbury caramel rabbit and Maid Marian from Disney's version of Robin Hood (which you were - this is not negotiable). If you don't grow out of it, it can manifest itself as anything from just enjoying anthropomorphic-themed artwork and other things (see Albion, above) to actually dressing in fur-suits - but to be honest I always find those immensely frightening no matter how much work goes into creating them. (The lion-woman on the right is by "baroncoon" - it took me ages to find something pretty but tasteful.)

I don't know if I would actually define myself as one personally, because that tends to imply that you have a character or form of your own, and being unable to draw in communities like this renders you pretty much invisible. But I discovered last week that I was on this list, and they know everything. I have become rather disillusioned with the community recently because even though it's meant to be a fictional perfect world that can only really exist because of the Internet, it was made out of hate for the real world and populated by people who are rejected from society by what I have to admit are usually extremely good reasons. Those being that if you talked to them in real life you'd be tempted to give them a swift punch on the nose after about five minutes of talking to them.

I should add that when searching for the Cadbury advert above, I came across Minerva Mink, who seems to be pretty much the American equivalent of her (some of that video, I promise you, is absolutely scandalous - the highlight comes at 3:10). These things mess with your head permanently. Anyway, why did I agree to take this meme? I think I've avoided answering this quite well, so I'll move on.

Prince of Persia

Is fantastic. The original game, written by Jordan Mechner (who apparently lives down the road from Whitney's parents), was most notable because of its fluid human animation that was very realistic for the time. Without the techniques of motion capture and rotoscoping that are available today, these were just achieved by the author studying films and photos of his brother performing the actions in the game and copying the movements.

The game itself is also unusual, even today, in that most of the challenge comes from mastering the controls and the game engine (most other games try to make the controller as invisible as possible). If you've genuinely never heard of it, it's a side-on platformer, but calling it a "platform game" doesn't sound right at all - it's a race through twelve levels with an hour-long time limit, and as such is the first game that I can think of that was ideally suited to speedrunning. Which I did, constantly, for several years of university.

I don't play it nearly as much as I used to because I hit a plateau of getting a time of 42:20 remaining (the official world record stands at 42:24), but I always meant to go back and redo my video of Prince of Persia in 20 Minutes so that it was actually watchable. I'm not too keen on the idea of the new ones, though, purely because they've tried to give it a new look that it never had before and turned it into Prince of Linkin Park. Jordan had this to say about it: ""I'm not a fan of the artistic direction, or the violence that earned it an M rating. The story, character, dialog, voice acting, and visual style were not to my taste." Hooray for him. Now write us a better one, or I may be forced to do it myself.

Silent Hill

(I gave up on finding an image that represented the series as a whole, so used this one by somebody called foreverdelayed at DeviantArt.)

This is another game series. I'm not usually into horror, but this series manages to mess with you on a psychological level so much that you just have to respect it. I played the first game on a "promo only" CD that one of 's friends had acquired (entirely legally, apparently), and had to rely on him and my youngest brother being employed as atmosphere-ruiners to be able to play it even during daylight.

One of the most impressive aspects of the game are the puzzles that appear throughout - they're vague enough to be challenging, often relying on the player interpreting a poem or set of apparently unconnected clues together with items in their inventory, and make you feel fantastic when you interpret them correctly and manage to get past. One of my favourites was the music room in the school from the original game, where you had to examine the verses of "A Tale of Birds Without a Voice" to work out the sequence of keys to press on the piano.

The series appeared to go a little downhill in the third series, with more of an emphasis on combat - and this is the one thing that the series isn't really good at. You always play as normal people rather than the military types featured in the Resident Evil series, and this is a major part of the weakness and vulnerability that you feel during the game. Most of the time in the first couple of games, you were relying on nothing more powerful than a shotgun that your character could only shakily handle. In the third game, they happily threw in a sub-machine gun as well, and quite a lot of the background scare factor is lost when you can blast oncoming monsters into next week rather than have to creep around and hope they don't see you. The puzzles in this edition also seemed to try too hard to be like the ones in the first (in Hard mode), and they went far too over the top, requiring insane abstract reasoning and an encyclopaedic knowledge of the Complete Works of Shakespeare to be able to get past the bookshop at the start of the game. (My whole family was in the front room trying to work that one out.)

The fifth one is on its way, and already contains something called Siam, which looks like the wrongest thing that the writers have ever come up with (and that's really saying something) - like Voldo from Soul Edge/Blade/Calibur but with all the wrong body parts. After the fourth one went in a completely different direction (I've never played it, but apparently it really isn't much good at all), it looks like the new team might be keeping its promise of going back to what made Silent Hill the way it was.

Something Awful

This is one of the sites that would like to think that it runs the Internet. It went downhill quite a lot since I put it on my interests list, and I haven't read it recently because of their strange decision to turn the front page into something that resembled Yahoo News. But let's look on the bright side - it's still nowhere near as bad as 4chan and the like (although perhaps I'm just saying this because I don't have access to the forums). I used to read it primarily for Ben Platt's film reviews, which were frequently hilarious, and Photoshop Phriday (a weekly forum thread to do up Photoshop images based around a particular theme) came up with some really good material, as well. You won't be surprised to learn that my two all-time favourites were the visual pun ones, both for computer terms and items from the news.

I suppose that one of their most recognized contributions to culture in general is the fifteen minute Doom House film, which was made after they decided they were fed up of reviewing terrible films and made their own instead. Oh, and that funny-ten-years-ago All Your Base song was done by a group of people from their forums calling themselves The Laziest Men on Mars.

Sonata Arctica

Surprisingly, this was the only band that was picked out of the number that I have on my interests list. I used to think that there were two distinct forms of power metal - the German style which is harsher, led by powerful choir vocals and medium-paced (e.g. Gamma Ray, Iron Savior), and the Finnish style, including Nightwish, Stratovarius and Sonata Arctica, which concentrates more on being as fast as possible with more of a classical influence behind it - but the two blur together so much that it's difficult to tell where one begins and the other ends. Sonata Arctica, however, fell firmly into the speed-classical category for at least their first three albums - they're one of the more instantly likable bands that I listen to, and as such gained a lot of popularity even a few years ago when power metal was relatively unheard of.

An extremely unlikely thing about the band that is nevertheless true (and I bet that Dragonforce would have absolutely loved to have this happen to them) is that they're so speed metal that a sound engineer thought that the master copy of their first single was running at the wrong speed and slowed it down before releasing the first batch. These days they have calmed down the speed and moved into a more medium-paced style for the most part, but the wintery sound of their music is still very apparent.

One of the unexpected uses of Youtube is for listening to music, as so many people set things to dreadful "AMVs" (anime music videos) stitched together in Windows Movie Maker. As such, Kingdom for a Heart is just about the most appropriate thing ever to use in a video of Kingdom Hearts - and while I'm on the subject, Modern Talking's Witchqueen of Eldorado is just about the most unexpected.

Other recommended listening from one of their later albums includes White Pearl, Black Oceans, which is quite possibly the most powerful song they've ever written, and (don't laugh) The Boy Who Wanted to be a Real Puppet, which despite the stupid title is very memorable. You can safely ignore the video on that last one.

My brother also pointed out to me that the chorus of Picturing the Past describes the story of Zasalamel from Soul Calibur strangely perfectly.

He cannot live neither die in this world
Burning sensation inside, you know how that hurts
Making up for the crimes of your life
With scythe as your sword, you must fight 'til the end of time
So I first thought that Zasalamel must have been a character from somewhere else that they'd both appropriated/written about, but I can't find anything on that so it appears to be just a strange coincidence.

They're also going to be in an upcoming RPG called Winterheart's Guild, in which you play as several members of the band in a post-nuclear winter Finland. An idea almost as inappropriate as Shaq-Fu. However, you can't deny that they have an excellent logo, even if they're beginning to look a bit like Nickelback these days. (I get the feeling saying that's going to cause a few comments.)

ZZT

Not a band with huge beards, as many people seem to think, but another game creation system. It doesn't stand for anything, instead being named that way so that it would appear last in all alphabetical bulletin board lists at the time of its release.

ZZT was written by Tim Sweeney and was the beginning of Epic Games, the team that's now known for Gears of War and the Unreal Tournament series. A lot has changed in fifteen years, as this shareware action-puzzle-adventure game was entirely composed of ASCII characters in the sixteen-colour screen mode used by DOS. And it was actually great - female ring symbols became keys, arrows for blocks you could push in limited directions, Ö characters for bears (see the resemblance?) and the like built up a fairly large puzzle-based game world.

But the most significant bit was the editor, and the ZZT-OOP language inside it. Actually, Tim Sweeney never expected the editor to become the most popular aspect of the game, which showed quite an astonishing lack of judgement - limited though the language itself was, it was a new idea, and the way of having each object with its own individual procedure means that writing things like basic artificial intelligence and unique behaviours is made very easy (more so than even most modern environments).

I made only a few releases under ZZT, mostly rather linear adventure games, but a couple were a little more significant. One of these was "The Mercenary", which began as a project in a different game creation system that was abandoned because I decided that what would be mediocre in Megazeux would be impressive to cram into ZZT's limits. And sure enough, it won the last Game of the Month award (the last because the admins were fed up of the usual cheating and controversy the Game of the Month caused). "ZZT Crime" was a tutorial pointing out some common mistakes made in ZZT games and how to avoid them. It was liked by some (though is the only one I can name offhand), but I'm not totally happy with it, mostly because it's obvious that the text was written by a sixteen-year-old idiot version of me (one board in particular is notorious for its message that is totally different from the one I had intended).

The last game I released under ZZT was "Castle of ZZT", which was finished in 2006 (I was waiting for delivery of new computer bits and ZZT was the only thing my laptop could run with any degree of reliability). This is definitely the one that I'm most proud of, but it wasn't without its problems either - strangely, after a while sitting in the upload queue, I checked on it and found that someone had replaced it with a sabotaged version, with a lot of boards entitled "Third Floor" and "Free Will" leading to a different ending. My name had been left on it. It was most strange, and quite honestly a reminder of why I moved on from the site in the first place.

However, the community is rather special on a personal level because it was pretty much my introduction to the Internet - even though it was in about 1997 when Scotland finally invented a way to connect to it, there was still a very active community surrounding the game. I wrote an entry on my general experience with it a couple of summers ago, and while the community is now really just a ball of in-jokes that happens to share a name with an old DOS game, it's still going strong. Look at the Wiki, too - their list of in-jokes tells more about it than I ever could.

I should probably add "Going on about things for hours" to my interests list, too.

You wait ages for a bus, and when it comes, it's on fire

2007-10-06T07:52:00.000-07:00

Let me tell you about the horrors of yesterday evening.

As usual, I came down to Davis Square station, which was unusually crowded for 6:30. This sometimes happens when there hasn't been a train on for a while, but isn't anything special in itself, and it wasn't long before one came and we all squeezed on.

It wasn't until it took us ten minutes to get to the next station (a short walk down the road) that it emerged that something was dreadfully wrong. We stood paralyzed in a tunnel just before the platform for a while, then the announcer came on and said that they had some traffic problems ahead because of a fire at Park Street, the central station where I change over to another line. This was when I began to get worried, but stayed on the train because of the constant reassurances that we would be moving "momentarily" - this added grammatical torture to the experience as well, but was unfortunately quite accurate because from that point to the next station, we never succeeded in limping more than about a carriage length at a time.

It was then that I got a bit fed up, and decided that if I was going to make it home before Sunday evening, I would have to overcome my fear and hatred of buses (a condition brought on by taking a sleeper-bus to England a few times and being on too many when I used to travel between Dundee and Aberdeen in first and second year of university). So I left the train and went up to the surface, where I waited about twenty minutes for a bus to bother arriving. (Nevertheless, I would later find out that this was a very good choice).

As the bus tried with difficulty to navigate through the traffic (nobody knows how to drive in this city, there are no road signs and everyone is on the wrong side of the road), I had a decent conversation about Doom with the skater dude next to me, who recognized what I was playing on my laptop. Apparently, even though the bus seemed as slow as the train, that was its perfectly normal operational state. With some guidance as to where to get off to be nearest the Green Line, I eventually got to Coolidge Corner to see an entire pilgrimage worth of people stranded there waiting for a train to arrive. At that point it felt best to walk home - another journey that had taken me double the normal time.

But when I looked up the various Boston news communities, it turned out that I was the one of the people that had made a good decision. Later on its journey, when crossing the bridge from Kendall to Charles/MGH over the river, the train had stopped for about forty-five minutes, doors locked, with only the constant reassurances from the driver that they would eventually move. After an hour of this, driven mad by the heat, cramp and her misuse of "momentarily", the passengers formed an uprising against the MBTA oppression, forced the doors open and walked to freedom. (The story behind the link happened in the morning - so it's rather incredible that a repeat of the situation happened hours later).

Now, if Park Street had been a blazing inferno, I could possibly have understood the reason for this complete breakdown. But according to the news sites that I looked at, the gigantic incident at Park Street was a small fire in a bin that a station employee stamped out with his foot. Apparently there was also a bit of smouldering plastic that found its way on to the line, so they had to turn the power off and on again, but this hardly accounts for the delays that they were experiencing last night - something else must have been going on while the MBTA officials were cheerfully saying to the media that service was never affected. Unless Boston is now genuinely this scared of terrorism, light boards, batteries, fire and twigs. We might as well just give up and hide under blankets.

Crystal Towers 2 - New Display

2007-10-02T07:56:00.000-07:00

The only thing worse than not updating for months is pointing out that you haven't updated in months. I'm thinking of just merging all the posts in this back into my standard journal under a tag, actually, as they're so few and far between that it isn't really worth the bother of logging in and out to post in it!

Anyway. The thing that I'm really excited about at the moment (and you'll think this is pathetic) is the rearrangement of the counters and icons around the play area.

Before

After

It's amazing just how much a few blue boxes can bring the look of a game together and stop it looking like a load of counters plonked onto the playfield. The best bit is the score and health displays - they expand to give room to each counter as they need them! No one's ever going to notice, but it's the little things that do it...

After that I went on a transparency spree (even though I did think that it made it look a bit "Crystal Towers 2 Vista" at first) and did a fade-in/fade-out that I copied from FFXII for the pause menu as well instead of filling the screen with really quite ugly scanlines that I copied from Kingdom Hearts.

Fight fire with fire

2007-10-02T07:32:00.000-07:00

I have developed a new tactic for dealing with the clipboard patrol. Boring them to death.

Last Friday I was halfway across the zebra crossing from the sushi place (who now actually recognize me, proving that not everyone in Davis Square has their brain erased overnight after all) when I looked up to the pavement opposite me to see a girl in a blue T-shirt with a shining zit-like piercing in her nose and a grin that was several times wider than her face. I had been trapped. She had seen me, eye contact had been made, and being in the middle of the road, I had absolutely no route of escape. Even worse, I didn't have any prepared dismissive things to say. These people are getting better.

But as I approached and she began her prepared speech about what a hard time the MBTA are having with their increased fares and rubbish drivers, I realized that the only way to stop her from speaking to me was to fight back and talk myself. As she handed the standard blue propaganda folder to me (I've no idea what she thought I could do with it, as one of my hands was full of takeaway sushi) I looked at the front and then launched into everything I knew about the issue on the cover, the Big Dig - mostly that bits keep falling off it and hitting people. And then I remembered about the renovations that were happening on the D line, and invited her to talk a bit about those, interjecting with my own thoughts on the buses, then in typical Scottish fashion, started talking about the fare increase and how it was still only a quarter of what I would pay if I still worked in Aberdeen...

It felt slightly cruel after a while, but I was actually trying not to laugh as I thought up more things to say about the T (any incident that I had had in the entire year I've lived here) and droned on and on about them - I found myself unintentionally speaking in a slower, more ponderous voice, which helped a lot as I thought up the next thing to say about the lack of ticket machines on the C line or the drivers that squish you between the doors when you're not expecting it. By this point, in a wonderful role reversal, I could see her eyes darting around to the sides trying to find some means of escape from me. Eventually I ran out of breath, steam and imagination, and she managed to get a word in again. "Well, you're clearly familiar with our issues..."

"I am. Thanks a lot for your time," I said, shook her hand again and walked merrily off before she had a chance to realize what was happening. It didn't save me any time, but it felt fantastically ironic, and besides, that's ten minutes less that she could spend bothering other people that day.

Liven up your pages!

2007-09-28T10:32:00.000-07:00

They could have chosen a better example to demonstrate "livening up" your pages...

Be More Than Just a Number

2007-09-27T07:46:00.000-07:00

Whitney has been watching a lot of Numb3rs recently. Even though I insist on calling it "num-three-ars", I find the idea of the programme very interesting - it's different from all the other police dramas in that it includes the use of often slightly stretched mathematics to solve each week's particular crime. But after seeing a couple of episodes, I suddenly realized that the whole thing was bizarrely reminiscent of an 80s schools programme called Wondermaths (which has an opening theme incredibly similar to Look Around You's parody of schools programming).

It's likely that not many people will have heard of this programme, as I was the only one to genuinely watch these sorts of things while everyone else grew up with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (or because we were in Britain, Censored Watered-Down Hero Turtles) or the like - it was an schools programme that had a science fiction setting to it, with a guitarist called Christopher Lillicrap (that's his name, honest) playing the part of Zak in a ghastly shell suit, accompanied by a woman named Stella and a wedge-shaped robot called Hudson that meeped annoyingly in a weird sort of nondescript European accent and constantly bumped into most of the other bits of the set due to the ineptitude of whoever had the remote control behind the camera.

The storyline, as far as I remember, was that they were somehow stuck on a ship called the Investigator and had to find a way back home to the planet Theta (yes). Each week they would be faced with a problem such as finding out which of their fuel cells were about to explode, repairing a crucial component on the outside to stop the ship from freezing, or navigating the lanes of a space highway (a constant pattern of changing from blue to red to green to yellow - something that is still easier than spending a minute on an American freeway), and eventually work it out using some form of maths. It was brilliant, really.

The best bit, though (and what I'm still trying to find) was the fantastic sort of synth-pop ending music. The talent of people responsible for children's TV themes in the 80s extended even to maths-based schools programmes - they just can't write them like that any more.

Recycling

2007-09-26T09:57:00.000-07:00

Today, I'm going to talk about recycling. No, don't fall asleep. Since moving here, I've never been quite sure how to deal with the vast amount of rubbish that we generate because of the different rules about everything that are put down by the town of Brookline and the apartment building themselves, and currently we've got one cupboard with two entire bags of empty cans and bottles that I have no idea what to do with.

Usually, people can apply for a blue recycling box by going on a weekday between the hours of when you have to be in work and when you get out of work to a small shed several miles from any public transport. This box is collected by the dustmen along with the normal rubbish, a bit like the blue wheelie-bins that we have in Britain. Not having one of these or much of a way to get one, we used to put paper bags full of cans and bottles out along with the gigantic pile of black bags collected by the superintendent on rubbish day.

But a couple of months ago, everyone in our building received a very rude and badly-typed notice from the building owners saying, among other things like not stuffing entire pillows into the washing machines, never to put any recycling out on the pavement. This is because the city laws say not to have anything out on the pavement before 3pm or after 7am on the pickup day, so that it isn't blocking more than three sevenths of the width of the pavement, facing North, punishable by hanging, and they would get the blame for it if anyone did. So the options are to just throw things out (which I'd feel incredibly guilty about), or to drive to a recycling centre and dispose of them there - something that we can't really do regularly without having a car, seeing as the nearest one is three miles away.

I had a word about it with the superintendent's wife this morning, and it turns out that because the building's rubbish is handled by a private company, they can't get the normal city recycling service - instead, we have to just put it out with the regular black bags and hope that they do something sensible with it on the other end rather than chucking it into a landfill. It's no wonder that Americans are seen as wasteful - it's not their fault, it's because everything in the country conspires against you trying to recycle anything.

I'm a published writer (sort of)

2007-09-24T12:20:00.000-07:00

http://www.bostonnow.com/print_edition/BostonNOW%209-24-07.pdf - Have a look at the top of page 5.

I admit that I've been trying for ages to get printed in that, regularly submitting articles that I thought offered amusing insights into a Scottish immigrant's view of life in America. Out of all those, they selected some drivel I wrote about biscuits and then cut out the funny bit, making me sound like a middle-aged Radio Times reader submitting a household handy hint.

It's not easy having editors, is it?

Discoveries

2007-09-23T06:19:00.000-07:00

I miss British biscuits, and even though you can just about get them here it seems that often they don't survive the import process. While attempting to reconstitute some disappointingly soggy imported Fox's Crunch Creams last night, I accidentally discovered that if you bake the biscuits for about five minutes in the oven they're very, very nice.

I also discovered that if you attempt to cool them down by swinging them round and round really fast, you will shortly have to invent a way of getting molten Crunch Cream filling off the ceiling.

Those Arts students up to no good again

2007-09-21T09:04:00.000-07:00

The Boston Police continue their hard work to protect us from light boards and nine-volt batteries

At least, that's what it looks like from just reading the headline. But it's different this time - at first it wasn't clear whether it was genuinely a "fake bomb" (which I'm aware makes no sense), or a "fake bomb" in the same way as the Mooninites were, i.e. "something entirely un-bomb-like that we thought was a bomb anyway". It's difficult to say whether the reaction was reasonable or not without seeing the "device" (remember that word from last time?) itself and seeing whether it looked suspicious or not. But it later mentions in that article that she had refused to talk about it when questioned at first, and that's all I would need to conclude that it wasn't exactly MIT-standard behaviour.

Let's be totally fair. Most people would have enough sense not to visit an airport while wearing something of that description. If you do, you're stupid. It's difficult enough going through one while looking a bit foreign. Bloody Americans. Etc.

This post is almost as long as Final Fantasy XII

2007-09-18T09:43:00.000-07:00

Final Fantasy 12 is turning out to be the longest game in the series ever. As far as I remember, I finished most of the FF games in about sixty hours of gameplay, with a reasonable amount of time devoted to optional side quests rather than just advancing through the plot. But this one is immense - the counter on our save file crept over one hundred hours on Sunday. (Clearly this is far too much, as I then fell asleep and had a confused dream about going on a side quest to gain the ability to undelete content items.) The only game that I ever saw actually claim to have over 100 hours of gameplay was The Granstream Saga, and that was perhaps the most overoptimistic guess ever - I think you could easily play it all the way through four times in that amount of time, including all the optional bits that anyone has ever discovered in it.

Another unique feature of the twelfth of the increasingly inaccurately-titled series is that I do not understand what's going on in the plot at all. Usually the games are about saving the world from certain destruction through a meteor landing, or time compression (whatever that is), or something called Necron that no one had heard of until the last five minutes of the game. But this time they seem to have gone for what almost seems like a fantasy version of a political thriller, with the storyline centering around Nethicite stones and their use as fuel and weapons. There are quite a lot of side quests to distract from that, too - so far, one of the most unusual has been the one to gain the ability to talk to cockatrices. Who, naturally, speak cockney. It's not quite the impenetrable standard stream of gibberish that I use when Americans ask me to say something British ("Cor cup a love, darlin', apples and pears - jellied eels, guv'nor, and it ain't 'alf hot mum") but it's close.

Quite a large amount of our time at the moment is being spent on finding and battering several special "Mark" enemies for bonus items. This is something of an extension of an idea from older Final Fantasy games - by tradition, they've always had two sort of tiers to them. The normal route through the game can be played through at your own pace and has a difficult but reasonably possible final boss (with the exception of FF8 with Ultimecia's five hundred different forms). There's also always another secret boss that's a bit of a cruel joke, but gives you something fantastic like the best weapon in the game if you ever manage to gather enough levels and expensive invulnerability items to beat it. This is slightly insulting as said weapon would always have been useful before you fought said impossible boss in the first place, but the thought is there. The mark hunts in FF12 have been getting steadily more difficult, with the highlights so far being something with one and a half million health points, and a hunt called "Battle on the Big Bridge" that is fantastic in that it's one large FF in-joke. I thought that those were difficult, but I've just skipped ahead to look at the inevitable mega-boss at the end of it all...

As it happens, Yiazmat has fifty million points of health. To put that in perspective, our characters have about four thousand each, and do about that amount of damage per hit. Apparently two hours is considered an exceptionally fast time in which to beat him, with five hours being the usual figure. When faced with figures like that, it does seem that there are better things to do in the evenings.

The state of our characters at the moment is quite unusual in itself, actually, in that usually by this point in an FF game you'd have upgraded at least someone to be at 9,999 health and damage (particularly in FF8 where you could abuse the system to the extent that this was virtually certain for all characters). The Licence Board system isn't anywhere near as abusable, but unfortunately it's nowhere near as flexible either. The Sphere Grid from FFX was large enough to make your characters different from each other as they learned separate abilities, but putting all six characters on the same board in FF12 means that there's no incentive to specialize in one area, and all your characters become virtually the same apart from the weapons that they use. Apparently this has been fixed in the International version with the introduction of alternate licence boards for different characters, but I think it's strangely the most inflexible system yet even without predefined character classes.

We had a look at the only released preview video for Final Fantasy XIII as well, and it looks like after going for a firm "fantasy" setting in FF9 they're drifting back to a science fiction setting again. (The twelfth game is something of a crossover, looking quite a lot like The Fifth Element in places). The best bit is the fact that Square have announced that there are in fact going to be three different games with the "Final Fantasy XIII" title - one "main" game, something by the makers of Kingdom Hearts and another mobile version that I don't know much about. Combined with the decision to renumber the games in the series depending on the country in which they were released, the confusion is almost perfect.

Why didn't I have this in school?

2007-09-15T11:49:00.000-07:00

Oh, why not.

Instructions:
1. Go to Career Cruising, http://www.careercruising.com
2. Put in Username: nycareers and Password: landmark.
3. Take their "Career Matchmaker" questions.
4. Paste the top twenty results into a post.
5. Put the careers you've actually considered in bold.
6. Print it out, nail it to a frisbee and fling it over a rainbow.

Multimedia Developer
Website Designer
Industrial Designer
Computer Programmer
Interior Designer
Desktop Publisher
Fashion Designer
Cartoonist / Comic Illustrator
Computer Engineer
Costume Designer
Video Game Developer
Computer Support Person
Computer Animator
Business Systems Analyst
Graphic Designer
Artist
Exhibit Designer
Web Developer
Database Developer
Medical Illustrator

The interesting thing about this is that I am or have been half the things that it suggested, to a greater or lesser extent. On the other hand, many of the rest seem to have been thrown in virtually at random - I cannot draw, I am not Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen, and have no interest in a career involving cutting aardvarks in half and preserving them in formaldehyde (although the potential for being paid three thousand pounds a go for putting some stripes on a wall does sound quite appealing). But you knew all of those things already.

By the way, it's only now that this got me thinking about it that I've noticed the complete lack of "What background character from Star Wars/painter/French subway station are you?" quizzes on my Friends page for at least the past year. Well done.

Really Bad Music

2007-09-14T14:53:00.000-07:00

This morning, Whitney got an email from Amazon with some suggestions from its famously dodgy recommendations mechanism. Among them, it said that customers who had bought Micro Machines V4 in the past also bought Crazy Frog Racer 2. This immediately raised several important questions:

Why did people who bought a decent game by Codemasters go on to buy that?

What justifies there being a game called Crazy Frog Racer 2?

Who bought the first one?

Who decided to make that, anyway?

Why did the whole Crazy Frog thing become a fad in the first place instead of the creators immediately being hunted down with cricket bats and their vital organs turned into wind chimes?

Of course, it had me thinking about the whole phenomenon - after someone stole the sound of a Scandinavian impersonating a two-stroke motorcycle off the Internet and marketed it as a particularly annoying ringtone, it spread into this and even had a single written. Well, I say "written" - it was just "Beverly Hills Cop" with some extra noises added. But that was easily enough for it to become popular among the morons that propagated the thing in the first place.

I vaguely remembered that last time I mentioned this topic, (because he is frustratingly good at coming up with counterarguments for otherwise completely unsalvageable things) defended it, saying that perhaps we'd look back on it later as "top quality cheese" like Christmas hits of the past such as the Mr. Blobby song. So, with Youtube being as helpful as ever at preserving ghosts of the past that should have been long buried, I looked that up and was surprised to see that over the fifteen or so years that it has existed, time has made my opinion of the song remain firmly as that of one of the seven worst pieces of music ever written (although it's quite funny seeing the comparatively young Jeremy Clarkson put in a brief appearance at the beginning).

I would like to be proud of most British things now that I'm surrounded by Americans, but as a nation, I can't deny that it has genuinely appalling taste. (If you're outside Britain the ghastly pink and yellow apparition in that video will mean nothing to you, and even though Wikipedia can do a decent job explaining its existence, I'm not going to try and do that myself.)

I also have to wonder about the mechanical motif that they seemed to be going for in that video, particularly the Psycho-like chords near the end. It's as if it's signifying the gears of madness grinding upon your mortal soul and the song wearing away your very fibres of being. Etc etc. And that's a pretty accurate description, as ever since I watched that video the blasted thing has been stuck in my head and will not go away.