Stress Testing

The Quotebook hasn't really been getting enough attention recently. In fact, only about five new ones have been added since I left university. I've got out of the habit of carrying a notepad around everywhere, and when I eventually remember it, it's more to sketch out ideas for an MMF project rather than as a quote archive because it's all been transferred online. (Exciting news about that to come soon, by the way.)

The stress test at work today could have filled a few pages by itself, though (stress testing being all too literal for us as well as the system).

"Tell me if you're muted."
"At the count of three, click all your buttons madly!"
"I can't, I'm covered in teriyaki sauce."
"What am I supposed to be doing again?"
"It sounds like someone's chainsawing through the roof."
"How did we get a query to block itself?"
"It's at least encouraging that we're getting the same error."
"This whole office needs to be quarantined."

By the way, have you ever taken liquid Tylenol? It's like drinking shots of concentrated Robinsons orange squash, only mixed with petrol and battery acid.

When the virus comes

I'm off work today with a ghastly cold and am doing quite a good job of heating up the living room with just the glow of my forehead, but that's not what this entry's actually about. It's more just of a "note to self" so that the text below doesn't drop off the face of the Internet.

The only problem with getting the import version of Heavenly's "Virus" was that the entire commentary booklet was in Japanese and I couldn't read it. Fortunately I knew just the place to find a store of Japanophiles, and a blue-haired hermaphroditic wolf came to my rescue by generously providing a complete translation. (I would have just made this a private entry, but I thought the last sentence was too good to waste.)


To Our Fans in Asia

To all our friends

You probably already know, but HEAVENLY is back! We are definitely looking forward to completely saturating the Metalheads of Asia with our newly-made "Virus". There are many changes since our album "Dust to Dust" from February 2004...

Three of the band's musicians left, and at the same time Sanctuary Group's Noise Records dropped their contract. It was hard to analyze the situation at first. It felt kind of like throwing away our previous feelings, you know? But the feeling that we had to continue with HEAVENLY was so strong, it was totally for real!

And so the band grew with a new vision in mind. We found three new members. They were guitarist Olivier Lapauze, drummer Thomas das Neves, and bassist Mathieux Plana. And with them on our team, we came to see the potential for our growth.

Through continuous sleepless nights, a melody arose in my head, and from there a guitar riff grew. What was born there is "Virus".

The hardest part was mixing the deep vocal melody with the loud sound of the rhythm guitar.

After striving to complete it, we had a great hit.

Try thinking about it for yourselves, headbanger dudes! Although there's no reason to forget the old HEAVENLY, we're definitely facing towards the future.

See you in Asia!

Take care! This "Virus" is invincible...

Ben (HEAVENLY)

---

Song commentary

The Dark Memories: This is HEAVENLY's darkest tune. The beginning guitar riff is very strong and powerful. Because of the choir, the chorus sound becomes louder. The lyrics are a nervous breakdown, and express the "low" times of human life*. As such this song has many different expressions. It becomes agressive, then tragic, then finally there's a rise and overflow of future-confronting hope.

* possibly also "The lyrics express a nervous breakdown and the low times in life".

Spill Blood on Fire: This is the band's biggest song. If you've ever been to one of our shows, you've probably asked to hear "Spill Blood on Fire". This song was really popular with 80's-era bands, like EUROPE's "Final Countdown", if you remember them. Even if you only hear the chorus once, take caution. You'll never be able to get it out of your head.

Virus: This is a really awesome song. It's almost like it's resounding to the limits of slash metal. It's pretty aggressive. With this song, I found a sound I had been searching for. This song is definitely the sound I had always dreamed for HEAVENLY to have. We were able to combine heavy riffs with a techno beat. We made a pretty good electronic sound. Truly, this song has my emotions in it. The anti-queen allusion in the center of the song also has my emotions in it*. It's in the place with the piano part and the middle-tempo. You can't escape from hearing this song!

* - I honestly can't make heads or tails of this sentence. I'm not sure if "allusion" is correct, but even so, I'm not sure what the anti-queen/"opposing the queen" is in reference to. Maybe you know. "Anti" in this sense is like... opposing, or possibly facing towards. It's actually phrased as an... adverb? but I couldn't translate it a better way. I don't think it's a reference to the band Queen. They're pretty big in Japan and would probably have their name spelled out, but in the passage it's written in kanji. I'm also not sure if allusion is the correct word, either; it's just the closest I could find.

The Power & Fury: You could call this heavy metal. With the wonderful intro and lyrics, it sounds kind of like the old Helloween. The chorus choir. Sometimes this some makes us think of the first album "Coming From the Sky". Listen to the guitar solo. Because it's awesome. Again, the lyrics have my emotions in it. We're not going to live for eterninty, so we're caused to feel like we have to enjoy our current position*.

* - this sentence is vague and I'm not sure what it has to do with the rest of the passage.

Wasted Time: This is the single most essential tune on the "Virus" album! First, our friend Tony Kakko* sings this with me. As a result, it became a splendid thing. Since the tempo of the chorus is really interesting, and quite melodious, we put all of our emotion into it. The whole thing really started with the string section's performance. Of course there's one part, in the space between the chorus. We think HEAVENLY's fans will enjoy listening to this. Definitely!

* - not sure on the romanized spelling of this name.

Bravery in the Field: This is a song we started writing after "Dust to Dust". You might take caution while listening to this song, how many similarities to past albums can you find? Of course, it's not bad that they're similar. There's also a very interesting solo part. It's a solo that you might think is a little unlike HEAVENLY. Everyone did some great things, it seems like anywhere they go is good!

Liberty: This is a song Charlie* put his emotion into, the sound is excellent. Truthfully, I think Phillip Corodetti* did some great work for us. The same is true of the other songs. We put a lot of emotion into the lyrics. The chorus sound is also really good. The guitar solo is overwhelming. Everyone really did some great work!

* - again, guessing on the spelling of these names.

When The Rain Begins To Fall: This song is a cover. This contains some unbelievable things, so melodious, yet packed with the essence of heavy metal. All of us prefer original things, so we made an effort to "Do it like HEAVENLY" would. The result was perfect. We think the duet section with Tanya of Lullacry makes this cover unique, and our number-one hit!

The Prince Of The World: This is the last song on the album. This is the single most emotional song we've written. There's an extraordinary part with just my voice and the sound of the orchestra. This song was difficult to sing. The vocal range is high, and I had to use my own (natural) voice to do it. So it became good for practice. Also, the solo part is interesting. All of HEAVENLY's members put their emotion into it, it's the most important thing.

Ben (HEAVENLY)

I HATE BUTES

Recently, I got the urge to play through Doko Doukutsu Monn Duok Cave Story again, because the last time I completed it I was informed by shortly afterwards that there was a much better ending for those that did a few extra side quests throughout the game and got through the final extra level. To pass the time on my commute I often play games on my laptop, but was on the point of finding less catastrophically frustrating things to do when other passengers were slightly disturbed by my under-breath shouts at the computer. But now, on the train this morning, I've finally got past the end boss, been saved by Balrog (who happens to be a flying toaster) and seen the Redemption Ending. If that's not an achievement I don't know what is.

By the way, if you haven't played Cave Story yet, it was a game written largely by one Japanese man from about 2001-2004. If I had to choose one, I would say that this is the game that made more people aware of the independent game-making community, and it's definitely an example of why I'm proud to be part of it. To sum it up, it's an 8-bit-styled Metroidish platformer with a reasonably complex storyline involving cute rabbitlike creatures being killed in various awful ways, and it can be downloaded from here, along with a patch to translate it into English. (The patch was made with the Clickteam Patch Maker, you know.)

To sum up this ordeal, there are two routes through the game. One of them, invariably the one that you discover on your first play through, is the normal route (calling it "easy" would be slightly insulting). The final boss of this non-extended game is the Undead Core, which I mentioned a couple of entries ago. And he's really quite difficult. If you complete the extra requirements, you can open up the Hard route instead of escaping the island at the end, which leads you to a nigh-on impossible extra level.

I know I said that we'd all been spoiled by the prevalence of snapshot saves in a previous entry, but I was sorely in need of them here. The Sacred Grounds (or "Hell", as the entire extra section is rather appropriately known) consists of a short spiky obstacle course, a room where you're bombarded with falling blocks, a decently large level while being shot at with angels with bows and arrows, a gigantic metal boss monster called Heavy Press, a small chance to recharge a bit and then four final bosses, just to make sure. All this from one savepoint at the end of the normal game. Interestingly, if you talk to the bookcase in that room, it'll smugly give you the chance to give up and revert to the easier route. If you've tried the secret level a couple of times, talking to a bookcase seems to be about the right level of sanity.

After getting anywhere near the end of the Hell levels, even the Undead Core seems like the easiest thing ever. I remember thinking of him as a properly Devil May Cry boss that flung things at you from all angles and could only be damaged for a few seconds per minute. Ballos does the same thing, but flies around frantically most of the time, has four different forms to go through and can only be damaged for about a minute per fortnight. Skipping the details about the trudge through the rooms being shot at by little angels called Butes, which take off almost a fifth of the maximum amount of life you can possibly have in the game when they hit you, and the easy-the-eighth-time Heavy Press, this is what happens.

The first form is actually quite easy, though I didn't think so on my first couple of tries. Most of the tactics of this section are in the timing, as he charges towards you, up into the air, towards you again and down. Staying calm and getting into a rhythm are difficult but not impossible, although occasionally he'll float into the air and throw a whole lot of lightning bolts down, which is a bit unsporting. I'd done this a few times before, and got through it pretty much unscathed.

For the second form, Ballos regenerates into a gigantic rock ball with glowing eyes and bounces around slowly. Again, rhythm is the important part here, and it's a matter of making sure you're off the ground and at the right height to hit him when he lands. Memorizing the height in relation to the background helped. Again, a couple of attempts made this straightforward, though it's easy to find yourself in a situation where you haven't left yourself enough room.

The third form is the one where you really have to worry about damage. The ball grows eight eyes which rotate around it while it trundles over you, and you have a very narrow gap to stand in to avoid having about a quarter of your life bar taken off. I almost died here, but thankfully had kept the Life Pot from near the beginning of the game for this very moment and was miraculously restored to full health. That item's absolutely invaluable for this section of the game.

The fourth stage is the killer. The gigantic head breaks apart slightly and bleeds from the eyes and mouth, transforming the entire walls and floor of the room into spikes and providing you with only eight rotating platforms to die on. In addition to this, Butes come flooding into the room and pelting you with arrows from the sides, as the author obviously didn't think this was difficult enough already. The online guide I was using gives a gigantically long list of tactics for this, but in the end I found the best strategy was to hit the Big Missile button as fast as possible and hope most of them get there. I got him down to about a quarter of his health with that after flying around uncertainly when the platforms didn't offer me a good vantage point. By this stage, my right knee was shaking so badly that it set off the hard drive protection mechanism and I had to wait, poised over the keyboard for about ten seconds, waiting to start falling again and considering what I was going to do next.

Eventually, I decided frantic shooting was the answer, ignoring everything flying at the character from all sides. After another twenty seconds or so, the game gave a noticeable jolt, and I glanced at the health counter to see if it was him or me who had just been killed. Twenty health points. Fairly safe, but I wouldn't have put it past the creator to put something in that room that took it all off instantly. But then the gigantic head exploded, I watched the ending, and alighted at Park Street with the unmistakable confident air of someone who's just seen the best ending on Cave Story.

Do that and writing an XML management system plugin for a system that only uses VBScript and JScript is easy by comparison.

Peeeer-fect!

Yesterday, I found myself with the privilege of securing a membership slot on Blackcats Games, a torrent tracking site that specializes in difficult-to-find console titles. For some reason they only have a few thousand membership slots and it's largely up to chance whether you get in at a time when there are places available, so being able to join isn't easy - and once you're in your uploads and downloads are monitored with efficiency that rivals the Germans to ensure that you behave yourself and seed back at least as much as you take out. But it's thanks to them that after years of searching, debating whether I should give in and pay the exorbitant $150 eBay prices for it, and wondering why no one's bothered to make a torrent of it yet, I now finally have a copy of Kurushi.

I'm not really expecting anyone to have heard of this (nonsensically, it was called Intelligent Qube in America), as the only time that I'd otherwise heard of the game was on the Demo-1 CD that came with early models of the Playstation. It can be loosely described as a puzzle/strategy game, but it's probably more descriptive to call it a very long Knightmare causeway puzzle. Your character is stranded on a set of platforms hovering in a black void, with an onslaught of cubes rolling towards him. The object of the game is to clear cubes without being squished or falling off the edge. Letting too many cubes pass or capturing black "Forbidden Cubes" by mistake will knock a section off the end of the platform, making your playfield smaller and more cramped for later rounds.

What made me play the demo for hours on end was the sense of atmosphere that the whole thing had (an unusual feature for a puzzle game, certainly). It was the sound that did it. The continual thump of the cubes as they advanced relentlessly towards you. The reassuring "zoosh" sound as you cleared one of them and avoided certain death for another couple of seconds. Conversely, the massively over-the-top bass boom as you mistakenly captured a Forbidden Cube combined with the crumbling sound of the end of the stage being sheared off behind you, and the tense string effect that played when the blocks you were meant to clear tumbled over the edge. After hearing too many of those, huge relief was brought by the choir sound when you completed a stage perfectly and were granted another row of the platform, equating to more time to live. Everything about it worked - I can't think of any other game with a set of sound effects so perfect.

You may have sensed a "but" coming up, and there certainly is one. In the full game, they've gone and duffed it all up by putting music in it. The dark foreboding lonely emptiness of the demo is replaced with a selection of Japanese orchestral/opera pieces that play in the background - as the developers don't want us to forget that this is, after all, an incredibly intelligent game. The music would be pretty great on its own, but playing Kurushi while the score Soul Caliburs away in the background feels as inappropriate as Unreal Tournament 2007 with a soundtrack by the Bee Gees.

People have said I'm very into my music, so it's rare for me to say that having it at all detracts from a game - and it's strange to think that the perfect atmosphere of the demo was created entirely by accident due to the CD tracks not being present. (There was a similar situation on another demo disc where a level of "Forsaken" got the music from another pinball game on the disc, and it fitted much better than the real soundtrack did). I'm going to have to work on finding some way to turn it off.

Things I Can't Do

Having devoted my life irreversibly to computer science now, I'm in a position of constantly having to learn. This is something that people have said I'm particularly determined to do - I'm involved in a large number of Internet communities, and if there's something that I don't know about that takes my interest, I learn about it until I have some competence. I may not be particularly good at most of the things that I'm involved in, but I've released music, games, level maps, tutorials, walkthroughs, and various other things to various places and got at least some response for them. But there are a couple of things that I'm absolutely stuck on.

I cannot draw. I tried to learn this when I was younger (when Hart Beat was still on television, if anyone else remembers it) and it didn't work out at all. Art was a class that I really struggled in - I could understand what they were trying to teach, but I think it requires some natural talent to do it, and that isn't one I have. I can't seem to translate lines and shapes on to paper with any kind of coherency (perhaps due to the lack of motor control exhibited by my ghastly handwriting), and I have great respect for anyone who can produce anything remotely good-looking - something which I mention to quite regularly. Have a look at her dragons. And while you're at it, she's amazing.

I am also having to begin to come to terms with the fact that I can't sing. I have made a few attempts to fit my voice to my music, and every time I do so it's a total disaster, even with the attempted aid of a software vocoder (which I've never been able to get to sound remotely right). I tend to sing to myself all the time, apparently, though I don't often notice it - but when I do, in my head it sounds decently tuneful and pleasant. Not exactly a Roy Khan, but not a Mark Vanderbilt either. But sitting in front of a microphone and recording my voice, it suddenly turns into a horrible sequence of off-key squawks reminiscent of Justin Timberlake being run over by a steamroller. This is quite annoying when quite a regular comment on my music submissions is "Do you have a band? Well, why not?". So it seems that my ideas will be stuck in purely electronic form for some time to come.

Additionally, I started on Cave Story again (which is absolutely amazing, by the way) and yesterday discovered that to get the better ending I was supposed to do something vital about two rooms before where my current save is. So "winning Cave Story" also seems to be something that I can't do. I defeated the Undead Core (final boss 4 of about 72) on my fourth try this time, though. That'll teach him to be big and red. [R. Sleigh, 2003]

Good Things

That "tell me something good about myself" meme is one of the greatest things ever. It's strange that we feel so uncomfortable talking about things like that when not constrained into it by a rule set (what?) - thanks to people's replies, I've been feeling good about things all afternoon despite going through an excruciatingly dull test on the new system for the eight hundredth time today. Someone's got to do it. The only worry is that my cynical edit of the meme text seems to have been copied into my immediate friends' journals and will eventually propagate around the universe.

Another thing that I've been looking at recently is , which I'd really recommend you to read if it sounds like that's the sort of thing that appeals to you. Rather than just simple discussion of computer games, it's more a series of articles about experiences with them - from semi-obscure nostalgia to things that everyone will recognize, tirades on the Mac "chimes of death" startup sound and ways of explaining game glitches, all written by some genuinely funny people. And me.

Reply to this post, you insufferable cretins

Help, the interface is pink. I would like to simply reiterate my Valentine's Day message from last year - stop sitting there and wasting your time like I did, and go and make someone feel good about themselves.

In that spirit, here's the little meme that found a few days ago thanks to a frankly frighteningly extensive trip back through my own journal.

Reply to this post, and I'll tell you the reason(s) why I like/love/adore you. You can even put it in your own journal if you think it's been a bit too interesting recently.

The Software Demo Demon

Today, I am the backup plan. The user acceptance test for the system that we've been working on is going on in another part of the city, so we have two people down there, another working from home to fix things if they go wrong, and I'm here to turn something off or turn something on or something like that in case anything needs adjusting on the demo server.

The Software Demo Demon that we were all taught about in Software Engineering took great vengeance upon the company last night, as the demo server began locking up at random and the workflow system that had been working fine for the weeks beforehand slowed down to a crawl because of some sort of jammed SQL query. Fuelled by some or more of beer, Diet Pepsi and pizza, we sat in the conference room with the two main developers tweaking bits of it then uploading, and the founder and I testing each possibility out.

I left at about 9:30 in the end because I needed a hope of getting up at 6:30 to prepare for my rush-hour trip into work. Normally I work from about 10:30 to 18:30, but the people at the company we're selling the system to have different ideas about the sensible time to get up on weekdays, so this time, after a night continually waking up from nightmares about balloting and SQL, I had to join the packed train that spent most of its hour-long journey time stuck in dark tunnels without moving. I'd rather not do that too often.

But on arriving here, I found out that the others had eventually got the system working and gone home at 4:30am. You have to admire anyone dedicated enough to do that. And when I get more experience in writing the thing, that's what I've got to look forward to!

Help!

They've turned SomethingAwful into Yahoo News! Occasionally, SA puts up parodies of other sites on its front page, and I honestly thought that this was one of them at first, but (being desperate) I even looked in the forums and this shiny, Web 2.0-ish interface is the genuine redesign - making it look rather like one of the sites that they're so fond of mocking in the first place.

It's quite nice to have better page navigation on articles, though. And, like every other site redesign in history, we'll all forget what the old one looked like within about a week.

Quote of the Day

From the API for Java Server Pages:

Inherits from Abstract.Insertion:
     -> The Insertion.Bottom class

Coincidentally enough, after ploughing through the unreadable code that I'm meant to be fixing, I was about to suggest something similar to JSP's inventors.

Your site a splode

Arses. Now FA's gone down (temporarily, who knows how long) due to a denial of service attack or something of that nature. Every site I post my music on seems to spontaneously combust within about a year.

On irritating, VOICES

There's a man on Food Network in the evenings called Marc Summers, who I gather used to be on television quite a lot a couple of decades ago. I don't know whether it was the years of presenting Double Dare that drove him mad or whether, he's always been like this, but he has, two very IRRITATING vocal features. The first, is the arbitrary EMPHASIS on several, words. Occasionally, he ALSO, feels the need to pause, IN, the middle of sentences, usually somewhere near the END, but often just at random PLACES, throughout. He's like the illegitimate offspring of Johnny Vaughn and Jeremy Clarkson.* Whitney doesn't mind it at all somehow, but once you've noticed it you can never un-notice it and watching Food Network Unwrapped becomes a twitch-inducing torture second only to nails on a blackboard or Mark Vanderbilt trying to sing. Aaaeeergh!

Right, after typing all that I checked his Wikipedia article, and it turns out that his presenting job in the 80s did actually bring about a disorder, so I'm officially a git.

* Sorry about this

Teletext x3

Courtesy of Chris Street, I present to you my third appearance on Teletext.

Or you can click here for the digital version if you don't want your eyes to fall off.

OH NO A BMOB

So, by now you might have heard about the widespread bomb scare that happened throughout the Boston area yesterday. A jogger had phoned up the police in the morning describing a suspicious-looking package suspended from a wire near one of the stations that I go through on my way into work. After word of that got out, more calls came in throughout the day, and it emerged that identical circuit-board-like devices were strewn around three parts of the city, including Somerville, the place where I work, as well as Cambridge and the city centre.

Immediately, an enormous alert was raised - subways were shut down, roads were closed, Whitney's university sent out an email advising about the threat and the traffic problems and general chaos that Osama Bin Laden and all his little wizards had caused throughout the greater Boston area. As we sat blissfully unaware of all this in our office, most of the city was brought to a standstill section by section as more of the boards were found, with thousands of dollars worth of police work, fire trucks and bomb squads being dispatched throughout the afternoon.

With everyone safely away from the deadly packages, one squad was getting ready to neutralize the original one above the highway. After poking around it tentatively for a while, they blasted it with a gigantic water cannon to neutralize any threat that it might pose, froze it, (goodness knows what, really) then carefully removed it from the area, drove it off in an armored van and detonated it safely away from any threatened civilians.

That was when somebody pointed out that it was actually a light board that was part of an advertising campaign for Aqua Teen Hunger Force.