They could have chosen a better example to demonstrate "livening up" your pages...
Friday, September 28, 2007
Liven up your pages!
They could have chosen a better example to demonstrate "livening up" your pages...
Thursday, September 27, 2007
Be More Than Just a Number
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.
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.
Wednesday, September 26, 2007
Recycling
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.
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.
Monday, September 24, 2007
I'm a published writer (sort of)
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?
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?
Sunday, September 23, 2007
Discoveries
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.
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.
Friday, September 21, 2007
Those Arts students up to no good again
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.
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.
Tuesday, September 18, 2007
This post is almost as long as Final Fantasy XII
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.
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.
Saturday, September 15, 2007
Why didn't I have this in school?
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.
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.
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
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.
Friday, September 14, 2007
Really Bad Music
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:
I vaguely remembered that last time I mentioned this topic,
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.
- 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?
I vaguely remembered that last time I mentioned this topic,
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.
Tuesday, September 11, 2007
The horrors of Linux
In what I can only describe as a moment of temporary insanity, I had a go at running Linux on my desktop yesterday evening. Whitney had been needing some extra space on her computer and wanted to shovel some files onto my external drive, but Mac OS X doesn't provide support for NTFS file systems so it looked like I would have to repartition it and provide some FAT32 space. (Sorry, this is turning out to be duller than most lectures on the same subject I attended. You can stop reading now if you like.)
It turns out that Windows XP doesn't allow you to drag around the sizes of partitions without completely reformatting a drive, although I'm fairly certain - in fact, I know - that Windows 98 could do it. It must be something to do with the change of file systems. I had a look for solutions online - the options seemed to be buying Partition Magic for about $60, downloading a command line one that looked like it would happily erase an entire drive if the wrong character was typed anywhere, and getting a Linux distribution because it has the ability to quite happily mess with partitions. So the preferred choice was obvious. After burning Linux Simply MEPIS Something to CD, I rebooted and watched.
Everything seemed to go well for a few minutes, with a rather nice blue boot screen giving some indication of slow progress. Then it noticed my external hard drive and panicked, vomiting out a rapid series of
At that point I felt it best to try again with the USB drive off during boot and hope that somehow it would be able to read it after boot, but I wasn't hopeful. With it off, it got right to the end of the boot process, stayed on a blank screen with the wristwatch icon for a moment, then started up with a friendly default background depicting a black and yellow warning sign complete with a skull and crossbones in the middle of it.
I tentatively nudged the mouse around a bit, and it seemed to be working despite the screen looking like it was trying to report that the computer was actually melting. I changed the terrifying desktop background first, then went into the partition manager, which is helpfully in
It's good enough to eject the CD before it shuts down, making sure that it doesn't immediately boot back up into the scariest operating system in the world again. The gesture was appreciated, but that disk isn't going back in my computer at any point in the near future.
It turns out that Windows XP doesn't allow you to drag around the sizes of partitions without completely reformatting a drive, although I'm fairly certain - in fact, I know - that Windows 98 could do it. It must be something to do with the change of file systems. I had a look for solutions online - the options seemed to be buying Partition Magic for about $60, downloading a command line one that looked like it would happily erase an entire drive if the wrong character was typed anywhere, and getting a Linux distribution because it has the ability to quite happily mess with partitions. So the preferred choice was obvious. After burning Linux Simply MEPIS Something to CD, I rebooted and watched.
Everything seemed to go well for a few minutes, with a rather nice blue boot screen giving some indication of slow progress. Then it noticed my external hard drive and panicked, vomiting out a rapid series of
Received bad response from USB device messages. When Whitney pointed this out to me I tried switching off the device, which caused the messages to scroll down the screen even more rapidly and be interspersed with Dead USB device warnings.At that point I felt it best to try again with the USB drive off during boot and hope that somehow it would be able to read it after boot, but I wasn't hopeful. With it off, it got right to the end of the boot process, stayed on a blank screen with the wristwatch icon for a moment, then started up with a friendly default background depicting a black and yellow warning sign complete with a skull and crossbones in the middle of it.
I tentatively nudged the mouse around a bit, and it seemed to be working despite the screen looking like it was trying to report that the computer was actually melting. I changed the terrifying desktop background first, then went into the partition manager, which is helpfully in
System > Administration Tools > Kernel Rooting Systems > Keep Out, This'll Break Your Computer > Disk Tools > GPart, or something close to that. As expected, it couldn't find the USB drive even after ten minutes of spinning, and not feeling like outrooting my subsigned drivers or whatever it is that Linux people do, I decided to retreat.It's good enough to eject the CD before it shuts down, making sure that it doesn't immediately boot back up into the scariest operating system in the world again. The gesture was appreciated, but that disk isn't going back in my computer at any point in the near future.
Friday, September 7, 2007
Coming Home
18:30: Leave work to see if Park Street has exploded.
18:32: Open laptop, start up a game from the "Retro" folder and wait as usual.
18:55: First train to Braintree arrives. Everyone piles on.
19:00: Train arrives at Harvard.
19:05: It's announced that the train will skip Central and Kendall.
19:08: Train stops because of "technical difficulties".
19:10: Train leaves Harvard.
19:14: Train stops at Kendall anyway. Doesn't bother opening its doors.
19:20: Train arrives at a boiling, crowded Park Street.
19:22: D train goes past on the wrong line.
19:23: D train goes past on the right line.
19:24: C train arrives, much to everyone's surprise. Some sort of announcement is made. Nobody knows what it is.
19:27: Train has limped to Boylston.
19:38: We have come out of the tunnels to reach daylight again. Or at least, we would if it was still light outside.
19:43: Laptop battery has run out. Continued log on stopwatch.
19:51: Arrive at stop halfway down the Green Line. Get off as fast as possible.
An hour and twenty-five minutes to get home - a new record. It's strange how short these spans of time seem when I actually write them out, but it's excruciating being stuck on a train that's going nowhere in the middle of a tunnel. I should probably be glad that I take the trains, though, because apparently the only reason that they arrive at all is because they're stuck to the rails - one of the bus drivers recently said to Whitney that we don't get many buses on the route outside our flat because his colleagues take shortcuts so that they miss it by miles.
18:32: Open laptop, start up a game from the "Retro" folder and wait as usual.
18:55: First train to Braintree arrives. Everyone piles on.
19:00: Train arrives at Harvard.
19:05: It's announced that the train will skip Central and Kendall.
19:08: Train stops because of "technical difficulties".
19:10: Train leaves Harvard.
19:14: Train stops at Kendall anyway. Doesn't bother opening its doors.
19:20: Train arrives at a boiling, crowded Park Street.
19:22: D train goes past on the wrong line.
19:23: D train goes past on the right line.
19:24: C train arrives, much to everyone's surprise. Some sort of announcement is made. Nobody knows what it is.
19:27: Train has limped to Boylston.
19:38: We have come out of the tunnels to reach daylight again. Or at least, we would if it was still light outside.
19:43: Laptop battery has run out. Continued log on stopwatch.
19:51: Arrive at stop halfway down the Green Line. Get off as fast as possible.
An hour and twenty-five minutes to get home - a new record. It's strange how short these spans of time seem when I actually write them out, but it's excruciating being stuck on a train that's going nowhere in the middle of a tunnel. I should probably be glad that I take the trains, though, because apparently the only reason that they arrive at all is because they're stuck to the rails - one of the bus drivers recently said to Whitney that we don't get many buses on the route outside our flat because his colleagues take shortcuts so that they miss it by miles.
Wednesday, September 5, 2007
PC Zone
Recently, I've found myself missing something that isn't really a part of Britain, more something that represented an era of my life in it. It's PC Zone, a PC game magazine that my dad used to buy around 1993 to 1995. He didn't have any particular loyalty to any magazine, usually buying whatever looked interesting to him that month. But what was special about this one was that didn't feel so much an organized publication as a group of highly dangerous people locked in an office with a magazine being produced as a sort of side effect. I remember one of the readers on the letters page called it a "lads down the pub" way of writing that set it apart from all the others (and this was actually pretty literal in later issues, as they had a feature every month where they'd all spend a day playing six games of the month's chosen genre, retreat to the pub, record the conversation that ensued, and then go back and transcribe eight pages of it).
One of the articles that sticks in my mind the most was a review of a CD-ROM collection of articles published by Newsweek, who had called it Globocop in an attempt to be witty. PC Zone only reviewed it for its seventeen-second President game, then declared that "everyone involved in this project should be boiled alive like lobsters" and summed it up as "a bunch of old Newsweek magazines tarted up with what can only be described as blatant gobshite". It achieved a final score of 0%, along with the award "The most expensive beermat in the world". (Incidentally, the only game that I've ever seen manage to do worse than this was a space simulator that I think was called Mankind or something, that was so riddled with bugs that it was unreviewable and was marked "N/A%" in the summary box.)
Duncan MacDonald was one of the most significantly stylized of their reviewers. Usually he'd throw in comments about how his school band was once booed off stage in favour of the Wurzels or how much of a tip his flat is that week, often eschewing commonly accepted review format altogether and making up miniature plays to demonstrate his thoughts on a game to the reader when he got around to talking about it. The most extreme case of this was for a review of "Son of the Empire" from about 1995, where he declared that he didn't know how to review the game, and instead wrote a courtroom scene with an RPG enthusiast defending the game against people who thought they were too good for that sort of thing.
And there was Mr Cursor, who had a column at the back of the magazine. No one really knew who he was, but it was probably Duncan MacDonald again even though the writers of the magazine said it wasn't. This column could contain anything, from detailing the time when the rest of the office installed a fake version of DOS on one of the reviewers' computers to make it look like his hard drive had been destroyed, to his thoughts on Formula 1 and the new title songs for daytime TV programmes ("I want a new Neighbours theme that's even more appalling than the old one." "Strewth! I don't think I can pull that off, Bruce." "I'll do it myself then."). At one point a reader wrote in to complain that he never wrote about anything related to computers, so in defiant response he wrote yet another column about something else but presented it in a flowchart.
The most important thing that this magazine did was that it helped bring PC games out of the basement, as it were - it was the first PC game magazine to actively target adults (possibly the first anything-game magazine to do that, now that I think about it) and have a relaxed style that didn't exclude non-technical types. Unfortunately with the advent of the MMORPG era it looks like everyone has retreated firmly back into the basement again, but you have to admire the effort nonetheless.
One of the articles that sticks in my mind the most was a review of a CD-ROM collection of articles published by Newsweek, who had called it Globocop in an attempt to be witty. PC Zone only reviewed it for its seventeen-second President game, then declared that "everyone involved in this project should be boiled alive like lobsters" and summed it up as "a bunch of old Newsweek magazines tarted up with what can only be described as blatant gobshite". It achieved a final score of 0%, along with the award "The most expensive beermat in the world". (Incidentally, the only game that I've ever seen manage to do worse than this was a space simulator that I think was called Mankind or something, that was so riddled with bugs that it was unreviewable and was marked "N/A%" in the summary box.)
Duncan MacDonald was one of the most significantly stylized of their reviewers. Usually he'd throw in comments about how his school band was once booed off stage in favour of the Wurzels or how much of a tip his flat is that week, often eschewing commonly accepted review format altogether and making up miniature plays to demonstrate his thoughts on a game to the reader when he got around to talking about it. The most extreme case of this was for a review of "Son of the Empire" from about 1995, where he declared that he didn't know how to review the game, and instead wrote a courtroom scene with an RPG enthusiast defending the game against people who thought they were too good for that sort of thing.
And there was Mr Cursor, who had a column at the back of the magazine. No one really knew who he was, but it was probably Duncan MacDonald again even though the writers of the magazine said it wasn't. This column could contain anything, from detailing the time when the rest of the office installed a fake version of DOS on one of the reviewers' computers to make it look like his hard drive had been destroyed, to his thoughts on Formula 1 and the new title songs for daytime TV programmes ("I want a new Neighbours theme that's even more appalling than the old one." "Strewth! I don't think I can pull that off, Bruce." "I'll do it myself then."). At one point a reader wrote in to complain that he never wrote about anything related to computers, so in defiant response he wrote yet another column about something else but presented it in a flowchart.
The most important thing that this magazine did was that it helped bring PC games out of the basement, as it were - it was the first PC game magazine to actively target adults (possibly the first anything-game magazine to do that, now that I think about it) and have a relaxed style that didn't exclude non-technical types. Unfortunately with the advent of the MMORPG era it looks like everyone has retreated firmly back into the basement again, but you have to admire the effort nonetheless.
Monday, September 3, 2007
Click Convention 2007
The annual Clickteam convention was held in Hemel Hempstead as usual on September 1st, and sadly, once again I had nothing to do with it because of being half a world away surrounded by cheap TV and Americans. But there were a few pretty amazing things revealed there, some of which I wasn't expecting even though I had known bits and pieces of their plans for a while - some of this is almost as exciting as the release of MMF2 itself.
The biggest development is the announcement of a hardware accelerated runtime. This is something that it's sorely needed for a while, as when you're writing programs at that high a level you need all the help with speed that you can get. The demos might not look terribly impressive at first glance, but those are massive amounts of objects being scaled, rotated and recoloured in real time without ever dropping below 60FPS. I think that's more than enough than people will realistically need for writing games now, and I'm hoping that it will be an instant fix for the slightly worrying speed issues that have been coming up occasionally in my latest game. People who attended the convention got a beta version of the runtime, too, which surprised me - I hadn't thought they were anywhere near anything releaseable yet.
It's wrong to think so, but I'm also very happy with hardware acceleration because it represents a kick in the teeth to a company that nicked a lot of Clickteam's ideas and tried to bolt on some of the ones that they hadn't implemented. Hardware acceleration was their big advantage over Clickteam themselves, and with this news I had hoped to see them all muttering on the forum and shaking their fists Dick Dastardly-style, but nothing seems to have come up as yet.
The next big announcement is the idea of the Java runtime. This is another exciting idea for a different reason - in theory, it will allow MMF creations to be compiled to run on pretty much anything that has an implementation of Java. This means that the audience, which is currently Windows-only, will open up to Linux, Mac users, mobile phones, and a whole host of other things Realistically, not all Java implementations are the same and you can't just get something working on one system and effortlessly copy it over, but this is the first step in opening up Click to the rest of the world, and - what Clickteam really should be going for - handhelds. The really frightening bit of this is that I'm meant to be writing parts of it, so I hope I don't mess it up. I could never have imagined this situation after first getting KNP when I was ten.
And, finally, Vitalize 4 will be released before the end of September. It's not as vital as it was over a year ago (when they thought they'd release it) because of the Java runtime potentially allowing webpage-embedded applets anyway, but it's nice to have it finally materialize. The reasons for the massive delay are unknown, but apparently they're primarily due to Vista being the worst operating system in the world.
Now I'm going to have to go and bother someone for that hardware accelerated beta. Botherbotherbotherbother.
The biggest development is the announcement of a hardware accelerated runtime. This is something that it's sorely needed for a while, as when you're writing programs at that high a level you need all the help with speed that you can get. The demos might not look terribly impressive at first glance, but those are massive amounts of objects being scaled, rotated and recoloured in real time without ever dropping below 60FPS. I think that's more than enough than people will realistically need for writing games now, and I'm hoping that it will be an instant fix for the slightly worrying speed issues that have been coming up occasionally in my latest game. People who attended the convention got a beta version of the runtime, too, which surprised me - I hadn't thought they were anywhere near anything releaseable yet.
It's wrong to think so, but I'm also very happy with hardware acceleration because it represents a kick in the teeth to a company that nicked a lot of Clickteam's ideas and tried to bolt on some of the ones that they hadn't implemented. Hardware acceleration was their big advantage over Clickteam themselves, and with this news I had hoped to see them all muttering on the forum and shaking their fists Dick Dastardly-style, but nothing seems to have come up as yet.
The next big announcement is the idea of the Java runtime. This is another exciting idea for a different reason - in theory, it will allow MMF creations to be compiled to run on pretty much anything that has an implementation of Java. This means that the audience, which is currently Windows-only, will open up to Linux, Mac users, mobile phones, and a whole host of other things Realistically, not all Java implementations are the same and you can't just get something working on one system and effortlessly copy it over, but this is the first step in opening up Click to the rest of the world, and - what Clickteam really should be going for - handhelds. The really frightening bit of this is that I'm meant to be writing parts of it, so I hope I don't mess it up. I could never have imagined this situation after first getting KNP when I was ten.
And, finally, Vitalize 4 will be released before the end of September. It's not as vital as it was over a year ago (when they thought they'd release it) because of the Java runtime potentially allowing webpage-embedded applets anyway, but it's nice to have it finally materialize. The reasons for the massive delay are unknown, but apparently they're primarily due to Vista being the worst operating system in the world.
Now I'm going to have to go and bother someone for that hardware accelerated beta. Botherbotherbotherbother.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
