Four Thousand Words About Me

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

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

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

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!

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

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

1. Multimedia Developer
   
2. Website Designer
   
3. Industrial Designer
   
4. Computer Programmer
   
5. Interior Designer
   
6. Desktop Publisher
   
7. Fashion Designer
   
8. Cartoonist / Comic Illustrator
   
9. Computer Engineer
   
10. Costume Designer
    
11. Video Game Developer
    
12. Computer Support Person
    
13. Computer Animator
    
14. Business Systems Analyst
    
15. Graphic Designer
    
16. Artist
    
17. Exhibit Designer
    
18. Web Developer
    
19. Database Developer
    
20. 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

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:

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


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


3. Who bought the first one?


4. Who decided to make that, anyway?


5. 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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

Rhapsody of FIRE!

It's been quite a while since I listened to any bands that were new to me. My personal favourite genre is even less easy to find in America than it is in Britain, where I could usually find something worth listening to at the music place in Dundee, and I haven't really been following the news about releases in Europe as much as I used to. In fact, America seems to have a tendency to get the Japanese imports of European albums rather than the original ones, which is nice for the bonus material but not for price or ability to read the booklet. Most discoveries are now thanks to Youtube's handy way of having virtually every song ever - some real videos, but most through someone with far too much free time and some video editing software putting together "anime music videos" for them.

So, as pointed out to me by , Rhapsody of Fire are a band from Italy (a country which my album collection does not yet cover). I was vaguely aware of them before, and had previously thought that they were a classical/symphonic metal band with a slight leaning towards a fantasy theme. They used to be called simply "Rhapsody", but someone had decided that their name wasn't daft enough, or something along those lines.

But, name issues aside, their videos are what really make them stand out. Most power metal music videos are done in a silly, tongue-in-cheek or over the top way, but Rhapsody are something special - it seems that every video they make is so unbelievably terrible in concept, production and general execution that you'd be hard pressed to accept that they're the real ones and not the result of someone trying to get on to Beadle's Hot Shots.

My favourite of them has to be Power of the Dragon Flame. It opens with the lines "Our brave young warriors must travel to another dimension in time to recapture the Mystic Emerald Stone and restore the glory of the Kingdom", in a classic example of cutting up an RPG game master book and pulling random bits of it out of a hat. And as if that wasn't silly enough, it proceeds to show various shots of two baffled-looking girls descending stairs, wandering aimlessly through streets and riding on trains, intercut with shots of the band playing in the middle of a countryside railway. It looks like they found some old clips from a home video, stuck them together in Windows Movie Maker and added some explosions using MS Paint.

The one for Holy Thunderforce (I'm feeling rather embarrassed repeating these titles, by the way) is marginally better in that it looks like it was actually intended to be a music video and that the actors in it hadn't been kidnapped. But they tried to do an epic battle scene and hoped that no one would notice that they only had about twelve people to make it. The highlight comes at just before the three minute mark - it's not as obvious as I first thought because I must have just paused the video at the exact moment by coincidence, but during the brief flash of the knight on horseback, there's a medieval electric junction box clearly visible in the background.

Somehow they managed to get Christopher Lee involved later on in their career, and I can't describe the video for Unholy Warcry any better than did. It features narration from the White Wizard himself, done up in what looks suspiciously like a paper crown from Burger King, going on about the emerald sword of the crystal angels or some other such silliness, complete with a scene involving rubbing what is unmistakably tomato ketchup on a skull.

Even the shots of the band, which most other groups manage to make fairly normal apart from Hammerfall's infamous "curling rink" moment, are placed in front of blue-screen effects that Knightmare was doing rather better twenty years ago, with explosions or meteors raining down in the background. But it's Fabio Leone (who could hardly have had a more stereotypical Italian name unless he'd been called Spaghetti La Cappucino) who steals the stage, by gesticulating wildly while singing to the extent that he's nearly knocked everyone else over by the end of each video.

With the level of hilarity caused by the videos, along with other stupid titles like "Knightrider of Doom" and "Steelgods of the Last Apocalypse", it's obvious that this band is the one that the members of Dragonforce most look up to. But the most annoying quality of Rhapsody is that despite all of that, musically they're really quite brilliant. They seem to be more melodic and diverse than their closest counterparts, and from the songs I've heard, I actually enjoy their music a lot if I don't pay attention to what they're actually singing. , you'd probaby love them too.

Amazingly enough, Christopher Lee decided that he wanted to work with them again, and they recently performed a duet of one of the songs from the album that he had narrated. This performance sets a record in that it makes him the oldest metal vocalist ever. (Although, seeing as Iron Maiden are still going, not by as much of a margin as you might think.)

Knytt Stories released

You all know by now how enthusiastic I am about the general independent game-making community. Some things that are being done by non-published game makers can be genuinely more fun than a lot of commercial games now (especially being better than those endless Bejewelled clones that most online collection sites insist on churning out). And hopefully, with a few more releases like this, MMF2 will get a lot more recognition as a powerful 2D game writing environment...

Knytt Stories was released today. It's a bit difficult to describe - it's an atmospheric platform adventure game by Nifflas, a Swedish MMF2 user. "Atmospheric" is the important word there - Nifflas has an incredible talent for making his minimalistic and simple graphics come together to form worlds that have genuine charm to them, blending together a mix of light, airy environments and claustrophobic unsettling ones.

The best bit about this one is that it includes a world editor so that you can make your own "Stories" - this is something that has been commonplace for commercial games to some extent but it's a very new feature in MMF2 creations. There's already one bonus pack out, and I'm hoping that player-made worlds will start springing up around the Internet shortly.

It's not for everyone - the game is slow-paced, thoughtful and peaceful rather than having non-stop action. But if you're at all interested, go to Nifflas's site and try it out - it's a 33MB download and it's well worth it. (And there's a tileset by me in it... not that that affects my enthusiasm for it.)

Youtube improvements

I noticed at the beginning of the week that Youtube have now added comment ratings to the site. It's a nice idea - on most sites that allow comments, this gives some idea of the worth of a reply by allowing users to vote them either "thumbs up" or "thumbs down". But given Youtube's population I think my idea is rather better:


(NB. Unfortunately but perhaps not surprisingly, that comment is real. It's on a video of the moon landing, in which most of the comments are giant leaps for sheer idiocy.)

I don't know if I've just noticed it more recently, but people like this are spilling over into everywhere even though that site and Myspace (truly the trailer park at the back of the Internet) have done quite a good job of rounding up the people who would lose a battle of wits with a glass of orange juice. It makes me wonder how they use keyboards without accidentally eating them.

"Astronomically stupid" would have been a cleverer pun, actually.