Attn: Microsoft Marketing Department

NO ONE (no one) does the unimaginably ridiculous things that you show in your lame bing commercials. They are loud and annoying and they do not make me want to try your product. In fact, your advertising campaign bothers me so intensely that I may never try your product.

That is all.

The Question Is: "Do You Like Fun?"

This was the response I got when asking a co-worker if I should buy Red Faction. Well, shit, I like fun and I promptly went against Friday traffic to Best Buy, one of my least favorite places in the world to pick me up summa that. Today around dinnertime I pop the disc in thinking that I'd probably have to update the system software and lo and behold, the game disc even told me so! It even had the appropriate update (2.60) on the disc! Three minutes later, and I'm good to go...so I thought.

Turns out that the system update 2.60 had fried the blu-ray player. Oh yes, good times. Updating to 2.76 also did not work. You can imagine the swearing involved at this point. So now I'm doing a full system restore in the hopes that I don't have to pay Sony 150 of my hard-earned dollars for the continuing priviledge of using their broken-ass software.

I take back all the nice things I've said about Sony and the PS3. This is lame. Did I mention that it'll take 2.5 hours?

(Don't blog when mad, huh? Just wait till I get going!)

I told you I suck at colors

...so I didn't even try!



The last, oh, two months have been spent in the pursuit of building a Mount & Blade mod. Oh the irony! Crappy documentation: Check. Broken API: Check. Convoluted code: Check. Poor grammar: Check. It's just like work! I might talk about it later but remember: I'm lazy.

This is the title image I made for it at some ridiculously DPI busting 5000x7000 pixels, now resized for more convenient viewing. If I were smart (and it's well documented that I'm not), I would have checked/realized that the image that goes into the game is a diminutive 340x275. A 340x275 image completely loses its meticulously crafted details when resized from gigantic so the three days I spent on it seem...underappreciated.

Rough pencils overdrawn and shaded in paint.net with a crappy 5.5x4" USB tablet. Yes, I have nicer tools (aka Photoshop CSR2 and a giant pressure sensitive Wacom) but I cleverly couldn't be bothered to dig them out. Click to embiggen. Really, it's much nicer.

How Can So Much Love Fit In One Bowl?

Yes, I said this aloud to no one in particular not 15 minutes ago. The picture says it all.

Well, ok, not "it all", but most of it. The rest of "it all" is played by roughly 2 pounds of cheese, a 1 pound box of macaroni elbows cooked to be super-aldente, about a tablespoon of chipotle powder, and topped with about a cup of the no-longer-elusive panko. All told, roughly $9.

It's telling that despite having had about a half dozen things cooking in my head to put in this space, that this is the one that finally gets me posting.

Carry on.

And Now A Message From Our Sponsors...

If you've ever moved, you've undoubtedly wondered how you might be able to get your cleaning/security deposit back. This usually requires a lot of elbow grease and the inhalation of dirt, dust, and industrial strength chemicals. If you handle this phase yourself like I typically do, here are a couple helpful product tips.

Kaboom Bathroom Cleaner
If you've watched TV in the states at all, you've probably been accosted by a very large bearded man named Billy Mays who invariably tries to sell you something that appears too good to be true. Kaboom Bathroom Cleaner is one such something.

The year: 2007. The place: Madison Wisconsin. I'm furiously trying to make my three bedroom home market-ready and I'm attempting to deal with a two year old soap scum residue covering the entire bathtub. Nothing is working. Scrubbing Bubbles, even, has failed me. After two days of going through just about every household cleaner I could get my hands on and contemplating replacing the bathtub, I got a tipoff to Kaboom. Off to the nearest one stop shopping center and I'm back with a purple bottle of disaster. Two hours later, the tub is spotless.

The year: 2009. The place: Cockeysville Maryland. I have a strikingly similar two year old soap scum residue covering the entire bathtub (hey, at least I'm consistent). I reach for that trusty purple bottle.

I'm pretty sure that this stuff isn't meant to be handled by normal people--it works too well. I can't believe it's safe to use on bathroom fixtures. I can't say that I've always been happy with stuff I've bought As Seen On TV, but this stuff works and it works pretty goshdarn well.

Mr. Clean Magic Eraser
Upon opening the box, you're greeted by what seems to be a fine foam sponge. In fact, upon contact with water, the Magic Eraser emits a strange liquid that will clean up just about anything off of a wall. In fact, I've pulled the paint off a wall working on a particularly bad stain. It'll grab dirt, grime, scuffs, kitchen stains, and the place where the coat rack fell against the wall and left a nice mark. Best of all, it works super-fast and doesn't seem to leave unpaintable patches later.

I have no idea how this stuff works--and I like it that way. I'm fairly sure that at least one soul changed hands and/or some eldritch evil was tapped to ensure the Magic Eraser's cleaning ability. They named it appropriately and if you need to clean something off of a wall really fast, it's the product I recommend.

Just thought I should pass that along. Oh, and Happy New Year.

Last Days and Long Trips

Today was my last day; I've had plenty of them. In an attempt to not answer the same questions more than I already have, I'll sum up:

I'm moving to the Boston area.

That's about 400 miles from here (Baltimore area).

I know it's cold there; I grew up where we put spiggots in the trees (bonus: the correct term is spile)

I'm driving up there on Sunday to look for an apartment then driving back here on Tuesday, weather permitting.

I'm in town for a couple days, then driving to Michigan for Christmas.

I'm driving back here before New Year's to pack and clean.

Movers come to pack dishware and CRTs on the 30th.

Movers come for my junk on the 31st.

I'm here in town sans stuff for a few more days till I can take possession of whatever apartment I find reasonable, then I'm heading back to Boston on as permanent a basis as anywhere I've lived.

Seriously, I've answered those questions at least a dozen times just today.

I figure I've got about three days of solid packing and two days of good cleaning before I'm done. Given that I'm lazy and likely to be inebriated during my time in town, I figure a week should be good for the packing plus a few days for the cleaning.

My connectivity and sane-time will be at a premium this holiday, so in case I don't get a chance to say it at a more appropriate time, happy holidays to all.

Bonus Edit!
I've added an articles section for those who just want to see the tech stuff and not details from my boring life.

A Wanderer Again

I'll be leaving my current place of employ at the end of the year to seek greener pastures. In this case, figuratively, since the change in venue also comes with a significant raise in pay. So I'll be packing my crap up around Christmas to send it about a day's north east to the greater Boston area; hopefully for a good long time to come.

If anyone knows of any good bars in the W/SW suburbs, lemme know.

Games of The Past

Let's take a trip in the Way Back Machine to the early 90s. I was starting my seven year quest to graduate (twice). The fastest machines you could buy were i386s of which I owned a VASTLY powerful specimen clocking in at 33MHz with 16MB of RAM and a staggering 4.2GB hard drive. Ah yes. The glory days.

Games of those days were different. Machines were pretty limited by today's standards (then again, most everything was) so designers couldn't ride the coattails of super-ultra powerful graphics hardware and million poly models. In fact, the best 3D of the time? X-Wing and Doom! Duke3D is still three years away!

Now, I don't know if there's any real truth to this or not, but I've always felt that games of yesteryear were better designed and written--especially those games around my college years. Maybe the hard walls of available computing power made the designers of the time exercise their imaginations a little harder. Maybe with smaller budgets they were able to explore the depths of the art more deeply than we can today. Perhaps in those days we just expected less realism and more fun. I dunno.

One game which I've always regarded with a great deal of nostalgia is Star Control II; a game that I used to sadly say I never finished. I no longer have to say this! I've known of its existance for a while but never got around to playing it. Seems that the fine folks at Toys For Bob released the 3DO port source and the open source community did a port named The Ur-Quan Masters.

This is one of the greatest games of all time. No, seriously, #17 in IGN's Top 100 and here again in GameSpot's Greatest Games of All Time. Let me splain how awesome this game is...no wait, there is too much, let me sum up:
- The game is jam packed full of some of the best dialog I've ever seen, evar.
- Every race has a unique background and motivation not to mention their own theme music!
- The races are extremely unique.
- There's a good amount of cause and effect.
- The game has a good pace both in tactical combat and in the story line.
- You get to save the Galaxy! Come on, how awesome is that?!

I sincerely hope that my former employers (Activision; now Acti-Blizzard or Blizzivision or somesuch) a) choose to make a true follow up, b) hand it to Paul Reiche III and Fred Ford who did the original, and c) don't make it into something lame a la X-COM Enforcer. In any event, you owe it to yourself to play this game if you haven't already done so. It's by far the best game I've played this year.

Food For Thought

One of the blogs I read on a semi-regular basis is Seth Godin's. Agreeing or not aside he's linked a few times to Gaping Void, the site for the guy (Hugh MacLeod) who draws comics on the backs of business cards whose work I totally dig.

Well, it's Tuesday and I'm supposed to be working but like so many other Tuesdays, I'm stuck in the middle of a very tedious and boring task--as is the fate of many-a Systems Programmer over the ages (Internet time here, people). I don't get out to Gaping Void nearly enough but reading through some stuff there, I ran across this nugget from his September 12th post titled "Good ideas have lonely childhoods":

5. "I want to be part of something! Oh, wait, no I don't!" I've seen this before so many times, both first-hand and with other people. Your idea seems to be working, seems to be getting all sorts of traction, and all of a sudden you got all these swarms of people trying to join the team, wanting to get a piece of the action. And then as as soon as they get a foothold inside the inner circle, you soon realize they don't really understand your idea in the first place, they just want to be on the winning team. And the weirdest bit is, they don't seem to mind sabotaging the original idea that got them interested in the first place, in order to maintain their newfound social status. It's probably the most bizarre bit of human behavior I've ever witnessed first-hand in business, and it's AMAZINGLY common. [AFTERTHOUGHT: "People are not primarily governed by their own self-interest. People are primarily governed by their own self-delusion."]

Rarely do I encounter something that expresses my own intuition as well as that.

AoC: Final Thoughts

Whereas I think that ultimately, AoC wanted to be a great game, it falls well short of the mark due to some designer shortsightedness, some very unfortunate bugs, and a posture that makes it fairly unapproachable by the masses. That said, I did quite enjoy a large part of it. Those of us who delve into this sphere of gaming all too often forget the parts that were good and fun when we get a' ranting and that's a shame. It is, after all, us, who largely determine its legacy.

More importantly, I think that in this day of (very) derivative design, that Funcom took a very bold step in an interesting direction. I can't say that I wholely agree with that direction, but in an age of autoattacks and the lowest common denominator, they struck out into the largely unexplored wilderness of more hardcore design. I think that's great and hope that more games strike out unto the unknown.

[edit: for some reason, this didn't post when I told it to. carry on.]