Nostalgia, it's a thing

I've spokentyped here about a few of the handful of things I've got nostalgia for. They're few and far between but for me, like I imagine a lot of you, they're special. Space Battleship Yamato, Star Blazers in the States, is one of those things. Some of my earliest memories of a childhood long in the rear-view are of watching this on the small screen in the early 80s. It colors how I think of sci-fi, epic fantasy, and ship design, and it shows in many of the things I build even today. "Is that from Star Blazers?" is one of the comments I fish for with my designs, right up there with "I can't believe that's Lego."

I've been told that 2199 was really good but I'd been disappointed at how poorly the original had aged when I re-watched it about a decade ago. At that time I'd moved hundreds of miles away from anything I cared about and it stood in stark contrast to Robotech which I'd revisited around that same time which had aged well. So I was hesitant and as usual, got swept away in a sea of other concerns. I purchased the complete series of 2199 on blu-ray months ago and for reasons I can't sufficiently explain, the box containing the discs sat unwatched on my desk. 

Star Blazers 2199 is almost everything I'd hoped and dreamed. It's the Star Blazers I'd always imagined existed but was in doubt ever did. It's the spiritual successor of the original but updated and embellished with some 21st century sensibilities. I finished the last episode about 30 minutes ago at a time that I desperately needed it without realizing it. It is a beautiful thing and by no means perfect but then again, what is? I expect to watch it again in the near future and I desperately want more. 2202 discs are on their way to me and by God I need it to be as good as 2199 is. 

Years ago when I started my Lego journey, I knew I wanted to build the Yamato but I also knew that I didn't have the skill yet to do so. In much the same way that the original Mass Effect pushed me to build my SR1, I feel that same compulsion now--a compulsion to do right by a thing that means a lot to me in ways that I can't adequately express. I think I have the skill and resources to feasibly do this now which would mark a thing off my bucket list. I'm hoping that in the months to come I can share that journey, one that I expect to be as meaningful as my first steps into the Lego world, and with a subject that I truly love.

I suppose that's the power of nostalgia and I hope it will carry me through to completion. Wish me luck.

A Lounge of Lizards, part 3 (2021 week 9)

This week we finish up the lizards theme strong with a bunch of figs plus a bonus.  

In keeping with our theme, this is an absolutely enormous croco-gator or something (actually a Dire Crocodile) who came in my Reaper Bones 4 pledge.  I actually used such a creature about a year ago in a sewer fight and had completely forgotten that I had this guy.  I don't recall what my standin was.  He was mostly painted with previously mentioned cheapo airbrush with a little bit of effort pulling out details but after last week's pseudo-try-hard effort, I just wanted to slap some paint around.  So that's what I did.  Most of the hard stuff on this guy was the airbrush but being a natural creature that generally blends into the environment, I didn't do a lot beyond its eyes and teeth.  I'd say it looks good for the roughly hour I spent on it.  

Also from my Reaper Bone 4 pledge came this Wyvern.  It'd been prepped on my priming/building desk for many months with a bunch of other large winged creatures which might make an appearance later this year.  It's painted in mostly the same color scheme as the Dire Croc with some dry brushing and washing in yellows and browns on the wing membranes to pop them out.  It wasn't super complicated painting but I think it looks good for the couple hours I put into it.  If I had it to do again, I think I would have toned down the wing membranes since the yellow is so eye-catching and detracts from his crazy-eyed head.

These guys are Nolzur's Grey Slaad and Death Slaad which I don't remember buying and yet they show up in my records nonetheless.  The more I paint these Nolzur's figs the more I'm disappointed with them.  I hate the mold lines which are awful and I'm not super sold on their "pre-primed" state which sometimes paint doesn't like to stick to.  I basically slapped paint on these guys in a pseudo-shaded basecoat kind of way channeling my inner Wappellious Spellbrush which is quite fun.  They're green and orange because I had those colors out on the palette and I don't particularly care what the models are supposed to be.  They were completed in around 4 hours total and I think they look OK for that investment.  

Next up we have three Runewars Flesh Rippers which I'm pretty sure I bought at steep discount with a bunch of other interesting figs.  I don't play Runewars and I have no idea if they're actually lizards but it's my theme and I'm going to count them as such.  These were a mess and I lost one of their arms which is why there are only three of them.  I don't know what kind of plastic they used but it's hard to get mold lines off of and on these guys they were brutal.  They were base-coated mostly with my cheapo airbrush with highlights and details as normal with a normal brush.  These weren't a hard paint but they came out OK to the tune of ~4 hours for the three of them.  They look a little flat now that I'm not in the throes of painting them and I might punch them up a bit at a later date.

Last up this week we have a Reaper Bones Chaos Toad Sorcerer.  It came with my Bones 4 pledge and since it's holding a fireball, I took this opportunity to have some fun with object source lighting.  And this one was actually fun!  It started out with slapping paint around the model and three hours later that was pretty much what I was still doing.  I don't know what it was with this one.  The details aren't good and there's a lot of crap that is just plain not right but I liked the lighting effect enough to stop painting.  I didn't even get back to cleaning up the mess on the smoke trail.  I like painting OSL and I'm excited to do more--stay tuned!

2021 serious OSL attempts:  1/5

2021 finished mini counter:  79/100

"A Lot of GMs Get a Bad Rap as Being Frustrated Novelists"

When I was young, I read a lot of fiction. I read all kinds of stuff from hardcore sci-fi from the 50s to the Dragonlance sagas to Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser, the Dragonriders of Pern and everything between. This continued into my early undergrad days and then I just didn't read anything but textbooks and technical docs for a long, long time and no, comics don't count. Neither do graphic novels, though I have a fondness for Empowered. Actually, scratch that, I did read one book, an Earthdawn one...er...Talisman which doesn't get its own link, an anthology of short stories which I recall being OK but not great--such was my love of Earthdawn. Sadly, the other Earthdawn books I bought in my ebay buying craze phaze in the early 00's sit next to it unread--er, anyway...

One of the things that keeps coming up in my renewed studies of GMing, is to consume lots of media. Pretty much everyone's said this now. Adult life has taken its toll on me for sure and these days I don't consume a lot of media aside from games and even that has dwindled in the last couple years. This is evidenced by my award-winningYear In Review(TM) posts. Matt Colville recommended Pawn of Prophecy, and at one of my seemingly semi-weekly Amazon orders, I figured what the heck. I hadn't read anything from Eddings but I'd always heard good things. I took the first book home over the Holidays at the beginning of thislast year not realizing it was a ten twelve(!) book series and was immediately hooked.

There are for sure things I don't like about them, now that I've read the first set, but there's an undeniable humanity and complexity to all of the major characters which makes them relate-able. I was pretty much able to guess at all of the major bits of the plot but finding out how those things came to pass kept me flipping pages until late in the night on too many nights. I finished the Belgariad this evening and looking back, I have to wonder how much more interesting the last twenty years might have been if I'd read more. Old age is funny like that.

The quote in the title is from one Adam Koebel of Dungeon World fame. He said this in his award-winning series "Office Hours" which I watch on the youtubes.  (The goods are here at 3:24 if you want to play along at home.)  I got a good chuckle out of that. Hankerin' and Colville (link above) are both actual novelists and folks whose GM tips I've found invaluable. (The goods are here and here and no, I've read neither yet, and I don't get Amazon referral bonuses, either.)

For years I've wondered if I should be writing. I invariably hear about nanowrimo and think, "yeah, I could do that." The same thing happens with game jams, naturally. Part of the reason I started this ridiculous waste of almost no bandwidth is to get better at it. I wrote a comic last century. I build things in Lego out of that universe. I run a game in a fantasy world I've been creating since the mid 80s. Both of these have been touched by dozens and influenced by a lot of crap that I probably can't even remember. Sadly, the only folks who ever really get to see any of it are my players. Is that how it's supposed to be? Did Koebel hit it on the head, or what?

Right at the moment I am too sober and feel the need to lift a toast to Aunt Pol, Belgarath, and Garion. I rather miss them already.

You'll thank me later.

 No, seriously. Watch that.

Why? Because I Can.

This is why I never eat in my dining room. There's too much firepower there!

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.

Switch?

Over the last, I dunno, few years or so, I've been trying to justify buying a Mac. in fact, it's been long enough that this post has been in my drafts list for the better part of a year and a half. Let's face it, I'm a die hard PC guy and a gamer and Macs just don't stack up in many of the ways I care about.

A brief historical interlude: way back in the day when OSX was first introduced, I remember having talks with one Jeff Kopmanis who at the time was the IT guy at the AI lab where I worked. I trust his opinion and he was Mac optimistic. Fast forward to my near-Chicago days and I had a bunch of friends who were also Mac optimistic, notably one Andy Carra whom you might recall is at least partially responsible for my tastes in laptops.

Around the time I was first writing up this post I was tooling around on AnandTech where I tend to go for hardware news when I want such things and I found this article and this article. Ever since there's been a BEER, I've been toying with the idea of porting it to the mac because, well, I know nothing about programming for the mac and goshdarnit, that's something I'd like to know. I'm told by people in the indie biz that the mac has a pretty captive audience who are just dying to have some games to play on their spiffy machines.

I now give you:

Exhibit A: the unbelievably slick design of these lovely slices of awesome

Exhibit B: the iPhone which I will own soon (very soon), and

Exhibit C: the iPhone SDK which will let me program for the thing

So yeah. I have a problem with technology; I'm an addict. I have no problem with this. I now own an iMac.

Oh man.

True Story

Last night I had some time so I fired up Spellforce 2: Shadow Wars. I didn't buy it because there's a half nekkid dark elf on the box, (though I might have bought this one because of the box art). I think I'm about halfway through given the mix of races, the explored vs. unexplored portions of the map, and comparisons with the original (they both follow the same general plot and buildup lines).

Without getting into a lot of detail about the game or the setup, the two characters in question here are Bors, the fighter dood, and the hunter Mordecay who at this point is fairly new in the party. On my way back through a zone to take care of some side-quests I found a named baddie and proceded to open a can on it. It dropped a pretty good two handed sword. This was the resulting voice-over banter (as best as I can remember; I was kind of drunk):

Mordecay: "Hunter weapon."
Bors: "No it isn't!"
Mordecay: "Roll?"
Bors: "Bah!"

That's far too awesome.

Script-fu

Not terribly long ago, I was a self-proclaimed scripting hater. "Oh sure," I said, "You can do some neat stuff in script-land with your not-real languages and your dynamic types. But wow, my C++ can do all of that and uber-more!" Yeah. So it's time to fess up and admit that I might have, ever so slightly, been somewhat mistaken on some 'a that.

I've had this completely irrational thing for Ruby for, oh, about a year now which mostly manifested itself as not doing Ruby. This (irrational thing for Ruby) is mostly the fault of the blogosphere, notably one Steve Yegge who, despite often being somewhat long winded with a propensity for ten cent words and compilers, is also quite often terribly amusing and a lot of the time spot on. He's got loads of stuff trumpeting the awesome that is Ruby. So I bought a book and read some online tutorials and then got a new job and moved cross country and got tied up in godawful amounts of stuff that's not ruby and wow is that a pretty laptop I should totally get one of those while not doing Ruby.

I used to know perl in much the same way that most people who knew (past tense) perl once did. That is to say, I have absolutely no ability to do perl now because a) it's very obtuse, b) it looks like line noise, and c) it's so unbelievably obtuse that sane human beings flee in terror when confronted with it. Have I mentioned its obtusitude?* Some have described Ruby as "perl with the suck removed" and as I mentioned before, I have a thing for Ruby.

<yet another entry for the worst segue ever category>

I'm now in charge of making load times not suck on my current project. I'd built a couple tools to build giant archive files and to parse in-game spew to do various things that are reasonable and useful toward that goal. I'd built them in C++. This in and of itself is not odd since by and large, I'm a C++ programmer. What I did notice is how godawful difficult seemingly simple things are in C++. This also is not odd since by and large, I'd been noticing that on and off for the last, say, decade. So moving from "hey, I think I can fix our load times" to "holy sweet moby jebus, I have to fix our load times!" I decided that I needed better tools.

Enter Ruby, stage left.

So I used it in a real "have to get this crap working right now kind of situation...and it was good.

So now I gotta take back some of the mean things I said about scripting languages and the people who promote them. Uncle already. I may have been a bit hasty with all of that. Ruby has made the otherwise unbelievably daunting data mangling tasks I've got slightly less unbelievably daunting because now at my very fingertips I have the power to mangle data like never before! Data the world around, tremble before my gemstone inspired might!

I'll save some gory details and horribly contrived examples from Teh Real World(TM) for a later date. So, if you're like me and only really ever looked at your primary statically-typed language for solving all manner of problems, you might go and pick up a scripting language just cause. It might save you some unbelievably daunting.

*obtusitude is not a real word. I made that up, honest.

Free Software

I'm always on the lookout for stuff that will make my computing experience better. And Lo! I have found not one, but two such things in times recent.

The first, is paint.net which is a wonderfully full featured image editor. It reminds me a lot of an ancient program I used to use called PhotoFinish crossed with an equally ancient version of Photoshop (3.0). It does layers and has an unlimited command history. Want the source code? BAM. How bout a blog with details of the development and business side? Got that too.

If only I'd known about this before I'd shelled big cashmoney for CSR2. MS Paint quakes in its boots in mortal terror.

The other one is ToDoList which is exactly what you might expect from a program of that name. As it turns out, this kind of thing is pretty rare in the software wild for whatever reason. This one has all manner of sorting and searching and you can set recurring tasks and priorities and all 'a that. It's swank. The only downside is that you'll need codeproject.com logins. Goodness lives here.

I'm using this to track features, bugs, and development of my home projects as well as tasks at work. And for those of you playing buzzword bingo: it stores its files as XML.

Elements of Computing Style

Usual disclaimers apply here: I'm not an authority on, well, anything, so take away what you will from any of my postings.

I also fully realize that not everyone is a computer enthusiast of the same 7th dan that I am. I always expect to have specialized machines around to do whatever nefarious bidding I require and use specialization as a reason (excuse if you prefer) to have a bunch of machines around. So with that as a setup, I have to say that I vastly prefer small laptops. Or notebooks. Some people prefer "notebooks". Feel free to do the appropriate mental substitution. There's just something magnificent about a machine that you can take with you.

Aeronauts, Unite!
One Andy Carra is particularly more responsible for my views on laptops than most. He introduced me to this machine. Yeah, I know that it's far more en vogue to use a pop can for scale but, I, um, didn't have one. Luckily, MacGuyver isn't my patron saint for nothin'.



This was before I really understood hardware or how to make it go. The Compaq Contura Aero is a 486sx 33MHz with a base 4MB of memory expandable to 20MB (max). It came with a 170MB or so hard drive, a proprietary PCMCI floppy drive, and a 7.8" 640x480 16 color passive display LCD. It weighs in at about 4 pounds with a footprint of 10.25" x 7.5" x 1.5". It's a thing of beauty.

It's surprisingly solid for such a small machine with a plastic shell. The trackball is tiny but still manages to be usable. The screen is compact but still readable. It has no internal fan so it's completely silent beyond the hard drive and the clicking of the keys. When you use it for a while and it starts to get warm, it has a very distinct odor--not an unpleasant one, but also not one that you'd expect to come from a computer. Most of the other Compaqs that I've encountered over the years have been junk, so I usually refer to the Aero as the "Greatest of the Compaqs". I don't think you can sum up in words what all makes the Aero cool, but if you sit down to use one, you know right away that it's a quality machine.

I bought one and modded it. It should be noted that the guts of the Aero were never intended to be mucked with by mere mortals. At some point I broke the infamous right hinge. For a short while anyway, I held the record for the biggest hard drive ever put into the tiny Aero (6GB circa about Y2K). I can't be mad at the guy who beat my "record" since he put up a kick-ass site about the Aero.

I still have this machine and it still works. It currently dual boots Win95 OSR2 and OpenBSD 2.8 (I think). Watch this space! for future hackeries with this, one of my favoritest machines.

Dark Sony Days
My first laptop was a godawfully heavy 13.3" Toshiba Satellite which I bought in grad school. It was (roughly) 12 pounds which doens't sound heavy unless you need to carry it around all day and with textbooks. With the right clutch of my Aero out and sans a battery that could run it for more than 15 minutes, I really really wanted another machine that I could take with me. At the time, and I did my homework for this one, the Thinkpads and the Vaios were the big names in subnotebooks. I bought a Vaio and it served me well. Specifically, a PCG R505DL boasting an at the time impressive 1GHz P3, 30GB hard drive, and 384MB of main memory. It's got a 12.1" 1024x768 passive display and sans docking station, weighs in at roughly 3 pounds.


This Vaio is a lot larger than the Aero but at the time, I don't think that Sony sold a smaller one (10" screen) with the appropriate power for a reasonable sum. It's a very full featured machine with a single PCMCIA slot, a DVD/CDRW, a floppy drive, built in Ethernet, a couple USB ports, and a Sony memory stick slot that I've used exactly twice in seven years. The dock and battery can be hotswapped in Windows if you're so inclined.

For as sleek and thin as the machine is, it's amazingly solid. The corners don't give, and you don't have to baby it to move it around. The base with all its ports is nice for folks who want to leave the optional bits hooked up to a workstation and take the machine for strolls. The base itself isn't terribly heavy so if you want to take the entire thing on a trip, it's not a big deal. The keyboard is compact but not too tiny to type on effectively and has a really nice feel. As an interesting data point to that effect, I think I've written more code on my Vaio than on any other machine I've ever owned including two engines and probabaly seven games/prototypes/tech demos.

It's a good machine, and I'm a little sad to be retiring it. Except that it means I have a new machine.

Humanizing Technology
With the sale of my house in Wisconsin, and a burning desire to buy something cool, I bought one of these. It's 10.6" x 7.5" x 0.9" with an 11.1" 1366x768 display and weighs in at less than 4 pounds. It's a low voltage core 2 duo and currently has 1GB of ram and a 120GB hard drive. The memory upgrade is already on the way though I suspect it'll be a while before I try to replace the drive (solid state drives need to come down in price a bunch).


Now, I'll be the first one to say that I was skeptical about the leather binding thing as well as Asus' current marketing campaign, but I have to say that the S6Fm is a high quality machine and it really wouldn't seem as cool without it. They really went out of their way to make it exceptional and that's something I can definitely appreciate.

Given that there are exactly two machines that fit my specifications available right now, I think I made the right choice. I thought that the price was high until I received it and found that with the machine I also got:
- a high capacity battery in addition to the normal one
- a matching optical mouse
- a mess of accessories which are by no means necessary, but definitely very thoughtful of them to have included

It's light, solid, and reasonably powerful for its size. Everything is built in and modern. I've got very few complaints. Course, I did just buy it and I haven't really had a lot of time to get used to it either, but I'm happy to have found an appropriate spiritual successor to my beloved Aero.

Hack: Impossible?

[insert theme music here]

Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to hack the following upgrade card into a workable machine sizing less than a breadbox and drawing under 50 watts of power at idle. Said machine should be capable of running OpenBSD 4.1 as a server or WinXP.

The target: one Powerleap upgrade card. Model: PL-Renaissance/R370S fitted with a 256MB stick of PC-133 SDRAM and an Intel 733MHz Pentium III Coppermine processor.


You have as much time as you need and a budget of $200. Beyond that, you may scrounge for parts around your workshop.

Good luck.

Old Hardware

Most of the people who read here know me well enough that this isn't a surprise, but for everyone else out there: I have a problem with obsolete computer hardware.

The problem is that I seem to accumulate it at an alarming rate (i.e., greater than zero) and have a real hard time getting rid of it. Currently I own seventeen machines in various states of disrepair. The vast majority of those are functioning but without a real purpose. I never take a machine that I don't intend to use for some purpose of varying nefariousness and while I did use most of them, most of those uses are no longer necessary. That makes me sad, not in the least because I get bitten by the "must have new hardware" bug about every four months.

I don't think there's anything that depreciates in value quite like computer hardware except maybe automobiles and my stock options. Computer equipment just doesn't die that often if you take care of it. Oh sure, you'll have a hard drive or two die but for most parts just don't stop doin' they thang. Some of my (vast) collection I still have uses for but that leaves about a dozen machines I need to offload.

This is where y'all come in. I need help getting rid of these but I'm particular about where they should go. I don't want them in a landfill; I want them in the hands of someone who will put them to use doing whatever or at the very least recycled. So if you know of a good or even slightly disfunctional home that could use an old machine or three, drop me a line.

Thoughts of WoW

If you don't like long posts, you can stop reading now. It might get a little sappy in here: you have been warned.

I'm in the process of fixing, reinstalling, rearranging, etc. all my machines. On this particular machine (laptop) I found the WoW videos I'd downloaded seemingly ages ago. In the process of going through them deciding which to keep and which to toss, my thoughts were again drawn to far away Azeroth.

I played nigh unto religiously for a really, really long time but only now many months after calling it quits have I finally come to terms with it. At one point I changed servers to Greymane with a few good friends. We were kind of fed up with all the BS that goes along with dealing with people and just wanted to have fun again. At some point we got into PvP and did a whole lot of it.

This time around, I played a mage which is pretty atypical of me; I usually play tanks or healers and had just come off a year gig as a paladin (yeah, sorry). For those who haven't played WoW, mages can be kind of squishy and for a good spell in the 30s and 40s brackets, I had been having kind of crappy luck and really seriously considered rerolling or finally quitting for good. I mean, shit, it had been a year and a half and it's not like I didn't get my money's worth.

I don't remember where I found it (probably the uber-useless mage boards) but I found this video and everything changed. Cliche, but true. I mean, jeez, that guy rocked. He has some serious gear to be sure, and a build that's all about making highlight reels, but still--daaamn. I figured I'd never see that kind of gear ever (I was wrong) but if you could do that, then it was something to shoot for; something far beyond the doom and gloom of the mage boards.

I respecced, busted up to 49 and we hung out there for a good couple months and went pretty much undefeated. I even made a PvP video (I'd link it here, but FileFront isn't playing nice this evening). We met a lot of great people and had a mess of fun. And little did I know it at the time, but that was the platform upon which the rest of our success would be built.



Me, Zura, and Vain were the last of the few that came from our previous server. If you look close, it's us three and a couple others in group 2. Despite my rantings and ravings and general malaise, they stuck with me (for better, I'd say). We did a lot of awesome things and got a lot further than anyone thought we would, myself included. These were the folks I counted on to stay sane when nothing was going right (pretty frequently, as I remember) and who sadly took most of the brunt of my bad calls (of which there were many).

This particular shot was just as we'd gotten some success in raiding; before it got too busy to PvP often. This was the second match we'd won after I dinged Exalted with the Defilers so I was sportin' some nice shoulders and an Ironbark: some of my first epics. Greymane was pretty godawfully one sided; if you smacked an alliance weenie real good, they'd just about rain epics like a goddamn pinata. It was terribly frustrating to lose because they had better gear which made our wins over such teams that much more satisfying. For months I'm sure I grated on folks nerves with: "What are those chumps gonna do when we start gettin' epics?" The above screenie contains the answer.


This is me and Hypo kicking ass in AV. The thing to realize is that even though the horde in general had better PvPers, they almost never showed up to AV once they got their shineys and the alliance (in general) had way better gear. The end result is that we lost a lot--but we looked damn fine doing it. I owe the top part of whatever skill I had to Hypo since he always pushed me to play better than I really could. He's an uber mage; probably the best I ever played with. Favorite story: at one point he respecced to fire like I was when we were working through MC to up our raid DPS.


This is probably one of my favorite raid shots. We had our raid firsts of Ragnaros and Onyxia pretty close together which established our position of prominence on our server. What you can't see in that shot is how we struggled through personnel issues when we couldn't get 30 people together to do a big raid or doing Lucifron shorthanded with only two priests (sorry, but you kind of have to know that encounter for the significance of that to sink in). You don't see the hours of frustration as we wiped due to server lag or just plain bad luck or the infighting that eventually drove the group to split up after I'd gone. You don't see the blood sweat and tears that went into the organization or the flak that we took for "just a game".

In the end, you don't see a lot of things in that shot, but that's the HRG I remember, the one I led: mature, determined, unstoppable.

My days as a mage came and went--memories that I might not have had if I hadn't found that one video. I met a lot of great people, many of whom I'm still in touch with today. Maybe Azeroth isn't as far away as I thought.

...So I Built It Out of Legos

Carry on.

Half a Rant

I got a package today. This has learned me four things:
- the mail carrier chick is hot
- either my angry calls to the post office or my judiciously applied handwritten nametag worked
- my doorbell also works (didn't know I had one, the random assortment of pizza doods that have been here always knock)
- my legos are no longer lost in the mail

That would be all except for my half a rant.

I spent two days trying to get Linux installed on a spare machine to be a) a non-windows platform to cross compile on, b) an always on place I can drop the multitude of files I want to keep, c) an X server I can break (no X on my firwall). Gentoo did not play nice. This morning after many hours of not being able to get xorg and fluxbox installed properly, I got pissed off and installed OpenBSD instead. It was installed with X before lunch with xorg and fluxbox no less.

Gentoo definitely seemed cool after about an eight year hiatus from anything Linux. If I cared more about the operating system, I probably could have spent another couple days getting it to work. Then I realized that I'm old and cranky and have got better things to do and...hey! Durn kids! Get off my lawn!

Adventures With Legos, Part 1

This one is dedicated to Mr. Brian's weiner cat who sadly can't play with legos due to a distinct lack of opposable thumbs.



Step 1: Pretend to be able to draw with any kind of perspective (yes, the torso part was hacked from a different scan to save your eyes some pain).

Step 2: Get drunk off your rocker and watch TV for five days straight in a pile of legos. Kids: get your parents' permission first!

Step 3: Build:



Depending on which one you saw first and/or your particular loyalties to the respective brands, this is either:
RFL3N-Rifleman from Classic Battletech

==OR==
Raidar X Battloid from Robotech

==OR==
ADR-04-Mk.X Destroid Defender from Macross


I swear that I've run across a blurb about how FASA settled in court with the Macross doods on Classic Battletech but for the life of me, I can't find it now.

Action pose!



And just in case you think I'm way out there, this dood will actually sell you a lego mech.

Stupid Ebay Tricks

A sane person might think that paying rent in one state, mortgage in another, and being out of work for the better part of a month would prevent me from buying crap on Ebay.

Ebay is evil; that is all.

Total Annihi...er...Supreme Commander

Way back before the dawn of time (i.e., the year 2000) I played a mess of RTS games. One of the most notable of these was Starcraft which I played an undue amount of. What killed it for me was when I realized that I was losing matches because I didn't micromanage the first minute well enough. That sucks.

Enter Total Annihilation.

I dunno if the time was right or whatever but I ended up playing even more TA than I did Starcraft and I never really bored of it (just got distracted with other games, then jobs). In fact, from the time I started playing TA, I've upgraded my main machine in these denominations over the last decade or so: Celeron 300A, PIII 733, Athlon 1333, P4 2533. Each of these has subsequently been ground to a screeching halt by that one game released in 1997 and modded to the moon and back. And it's still fun. Lots of people didn't like TA, however, because it was less action, more strategy, and was 3D rendered in software right around the time that everything had to be 3D accelerated.

Enter Supreme Commander.

Supreme Commander (for those who have no idea what I'm talking about) is the spiritual successor to TA headed by the same dood (one Chris Taylor, not to be confused with my recent student of the same name) but at a different company and with uber modern requirements. I suppose that as a true spiritual successor, it will need to bring yet another three generations of machines to its knees and by all accounts it does so.

So after having pre-ordered it, I built a new machine. In fact, I got the game before I got the parts. The final upgrade straw was that my old machine wouldn't ever have enough video card to run the game (GeForce 6 minimum). This is the first reasonably cutting edge machine I've ever owned to the tune of about $2K (running Vista, but that's a rant for another day). I built it yesterday, got it all configured and downloaded and patched and almost usable and went to play Supreme Commander for the first time. After roughly ten years of antitipation I've now been stuck in the patching portion (done in the background) for, oh, the last two hours. On a blazingly fast machine. That was built specifically to play this game. On my extra premium 3Mbit connection that's normally really nice.

I'm convinced that the universe hates me.

Roddenberry & Lucas

These days I don't watch a lot of TV and don't see many movies but that wasn't always the case. In fact, I whiled away many a youthful hour locked up in the vivid scenes conjured from someone else's imagination. Most of those years have been subsequently locked up away from my own prying eyes in the bustle of daily existance. So well, it seems, that I can barely recall much of my pre-college days--probably for the best.

It's been a long weekend (thankfully) and I caught two shows on the History Channel. Yesterday was Star Wars: Empire of Dreams. Today was Star Trek: Beyond the Final Frontier. I don't know what it was about those two productions but it reminded me of the wonder I had of cinema and TV that I've all but forgotten. Maybe it was Wil Wheaton's Blog which I discovered a couple months ago (it's on the must-read list). Maybe it was his commentary on ST:TNG. I dunno.

The prevailing theme through all of that was that those two pieces of fiction changed the world. I'm not sure that anyone who lived in this country who were at least as tangentially aware of popular culture as I am would argue against that. So what happened? The only thing I can think of that comes even close was the Lord of the Rings trilogy but even that was written a really long time ago (I doubt many people realize that it was originally written in the WW2 era). Are we so focused on the glitz and the glam that we've lost track of the bigger picture?

I don't know when the hell it was that I got old, but I find myself longing for simpler times; the kind of times that I barely remember.