| Empty-Headed Mind Dump |
[14 Nov 2009|02:31pm] |
- Sis's copy of Lost Odyssey returned after having sent it to a friend for six months. Man, everything is so much more legible on an HD screen...and the load times after install! It's like rocket-powered or something!
- Returning to The Beatles: Rock Band after a couple of not playing the game is almost like returning to an old friend...a friend that still kicks my ass on "I'm Looking Through You" in Expert mode.
- I finally tried Tomb Raider: Underworld, and it's tough! The environments blend in with the platforms too well, and it's difficult to know where I'm supposed to jump next! Don't feel bad for me, though: Sis was playing Alone In The Dark the past week! Eugh!
- I should get to finishing Rocketbirds: Revolution. I'm pretty close to the end. RIDE THE WHIRLWIND, ASSHOLE! RIDE IT!
- Since I won't be getting the...uh...new New Super Mario Bros right now, I started playing the DS version again instead, and oddly enough, I'm enjoying it. Last time I played the game, I really wasn't feeling it, so it's an odd experience to actually WANT to play something again after I've grown tired of it. Only a very select few games hold the power to do that to me.
- I beat Rabbids Go Home, only to open the option to perfect every level. What prize waits for perfection, I cannot be sure, BUT I'M NOT DOING IT!
- I bought a swapdisk mod kit for my PS2! I hope it allows me to play PAL games like the Dreamcast could (Some DC games could detect the TV you were using and switch modes accordingly. Shenmue 2 did this). I'd love to play ICO for the Watermelon ending! Ooh, and Polaroid Pete, too! Any other imports you folks could suggest? Mojib Ribbon? Any of the Pop'n games? Maybe a good place to download this stuff?
- Been hearing about Microsoft bringing the banhammer down on a lot of people. Doesn't effect me, though; I've feared modding online-heavy consoles since I noticed you could see what games OTHER people are playing. I feel, ironically enough, that if you're going to go online and blatantly show other people that you're playing modded games, you deserve t....
- ...Ooh, Lunchtime! Chicken Corn Chowder? Sounds yummy!
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| I could be posting more con photos... |
[14 Nov 2009|04:31am] |
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music |
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Across the Universe - The Beatles |
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Instead, more action figure antics.
( Spock Prime and Bones take a more active role this time... )
Less stupid, but just as pointless - this afternoon I decided to check a used CD shop for the Beatles albums I didn't have on CD yet, and turned out they were having a buy one, get one half off sale. So I picked up Please Please Me (only owned on vinyl), Help, Let It Be (both of which I had never owned, but had most of on various compilations on tape or vinyl), and the third anthology. Now all I need to complete the set is Abbey Road, which I'd only owned on tape. Have just ripped them to put on the iPod, and am going all eeeeeee over some of these songs I haven't heard for ages. "There's A Place", "Two Of Us", "You're Going to Lose That Girl", "I've Just Seen a Face"... I don't even know which songs to go back and listen to repeatedly first. :D (Also, speaking of "Two Of Us", LOL at "Iiiii dig a pygmy!") And it definitely makes me want to pick up the guitar again.
Probably more stupid but less pointless - last night I was bored and unmotivated, so I thought it was time to play a video game, but couldn't think of any game I'd been meaning to replay that I actually felt like replaying at the moment. I decided on FFXII, because I knew I'd get into it fast - except then I couldn't find my PS2 memory card. Since ![[info - personal]](http://s.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png) akatonbo and I both had PS2s when we moved in together, one is in the living room with the TV, and the other is hooked up to my computer's video capture, and I thought maybe my memory card was in there...
It was not, but Shadow of the Colossus was. I hadn't actually started playing it yet, but the other day I had been calibrating the video capture, and grabbed it because it was near the top of a stack of used games and I knew it would be pretty, therefore great capture material. ...Suddenly realized "Wait - why haven't I played this yet?" And since one of the games under heavy consideration for replaying had been Ico, seemed appropriate.
To sum it up, I fumbled around forever before I figured out that the colossi might have more than one weak point (you don't even want to know how many times I stabbed that first one in the leg and wondered why it had stopped working), wandered around taking in the scenery and lighting effects, and spent an hour and a half fighting the third colossus - one hour of which was a single attempt after I figured out how to do it, but kept falling off. XD But boy, did it feel good when I finally took that thing down. Definitely time for a break then, though. That was over 12 hours ago - think it's time to go find another monster to climb. :D
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| As akatonbo observed last night... |
[12 Nov 2009|10:24am] |
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mood |
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 amused |
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And directly related to my previous post regarding young Vulcans knowing the work of Lennon/McCartney...
Outtakes from RP, #1:
Spock: *playing the lute/harp-thing* It would be more recognizable with a vocalist, I imagine. Since we had mentioned late twentieth century Earth, the songwriting duo of Lennon and McCartney seemed appropriate.
Jim: ...Wait. Is that "I Want to Hold Your Hand"?
Spock: ...
Jim: Are you Vulcan-flirting with me?
Spock: *clears throat, changes to "Let It Be"*
...We discuss a lot of weirdness like this that the characters are too smart to actually do. XD
Scruffy!Spock plotamari: I got past the minor block I had in writing it, the night before last at work, just by giving up on trying to make the scene meaningful or relevant to the plot and writing it anyway. It gave itself relevancy all on its own, and told me exactly the next scene I needed to write, and how to make that one more relevant too. I love it when my characters are smarter than I am.
So I wrote some yesterday morning after work, in bed, without the laptop plugged in, and the batteries ran down. Then I took my laptop off to work... and realized I didn't bring the cord, and the batteries were almost dead. Quickly renamed the file (because "adoptavulcan.txt" is somewhat more conspicuous in the recent documents list than "09-11-11.txt"), stuck it on a flash drive, and worked on it on the work computer. Not nearly as much as I wanted to because they were doing some upgrades and reboots, and I didn't want to chance having my text file up there when the remote techs decided it was time to do stuff on our computer. Had to wait until they were done.
Even so, when I got home, I compared text file sizes from the laptop and the flash drive. Before tonight's remote work, 156k. After tonight's work, 172k. Wrote more when I got home, now 180k and a total word count of 32740.
...I think I'm going to add a new tag to my list with this entry. XD
I'm beginning to wonder if I should just start posting this serialized as I write it, because I've been doing that for kink memes for the last year and a half anyway - no beta, no editing, just posting every time I get to a good stopping point. And it's worked out decently. On the other hand, everything longer than about 20k total words, I have gone back and edited or made additions to at some point after I finished. But on the bright side, the edits were for embellishment, rather than because I wrote myself into a corner, contradicted myself, or changed my mind halfway through about some detail of the plot. And this thing is mostly outlined in my head as far as what came before - it's just what's yet to come that reveals what came before that's up in the air.
I'm just... weirded out. I never wrote things in a linear fashion until kink memes ate my life. It was more writing the interesting bits, then going back and filling in the blanks.
Anyway, even if no one else ever reads this thing, I'm having so much fun writing it. (PROTIP: The way Spock shoots pool is totally revenge for the way Kirk plays chess.)
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| Armin Gessert, A Great Giana Brotha |
[11 Nov 2009|05:20pm] |
So it was brought to my attention by my sister that Armin Gessert passed away earlier this week.
None of you will know who he is...heck, of the three people responsible for the Euro-popular Great Giana sisters, only Manfred Trenz strikes me as familiar. But Armin was not only a part of that controversial group, he and his company, Spellbound Entertainment, also worked Giana Sisters DS, which now serves to be the final completed project Armin ever worked on.
Sadly, Giana Sisters DS remains stuck in Germany and Australia, so if you don't know anyone in either of those areas to help you import the game, R4 may be the only way to go. The classic original (The Commodore 64 version Gessert was responsible for programming) can be found just about anyplace you make an effort to look for it. So why not spend a few minutes and play one of the better Mario clones out there in his memory?
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| Dreamin' And Gamin' |
[10 Nov 2009|09:09pm] |
I had this weird dream the other night.
Yeah, so that's how most dreams are, right? Except when I relayed it to my sister, she insisted that it should be converted into a short sci-fi horror story.
Thing is, my writing skills have atrophied so badly over the past year I don't think I have what it takes to make the proposed short story, but I'm more than glad to offer bullet-points to the dream here, and someone else can write the story accordingly.
So here's what I remember...:
- It was set on-board a ship in deep space.
- A meteor or some other physical anomaly has damaged the ship's engines, effectively turning it into a floating vegetable. The engines are so damaged that there's no ETA to when it'll be fixed.
- One-by-one, members of the ship start disappearing. People begin to expect foul play.
- A surviving Engineer discovers that the physical damage also effected the computer in the ship's warp-transporter room, setting the transporter to warp people out of the ship at random intervals. The location of the warp is unknown, and could be anywhere in space (This is never answered for horror factor. These people could wind up on an abandoned planet or in mid-space without proper equipment).
- The race begins with the Captain, his CO, and the Engineer trying to reach the warp room before it's too late, but on the way, the Engineer is warped out.
-The Captain and CO reach the room, and notice the entryway is blocked with rubble. They begin moving things, but the workload suddenly gets harder. When the Captain looks to see where the CO is, he's missing, presumably warped out.
- The Captain tries to find more help on the ship only to discover that, by random luck or cruel fate, he is the last surviving member. Just as he realize this, he, too, is warped out.
- The ship floats silently in space, a lone distress beacon blipping seemingly for eternity.
...
...Yeah, this dream scared the shit out of me. But there're your important bits.
I also had this long-winded rant regarding Square Enix deciding to rename Eidos "Square Enix Europe", how the whole thing reeks of a once-great company becoming so bloated and shameless that they can't even go five minutes without hearing the sound of their own names on singing cash piles! Seriously, I didn't mind when they grew too big for Hironobu Sakaguchi's britches, or when the Squaresoft/Enix merger turned them into a soulless, multimillion-dollar game-droid, but when you've become convinced your name carries so much power that you're willing to destroy a previous company's history just to relabel it, you've become way too greedy, and are on the road to imploding on yourself like some kind of giant warehouse chain.
For once in my life, I actually hope it happens to them. It's Mistwalker from here on out, baby!
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[10 Nov 2009|07:50am] |
I had previously posted regarding my city's non-discrimination ordinance, and the ridiculous tactics the opposition was trying to use to get it shot down, and how generally pissed off I was about it. (And actually, the fact that there even had to be a vote on something so basic.)
I did not post a follow-up after the election, simply because most people who were interested in such things were following the story in Maine, and although the news was depressing out of Maine, my hometown generally got a little byline in the national news coverage, saying that at least Kalamazoo, MI had passed a non-discrimination ordinance, so the gay rights battle wasn't moving backwards everywhere. And it passed by a much larger margin than I was fearing, so overall? I'm pretty darned proud to have lived here my whole life, at the moment. (Kalamazoo County, at any rate, if not always in the city itself.)
And now? It appears that Kalamazoo's support for the ordinance has inspired a bill to overturn the gay marriage ban Michigan voted into place in 2004, since it may indicate that feelings on the subject have changed. If this passes, it'll be on the ballot in 2010.
On the one hand, it's not asking for gay marriages to take place in my home state. It's just striking down the amendment that legally declares gay marriages invalid. But it's a step, and it would be incredibly nice to be married in akatonbo's home state and then come back to my home state and still be considered married.
I just wish I could believe voters would actually vote it out. Unfortunately, I don't. Despite the mostly Democratic state leadership for a while, and the larger cities largely embracing diversity and equality, large portions of the state are still conservative. And as noted, that election here in Kalamazoo? Was for an ordinance the city council passed unanimously, and then there was enough of a ruckus that a group got together to force it onto the ballot. (Which isn't a bad thing in general - I like to think most people are sensible enough to vote sensibly.) In other words, there are enough people in this city who apparently were so offended by not being allowed to fire or refuse housing to gays, lesbians, and transgender individuals just for being gay, lesbian, or trangender that they managed to get it on the ballot. And this is one of the big "liberal" cities.
But even so, I'm certainly willing to give it a shot. And if my city's progress inspired it, I'm even more proud of my city.
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| Thank you, canon, for a lovely gift. |
[09 Nov 2009|08:08am] |
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mood |
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 dorky |
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It is semi-canon for the new Star Trek movie that Vulcan children's education includes at least some knowledge of John Lennon and Paul McCartney. By semi-canon I mean that it's in an early version of the screenplay and in the novelization based on it. (And actually I'm not sure if that line didn't wind up in the movie, or if the dialogue during the Vulcan school-bowl-thing scene went too quickly for me to hear it. Maybe it's full canon.) Being a big dork of a Beatles fan, that in itself made me grin.
But now akatonbo and I have gotten to a point in RP where Spock is making use of his Vulcan lute (never mind it is SO not a lute, that's what they call it apparently), and it had been in the back of my headcanon even before the movie that his mother liked hearing him play Terran songs when they were alone with no one to get on his case about not being Vulcan enough, and oh hey - what Terran music are young Vulcans now semi-canonically quizzed on? Well that's convenient! So in addition to just making a bunch of stuff up which may be recorded sometime in the next couple centuries by people who aren't born yet, I can also use some of my favorite songs!
Except that I find myself being a little wary of which songs I choose, because Spock definitely wants to avoid giving anyone the wrong idea by playing love songs to them, or songs which someone might mistakenly assume are revealing his inner hidden emotions or some such. So I'm largely going by "what's a song that would sound nice as an instrumental, played on a lyre?" and secondarily considering lyrical implications (since he's not singing anyway), and I fear my bias for John is showing. All the songs that have been springing to mind easily except "Yesterday" are John's songs and I'm totally saving "Yesterday" for something. And sadly, I am realizing that a lot of the Beatles songs that Spock might approve of are... not Paul or John, but George. Can I assume he researched the topic of these 20th century composers further and became acquainted with their collaborative efforts? It is Spock, he's thorough...
But I think I may have already hit the jackpot of semi-canon intersecting with my own personal taste when I realized "DUH - Across the Universe."
And then I was thinking about this while I had my Beatles playlist on shuffle at work tonight and it pulled up a particular track from the White Album, and I realized - John wrote a song for his dead mother - and my brain basically broke.
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| Gratuitous icon post |
[08 Nov 2009|12:58pm] |
Yeoman Rand is my new "work" icon, because I was watching "Charlie X" for the ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/community.gif) ontd_startrek rewatch last night, shortly after I had this conversation on the phone:
Phone: *ring*
Me: [place of employment], this is [name].
Idiot: *mumbles a question*
Me: What was that?
Idiot: Do you give head?
Me: No.
Idiot: Why not.
Me: I'm sorry, that's not one of our services. *hangs up*
Phone: *ring*
Me: *considers picking it up just so if it's the same guy, I can say "I'm sorry, might I recommend someone else who might be able to assist you in this? For instance, your mom?"*
So uhm. What does my job consist of? Making coffee, getting people snacks, doing all the things my coworkers can't be bothered to do during their shifts, getting harassed and hit on by creeps, and smiling pleasantly while I mentally compose snarky replies and fantasize about kicking them in the groin.
SOUNDS FAMILIAR.
The red uniform shirt is about as long on me as her dress is on her, too. Is it bad that I'm seriously considering tailoring it a little, taking it in so I can make it have the little flaps in the skirt?
...Kinda tempted to do some basketweaving with my hair, too, just for kicks.
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| D'aaaah 2.0 |
[08 Nov 2009|06:00am] |
So, after three games with Rayman in the title, the Rabbids strike off on their own title in "Rabbids Go Home".
For starters, it's not a minigame collection, and on this front alone, it's an improvement.
What Rabbids Go Home is, however, has more to do with Katamari Damacy than WarioWare. This time, Ansel's crazy bunny-creatures are aiming to reach the moon, and to do that, they're going around trying to collect as much random crap to make a junk-pile high enough to leave orbit. A cute premise to be sure, but what this means is that you'll be spending each level moving a pair of Rabbids around with a shopping cart as they attempt to collect everything they see.
Which isn't a bad thing, but what can be annoying...for the perfectionists, anyway...is that it's also one of those games that checks off whether or not you've collected everything in a particular stage, and if you miss anything, there's no indication, once returning to the level, what exactly it is you've missed.
This has been my only major complaint with Rabbids Go Home so far. I don't mind that each stage has the same premise (Collect as much shit as possible) or that the hub level is severely lacking in any practical use (You can collect junk in the hubs, but this serves little purpose since you can collect even more in the main levels themselves). Heck, I'll even admit that losing the minigames makes the Rabbids seem...well...not as random. Oh yeah, they're still funny as all get-out, and watching their antics as they pick up a new item or get a crazy idea regarding sanitation beds or jet-engines show just how delightfully dim-witted they remain to be. But in an attempt to create a coherent game, the Rabbids are also forced to be a little more consistent from the norm, and so watching them jet around with the same shopping cart the entire game seems....I dunno...boring by comparison? Say what you will about Rayman Raving Rabbids, when it was fresh, it was randomly hilarious. They could've also shown more originality with the transitional video sequence of the Rabbids running down the sewers on an old mattress, since you're forced to watch this clip and numerous variants of it every. Single. Time.
But at least the game controls well, and getting a working tally on how much stuff you've collected does offer a sense of satisfaction, especially when you've collected enough to reach the next stage or bonus area.
I also forgot to mention the Rabbid Channel, which you can opt to install separately from the game itself. In the game, you'll eventually get the option to paint, stamp, and mangle your Rabbid character into different designs and styles. You can then upload these styles to the Rabbid channel and, in turn, download other Rabbid styles and use them in your game. It's a lot like the Mii Channel, except for Rabbids, and is perhaps the first Wii channel that you can get from a game to have online connectivity. Bravaa, Ubisoft Montpelier. Let's see if it remains practical a year from now.
But yeah, so far Rabbids Go Home has managed to hold my interest, especially when nothing much else has succeeded to as of late. Only time will tell if this remains to case.
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| Youmacon part 1 |
[06 Nov 2009|11:56am] |
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mood |
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 okay |
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My writeups are always really long, so even a con we only spent two days at? Gets two posts. This one covers Thursday's preparations, and Friday's Star Trek silliness and the Pistons game.
( Several pics and a few embedded videos, so watch out for bandwidth! )
Tomorrow, Cid and Edea meet some of their students, Klavier (doing his best Adam Lambert impression) and Ema take part in the masquerade, and ... a lot of really random things happen that could ONLY happen at a con. Really. Only at a con.
I can't believe it's been a whole week... but then again, it might help that I was asleep for large portions of that week, after the fiasco Sunday. :P
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| Writer's Block: Here's looking at you |
[05 Nov 2009|11:52am] |
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mood |
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 silly |
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The last few seconds of this, especially.
...What?
This was seriously the first thing to come to mind. I dunno, every time there's a serious romantic scene in a movie, I want to fast-forward. :P
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| That Blobby Feeling |
[03 Nov 2009|07:35pm] |
A Boy And His Blob continues to hold my interest, with stage 2-2 beginning with a direct homage to the NES game's opening house and city-skyline. No vitamin shops though. Ah well.
I played the demo to Rocketbirds: Revolution earlier today, and loved what I saw: A poultry-fied cross between Flashback: The Quest For Identity and Blackthorne, complete with those ever-so-popular 'animated cutscenes' that were so popular back then. Seriously, any game that touts '10 minutes of animation' as a bullet-point feature takes me way the hell back to the days of Working Designs Sega CD games. Man, I miss knowing how much game is actually game and not video. Okay, so I love digital cell animation, too. Very clean, very pixelly!
But where was I? Oh yeah, Rocketbirds. The demo offers a nice taste at what the full game is about, and the full game itself can be unlocked for 10$. It's pretty slick for a flash-based game, and all the scene-loading and game-saving is done server-side...possibly to detract torrent-hoarders.
Seriously, I felt kinda guilty having to download Ballance for the third time a couple of weeks ago. I love the game, but had never officially owned it. Seriously, you can find new copies for as cheap as 60 cents now, so there's NO reason not to get this game, what I still consider the best 3D marble videogame ever made! I finally got myself a for-reals copy, and the game works wonderfully in Vista, so I'll be damned if Windows 7 fucks it up at all. Just keep the video sync option off if you don't want any of that screen skippiness.
When I'm not playing videogames lately, however, I'm home getting over a nasty bug, one that floored me all of Monday. I was a wreck, had hallucinations, nausea, headaches, diarrhea, the whole works. It was an adventure, and one that, as of this writing, has since been reduced to a minor cause of stomach discomfort. Just gotta keep chugging the kaopectate 'till I'm fine, but I fear my sister's come down with it too. =\
Also, not that I'm involved with either, my buddies have signed up for this year's NaNoMangO and NaNoWriMo challenges. Go take a look at their works and cheer 'em on!
Fheh! I just completed two levels in Half-Minute Hero and forgot to save my progress! Great going, Freako!
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[03 Nov 2009|09:58am] |
After having retrieved my backpack Sunday afternoon, I tried to wind down by catching up on email and so on, failed, and slept for a couple hours. Then headed off to work. Then came home and slept until around 9 last night. Then went off to work at 11, then came home, and went to vote.
Still don't have con pics/videos dealt with, because I haven't exactly had much time at the computer. And the vast majority of pics are going to be from the Pistons game, really, I think... I didn't whip out the camera too much at Youmacon, but at the game, I was like "OMG TAYSHAUN IS RIGHT THERE *click* OMG YOU CAN SEE KUESTER'S CLIPBOARD AND WHAT HE'S WRITING ON IT *click* I CAN ACTUALLY SEE WHAT FLAVOR GATORADE THEY'RE DRINKING *click*" But seriously, despite the Pistons losing that game and us not winning anything at the masq, and the camera's batteries dying just when the most hilarious photo opportunity presented itself, it was a pretty awesome time aside from the backpack thing.
Which I am still not exactly awake enough to write about yet. Maybe at work tonight or something. But I kind of want to wait to find out if other people got photos of the hilarious photo op, or masq footage, too... Actually, I never even wrote up Otakon yet, hah.
But yeah. Content will have to wait until I've recovered. But because I had just posted a comment over at bunnyowners, here's some copypasta picspam that everyone can enjoy.
( All seven of the bunnies I have owned and a quick summary of each. )
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