Twenty Sided

By Shamus Posted Tuesday Nov 28, 2006

Filed under: Rants 16 comments

Next PostSpam: How to Make Things Worse 

Via Haibane.info I find this article, which simply belabors the fact that the Wii is a great idea, albeit with a dumb name. I’ve already done my own cheerleading for the thing, so I’m not going to get into that now.

What I find interesting here is what Toys-R-Us did:

In my opinion, Toys R Us is using underhanded sales tactics to push their extended warranty. I did not preorder, and I did not wait in line. My local Toys R Us claimed that they had units in stock when I called. I drove the seven miles and got in line, which was short – only two people in front of me, and neither of them were buying a Wii. Lucky me.

When I asked for a unit, I was told by the “R Zone” clerk that they were out of individual Wii units. They were now only stocking “bundles”. This “bundle” is not officially-sanctioned. It does not come in a bigger box with factory-packed extras. No, the Toys R Us “bundle” consists of simply a standard off-the-shelf Wii, upon which you are forced to add a game, two accessories (which don’t even have to be official Nintendo accessories), and the extended protection plan from Toys R Us.

You can read all the gory details for yourself. He’s certainly a lot more forgiving than I am. Those people would never have gotten my money. They may have squeezed this guy for an extra $100, but they will never, ever see a penny from me. I’m not talking about this Christmas season. I’m talking about from now on. This sort of thing is disgusting, and I would never reward this sort of behavior by shopping there and taking part in it.

People look down on those Grinch-like “scalpers” who buy units and then turn around and put them on EBay for a $50 markup. I draw no distinction between those scalpers and Toy-R-Us, except that TRU has an even higher markup and are doing it on a much bigger scale.

A compliment is more easily forgotten than a slap in the face. I’m going to remember this for a long time.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

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Evil has a bendy new ally

By Shamus Posted Tuesday Nov 28, 2006

Filed under: Pictures 8 comments

 I'm back, feelin' good... FEED MEPrevious Post

Next PostT101 Seeking SWF 

Adaptive filtering worked pretty well for a while, but the alternate spelling stuff has been running circles around my filter in Thunderbird. Arg.

UPDATE: Looking more closely, it’s not so much the alternate spelling ones that are the problem, but the ones which are 10 mispelled words and 200 correct but unrelated words at the end. They have their ad on line 1, which is then followed by a couple of paragraphs of English gibberish. Flagging these as spam just teaches the adaptive filter to treat normal, valid words as spam words, which in turn leads to lots of false positives.

I think we need a more drastic solution.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

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Wil Power

By Shamus Posted Monday Nov 27, 2006

Filed under: Nerd Culture 12 comments

 dOrangePrevious Post

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A few people have put up comments over the past few days saying they found this site (and DM of the Rings in particular) via Wil Wheaton. This seemed odd to me, since I didn’t see any posts linking here over at his site. If it was just one person I’d assume a misunderstanding, but several people have said this now and I’m getting curious. There’s nothing linking me on his Typepad blog. There isn’t even anything coming from his old site.

My ego has a ravenous appetite, and its great hungry maw can only be sated by a constant supply of self-esteem affirming links. The thought that I may have missed one will soon begin eating away at me. From the inside.

More seriously: Can anyone shed some light on this? What did I miss?

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

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DM of the Rings XXXIV:
Let’s Make A Deal

By Shamus Posted Monday Nov 27, 2006

Filed under: DM of the Rings 35 comments

 DM of the Rings XXXIII:
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A Dubious Victory 

Departing Lothlorien, Rope, Boats, Celeborn

I’ve had my players try to barter for items I was trying to give them for free. This is not a bad thing, but it always throws me off-script. It’s like little Timmy coming downstairs on Christmas morning and crying out, “Sweet! Okay mom and dad, how much for the big box with ‘timmy’ on it? Huh? How much?” It doesn’t matter what you say now, the moment is ruined.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

 DM of the Rings XXXIII:
StuffingedPrevious Post

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A Dubious Victory 

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Scrapland: Junky

By Shamus Posted Sunday Nov 26, 2006

Filed under: Game Reviews 4 comments

 ScraplandPrevious Post

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SEPERATED AT THE ASSMBLY LINE?
Top: D-Tritus, your main character from Scrapland. Tommy Vercetti he aint.
BOTTOM: Rodney, the protagonist in the movie Robots.

I mentioned that I picked up American McGee’s Scrapland. Laying aside whatever way this software violated my computer in the name of keeping me safe from pirating it, I’m finding the game itself to be instantly tiresome and hopelessly dull.

The game styles itself as a freeform exploration and mission-based game. To wit: Sci-fi Grand Theft Auto. If this is where they were aiming, they fell pretty sort of the mark. The city is indeed large and quite pretty, but it is compartmentalized so that you can’t just freely fly from one section to another. You have to go on foot to jump from one playpen to the next. Taken together, the areas don’t add up to much. I’m looking at the map and at two hours into the game I’ve seen nearly all of it. It’s not very big. Worse, the areas are maze-like and constantly blocked by walls. You never get that feeling of flying over a huge city. You never see the horizon (not even a fake backdrop one) and so that whole game feels like it is taking place indoors.

The character designs make this seem like a Gamecube title aimed at young teens, but the game itself (missions involving robbing and killing) and the dialog (bleeped out swear words and a little robotic sexual innuendo) make the game seem more adult. The protagonist seems like a clueless imbecile. He has an earnest, cheerful, “golly-gee” delivery that doesn’t suit his actions or abilities at all.

It has very mild RPG-ish character development, where you become stronger by getting more and better parts for your ride. As the game goes on your vehicle gets more hit points, stronger engines, and more powerful weapons. This sounded pretty great, but they made an all-too-familiar mistake: You can only get better parts by completing missions, so if a mission is giving you trouble you can’t go earn better parts to help you though it. This is another sad example of a game which was self-balancing until the makers thwarted it by inserting arbitrary roadblocks to progress. Lots of games make this error, and it’s always depressing to see it happen.

The best thing about the game is that it made me remember all the fun I had playing Descent 2 back in 1998. So I dug that game out of mothballs, found some nice user-made patches to make it work on modern systems, and I’ve been having a grand time with this old favorite.

I can’t bring myself to go back to Scrapland. I found the game in the bargain bin for $5. When I bought the game I said that “you can’t go wrong for a fiver.” Looks like I was wrong.

UPDATE (10/13/2007): I never did come back to this game. Too bad. The Starforce copy protection on this thing seems even more absurd now. This game is available right now on Half.com for $0.75, which is more or less free, and people still don’t want it.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

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Transporter 2

By Shamus Posted Saturday Nov 25, 2006

Filed under: Movies 8 comments

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Some thoughts on The Transporter 2:

The term “former special forces” has become movie shorthand for “is invincible and has magical powers, but only cool ones and not gay like that Sailor Moon crap.”

Dear writers: Poisons have antidotes, diseases have cures, and viruses have vaccines. (The latter must be administered before exposure.) Please try to get this straight in your head before you build a movie around one of these things.

I know action movies are not murder mysteries. We’re not supposed to think too hard about the plot, which is usually nonsense. But is it too much to ask that the movie at least make sense from moment to moment? We’ve embraced the conceit that Jason Statham Can Do Anything, now all you need is some excuse to chain a bunch of stunts and fights together.

In one scene the hero runs up to a moving truck, leaps up onto the hood, climbs to the top, and onto the bridge overhead. A cool enough idea. Takes about four seconds of screen time. Jackie Chan would do this move for real, while delivering dialog, on fire, holding a baby, and they would show this to us in one unbroken take. In this movie they do about four or five flashing, slamming cuts that change angles in dizzying ways while doing this little stunt. Fine, I understand we can’t expect Jason Statham to do this, but could they at least try to convince me that someone did the stunt?

This movie wants to be a Hong Kong chop-sockey flick in the worst way. They have a fight where the hero is swinging around on a “rope”, fighting. (like Jet Li in Romeo Must Die) They have a fight where he uses a firehose. (also used in Romeo Must Die.) At another point he puts two solid but ridiculous objects on his hands and uses them to fight. (Jackie Chan, in lots of his movies.) There are winks and nods to other Hong Kong films throughout this thing, but this only serves to remind us how Chinese stars tend to do their own stunts and do them better, without the aid of editing.

The filmmakers have gotten it into their heads that when filming an action sequence it is important to keep the camera moving around at all times, preferably vertically. The best way to do this is to 1) Hire the cameraman from The Blair Witch Project, 2) Get him very drunk, and then 3) Hire someone else to punch him in the crotch repeatedly while he’s trying to film.

And yes, if they make a Transporter 3: The Most Transportingest I’ll probably end up watching it. Shut up.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

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Thankful Day

By Shamus Posted Friday Nov 24, 2006

Filed under: Personal 8 comments

 Seven Springs, Part TwoPrevious Post

Next PostRE: DM of the Rings 

Yesterday I tried to come up with a reasonable “what I am thankful for” post. There are two problems with this: 1) The subject is too huge and 2) The title ends in a preposition.

Echoing back to my earlier thoughts on how awful it would be to be a king in the middle ages, trying to enumerate all the things which I have to be thankful for is a daunting task. The original pilgrims were thankful for the fact that some of them survived, and that they were not in immediate danger of starvation. They had buried a lot of people in the past year. If I found myself in their position today my first response probably wouldn’t be thankfulness. My worst day at work would be a vacation for one of them.

If I were to try to list all the ways that my life is better than theirs, it would start with big stuff like warm housing and plentiful food, and end with little stuff like Galactic Civilizations 2 and the way flash memory prices have fallen this year. Along the way I’d need to cover things like antibotics and carpeting. It’s just ridiculous how good our lives are.

Would I be grateful if I won the lottery*? I already did. I was born into the middle class in the west during the second half of the 20th century. Very few human beings in the history of the planet were lucky enough to end up here. I could have lived during the great depression. Or been purged by Stalin. Been a Jew in Poland when the Germans came. Gotten “converted” during The Crusades. Buried my family as they died from the Black Plague. Had a limb sawn off in the Civil War. Gotten branded a heretic in the middle ages. Lived as a farmer during feudal times. Been a native American in the nineteenth century. Lived in Nanking when the Japanese came knocking. Lived in Rome during its decline. (If we are to believe Durant, then the population of Rome went from about a million at its peak to about 40,000 in the fifth century. I’m not even sure I’d want to be among the survivors of that.) Could have been a slave. Wound up a young girl in an arranged marriage to a guy two decades older than me at 14, then died in childbirth at 19. The catlog of human misery is such a massive volume that even the summary pages are beyond comprehension, and so far I’ve missed nearly all of it. Caesar never had it as good as I do.

* This is not to imply that I would ever play the lottery.

How does one express the appropriate level of thankfulness for this? Should I wake up each morning and cheer, “Alright! Another day free of dysentary! Woohoo!” If one of the pilgrims would have set down their description of what life would be like in a utopia, it would probably fall short of how I’m actually living.

Life is good. I express my gratitude the only way I can. I thank God.

Hope you had a great holiday.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

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