T w e n t y S i d e d
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Remember, nothing will spice up your campaign quicker than long descriptions of NPC’s doing spectacular stuff while the players sit around and watch.
DM of the Rings VII:
An Island Where No One Lives
Beckoning Chasm has moved into some new wordpress-driven diggs. If you’re the bookmarking sort, then I suppose this would be the point at which you update them.
He also has a few new posts in the Telephone Girl series, which I mentioned before.
The painting is a tough one. Now, aside from using fingerpaints as a child, I’ve never painted in my life, but I can still recognize the process he’s going through. I follow a very predictable cycle when undertaking a project, and I bet a lot of people will find this familiar.
- Enthusiasm: This is going to be my best project ever!
- Unease: Hm. This is getting tough.
- Dismay: This is impossible! It’ll never get it!
- Defeat: What a waste of time. I must destroy this project and erase all traces of it so that my lack of talent is never exposed to the world.
- Grim resolution: I’ve come this far. I might as well finish it, even if it sucks.
- Hope: You know, I’m starting to get it. I might pull this off after all.
- Elation: I did it!
- Hubris: That was easy! Next time I’ll do something twice as difficult!
I’m somewhere between steps 5 and 6 on my current project, which is making a character animation engine. (In videogames, this is what makes those 3d characters move and bend their limbs instead of sliding around like statues.) I enjoy it anytime I can see someone make it all the way #8.
Full Metal Panic: Gauron
Steven was talking about anime villians yesterday and he singled out Gauron from Full Metal Panic as a good example of a terrible bad guy:
Gauron […] is close to the worst villain ever IMHO. He’s a cartoon, in the worst meaning of that term. He’s the distillation of unfeeling brutality, but there’s no obvious reason why he became what he is. He’s an icon, a contrivance, a caricature.
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| Gauron has two facial expressions: Evil Sneer, and Evil Sneer 2. I like the spoilers on his eyebrows. |
At the end we finally learn his “big secret”, which is that he isn’t working for the bad guys, or for a government, or for himself: He’s just trying to commit suicide. He wants to die in a glorious conflagration of twisted metal and burning fuel, and he wants to take as many people with him as he can. I actually think that’s a good hook for a character. That was a good place to start, not end! He was all premise and stubble.
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| Some days Gauron’s mech just can’t do a thing with it’s hair, and he’s forced to pull it back ino a polytail. One of these days he’s been meaning to get a perm. If he could just get the budget increase he wants, he could go through with his plan to have his mech fully decked out with a fearsome beehive hairdo! |
Like the series itself, Gauron was a great idea that was never really developed or explored.
UPDATE: Lots of great comments below, and a great post on the villian from Xenogears at Criminally Weird. I didn’t play console games between 1985 and 2002. Since this game fits into that very wide gap, I missed it. I gather that it is one of those games people talk about when they reflect on the greatness of Final Fantasy VII and start looking for something to fill that particular void.
DM of the Rings VI:
Lootless
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On one hand, it makes no sense for the monsters and encounter areas of the gameworld to come pre-stocked with loot. It also makes no sense for feral beasts and the shambling undead to walk around carrying fabulous cash prizes.
On the other hand, gold coins are shiny and make a fun jingling sound when you have lots of them.
Pictures from Silent Hill
Here are some great Silent Hill images for you:
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It wouldn’t be Silent Hill without an endless supply of framerate-boosting fog.
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You can’t leave Silent Hill. Once you get in, the streets are all mysteriously blocked by construction and roads come to an unlikely halt at the edge of a chasam.
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One of the great things about Silent Hill is the way everything seems a bit out of date, but in an odd way. Some things are a quarter century out of style, but only look a few years old. Other things are current, style-wise, yet show decades worth of decay.
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Even when there aren’t any monsters around, Silent Hill is spooky because the town is intact, yet deserted. The power is on, but nobody is home.
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The town has a worn out feeling. Everything is neglected and shabby. Fences, gates, and walls make up a large part of the scenery.
Ok, I am just messing around here. These were all taken in my hometown on my way to church yesterday morning. All of them are untouched, except for #3 where I edited out a pedestrian and covered the billboard advertisements. The streets really were this empty, and it really was this foggy. It was a very strange, quiet morning and it made me think of Silent Hill.
Lightsaber Duel: Ryan VS Brandon
In the past I’ve mentioned the work of Ryan Wieber. He’s a hobbyist who makes lightsaber duel movies. His last one was very well done and showed a lot of polish, but since then he’s gotten even better.
I like that they avoided the mistakes common to a lot of fan-made stuff. They don’t engage in any dialog or try to establish setting or motive. While a total lack of acting ability and clumsy fan-written dialog can really give a film the authentic Episode III feel, these short movies don’t have enough time to build a story. So, they wisely left it out and focused on the dueling, which is why everyone watches these things anyway.
The fight shows a lot of imagination. They keep it varied and interesting, and don’t just try to re-hash what we’ve seen in the movies. They are also really fast. The speed of this battle is similar to that of the fight between Obi-wan and Annikin in Episode III. It must take a lot of practice to get their routine down to the point where they can perform it this cleanly.
Nicely done.
Are you Marketing to ME?
Advertisements are not written with the engineer in mind. I know this. Marketing – particularly the marketing of personal care products – is aimed at people who care about image. Ads are for people who will buy something not based on what they think of the product, but based on what they think other people think of a product. They are for people who can be hooked by clever slogans, soothing words, nice images, and who recoil at the cruel, hard world of numbers and quantifiable properties. You know, normal people.
If someone is selling perfume, they don’t bother telling you it smells good. They show you people who they hope you will envy or desire to emulate, and then imply that they use the given perfume. Engineers are all but immune to this sort of thing because a) Who cares what that moody idiot uses? and b) Why should I expect the same results? Plus: c) while we’re at it, just what sort of results are we talking about here? How does this increase my chances of mating with another person as compared to smelling like regular B.O.? How much will this improve my odds? How were those numbers obtained, and what was the error margin of the study?
No, marketing to engineers and mathematicians is mostly a waste of time. Better to aim your salesmanship at their friends, spouses, and coworkers and hope your product is purchased as a gift on their behalf. Given the way engineers tend to smell, this is actually a pretty safe bet.
I know all of this, but I still get incredulous when I read the idiotic things I see on packaging. I get irritated and defensive, as if someone wrote them for me. What do you mean? Do you actually expect me to believe this stuff? You think I’m an idiot or something?
Case in point:
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Suave hair goop. Haircare has now advanced so far that you need a PHD in Molecular Biology just to get your hair wet. Shampoo, PH-balancing conditioner, oily / dry correctional post-conditioner rinse, super-hold gel, and let us not forget that towering nemesis of the ozone layer, hairspray. (And let us not speak of the complex chemistry set they sell you if you plan on changing your hair color!) Whatever this is, the back of the bottle has this to teach me:
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Translation: This product does X, and costs less than products which cost more. Of course it costs less than more expensive brands. It would be impossible for it to be otherwise! It reminds me of this old post from Steven: A blurb which sounds nice but contains no information.
But I suppose that’s better than simple nonsense:
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Seems harmless enough. But when we look closer:
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What exactly is “family protection”, and how would it differ from the other forms of protection offered by other types of band-aids? Are these designed to be worn by more than one person at a time?
And my favorite sort of blurb: The herbal paradise utopian new-age eco-spiritual sales pitch:
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This one paragraph is a deep, bountiful source of untapped insanity. This reads less like a sales pitch for shampoo and more like an invitation to join a cult. Fully deconstructing this and holding each bit of sophistry up to the cold light of reason would take ten pages, but my favorite bit is this: “will take your hair to a place it’s never been before”. So, I guess it’s like the U.S.S. Enterprise of shampoo? Scotty! Three to beam down, plus my hair!
From The Archives:
Pixel City Dev Blog
An attempt to make a good looking cityscape with nothing but simple tricks and a few rectangles of light.
TitleWhat’s Inside Skinner’s Box?
What is a skinner box, how does it interact with neurotransmitters, and what does it have to do with shooting people in the face for rare loot?
Silent Hill Turbo HD II
I was trying to make fun of how Silent Hill had lost its way but I ended up making fun of fighting games. Whatever.
A Star is Born
Remember the superhero MMO from 2009? Neither does anyone else. It was dumb. So dumb I was compelled to write this.
Please Help I Can’t Stop Playing Cities: Skylines
What makes this borderline indie title so much better than the AAA juggernauts that came before?
Project Button Masher
I teach myself music composition by imitating the style of various videogame soundtracks. How did it turn out? Listen for yourself.
Playstation 3
What was the problem with the Playstation 3 hardware and why did Sony build it that way?
The Best of 2013
My picks for what was important, awesome, or worth talking about in 2013.
The Plot-Driven Door
You know how videogames sometimes do that thing where it's preposterously hard to go through a simple door? This one is really bad.
Grand Theft Railroad
Grand Theft Auto is a lousy, cheating jerk of a game.