The week of UT3 blather continues. You should know that I have abandoned any concept of self-restraint. I see that almost nobody is reading these posts, which is fine. They’re huge rambling things full of speculation and ruminations on a niche game that isn’t even out yet. I am under no illusions about the usefulness of these articles. I write this stuff because I must, not because I expect you to read them. Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Unreal Tournament 3: Weapons”
Here is a guy who takes modern laptops (and other gadgets) and rebuilds them to look like steampunk devices. He’s an odd* fellow, but his work is brilliant.
I’d like to see him do his thing to a cellphone. What would that look like?
* By “odd” I mean “unconventional”. I mean this in the nicest possible way.
I’m not the best guy to review the graphics technology of a cutting-edge game like this. I’m a bit of a luddite when it comes to technology enhancements. If you want to know how the game looks when run at 3072×2048 on a 28 inch LCD using an array of overclocked GForce 8800’s submerged in liquid nitrogen you’re looking at the wrong guy. Still, I can’t resist doing a little armchair quarterbacking on what they’ve done. Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Unreal Tournament 3: Technology”
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It feels like a sort of credit card where you can borrow energy that must be paid back later. You can keep making payments every day to maintain the debt, but as soon as you stop paying (taking caffeine) the borrowed energy is repossessed. Abruptly. You’ll pay back the energy, and then some, in the form of a prolonged crash. Just like with a credit card, what you pay back is always going to be a good bit more than what you borrowed in the first place.
I knew all of this, but I fell for it anyway. I’d been incrementally increasing my coffee intake over the last year. When a rough day came along I’d have an extra cup, which then became my new minimum payment. When the weather turned cold, I foolishly started drinking a little more each day because hot coffee is great for keeping warm. (A contributing factor to this was getting a coffeemaker with an opaque pot. It’s insulated, which saves energy, but it allowed me to up my intake without noticing. How many cups have I had again? Three? Yeah. Probably three. Hey. Why is the pot empty?)
A couple of weeks ago I realized I was in trouble when my wife woke up and found the coffee pot was empty. I’d demolished our entire 12-cup pot on my own. Oopsie.
I knew I couldn’t do anything about it right away (aside from brewing another pot of coffee) because I was knee-deep in a major project at work that was already demanding overtime. So I just maintained my habit. Last week I finished that project, and this weekend I got rid of the coffee. I hate being in debt, and by this point I’d run up quite a bill.
I replaced the regular coffee with decaf and endured the crash. I’m now on day four of the process. I’ve gone from having 1350mg of caffeine to about 50mg a day. (Even decaf has a bit of caffeine. ) My body has filed numerous protests in the form of headaches, lethargy, drowsiness, and a sort of generalized state of non-specific suckitude.
Yesterday I dashed off the snarky bit about the writer’s strike, and then as I read the comments I wondered WHAT IS EVERYONE’S PROBLEM TODAY?!?!? It was one of those, “everyone else is driving like a jerk” moments, where I realized everyone else was (probably) normal and “everyone’s problem” was that I was in a state of perpetual agitation.
I’m in a mess of my own making, the result of being careless with a habit-forming psychoactive stimulant. This is easy compared to quitting smoking (not that I would know, I don’t smoke) but it still sucks and I’m kicking myself for letting it go this far.
Other amusing symptoms:
Interesting experience. I think I’m passed the worst of it now, but if I seem unusually grumpy please humor me. I’m not really an awful person, I’m just punishing you for my mistakes. Is that so wrong?
I didn’t think I’d be excited about this game. I didn’t think I had the capacity to be excited about this game. Understand that I’d more or less written off subsequent entries in the UT series a couple of years ago, and I didn’t think I’d be coming back. Now that UT3 is near release, and now that I’ve learned that it may attempt to cater to my particular tastes, I’m finding myself drawn to learn more and see exactly what sort of game Epic has for us here. I spent most of the weekend playing, studying, swearing at, and thinking about, the demo. A whole bunch of UT3 posts this week are the natural byproduct of this behavior. Starting with this one. Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Unreal Tournament 3: Interface”
I see that Hollywood Writers – a term somewhat akin to Nebraskan Surfers – are apparently going on strike. Cue dramatic music. I hope they do, and I hope it lasts. I want to see if we can tell the difference. The folks who haven’t had an original idea in years are threatening to stop writing? How would we know? (Since they have elected to no longer write, it would be funny if they picketed with blank signs.)
Maybe this is just an excuse to get some time off so they can take part in NaNoWriMo. You can’t deny they need the practice.
A couple of years ago we rented Firefly through Netflix, and we saw how good writing is rewarded: The show gets shown out of order in a moving timeslot and canceled mid-season. We have more sitcoms about wacky, off-beat families than we have televisions in this country, and yet somehow nobody could find room to give Firefly more than thirteen episodes? I now carry a bitter grudge against the industry in general, with a special abhorrence for all the writers who think “sci-fi” means “moody, angst-ridden romance in space”.
I don’t expect the strike to last. The writers won’t have anything to do but sit at home and watch television, and they are sure to crack after a couple of days of that torture.
So Dexter, the latest version of WordPress, is up and running here on Twenty Sided. I managed to break the site for an hour or so this morning but I think I have it all ironed out now. Let me know if you see anything screwy. I’ve also modified the CSS so that when people post huge URLs in the comments it won’t break the formatting. This is only tested in IE and Firefox. If the right side of comments are getting chopped off, please let me know.
I got a decent start on tagging some of my old posts. I worked my way backwards through the videogame archives, adding tags. I have noticed some things about this process:
1. It is very easy.
2. It makes the site more useful, even for me.
3. It is a gigantic task that would take forever.
That last item worries me a little. I’ll try to do it in bite-sized bits. Ideally, I’d like to have all of the videogame and anime posts tagged at some point. In any case, at least I won’t be adding any more un-tagged stuff to the site.
EDIT: DEV NULL Below points out there aren’t any tags visible. I guess I should have mentioned that. Tags should appear at the end of posts… but only for ones where I’vbe manually added tags. The most recent posts in videogames are mostly tagged. All other posts are withouttags at the moment.
LATER: Thanks to those who pointed out that wordpress is puking SQL errors all over the DMotR entries. Turns out that Dexter has a totally different way of sorting posts into categories. The First / Last navigation links need to query SQL to find the first and last posts in a given category. This would be easy if the category was stored with the post data in the same table but instead this information is in another table. Sigh. It was already a crazy process to find out this simple bit of information, requiring an INNER JOIN and some other hocus-pocus that goes beyond my limited SQL-fu. I couldn’t even understand the new system, much less figure out how to query it.
About an hour in I realized I was re-inventing the wheel for nothing: DMotR is done. I don’t need fancy queries or anything else. The first post is #612 and the closing credits are #1306. I just hard-coded them to always point to these posts and called it a day. The downside is that if I ever added a comic the navigation links would ignore it, but I don’t think it’s worth the hassle right now.
Okay, problem “solved”.
Crunch-mode game development isn't good, but sometimes it happens for good reasons.
Cities: Skylines is bound to have a sequel sooner or later. Where can this series go next, and what changes would I like to see?
Why spend millions on visuals that are just a distraction from the REAL game of hotbar-watching?
What is "Domino Worldbuilding" and how did it help to make Mass Effect one of the most interesting settings in modern RPGs?
I called 2019 "The Year of corporate Dystopia". Here is a list of the games I thought were interesting or worth talking about that year.
Most stories have plot holes. The failure isn't that they exist, it's when you notice them while immersed in the story.
Scenes from Half-Life 2:Episode 2, showing Gordon Freeman being a jerk.
What are publishers doing to fight piracy and why is it all wrong?
The Thieves Guild quest in Skyrim is a vortex of disjointed plot-holes, contrivances, and nonsense.
A horrible, railroading, stupid, contrived, and painfully ill-conceived roleplaying campaign. All in good fun.
T w e n t y S i d e d
