Once in a while you see a mistake in the news. Sometimes they spell the name of a city wrong, or misplace a comma in an amusing way. It’s funny to see when it happens, and sometimes good for a laugh.
But last night I saw this. The story hasn’t changed since I spotted it twelve hours ago, but I’ve saved the text in case they do:
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Context-Free News”
Steven is writing about Ai Yori Aoshi. It’s very interesting to see his reactions to the series. (My own synopsis is here.)
Ai Yori Aoshi is the second anime I’d ever watched, right after Cowboy Bebop. I really enjoyed it, but as I took in more shows I looked back and wondered how much of the appeal wasn’t the newness of anime itself. The show has a slightly different premise than the standard harem comedy (in this case the lead character is fully committed to one female at the outset, instead of being some sad-sack who can’t make up his mind) but it still hits all the harem comedy tropes: You’ve got one guy surrounded by a few pretty and unaccountably single girls, you have your beach episode, the harvest festival, and many chances for the guy to fall into preposterous and compromising situations with the girls. All the girls dig him, although some do so more overtly than others. Then there a plot justification to keep him from just running off with his chosen girl. Add fan service and stir.
I still can’t be objective about the show. I’ll always view it through those rose-colored glasses that only a new otaku can wear. Now Steven is watching it, and he’s seen easily an order of magnitude more anime than I have. I’ve been eager for him to try the series, although I really expected him to stop somewhere on the first disc because he’d seen it a hundred times already. The fact that he’s sticking with it means the show probably isn’t the crap I feared it was. The fact that he’s not crazy about it probably means my own appreciation of the series is more than the show would normally merit.
Some of my old posts on the show:
Synopsis
Why I like Aoi Sakuraba
About Tina the American and her breast-grabbing
Widely regarded as one of the greatest strategy games ever, X-Com is a game with compelling gameplay and generous depth even by today’s standards, and was an amazing achievement given the technology available in 1993. IGN calls it the #1 PC game of all time.
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| The world map is astounding. It’s a real 3d world you can spin and view in real time, like Google Earth. No, you can’t zoom in and see things in detail, but you can see national borders and major cities. |
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| Unlike in the movies, the aliens aren’t just here to conquer New York or LA. |
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| Here one of my units has entered a room with a couple of filthy alien scum. You can tell they’re evil by how purple their funiture is. |
The game begins with the geoscape, a map of the Earth where you can see your bases and order your forces to move against any enemies you’ve managed to detect. There is a running day / night cycle, and you can plan missions to take place at day or night, depending on your preference. (Super-secret expert hint: It is dark at night.)
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| The base view screen. You can have up to eight bases anywhere on the globe. All of them are belong to us. |
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| Your soldiers gain experience and improve with each mission, assuming they survive. You can hire more soldiers whenever you like, but constantly marching into battle with a collection of pants-wetting noobs is not recommended. |
There is a lot here, and I’ve only scratched the surface. I can’t believe this game even fit into memory back then. (It only requires 2MB.) There are two or three strategy games layered together here, and all of them are compelling and fun. I went through the game last weekend in preparation for this post, and it was just as fun now as it was four years ago. The patched version is also easy to get running, without needing to fiddle with DOS emulators or slowing down your CPU. The graphics, while old, are still nice to look at.
If you’re running Windows, you can get a working version of the game from The Underdogs. It’s just a 3MB download, although that site is throtled back so much that it took me 15 minutes to get the file. If that site is too slow or you can’t get to it from where you are (I’m talking to YOU, people surfing the ‘net from work) then I have the file mirrored here. Just run the installer and then run xcom1fix.exe for Win 2000/ME/XP.
I notice my Google ads have gone nuts lately. Time to clean house again.
Since the ending of DMotR, this site has been pretty tightly dedicated to a couple of core subjects, so Google should have no problem figuring out what ads should be running here. But instead of better targeting, I’m getting ads for all kinds of stupid stuff. One of them is for some sort of “enviro-friendly waterless toilet. (Enviro-friendly? Is human waste no longer biodegradeable?) Whatever. It may or may not be something my readers might want, but Google seriously needs a checkbox labeled “NEVER EVER ADVERTISE PINK TOILETS ON MY SITE, EVEN IF IT’S A CHOICE BETWEEN THAT AND FURRY PORN.” Selling toilets on my website? Not in this lifetime.
That ad has been nixed, which means it should stop showing up in the next 24 hours or so. I’ve also killed some unwanted stuff for ringtones and that sort of thing. Still, I’d like to ask for your help in tracking down crap ads. Here are the sorts of ads I want to kill:
If you see one of the above appear, please drop the domain name of the site in the comments, here or in any other post. If you tell me “I see an ad for free ringtones” that doesn’t help me, because I don’t know where it goes so I have no way of blocking it. If you tell me, “I see an ad for ringtonespammers.com” then I can block the ad. Note that the URL should be listed underneath, so you shouldn’t have to click on the offending ad.
Also: I see on other sites they have great ads for videogames and nothing else. I’d hate to give up on my existing ads, which include RPG dice and other cool stuff, but if Google is going to continue behaving like this then I’m going to look elsewhere. An ad for videogames or dice enhances my site. An ad for toilets detracts from the value of the site in ways I can’t begin to calculate. This ain’t no Home Depot.
But where do you go to run those videogame ads? I Googled around for an hour (er… maybe “Googling” was a bad idea in this case) and couldn’t find anything except services that wanted to provide advertising FOR me. Maybe those ads are only available for “large” sites and they don’t want to deal with hobby blogs. Still, if anyone knows about who provides those ads and where I can go to check it out, please drop a link in the comments.
(Also: If you are using some sort of ad-blocking and never see the ads, you really don’t need to brag about it. It’s a free net and I don’t object at all to surfing on your own terms. But, I pay for bandwidth with this ad revenue, so this isn’t a case where I’m going to give you a high five for your efforts. I’m not going to join you in cheering, “YEAH! Stick it to The Man!” in cases where The Man is me.)
EDIT: The ads at Kotaku are what I’m looking for. Videogames and technology stuff. I wouldn’t use that many (and I don’t need to, since I’m a lot smaller than Kotaku) but one ad that is reliably relevant and technology / videogame focused would be perfect.
I’ve written before about the difficulties of learning to navigate a 3d world in first person. It’s daunting and slow, and usually means the player needs to learn how to walk and look around before they can begin learning the particulars of the given game. There is a certain overhead that must be dealt with before someone can play first person games. Because of this, the conventional wisdom is that first-person games are for hard-core players. As someone who probably falls into the “hard-core” demographic, I’m not really in any kind of position to assail that line of reasoning.
On the other hand, the conventional wisdom seems to be that hard-core players, (the kind which, if you see where I’m going with this, play first person games) have no interest in puzzle games. They want to shoot aliens, gun down Nazis, capture flags, and generally pwn n00bs and whatnot. I’m a good counter-example to this, although one noisy man on a website does not constitute a viable market. Until now, nobody has been willing to risk a couple of million bucks finding out if the hardcore players want puzzle-focused games. First person games are notoriously expensive to produce and doing so is a waste if players would be just as happy doing the same puzzle within the context of a lightweight 2d game. So the only way it could even make sense to consider a FPS puzzler is if the gameplay demanded that sort of perspective.
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| 9.8m/s2. I’m looking down from a ledge into a pair of portals on the floor. Looking down into the orange on I see the view looking up from the blue, and vice-versa. If I jump into the blue one I’ll come sailing out of the orange one feet-first. It’s disorienting, but fun. |
The game, like all great puzzles, is something which can be grasped in seconds and yet leads to challenges of fiendish complexity. In the game you have a “Portal Gun”. You can place portals onto any smooth flat surface large enough to hold one. Once you make two portals, they will be “linked” so that you can walk through one and come out the other. You can put them anywhere: Floors, ceilings, walls. You can look through the portal and see where it goes. Put the two portals facing one another and you’ll find yourself looking over your own shoulder into infinity, with infinite copies of yourself looking through the infinite portals. It’s like, deep, man.
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| The sparse environments do a great job of keeping things focused on the puzzles |
The game is short, and it’s clear they weren’t sure how far to push this. The game introduces the various types of puzzles, then layers them together with gradually increasing complexity, culminating in a timed situation where you must employ everything you’ve learned so far. Then it ends. It’s obvious that they have barely scratched the surface of what can be done with this gameplay. It seems they are hoping that the fan base will take these tools and expand the game via user-designed maps. I look forward to seeing where that goes.
If you just read Chainmail Bikini and don’t hang out in the forums you might have missed it, but Shawn and I (er, mostly Shawn so far) have begun doing “Wednesday updates”, where we post some bit of art or other funny stuff that’s related to the comic but doesn’t fit into the story.
Yesterday Shawn posted bit bit about “Schrà¶dinger’s Pants“. He and I both have different ideas about what sort of pants the Ramgar character is wearing. He thinks of it one way, I think of it another, and the “answer” has never appeared in the strip. He even has a poll going over at FtB so people can make their own guesses.
Which is it? What is he really wearing? How long until the situation forces us to see him from the waist down? I guess we can all argue about it fruitlessly until we find out. That seems to be the way you’re supposed to do things on the internet, and we are nothing if not rigorous stewards of tradition.
It’s September 22nd, and my brother and I are sitting in the pastor’s office in our tuxedos. We’re listening for the music change that will cue us to walk out into the sanctuary, where the ceremony will take place. We’re sitting in nervous silence with the pastor, who has given up on his attempts at small talk and has left my brother and I to our fidgeting. This would be an excellent time to go over the order of events in my head, since I would very much like to get through this without screwing up my brother’s wedding.
But then I see a puzzle on the bookshelf beside me. It’s right within arms’ reach. It’s a piece of wood with a few plastic pegs in it. There is a bit of text on the side explaining the rules, and under that are the words, “IF YOU CAN SOLVE THIS IN THREE TRIES OR LESS YOU ARE A GENIUS.” Now, you should not believe puzzles when they make these sorts of claims. These things are designed to sell themselves, and so it is in their best interest to flatter you. I know this, but a statement like this is the equivalent of telling a guy with a gambling problem that you have a hot tip on a horse and that it’s a sure thing. I’m defenseless, even against such a clumsy and obvious ploy.
I think about the fact that we are due to go out any second, the fact that my brother is about to be married, on my responsibilities in the coming hours, and I turn away from it. But it’s too late. My brain is already picturing the arrangement of pegs and holes and visualizing the various permutations of moves. I’m screwed. I sit there for about thirty seconds before I give up and childishly swipe the toy from his shelf. My brother laughs at me.
The pegs are exceedingly stiff in the holes and it shows no signs of wear. Either this thing is brand new (unlikely) or the pastor just keeps it here as a decoration and never plays with it. He sat in the same room with it for years and never felt compelled to touch it, and yet I could not do that for even thirty seconds. There is something wrong with one of us. At least.
My hands are shaking. Not over the puzzle. The puzzle has a calming effect, but not enough to overcome the anxiety of the coming hours. I have to give the wedding toast, and I’m filled with apprehension.
For crying out loud. When I was trying to think about the wedding I couldn’t stop thinking about the puzzle, and now that’ I’m doing the puzzle I can’t stop worrying about the wedding. It really is tough to make the pegs go in with my hands trembling like this.
I solve it on my second attempt, which means I get the satisfaction of knowing a piece of wood thinks I’m a genius. The music changes and we all stand up as I’m shoving the last peg into place. We walk out and the ceremony begins, but in the back of my mind I’m still fiddling with the thing. Was that the only sequence of moves that would lead to the solution? Could it have been done in fewer moves? What is the maximum number of moves you could make without hitting a dead-end? It really is sad.
I have never had any interest in recreational drug use. I’d rather be stoic and alert than happy and fuzzy-headed. Drugs just don’t offer the sort of stimulation I crave. But if someone ever comes up with a way to capture and purify the sensation of solving puzzles and distill it into liquid form, I’m hosed. Three weeks after the drug hits the streets you’ll find me in some filthy hotel on the edge of town, needle still in my arm, overdosed on some cheap Tetris clone.
I don’t know why I’m wired this way. I’m driven to overcome obstacles and create order from chaos, but only in abstract, symbolic ways. Getting a bunch of shapes into the right color and configuration brings me a sense of satisfaction, but getting the grass in my yard to a uniform height and color gives me no such thrill.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “The Puzzle Drive”
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