March 2001
This will be my last entry for
a while, for tomorrow I go back to college, where the firewall is waiting
patiently to block out any attempts to connect to the server through FTP,
as well as any attempts to play games online. Yes, that's right,
I am no longer to play Drakan or Unreal Tournament or any other game online
from college. They saw that their servers were being strained by
too much Napster use, so naturally they decided to start blocking game
data and leave Napster functional. That's all right, though, because
it keeps me working on my levels and Sine Wave projects instead of playing
online all the time. I had a chance to play Drakan online a few times
during spring break, despite the master server being down, and it's the
same as it's always been. If the server goes up again, and I'm ever
able to play normally, don't expect to see me on there very much anymore.
As you may know, I used to run a Drakan server. One time, someone
was on there creating chat macros. One of those macros was "Type
killer!" Apparently that's something people feel they have to say
often enough that it has to be bound to a single key.
I've updated the links section
of this page. Since Gamecenter is no more, that link is gone, but
the ActionXtreme forums remain active at this moment, so that link stays.
Drakan player Sulalee has created a new forum called The
Lovely Pink Place, which is a discussion of all sorts of things, so
there's a link for that too.
Yesterday's entry may seem a
bit incongruous to you, because it suddenly shifts its attitude a little
and makes reference to something that you would think was mentioned earlier,
but actually wasn't. It also seems like it's almost long enough to
be two entries merged into one. That's because it is, with the exception
of one paragraph. There are some paragraphs that I write and later
feel like they're really subjects I don't know so much about and should
just shut up about, and they're gone before anyone can see them.
Call it cowardice, call it failure to take responsibility, call it damage
control, and I won't deny that what I'm doing is any of those things.
That's why I'm afraid to join the SDMBs. I'm afraid I'll do my usual
Salix "thing" and they'll ban me for it. This paragraph I'm writing
now is exactly the kind of thing I would feel remorseful about and delete
later, so I had better leave this message to myself: self, don't delete
the paragraph at the beginning of the entry for March 16th. Use it
as a reference for if you ever grow out of this phase where you need to
run damage control on your site all the time.
I read this
on the SDMBs today. Apparently, a bill was introduced in Michigan
recently that advocates the teaching of intelligent design by a creator
alongside evolution in science classes. Even though intelligent design,
part of the creationist idea, is really a religious concept rather than
a scientific theory, this is still being seriously proposed. Well,
I think people should just stick to teaching evolution in a science class
because it is the most greatly supported by scientific evidence, and religious
creation stories should be taught in a religious studies class rather than
a science class. Personally, I see no conflict between these two
ideas, because it is possible to believe that evolution is the means by
which this intelligent design is achieved, and that the creator has guiding
the process of evolution since the beginning of life on Earth. Besides,
if we start teaching religious concepts in science classes, that opens
up a big can of worms right there. There would be nothing to stop
math teachers from requesting that the theory that pi = 3 be taught alongside
the real, mathematically derived value of the number; or chemistry teachers
from requesting that the theory of fire, water, earth, and wind be taught
alongside atomic and molecular science.
Here's something I've been thinking
about lately. The Christian belief states that God is omniscient.
That means God knows everything that happens in the universe, including
the past and present. It also states that humans have free will.
This is really the biggest contradiction of all. If God really knows
everything, including the future, then that means that what happens in
the future is already predestined and that we don't have free will at all.
You might argue that there are several paths to take in life, and that
God knows the outcome of each of those paths and it is up to us to choose
which path to take in life. But since God is omniscient, then God
must know which of those paths we will choose to take and which future
will become reality. Either God is not really omniscient, or our
free will is just an illusion caused by our own lack of knowledge of the
future.
As you may know, many sites on
the Internet are having troubles. The Sine Wave is no exception,
what with the firewall issues back at college, but as long as I have a
way to connect to the server, this page can keep going. That isn't
the case with other sites, whose existence depends on the continued inflow
of money, particularly from advertising. Now I've been hearing about
how the people who run these sites aren't being paid anymore. I wonder
what would happen if The Sine Wave were the last surviving site of its
kind on the Internet. What if I had to take on the task of being
the world's only source of information on... well, I talk about a lot of
things here, but let's say... Drakan information. With the closing
of ActionXtreme, and the recent troubles with Surreal-News advertising
budgets, and Surreal's focus away from Drakan and on to their PS2 projects
and Traveler's Quest, what if the only place for Drakan information was
this site? Fortunately, I don't think the last few Drakan-specific
sites are going down anytime soon.
It's a good thing I won't have
to take on that task, because it's been one and a half years of playing
Drakan and making levels for me, and I don't think I have the patience
to make any more levels, besides the ones I'm working on. The only
Internet project I'll be working on now is Auropolis, and for single player,
Journey to Azenera.
The ActionXtreme forums are being
closed down. This is because GameSpy wants to use the server that
is currently carrying ActionXtreme to expand the space used by the Great
GameSpy Empire network. This action will effectively destroy one
of the main Drakan forums, as well as some really popular boards for Aliens
vs. Predator and the Rainbow Six games. There's still the Surreal-News
forums, which fortunately have recently been loaded with better board software
with more features, but this means there's one less Drakan forum for us
to populate, and a lot of newbies come to Drakan.net first so the ActionXtreme
forums are the ones they visit first. I suppose one thing to do would
be to link to the Surreal-News forums from Drakan.net. This isn't
the only rant I have against GameSpy, though. Some time ago, they
acquired Mplayer, who owned one of the Drakan master servers, so then the
servers were both part of a single entity. Now, for some reason,
GameSpy has dropped their Drakan master server, which means there's no
server list in the game anymore. Now everyone has to get the IP addresses
of all the servers before they can join, so it's much less convenient.
It's a real shame these things can't last forever.
I'm almost afraid to become a
member of the Straight Dope
Message Boards. It seems that on there, you can get banned permanently
for momentary lapses in judgment, and that no one is permitted to speak
of such bannings unless a moderator brings it up first. Just recently,
a few people who had a post count of over a thousand were banned for various
reasons. I'm glad I've been lurking there for a while because now
I know I would be walking on some extra thin parakeet eggshells if I ever
decided to join.
Okay, fine, you made me do it.
Now you have to read through yet another paragraph of me babbling about
various things. Here's one to start: this Zero Wing craze has gotten
out of hand, even on the Drakan sites! I was looking at Surreal-News
to see if they've updated (they have, with 6 new levels), and I saw the
banner ad at the top of the screen. It was yet another Zero Wing
reference, with Cats saying the usual line about all of something of ours
being belong to them. Imagine what people will think in a few months
when they think back and remember all this stuff. Right now, the
mass audience I call the Collective has decided that the Zero Wing mistranslation
is funny. They all laugh in unison, thinking that the lines from
their sacred mistranslated introduction carry some universal humor and
that this, this one thing, will turn out to be timeless. Of course,
just like Where's the Beef, Whassup, and Zesty (which never caught on anyway,
that's a relief), All Your Base will one day be seen by the Collective
as something that might have been funny yesterday, but is just grating
today. You can count on that.
The Collective really likes their
movies a certain way. They like predictable romantic comedies where
two potential lovers get together and break up again, only to get together
again at the airport. They like their action movies with car chases,
explosions, and mouthing off to the police chief. They like their
romantic dramas where the woman has a terminal illness and manages to make
the once emotionless man find the True Meaning of LoveTM
before she finally passes away while not losing a bit of her radiance.
Sometimes, however, the Collective decides to like something totally different,
like the martial-arts movie Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, and in this
case I can't help but agree with them. I saw this movie today, and
it was really good. The visuals and costumes were beautiful, the
story was interesting, and the fighting scenes were really impressive.
Even though it wasn't really realistic, with all the flying and walking
on walls, it was really well done.
No, Marcie! You didn't
have
to do that! Well, maybe she didn't, and maybe I didn't have to bring
back The Sine Wave either, but I did. And I have a confession to
make. Over the entire history of this site, I have made quite a few
promises that I haven't kept, fortunately not so much to other people,
but to myself. I didn't finish the Drakan story adaptation, I didn't
make that Lunaria game yet, and I've only just started on Journey to Azenera,
getting sidetracked way off into the distance by other projects like Auropolis.
Well, that's it - from now on, I'm not making promises. I'll only
make plans and expectations. Those will really be no different than
promises, except it's not as devastating when I don't manage to get them
done.
I mislabeled the date on yesterday's
Sine Wave entry, not that anyone saw it. Now that this page updates
sporadically, it has lost most of what little readership it had.
I don't know if I'll be able to keep up this site during the next few months
or the summer, but I hope I can. I've really been getting into criticizing
the things I read on message boards and web pages lately.
Sometimes I read the Surreal-News
forums to see what's going on, and to help people with level editing questions.
I also look at the Traveler's Quest forum to see what people are suggesting.
There are a lot of good ideas there, but there are also ones like this
one from this
thread: "And, also i think it would be pretty neat to see indian-style
warriors that you can fight, u know like the people frm Africa, or somethin
like that, oh well, just an idea." Wow! That is such a
great idea! Let's have one of the enemies in the game be Indians!
But not just any Indians, we'll have them be Indians from Africa!
I'm sure that particular ethnic group, if they existed, would be so glad
that they were finally getting some representation in a computer game,
although I don't think they would take too kindly to the suggestion that
they be a simple enemy and not a playable faction. I know that was
an old post, but it's just an example of why I'm glad that today, Sageous
cleared up in this
thread the fact that the game would be taking place in a land not on
Earth, so they would have no reason to copy any particular time period
or place on Earth. That's a good thing, because it means the TQ team
doesn't have to spend all their time doing research on the cultural and
artistic history of all those Indians from Africa.
Oh, hello. I suppose you're
expecting another update, now that I'm home for spring break? Well,
you're going to get an update! So, here's what's been going
on in life: during the last days of college before my break here, I took
a few tests that I wasn't too sure about and wrote a paper I think I did
well on but I'm not too sure about that either. It just feels like
I've been coasting through life on luck, and one of these days I'm going
to freeze up and get burned when the situation gets sticky. I study,
but it never feels like it's with enough concentration or repetition.
The new ActionXtreme Drakan forums
have been invaded by genre dysphoria! It seems someone has started
a thread in which they name off suposedly "lame" games, and the first one
mentioned was - get this - The Longest Journey. I don't know much
about that game, but I'm obligated to defend it in this case because of
the way it was so quickly dismissed by a few members of the action-loving
Drakan community. The first complaint was about the graphics, and
how there was "too much clicking" (Diablo, anyone?) and my favorite quote
out of the bunch was this: "The game is played solely with a mouse,
NO WEAPONS to kill things with! That should tell you something right there!"
Oh wow, what an insightful comment right there! You can't kill things!
With weapons! Therefore it's obvious that the game's worthless!
Give me a break... it's a standard adventure game; of course there's a
lot of story-based stuff and not much action. If you try to play
it as an action game, of course you'll be disappointed, just like you'll
be disappointed if you watch Gone With the Wind to marvel at the kung-fu
sequences.
I made this level in one afternoon,
just because I felt like it. It's a standard multiplayer ground level,
but this one has weapon spawns everywhere, so all the whiners in multiplayer
won't have to reach for that macro that begs for everyone to let them get
a good weapon, because of course everyone should have the same strength
weapon when they're in a free-for-all deathmatch. It's just like
how Surreal put invulnerability runes in their levels not to be used, but
so players would simply be tempted. Right. Anyway, the level
is Ironthorn Woods.
It's called Ironthorn Woods because there are spiked trees in the level, and they're covered with strong poison that will kill you instantly. There's a Dreadnaught Minor at the bottom of the pit, speed potions on the bridge, and health on the grass.