September 2003
- 30 -
I've got a crash on you
Morrowind has been crashing a
lot when I fight Ancient Vampires in the Giants mod and try to loot their
corpses. I'm using a bound axe summoned by a constant effect item,
and I wonder if that has something to do with it, because once I crashed
out and when I reloaded the save game, I had two bound axes in my inventory
as well as the axe I summoned, and when I took off the axe-summoning belt,
I still had one of the bound axes permanently stuck there. I guess
this is one of those beneficial bugs because you get a free item with zero
weight, but I don't want a bunch of extra stuff to build up in my inventory
due to bugs, and it feels even more like cheating than using magic regen
or increased skill gain mods, so I always use the console to delete excess
bound weapons.
Did I actually type "presense"
in that Lalo update in July 2001? Oh no, I did! I obviously
meant "presence" because there's no such word as "presense," at least not
in the context I gave. Well, folks, this is it. This is the
end of my flawless track record when it comes to avoiding typos.
I'm always reading people's posts on message boards, cringing whenever
I see a typo, and saying to myself, "How can people not know how to use
their own language?" Yes, I know there are some people who speak
English as a second language, and I'll make an exception for them, but
for the people whose first language is English, I saw repeated misspellings
as inexcusable. Now I know that I'm just a big hypocrite, and that
I was just trying to pull the chitin daggers out of people's eyes while
I didn't see the Daedric dai-katana in my own. Well, of course I
didn't see it, because there was a freaking sword in my eye! I guess
I could have used my other eye, but it was too busy looking at other people's
eyes for weapons. I suppose I could have just retconned those old
updates by quietly changing the text, but you know what they say: when
you retcon too much, you make a "ret" out of "c" and "on." Or something.
Long after I made up that Island
of Lalo stuff, a new comic appeared in my Minnesota daily paper, the Star
Tribune. It's called La Cucaracha, and it's by someone named Lalo
Alcaraz! Now that is just another strange coincidence, just like
the Star Runner/Homestar Runner thing and the Demo Days name thing.
I wonder what's next. Will I discover someone whose real name is
Shanvar, like the character I made up in my September 9, 2000 update?
Only time will tell.
While I was looking at the July
2001 archives, I saw a few of those Zelda-pop songs I did, and yeah, they
were cheesy, but I guess I should do another one now that I have Wind Waker.
I don't have much time, so I'll just do a few verses:
On top of a Moblin
All covered with fur
I stole a Skull Necklace
And ran like a blur.
I gave the Skull Necklace
To a guy on Windfall
He made me chase pigs there
And I caught them all.
I should learn my own history first
The book I'm reading for my Western
literature class now is the Histories, by Herodotus. I haven't read
it before, but back in 1998 or so, I wanted to test the download speed
of my modem, so I downloaded two big text files that turned out to be a
two-part version of that very same book. Even though it's the same
story, the text that I downloaded is a different translation from the book
that we're reading in class, so now I have two books with the same events
but different wordings of them.
Originally, there was a problem
with the Meteor Blast, but I turned it into a cool extra. It turns
out that if a bow weapon has no auto-aiming function, homing projectiles
don't work with it. Really, this test was the worst test ever and
I'm really not looking forward to the next one. I hate proofs so
much I just want to die! Okay calm down... but I can't calm down
because it seems like my Japanese class just keeps getting harder and harder
and I can never keep up. It's a strategy-based game, and I have never
really been good at those. I always lose at chess and a lot of other
board games, so I was thinking I wouldn't do too well in Rogue Spear.
That was a strange thing to say. How could anyone not know where
the castle was? It is visible from the marketplace at Kudor, which
is the most popular marketplace in the land. It's called the Hunter's
Knife, and it does 5 points of damage and gives you 2 health points when
you hit an enemy. The people of Lalo should never be found out by
ordinary people, anywhere else in the world, because they have a secret
that would be corrupted by our presense and our ways. Diablo has
you killing a bunch of enemy swarms, but there aren't any generators.
KISS: Psycho Circus, however, was a first-person shooter that did have
generators, and that aspect of the game was compared to Gauntlet in many
reviews.
That last paragraph there was
my little experiment in what it would look like if The Sine Wave consisted
of nothing but an automated program that puts together random sentences
from Sine Wave archives from the last four years. I got the idea
by looking at this site, which
I thought was real up-to-date commentary on random things until I realized
it was randomly generated. I can't put any scripts on this site,
so I can't do the same thing, but sometimes it feels like I'm falling into
the same writing routines, making it so that it would be effectively no
different from usual if I replaced my original writings with a random generator.
It's not totally like that, because I keep up with the latest games and
demos, and I talk about things like dumb ads that are playing right now
but probably will be off the air in a few months, whereas that automatic
E/N site still generates stuff that talks about Napster. Nobody really
talks about Napster anymore now that it's gone. The Napster
site is still up, but now it just has a bunch of crazy Flash animated cartoons
on it starring the Napster mascot.
I just realized what separates
my web page from most real blogs: lack of feedback methods. Most
blogs have a comments section attached to each entry where other people
can say stuff, but I have nothing. I can talk at you all day long,
but there's nothing you can do about it that can be seen by anyone but
me because I don't have a comments section. Sure, you can e-mail
me and ask me to display the e-mail, but there's no guarantee I will.
In fact, there's no guarantee I'll actually see it because I get so many
messages with such a high percentage of spam that I tend to go through
them really quickly, and I might miss something. The only reliable
way to refute me and have everyone see it would be to post on a message
board with a link to my site and a response to the content. Either
that, or you could set up a site like sinewavewatch.com that monitors and
responds to the things I write. No, I'm not going to register sinewavewatch.com
as my own domain and use it as a dummy site where I pretend to condemn
myself. The Sine Wave in itself is a dummy site enough as it is.
You know, the past few days I've
been getting really snippy with everything, so this paragraph I'm writing
right now will be free of sarcasm. Lately I've been playing Morrowind,
and I'm really enjoying it with a few really good mods. You can find
a bunch of cool ones at the Morrowind
Summit. Now, I have both Tribunal and Bloodmoon, and many of
these mods require one or both of these expansions, but there are still
some good ones that work with Morrowind by itself. First of all,
I have all the official plugins, and those are pretty good. The Siege
at Firemoth official mod is good, although if you're at a high enough level
the people who accompany you on that quest aren't as useful, and you really
do have to be at a high level (or have good resist lightning abilities)
to defeat the Lich. Another good mod is Giants, by The Puma Man,
which adds several new items and enemies to the game. There are some
night-specific enemies like shades and vampires, which adds an atmosphere
of horror and makes night more distinct from day. This might be considered
cheating, but I use Magic Regen v1.3 by __c4.ep and LanceVorgin because
I don't want to have to carry potions around if I want to be a mage.
One mod that's good for alchemists is Sri's Alchemy, by Srikandi.
I have the Bloodmoon edition, which spreads items from Tribunal and Bloodmoon
throughout the land, but I think there are earlier editions that work without
the expansions. For marksman weapon enthusiasts, there's the Marksman
Mod, by Intelligentsia, which adds some cool new bows, arrows, bolts, and
throwable weapons, but I must warn you that it lets some Cliff Racers attack
with magic spells. I also have the Definitive Birthsigns Pack V1.0,
by Doy and IceNine0, which adds a bunch of new birthsigns and modifies
existing ones, adding some unique starting equipment to the game with some
signs. Then I have the Real Signposts mod, by ElBundee, which adds
readable text to signs, and the Mana Cost mod, by Eldar, which reduces
the cost of spells if your combined magic skills are high enough.
Along with all those mods, I made a few myself, such as one that reduces
(but doesn't eliminate) the shimmering on magic items, one that lets you
walk faster, and one that lets you gain skills ten times faster because
I don't want to spend so much time building up my characters. Now
that's a lot of mods!
Hey, you know what's really annoying?
No, I'm not talking about ads this time, I'm talking about when you go
into a restaurant and ask for a knife to cut your steak, and instead of
a knife, they give you ten thousand spoons. They just bring in a
bunch of spoons in wheelbarrows and start loading them onto the table.
I mean, I don't need even one spoon, so it's not like the solution to my
problem is more spoons! Where do they get all those spoons, and why
do they need so many? The only word I can use to describe it when
this happens is "ironic." I mean, there's just no other word to describe
getting ten thousand spoons when all you need is a knife. There's
just not, seriously.
Another thing that's just as
ironic as getting a bunch of spoons is when you're playing Tetris and you
need one of those long pieces to fill a narrow gap, but all you get is
a bunch of square and S-shaped pieces. I mean, that is just so ironic!
Ironic ironic ironic. I've decided I really like that word, and I
can use it to describe just about everything. Like, when you're playing
Unreal Tournament and you're just about to score a perfect 50 kills in
a row without getting killed, when suddenly you get killed by the player
with the lowest score, that is just ironic. And when you're doing
your homework and you've just finished all the problems for chapter 7,
and then you look on the syllabus and see that you didn't have to do the
chapter 7 problems, that's ironic. And when you're sending me a sarcastic
message telling me that making fun of that song is so five years ago, that's
ironic because my site hasn't even been around for five years! The
joke's on you now, so you'd better check your face in the mirror because
I'm not sure but I think I see a little egg. Now that's what I call
irony.
So, has anyone heard of the upcoming
movie Kill
Bill? I wonder: is it going to have any, I don't know, fight
scenes in it? The previews I've seen sure don't give any indication.
I'll have to keep an eye on that one. Also, have you heard of Duke
Nukem Forever? It sure is taking "forever" to make! Get
it? Because it's been in production for so long, and the word "forever"
is in the name! Now that was a pretty good joke I made just there.
Don't use that joke without giving me credit, or I'll be upset. Hey,
here's a neat trick: go to Google,
type in either "weapons of mass destruction" or "French military victories"
and then click the I'm Feeling Lucky button! Now that's entertainment!
It's easy to understand the word "entertainment," but you would also understand
it if I typed "eanitnenmrtet" because did you know that adcicnorg to a
sdtuy on hmaun icnnteeglile or whatever... oh forget it, just go here.
Oh, and did you hear that all your base are belong to us and somebody set
up us the bomb? Yeah, it's really funny and... oh look, there's something
shiny.
I'm under the risk of winning
the award for Most Incoherent Blogger, so I'll lay off the sarcastic rants
now. I don't know if you'd actually call me a blogger per se, because
I host Drakan levels and travel logs on here as well as commentary and
let's face it, I've been stripped by society of all opinions and been left
an empty shell lashing out to find any meaning at all in my life.
It's a tragic tale and maybe I could write a book about it, but it probably
wouldn't be a best-seller because it wouldn't be about how the liberal
conspiracy or the right-wing demagogues or whatever are ruining America,
it would just be a sad little story about me and my petty emotional barely-issues.
See, there I go again! All right, I'll be serious now: I've mostly
finished my numerical systems homework, and I've read the assigned chapters
in the Iliad. I might read the whole thing someday, but for now,
I have to start reading the Histories, by Herodotus. It's about the
Greeks' efforts to fend off a Persian army, as well as descriptions of
the world in and around ancient Greece. Then there's the steady stream
of technical Japanese writing that I have to read and translate, and the
homework I have to do for my algorithms class. It's going to be a
tough weekend.
Well, I've gotten a bit more
used to Matlab now, and now I can program more efficiently. It's
good for dealing with matrices and vectors, and you can create matrices
using far fewer commands than other languages, but it still uses the same
floating point numbers and is prone to rounding error. That can get
tricky when you're trying to detect zero vectors or find orthogonal matrices.
I just found out that one of the problems was written incorrectly, so now
I have to change one of the lines on a big matrix and go through the results
of an algorithm all over again.
Yesterday was the autumnal equinox,
but you don't have to know that to know that it's inching ever and ever
closer to winter here in Madison. I've started wearing long pants,
and I'm already wearing a jacket. Just a few weeks ago it was so
hot that I had to be running the fan all the time, and now I don't even
open the window most of the time. I guess that's the price of living
in a temperate climate. No, I'm not really complaining about the
weather, I'm just observing. Can't someone observe the weather without
being seen as complaining? I don't know, because no one has ever
responded to my weather-related entries, but I suppose "Nice weather, isn't
it?" could be seen as a comment on the weather that's not a complaint.
See, this is why so few people (if anyone) read my site, because of boring
entries like this.
I saw a preview
video for Half-Life 2 and yeah, I guess it looks all right, more or
less. Actually it does look quite good, especially the physics system
and the way you can pick up debris around you and fling it at enemies.
I hope I'm not too burned out on first-person shooters when it comes out,
because I think I might have to get this one - that is, if there's not
too much complaint about that "Steam" thing that seems to be connected
to it. I've heard lots of comments about Steam, such as speculation
that you'll need an Internet connection to play even single player after
you've patched the game or played in multiplayer mode once, but others
have taken a more positive attitude about Steam because it'll let you download
all the original Half-Life scenarios and mods if you subscribe to it.
I already have most of the old Half-Life stuff, so I probably won't be
subscribing to Steam, but I hope Valve keeps making enough content to make
the cost of the service worthwhile.
I'm watching TV again, so I've
been reminded of a few more ads that get on my nerves. There's the
ad where people keep trying to pronounce the name Touareg. Then there
are the McGriddles ads that I used to see all the time. Do I really
need to keep being reminded how "bizarre" they are? I doubt they
really are anything out of the ordinary, but McDonalds likes to play up
that marketing gimmick anyway. This last one is only an NBC thing,
but I'm tired of seeing that same Must-See TV preview all the time.
Yes, Rachel, you're her. Yes, Will, you've woken up next to Jack,
screaming. Yes, mister silver-haired guy, you go out with but don't
sleep with men. Now silence all of you, or I shall make use of the
almighty remote control. Maybe I just need to watch less TV.
There's no reason to watch two or three hours of primetime shows and then
another two and a half hours of late shows. Wow, I'm really wasting
my life, aren't I? No wonder I think I don't have much time for homework;
I consider the time I spend watching TV to be "lost time" that I'm fated
to spend rotting my brain with some dumb sitcom, just as Achilles is fated
to die because he's still a mortal no matter how much he wants to be like
the gods. Television is the means of my hubris, and I fear that soon
my downfall will come.
If you can read this, it means
my ISP hasn't disabled my access from Wisconsin. I'd better enjoy
it while it lasts. But if it doesn't, that's all right too because
there's not really much for me to talk about lately. There's a lot
of homework I have to do this week, for every single one of my classes.
One of my classes, Intro to Numerical Methods, is one I end up forgetting
all the time. The homework for that class involves going to the computer
lab to use a program called Matlab, which sounded kind of similar to my
graphing calculator when the professor described it, but it's actually
unfamiliar and there are a lot of things I still don't know how to do.
The user interface is kind of clunky, I haven't found a way to get out
of infinite loops, and the computers I have to work with are slower than
I'm used to. Maybe they're slow because other people are connected
to them, or maybe it's the processor speed, but it takes a few seconds
just to load all the icons in the Matlab window. I hope I can get
used to it after a while. I've finished reading the Iliad, but there
are probably lots of subtle details I missed because all the plot threads
are hard to follow. You have the Achaian Greek heroes and their struggles
with the Trojan heroes, and you also have the internal strife among the
Greeks, especially between Achilles and Agamemnon, and then you have the
gods who are overseeing the war and intervening in people's lives and dictating
everyone's destiny, and then you have the battles where people make long
speeches in between slashing each other with swords and throwing spears
at each other. I know Achilles is supposed to be really tough to
beat, but don't you think someone could have snuck up on him and hit him
with a lucky shot while he was in the middle of babbling on about how he
wanted vengeance and honor? But then again, Achilles wasn't destined
by fate to be killed by some random Trojan underling, so he could get away
with making big speeches in the middle of the battlefield.
My teachers send me e-mail all
the time and it's beginning to get lost in all the spam. I put my
stupid e-mail address as a link on the bottom of this page, and now I have
to lie in the bed I've made for myself. A bed of nails. Poison
nails. And the poison is on fire. I've been getting like 50
messages a day, and 48 of them are spam, so I've decided to ditch the old
Netscape Messenger and go with Mozilla Thunderbird, which has an adaptive
spam filter. So far it hasn't been working too well, labeling nearly
all messages as spam, even the messages I get from teachers, but I hope
it adapts better in the future.
In addition to doing homework,
I watch TV sometimes, and the same annoying ads play over and over again.
Most of them can blend right into the background, but there are a few that
just grate on me. One ad I'm sick of is that one for Old Wisconsin,
where the little girl hits the guy with a fork at the end and laughs.
I swear, that laugh is just the creepiest thing ever. Everyone might
love that Old Wisconsin flavor, but I don't love the way they're selling
it. Another annoying ad is that Axe deodorant ad where the guy and
girl are on the bike, and the guy sounds like a nice guy but then everything
goes in reverse and the guy sounds like a total lecher. In fact,
all the Axe deodorant ads I've seen, like all the ones with the mannequin,
have been silly and dumb. There are also some ads that are all right,
but I can't think of them right now. You know, I just noticed that
I remembered the products being advertised in the really tiresome ads,
but I can't even think of the cool ads, much less the products they might
be selling. Maybe the makers of annoying ads have caught on to something.
Lately I've been playing a little
freeware Japanese game called Ikachan,
and it's not a very long game but it's fun. It's also impossible
for me to understand, not because it's in Japanese, but because the dialogue
doesn't even show up correctly on my computer. It all looks like
gibberish, like some Japanese web page in Internet Explorer under Western
European encoding. It's an unintelligible mix of squares, lowercase
letters, and fraction symbols such as 1/4. I'm running Windows ME
(yes I know), and apparently it has limited multilingual capabilities,
or perhaps I don't have the right fonts installed. If the text showed
up, I would at least have some idea what the story is supposed to be, but
as it is now, I can only guess.
It looks like I can still update
this site from college, even though I'm in Wisconsin instead of Minnesota,
so I'm going to update it with all the latest information. I hope
they keep it accessible like this. Let's see, what's new? Here's
something: the video and computer games site GameSpot
seems to have relaxed their restrictions on non-subscribers a bit, so now
I can see their reviews of games instead of just the score. The game
guides are still Complete content, but there's always GameFAQs
(which is also on CNET, just like GameSpot) for that. GameFAQs is
a good site, but they only allow FAQs in text format with no pictures,
and sometimes it gets hard to visualize what place they're talking about,
but there's still a lot of good information. Also, have I mentioned
that I like the way Salon.com has an
ad-supported option as an alternative to subscription for those of us without
readily-available credit cards? It's much better than locking out
half of their content. I just thought I should comment on good subscription
systems after all the negative stuff I said about them in April 2002.
I've recently become aware of
the Web cartoon Homestar Runner,
and I like it a lot, although the constant references to it on message
boards can get kind of tiresome after a while. I guess it's like
the new Monty Python and the Holy Grail, or the new Princess Bride.
Anyway, I want to make clear that the little C++ Builder game I made, Star
Runner, has nothing to do with Homestar Runner. You can try to
fit the two together by imagining that the little yellow circle is the
Cheat, and that he's jumping over colored circles representing clones of
all the other characters, but I really just chose the name Star Runner
at random because it seemed like a good name, since you were running down
a path and there was kind of a space-looking background so you might be
a star, or on a star, or jumping over stars, or something. I made
it back in 1998 (you can tell it's old because the page has the name Nalenna,
which was going to be my independent games company someday but now I don't
know if I'll try to make games for a living or not), and I don't know if
the Homestar Runner web site was up then, but either way, I can assure
you the name is just a coincidence. Another coincidence I noticed
is probably just GameSpot's latest Gamespotting feature includes an article
called Demo
Days, which is the same as what I called my series of demo mini-reviews
in August 2002. They probably just used the same method of looking
for alliteration as I did, and they've probably never even seen my site,
but I still thought it was a strange coincidence when I saw it.
Let me share my experiences with
a few more demos. The Jedi
Academy demo is pretty good, and although it has the same style of
gameplay as Jedi Outcast, you can customize your character's appearance,
lightsaber style, and force powers and alignment. At first, the name
Jedi Academy was kind of misleading because I thought it wasn't going to
be a Jedi Knight-style action game at all but more of a complex space flight
and combat game like Star Trek: Starfleet Academy, but if the demo is any
indication, it's like Jedi Outcast except you get your force powers and
lightsaber at the beginning. That kind of makes weapons less useful
because you can just use the lightsaber and the Force for everything, but
it's still fun sometimes to break out the old Imperial Heavy Repeater and
fire away at the enemy. Also, did I ever mention I played the Enclave
demo? Well, I did, and it was interesting with good graphics, but
the gameplay got clunky in some places and the paths were really quite
linear. You know, all this talk of action game demos I've played
makes it seem like I'm some sort of fast-action game junkie, and yet one
of my favorite games is Morrowind, which is not fast at all. Neither
is Zelda: Wind Waker, for that matter, and it's also one of the best games
I've played. I haven't really gotten into Baldur's Gate, or Neverwinter
Nights, or even Planescape: Torment yet, but someday I will. Someday.
Just not today, because I have to read the rest of the Iliad for my Western
Literature class.