November 2003
- 25 -
A much needed break
Thanksgiving break is coming
up tomorrow and I can't wait to get home! I'll get to see my family
and get back to some of those games for the Gamecube and PS2. But
which ones? There are so many games that I want, it's just insane!
I mean, there's Jak 2, Ratchet and Clank 2, Super Mario Sunshine, Eternal
Darkness, Final Fantasy X-2 (not to be confused with the upcoming Final
Fantasy XII, which I'll probably be interested in too), Drakan 3... oh
wait, there's no announcement for a Drakan 3. Oh well... let's see,
there's Viewtiful Joe, and Jedi Academy, and Star Wars: Knights of the
Old Republic which is coming to the PC soon, and if I get all those games,
then I might possibly be interested in that other famous port from the
Xbox, Halo. Oh yeah, and then there's Max Payne 2, and XIII, and
Worms 3D, and I really want to find some way to get that Zelda Collector's
Edition disc. Maybe I'll just get that Nintendo Power subscription,
or look into Mario Kart for the Gamecube and Mario and Luigi for the Game
Boy Advance. I still don't have Grand Theft Auto 3 or Vice City yet,
and there are probably some good GBA games I missed, like Warioware.
It's a good thing Christmas is coming up, because I know I'll have a lot
of stuff to ask for. Most years I haven't been able to decide what
I want, but now I know all too well what games look good.
I remember playing a game called
Bubsy: Claws Encounters of the Furred Kind, which is a pretty cheesy title
if you ask me (but then again it's supposed to be), for the Super Nintendo
during my youth. It wasn't the best game, but I still had a lot of
fun with it and played it to the end. Well, I recently tried playing
it again, and it just didn't seem as fun as I remember it. The unpredictable
control, particularly the weird way they handled conservation of momentum
while jumping, became obvious, and I remembered all too well my frustrations
with not being able to see where you're going. When I was a kid,
I always shrugged off the seemingly arbitrary deaths from running into
unseen enemies because I figured that kind of thing was normal for a platform
game, which it was in many cases, but now that kind of thing just isn't
fun for me anymore. Also, when I was a kid, I thought the death animations
in the game were kind of incongruous and creepy, and even now I think they
don't fit well with the actual mode of death in many cases. For example,
if Bubsy gets hit by a flying gumball that a machine shoots out, he turns
to the camera with a big grin on his face, stands there for a while, and
then shatters into pieces. When he runs into one of the many enemies,
even one that's just standing there waving around its hair tentacles, or
whatever those things are, he'll sway around for a while with a lazy expression
on his face, and then he'll smile and melt into a puddle. I remember
having flashbacks of Bubsy when I was playing Crash Bandicoot 2 and the
normal death animation was simply Crash turning into an angel and floating
upwards when he touched an enemy. But for all its problems, at least
Bubsy was better than its sequel Bubsy 2, which I rented when I was a kid
but didn't buy because it was so bad. I hear that Bubsy 3D was one
of the worst games ever made, and there weren't any good Bubsy games after
that as far as I can tell, so I can see why Bubsy the Bobcat hasn't become
a household name.
You know, I really liked Deus
Ex, so I was really looking forward to the sequel, Deus Ex 2: Invisible
War. However, the demo was released recently, and let me tell you,
it is not making me want to buy the full game. Basically, it's unplayable,
at least on my computer. It's not completely unplayable, but it has
so many broken features and the frame rate is so bad no matter what settings
I use that there's just no way I can get into it. First of all, the
demo has crashed two out of the three times I've tried to load a new game.
It just freezes up on the loading screen and I have to restart my computer.
The one time I did get it to work, the frame rate was awful, like 5 frames
per second, and it was like that even for indoor areas with a low number
of polygons. The only time the frame rate was close to playable was
when I was looking directly at the floor or a wall. I'm playing on
a 1 GHz processor with a Geforce 4 Ti4200, by the way, so it's not like
my computer is some ancient relic. Also, the mouse had this horrible
lag that would make my character turn about a second after I moved the
mouse. Finally, there's no way to save the controls and other settings.
Every time you restart the game, and even when you begin a new game from
the menu screen, all the settings revert to default. I'm sorry, Ion
Storm and Eidos, but this is no way to make a demo. Even the Halo
demo played better than this! I think I'm going to have to wait and
see about this game.
Well, after a long weekend of
work, I'm done with my numerical methods homework and all of the algorithms
I had to implement! In addition to that, I had to translate more
technical Japanese passages. I tell you, that class just doesn't
stop for anything. Well, actually there was that one week where the
professor was out of the country and there was no class at all, but there
was a test due on Monday of that week so it wasn't like a week of relaxation
or anything. But even so, at least with translation from Japanese,
one line of text isn't a make or break situation like it is when you're
writing a program. With a program, if you accidentally type "x" instead
of "y", or "=" instead of "==", it could have disastrous consequences on
a bunch of other parts of the program, whereas in Japanese translation,
it's not that big a deal if you translate a word as "subject" when it really
means "task."
Oh no oh no oh no, this is just
too much... I can't go on... you'll have to go on without me... don't worry,
you'll be better off without me. Go and save yourselves while you
still have the chance! I'll try to fend for myself here in this bleak,
terrible place, but don't count on me returning because the chances here
are slim to none, and slim just left town. Everything's swirling
around me... I don't have much time... seriously, I won't be able to write
an update for today because this time I really do have to spend all day
writing programs, and this time I mean it. No messing around, no
spending a bunch of time on the Internet.
So, I guess you've heard the
latest news about Paris Hilton and that little video that she's in.
I haven't seen it but I sure have heard a lot about it from the late night
talk shows, and also I've gotten spam advertising it. This is it,
folks. This is conclusive proof that all the spam floating around
the Internet isn't just old stuff from many years ago that keeps being
generated by abandoned computers on spam autopilot. People are actually
writing new spam and sending it out, despite the fact that spam is universally
loathed and is actually illegal in some places. Why can't people
learn that spam isn't doing them any good and is just annoying people?
In fact, if I saw spam advertising something, with all the usual pathetic
attempts to block filters such as random letters and weird spacing, I'd
be less inclined to buy what they're selling rather than more. I'd
figure, if they have to spam it, then how good can it really be?
Maybe corporations have realized this, and maybe, just maybe, most of the
spam out there advertising a product is actually written by the competitors
of that product's manufacturer, who try to compose the most annoying spam
ever in order to put a negative association in people's minds. That
would be clever, and it would certainly work on me, but I doubt that's
what's happening. It's probably the case that most spam is sent by
people who actually think they'll be able to sell one more bottle of Phenterxanazepam
if they just add a few more lines of concealed gibberish to their message.
Well, part of the horror is over
because I'm done with my three-quarters-term exams. Or maybe it's
two-thirds-term. Well, whatever they are, I'm done with them, and
now I have to deal with the other part of the horror which is my programming
assignments. I used to complain about Matlab, but now that I've been
trying to do math in Java and keep track of all the variables, I'm appreciating
Matlab more than ever. In Matlab, there's a command window where
you can check the contents of matrices and arrays without having to code
up a loop inside the program, and the syntax is a lot more friendly when
it comes to doing operations on variables. There's a matrix multiplier
that computes the product normally, as well as several division methods,
and then there are elementwise versions of most of the operators.
What would take 5 or more lines of code in Java often only takes one in
Matlab, and I've hardly ever had to have nested loops. Contrast that
with my latest Java program, which has a conditional inside another conditional
inside a group of two nested for loops inside yet another conditional,
and all that is inside another two nested for loops, and that's just the
part of the program that separates a grid into different disconnected sections.
Sometimes it's hard to keep track of what's doing what.
I've been seeing too many debates
over which format of music is the best. Some folks like MP3, others
like Ogg, and then there are some AAC and WMA fans, and it seems everyone
will defend their choice of file format to the death. But they're
all wrong, because I have the definitive answer for what kind of format
is best for digital music:
That's right, let's forget about compression altogether and stick to uncompressed CD-quality WAV format. Seriously, how cheap is space these days? Hard drives are doubling in size at a rapid rate, and new storage devices are manifesting themselves all over the place as we speak. Recently I got one of those 256 MB flash memory devices, and granted, right now those are expensive, and one of them would only hold about 25 minutes of CD-quality music, but it's still pretty impressive that flash memory has reached that level, and it'll probably become even better in the future as long as some nasty physical molecular or atomic limit doesn't get in the way. But then, when we're able to store 2 hours of uncompressed CD-quality sound, we'll also be able to store 10 to 20 hours of high-quality compressed music that sounds just as good, so there probably is still a place for compression in the digital music world. Even so, I still like to show how hardcore I am by bragging about how I rip to .wav format. Yes, that really is my idea of being hardcore, and no, I'm not going to get a life because I have a life... a virtual life!
Today I was sitting Sorry I haven't updated in a
while, but I've been busy busy busy! I've been so busy that it's
more like biz-zay. I have a test tomorrow and another one on Thursday.
It looks like I won't be able to finish level 5 of Azenera before Thanksgiving
because my real life is once again imposing on my free time. I wish
I had all the time in the world to sit on the computer and do what I want
to do. I've heard that the Brothers Chaps have quit their day jobs
to work on Homestar Runner full-time, and I know I keep mentioning Homestar
Runner, but it's amazing how much this Internet-only cartoon has ballooned
in popularity so much that I'm starting to see mention of it everywhere.
Seriously, it's like these days there are three major fixtures of pop culture
that seem to influence everything: the Simpsons, Queer Eye for the Straight
Guy, and Homestar Runner. Seinfeld used to be on that list, but its
influence seems to have faded since the show went off the air.
In the past, I've spent so much
time complaining about annoying ads I see on TV, but there are some ads
that I don't mind so much, but the ones I'm fine with are mostly ones that
would provide a hilarious excuse for any bad behavior I might do.
I can just imagine myself accidentally ruining someone's car, maybe by
throwing a baseball and it misses and hits the car instead, and when the
owner gets mad at me I can just say, "Uh oh, better get Maaco!" Then,
I can go to the store and steal a bunch of stuff, and if they catch me,
I can give back the stuff and say, "All right, you got me, but it's okay
because I had Subway for lunch!" On second thought, I'd better not
do that stuff because there's no "Subway for lunch" clause in any U.S.
system of law... not yet, anyway.
I actually got done with two
of my Java programs I'm making for my algorithms class, and they're working
pretty well. Implementing these solutions is hard, and I never know
if they're right for every single test case because I can't test them all,
so sometimes I feel like I'm flying blind in an airplane of uncertainty
over a landscape of doubt and oblivion. Still, I'll press on, and
I won't give up because I believe in myself.
You know, I always wonder about
these serial killers, what kind of stuff did they write about for their
creative writing assignments in school? Did most of them write really
disturbing stuff that would sort of foreshadow their later killings, or
did most of them write normal-sounding stuff that was indistinguishable
from the works of normal students who didn't grow up to be serial killers?
If they wrote normal stuff, then that would be really creepy, because what
if an elementary school teacher grades a student's creative writing paper
and ends up really liking it and cherishing it in his or her heart for
years, but thirty years later the teacher hears that the student has killed
a bunch of people? I bet that would just freak that teacher out.
I wonder if there are any people before the Columbine killings who were
fans of the Doom levels made by one of the killers, and then when the killings
happened they were shocked because they had actually experienced and enjoyed
a piece of work made by someone who would go on to become a mass murderer.
I'm sure there are plenty of people who searched for the levels after the
killings because of morbid curiosity, but that's not the same as having
played the levels beforehand. Just imagine: the author of that article
you're reading, that blogger whose site you visit frequently, that media
personality you see on TV, or that coworker you enjoy talking to could
go on to commit murder or molest a child or commit some other monstrous
deed, so you really can't trust anyone. But it's not good to go around
looking over your shoulder all the time and hating people for all the bad
things they could possibly do but haven't done yet, so it's probably best
to take a cue from the court system and consider people to be innocent
of all the evil in the world before proven guilty.
You know what? You just
can't do anything original these days. Whenever I think of a new
direction to take my site, I just think, "no, then it'll just be a substandard
ripoff of X" where X is some other site or a TV show or something.
If I introduce wacky characters and try to build up a bunch of catchphrases,
then this page is just a Simpsons wannabe, and if I add hidden stuff on
top of that, it's a Homestar Runner ripoff without any of the animation.
If I try sarcasm, then I'm just a Something Awful or Pointless Waste of
Time wannabe. There are already plenty of game and movie review sites
out there, and when it comes to political opinions, you can just check
the sidebar on any political blog and follow the links to find what must
be thousands of blogs dealing with politics. I could try to make
a site that's just about random stuff, but there are too many of those
as well. The thing is, I'm not really particularly good at anything,
so the only chance I have is to do something different and original and
at least be known as a pioneer, but there's very little I can do that's
new. There are all the Drakan levels I've made, and those seem to
be regarded well, but if Drakan were as popular as other games like Unreal
Tournament, then better level makers would flock to it and my levels would
be considered average at best. Maybe I don't need to be popular -
I don't want to deal with all the e-mail that the creators of popular sites
must get.
Well, I've got to program this
stuff before it's too late. And then I have to study for an exam,
and also I have to work on my other programming assignment, and I'm sure
I've mentioned all this before. Let's face it, I've got nothing to
say these days.
I knew I would have a lot of
homework, but I never thought it would be this much. My latest algorithms
assignment requires programming, and I have to review my Java knowledge
and make some programs that use these complicated algorithms. I hope
I don't have to implement the quick sort algorithm all over again, because
it was hard enough the first time. There are a few network flow problems
that I know about, and one that deals with graph paths and divisions.
Besides the algorithms assignment, I still have to work on more problems
in Matlab, and I have a few tests and quizzes coming up. This stuff
all has to be done before Thanksgiving break.
Well, I got a bunch of homework
done today, and I read books 2 through 6 of the Aeneid, but seriously,
I have so much stuff coming up that I have to do that it's not even funny.
Actually, it is a little funny. Ha ha ha. That was the most
unconvincing laugh ever, wasn't it? I got my TV tuner set up, and
I've been thinking about using it as a substitute for the VCR, but it's
kind of limited because the software doesn't seem to have a way to program
recording for specific times. That's not such a big problem, and
besides, I shouldn't be watching so much TV with all this homework hanging
over my head.
You know, I'm going to try to
get to bed early tonight so I can feel rested tomorrow and get up to speed
on the Aeneid. I remember last semester when I had my African Storyteller
class, and not much other homework, and I could just spend night after
night reading the stories and not have to worry about all my other classes...
ah, I'm probably misremembering. I probably had so much other work
to do, and maybe I didn't watch as much TV. But really, it seems
like as the years go by, I have less and less time to just sit back and
relax. TV sure isn't relaxing, because so much of it is intense or
grating, and yet I still watch it because I dunno. Internet message
boards aren't relaxing, because everywhere I turn there's another forum
member or webmaster or someone's friend dying or getting in some horrible
accident and everyone starts praying and sobbing, and I can't help but
feel sad and angry because of the whole distant empathy thing I talked
about on November 4th, and it's like a freaking plague of death out there
on those boards with people dropping like flies left and right. Don't
get too attached to anyone because tomorrow they're gone. Then there
are the endless, pointless political debates where everyone says the same
stuff all the time. Games sure aren't relaxing because, well, it's
pretty obvious, especially with twitch action games like first-person shooters.
Maybe a slower role-playing game would be a nice change of pace, or perhaps
some kind of sim. Even sleep, which is supposed to be the most relaxing
thing ever, isn't relaxing because I always overthink its aftereffects,
like if I go to bed late I think to myself, "I'm going to be yawning and
having trouble keeping my eyes open all through such and such a class tomorrow,"
and that thought always comes true without fail. Like today, I really
really wanted to stay awake in my algorithms class because I want to understand
the subject, but I just couldn't keep from falling half-asleep every few
minutes and I couldn't pay attention at all. It was actually physically
impossible to keep from twitching and stretching to keep awake. I
keep thinking I can just look back at my notes but it's all a haze and
I don't know the context for anything I've written. I've mastered
a technique where I can stifle a yawn by going through the motions of yawning
while keeping my mouth mostly closed, but you can probably still tell.
My professors probably all think I'm bored by their classes when most of
the time that isn't the case, the truth is that I'm just so tired.
I've written too much already, so it's time for bed. Sorry about
the whiny rant, but you know it wouldn't be the Sine Wave without rants
like this.
I'm getting spam like this now:
"Tra ditio nal, libe ral or news chool? De pends on how you were raised.
Are we ge tting pol itical here? He ll, no! This is ju st to des cribe
yo ur s e x li fe. If you 're traditio nal, de le te this m a i l no w.
Pl ease. If you're libe ral, you get yo urs elf some p il ls after you've
rea liz ed that han gi ng a two-pou nds st one from yo ur c..." okay that's
it, I'm not copying and pasting any more of this travesty. Basically
they're trying to capitalize on the current divisive political climate
to instruct "liberals" to buy their sex enhancement products, and they're
trying to get past spam filters by adding random spaces, quotes from novels,
or phony HTML stuff to the body of the message. Who falls for this
stuff, anyway? Why is it all sex drugs, illegal drug substitutes,
fake diplomas, mortgage refinancing, the occasional art auction, and just
plain gibberish that's advertised in spam, and not anything useful like
cars or furniture? Sure, there are a few software and printer cartridge
offers, but there's more in the world than that to sell. Hey, spammers,
let me tell you something: if I filtered out your message the first 20
times you sent it, it means I'm not interested in your product, and sending
me the same message a hundred more times with random nonsense scattered
all over the message is just making me less interested in buying your product
and more interested in finding the computer you use to compose your spam
and smashing it with a sledgehammer. Go and "not try to get political"
with that.
It's all coming back to get me.
My procrastination, that is. I have to do a lot of homework, including
some algorithm problems, some energy resources problems, and some translations
of technical Japanese, along with more reading from the Aeneid. Saturday
has become my big homework day, especially since there's not much good
TV on that day, and everyone knows I can't miss my TV or else I'll just
shrivel up and die. It's getting to where I can't get my fix with
just one TV show, so I'm getting a TV cable splitter so I can use my TV
and the tuner on my computer at the same time so I can watch two shows
at once. And while I'm watching TV, I'll be editing Drakan levels
and testing them in a window, and sometimes I'll switch over to a web browser
window, and if I absolutely have to, I'll have Microsoft Word open as well
with one of my homework documents. I have bad concentration skills,
even when I'm just trying to pay attention to one thing, so I figure that
if I'm going to fail to concentrate, I might as well fail to concentrate
on multiple things at once.
Today I finished creating the
landscape structures for the rift vortex trapping device, and I even copied
a few of the rift objects from the Volcano level for the rift entrance
instead of just trying to make a purple particle fountain that looks sort
of like a rift vortex. It's going to be kind of weird having this
cave city where the Kavoh are going about their daily lives while a giant
purple vortex swirls around above their heads all the time, so maybe I'll
have one of the Kavoh comment on how creepy the rift is and how crazy it
is to want to trap a rift entrance in your town. Another crazy thing
is how this giant rift trapping device is built over a small river even
though
that's probably not safe. But then again, I did design the town in
level 2 to have this giant green-blue rock fortress there along with some
houses made of grass and wood, with a grass field nearby, so I can explain
that away by saying that the Kavoh have a strange sense of style and design
and that their motives can't always be understood by others. A more
accurate explanation would be that I'm not the best designer of realistic
architecture, but we're talking about a game with magic and dragons, so
realism isn't high on my list of priorities here. But if you're looking
for more plausible designs, then don't worry, because the orc city I'm
building on level 7 will be less crazy and more down to earth.
Azenera is coming along nicely,
and I just got finished with most of the landscapes, particularly the stream
in the fog cave and the Kavoh city of Kozilo Canyon. This city consists
of a series of caves with holes in the ceiling and a passage to the ocean.
It's kind of weird, because to most players of this level it'll look like
there's a huge ocean on the entire north side of the level, but in reality
it's just a few medium-sized layers that are stretched out to beyond the
fog limit, and while I'm playing the level I'll never have the feeling
that I'm looking out at a vast ocean because I'm so familiar with the layers.
Also in the city there will be a tower where the rift entrance has been
trapped. You can't actually go into the rift world yet, because that'll
be the last level in the game, level 14, but the presence of the rift entrance
in this town is a significant part of the plot progression. Let's
just say you'll be meeting a very familiar character on level 6, and Rynn
and Arokh's motivation for journeying further into Azenera will change
dramatically.
Today I've been getting back
to Unreal Tournament 2003 now that a few new mods and maps have been released.
It's still a fun game, although it's not much different from the original
UT, and a lot of Unreal modders are busy updating their mods to UT2003
instead of being able to keep working with the original game. Add
that to the Unreal 2 multiplayer patch coming out, and the fact that Unreal
Tournament 2004 will be out next year, and you've got mods being spread
out across a lot of Unreal games. I've heard that mods for UT2003
and UT2004 are supposed to be compatible with each other, but I'm not sure
just how compatible they'll be.
I don't live in reality.
I live in a fantasy world where the latest anecdote forms reality, and
cold hard numbers and statistics form history and the basis for that reality.
One day I'll read a news story about people doing good things, and I'll
think, well, the world is basically good. Then I'll hear about some
horrible tragedy and I'll think that the world is a terrible place and
that I need escape from it. My impressions of entire religious and
ethnic groups shift constantly based on the most recent news story I've
read about someone from one of the groups, so I am unable to form consistent
political opinions about anything. So, I suppose you could say I'm
not partisan, but you can't say I'm unbiased because I'm biased, just in
a different way each day. Maybe the problem is that I don't get out
that often and take part in the real world, so I'm forced to vicariously
live through every poor sap whose name ends up in the paper. It's
funny because I tend to not feel emotion toward people I actually know
in real life, but I'm always crying and agonizing over random people in
the news. This can't be a normal thing, but rather the product of
living in a fantasy world most of the time, whether it be the world of
video games, books, or mathematical word problems.
On Halloween I said that nothing
really happened, and there were no riots or anything, but it seems I was
jinxed a bit because yesterday, Sunday morning, there was chaos on State
Street. Drunken people were pushing and shoving and yelling, and
people were looting stores and breaking windows, and the police had to
come in. I'm glad I wasn't there, because that kind of chaos is just
not my thing, and I don't care for the smell or taste of tear gas.
I'm getting finished with my
ancient Greek readings, and soon we will be on to Roman writings like the
Aeneid, and after that, it's time for Saint Augustine's Confessions and
Dante's Inferno. We've been learning about how so many Greek plays
and stories have been lost over time, and just recently we read the play
Samia, by Menander, which has a bunch of lines missing, including some
important ones at the beginning, so the translator has to infer the meaning
of the lost lines through the remaining part of the play. Other than
those readings for my literature class, I don't have much homework due
this week, and my midterm exams are mostly over. My Technical Japanese
professor is taking a trip out of the country this week, so there's no
class, which means I don't have to get up at 7:00 tomorrow or Friday. On
Wednesday, I still have my literature discussion in the morning, but I
don't have any class at all on Friday. Finally, a three-day weekend,
just like I had in high school during teacher workshops! Yes, I am
still a juvenile person trapped in an "I only go cuz I hafta" kind of mindset,
although I've been broken out of that a little by professors who say they're
not going to "play school" with us. There's one like that every semester.
Well, I did a whole month of
Shalo Kitie telling you my current mood and current music at the end of
every entry, just like on LiveJournal, but I think Shalo Kitie needs to
take a little break right now. Right now, Shalo Kitie is saying,
"Do not bother me about mood or music now or else kitty will become dragon
and unleash fiery wrath!" So, rather than risk being burned up, I'm
going to play it safe and give the mood and music stuff a rest. But
don't worry... or if you hate the whole Shalo Kitie and/or Super Explodo
Reptile thing, worry... Shalo Kitie and/or Super Explodo Reptile will be
back! Azenera will be back too, just as soon as I get all this level
5 stuff finished. I need to get that foggy cave taken care of, and
then finish the cave city area.