| After living in Santa Barbara for 5 years I finally gave in and bought a pair of sandals. Not much else to say about that. They're comfortable.
I've been doing kendo for just over a month now. It's really enjoyable, and it's interesting how much depth there is to something that seems fairly straightforward on the surface. There are people who have been doing it for more than 50 years (45 minute National Geographic documentary behind link), and even then they say that they're still learning more. I'm still sore for a couple of days after each practice, but that's been diminsihing each time, as I get more used to the exercise and as I learn to cut more with my whole body instead of just with my arms.
The Sci-Fi channel has been showing a marathon of the original Twilight Zone series. As I haven't seen most of them, I've been quite entertained. Despite its age, the majority of the episodes don't seem dated. In fact, much of the series's style seems more akin to modern shows.
A preview just showed for a movie about a group of spelunkers who get stuck in a cave. And then... monsters? Sounds like Blair Witch in a cave, though I imagine it would be hard to make another horror movie as boring as that was. Touching the Void was good and they didn't need to jazz it up with yeti attacks. But I'm just not really one for monster movies. I think I like horror movies better when they only involve people.
I watched Click last week. It wasn't excellent, but I enjoyed it. I think if you go into it expecting a comedy you're more likely to be disappointed; it's really more of a drama with some jokes thrown in. Sandler isn't as good here as he was in Punch-Drunk Love, but the style is closer to that than it was in, say, Billy Madison. The ending is rather hackneyed; I'd have preferred that the movie ended with the poignant, bittersweet ending that preceded the final two scenes, but tacked-on happy endings are standard for mainstream fare these days.
I've been reading a fair amount of sci-fi recently. I read Speaker for the Dead and Xenocide while in New York, both sequels to Ender's Game for those who don't know. He does an excellent job of characterization. I've also been reading various Heinlein and Gibson works, and now I'm starting on Dune.
I guess I haven't written anything since I went to the Ashland Shakespeare festival. I was impressed, to say the least. I saw The Diary of Anne Frank, Cyrano de Bergerac, The Winter's Tale, and the Two Gentlemen from Verona. The acting in all four plays was superb, some of the best I've ever seen.
It was a bit weird watching Anne Frank, knowing how it was going to end when the characters thought they were safe. Cyrano was excellent, and my only previous exposure to the story having been through Steve Martin's movie Roxanne, I found the ending to the play much more satisfying, and Cyrano's character much better developed.
The Winter's Tale is definitely not one of Shakespeare's best plays. The story just seemed a bit lacking and more than a bit contrived (though Shakespeare was aware of that: the script of the play comments on how ridiculous the events are). But the acting was great, which more than made up for what the story lacked.
The Two Gentlemen from Verona was done in an interesting style. It took place in semi-modern times, with Verona being like an Amish community, and Milan being a country club, complete with tennis and croquet matches. The bandits outside Milan were styled after a mix of punk and goth. Overall, a very amusing and enjoyable take on the play.
If you ever get a chance to go, don't pass it up. Just make sure to buy your tickets well in advance. | comments: 6 comments or Leave a comment   |
| | It's ok to say "ass" on television. But if you say "asshole," the "hole" part is bleeped out. This doesn't really make any sense. | | comments: 6 comments or Leave a comment |
| Some thoughts on E3 announcements...
$600 for the PS3? Ouch. Think I'll hold off on that for a while. And I assume that MS is going to drop the price on the Xbox 360 even more once the PS3 is released, so Sony may have a tough time selling to the non-fanboy segment. On the other hand, I may get a PS2 soon. I'm curious to see how well the motion sensing is used, and how it ends up comparing to the Wiimote. But no rumble support in the controller? They say it interferes with the motion sensing, although it seems like a low-pass filter on the accelerometers would be good enough to get around that; anyway, Nintendo has rumble on the Wiimote so it must be possible.
The Wii looks cool despite the mediocre name. The guys at Joystiq had a lot of trouble with the responsiveness of the Wiimote, so I hope that can be improved; other sites didn't mention this so much. Supposedly it's going to cost less than $200 though. For 1/3 of the price of the good version of the PS3, they may have a winner on their hands. I'm also curious about how the Wii and Gamecube versions of Zelda will compare; the controls for the Wii version sound pretty cool. And putting a speaker into the controller is an interesting choice that perhaps could have some good uses. The virtual console is going to have games from the Sega Genesis and the Turbografx 16 (Bonk!). Nice.
Ouendan is coming to America, with American songs and maybe new levels. There weren't a lot of details, but I'm looking forward to it. The official English translation of Phoenix Wright 2 is coming out in October too.
Assassin's Creed holds a lot of promise and looks like it'll be great. The preview's mention of the sci-fi teaser in an otherwise medieval setting is rather odd.
Spore sounds neat too and will allow you to evolve your own race of creatures and take your place in the universe or something like that.
Mass Effect, one of Bioware's new RPGs, is looking good, although saying a Bioware game is going to be good is practically stating the obvious.
Elebits could be a lot of fun, in the same way as Katamari, though I doubt that it will be as wacky.
Gears of War is only going to show the targetting reticle when you move slowly or not at all. Sounds like a nice design decision.
Nothing yet about STALKER, which last I heard was being delayed because the publisher wasn't happy with the game. The concept is very promising, but that news worries me. I'm not sure if the game is being shown at E3, but I assume we'll hear something about it if it's there. | | comments: 8 comments or Leave a comment |
| | Wow, that was a long movie. Not that 3 hours is always too long for a movie. Return of the King was 200 minutes long and kept things moving. But they could have easily trimmed at least a half hour from King Kong. | | comments: 1 comment or Leave a comment |
| | I finally got around to finishing Splinter Cell 3. Looks really nice with the new graphics card, and the level was nicely designed. But is it just me, or does the endgame cutscene get shorter with each game? | | comments: 2 comments or Leave a comment |
| Ok, so it's been... just over two months since I last posted, and that was just about my lack of posting. Four and a half months since my last post that was actually about something. So here goes.
Work remains fun. We're finishing up support for TI's DaVinci chip, which combines an ARM CPU, a TI DSP, and video processing circuitry in one chip to make a nice platform for almost anything that needs to do image or video processing. Pretty cool stuff, since you can use the ARM side for things that normal CPUs are good at like the user interface, and the DSP side for things that DSPs are good at like image processing.
I'll be going out to New York for a week to get early access to a certain processor that we have a big contract to support. The area I'm going to is the carousel capital of the world or something like that, with six of them there. So I'll bring back some pictures should I have some free time to drive around and see them. This trip has been pushed back a lot, since they've been having issues with the boards, but it may be next week that I go. Should be an interesting experience; my first business trip.
I haven't played Animal Crossing DS for a few months now, pretty much ever since I got my laptop. I imagine the town must be getting pretty messy with all the weeds sprouting up everywhere and me being the only one who ever deigns to pluck them out. I'll probably go back to it sometime, but I have many other things to keep me busy in the meantime. Metroid Prime: Hunters is quite fun and I'm impressed with the detail they're able to push through the DS, though it takes some time to get used to the control scheme. Tetris DS is also fun, and has a number of new modes to spice up the classic formula.
Elder Scrolls Oblivion has been a lot of fun, although counting my graphics card upgrade the game cost me $400. I've put about 80 hours into it so far and still have a lot left to do. After playing the game that long, various flaws have become apparent, but I find that none of them are that major. Between the built-in content and all the mods that are coming out, it's definitely a good value. But, for no raisin (sic), I only give really thorough reviews to things I didn't enjoy, (hurrah for citing one's own work!) so you'll have to look elsewhere to learn more. Just don't read the forums too much. The whining isn't as bad now as it was when the game was first released, but still there are far too many [Xbox|PC|ATI|Nvidia|Bethesda|Gothic 3] fanboys and anti-fanboys on the prowl for there to be many meaningful discussions most of the time. I usually only read the mods forum now, as the discourse there is usually constructive and informative.
Thesaurus.com: No entry found for fanboy. Did you mean fan boy?
No entry found for fan boy. Did you mean fly-boy?
No, no, I didn't. Why bother suggesting terms that aren't on the site? Oh well, "anti-fanboy" it is then.
The Longest Journey 2 just came out too. The first game was excellent, and I recommend it to everyone; you can find it in the bargain bins for about $10. The sequel isn't as good, so I hear, but I plan to pick it up sometime anyway.
The second season of the BBC's new Doctor Who has started. I've downloaded the season premiere but haven't got around to watching it yet. I think the Sci-Fi channel has been showing the first season. Definitely worth checking out for any sci-fi fans.
Trader Joe's had a really good Vanilla Bean cream soda, but they've stopped carrying it. Too bad, since I liked it better than most other cream sodas. Virgil's is also good, but the closest place that has it is the Bev'Mo' in the Valley and I can't just drive down there every time I run out of cream soda. Oh well. At least I can get Virgil's root beer up here. The real sugar is what makes it good; no corn syrup. Same thing that makes Mexican Coca-Cola superior to American Coke.
I find that I've fallen into somewhat of a rut in my life. But it's a comfortable rut, so I suppose things could be worse.
But there is one thing I need: furniture. Remember that scene from the Fry gets tapeworms episode of Futurama, where we see Leela's living room and there's just a chair and a TV? Ok, you probably don't, but my living room isn't much more adorned than that. I'll probably get a second couch of some sort and maybe a recliner or one of these or one of these. And of course, a nice wide coffee table, perfect for tabletop RPGs. If anyone has other suggestions, feel free to chime in.
Well, I should really go to bed, so that's all for now.
Edit: Why does searching Google maps for "Couch" bring up so many diaper services? Try clicking it. It's really weird. | | comments: 4 comments or Leave a comment |
| So I spent the weekend with the flu, which mostly entailed lying on the couch. But The Wizard of Oz was on TV on Saturday night, and I began to wonder some things in my fevered state:
Glinda says that only bad witches are ugly. So are they ugly because they're bad, or are they bad because they're ugly and everyone made fun of them in witch school?
Munchkinland is presumably a fairly crime-free place. So why do they have a coroner?
The Lullaby League ballet dancers (the characters themselves, not the actors) need to read their lines as they sing their song to Dorothy. The Lollipop guild has a much better memory, and they give her a lollipop! I know who I'm voting for. Also we never see that giant lollipop again. I guess Dorothy is watching her weight.
The plants in Munchkinland shine like they're made of ceramic.
The wizard says he's "not a very good wizard." But he's certainly a good inventor, having made that big hologram head and all the fire spouts and such.
With all that ingenuity, wouldn't the wizard have set up a nicer control booth? And maybe one that wasn't in plain view separated only by a curtain?
With all that ingenuity, wouldn't the wizard have some idea of how to use a hot air balloon?
What if the wicked witch gets dehydrated?
We've all heard that they had to bring in a few children because they ran out of short adults to hire, but it's actually quite obvious in one shot that one of the munchkins is about 20-30 years younger than the rest.
I also replaced the lines with my own for a while, but this was rather mentally tiring with a fever, so I stopped around the end of Munchkinland. But it was fun while it lasted. The way I look at it, I may be sick, but I might as well make the best of it. | | comments: 2 comments or Leave a comment |
| | I'm amazed at all the great mods out there for Morrowind. They're good enough that I think I'm going to cancel my preorder for Xbox 360 Oblivion and get the PC version instead. | | comments: 6 comments or Leave a comment |
| If you're an FPS fan and haven't played FEAR yet, go out and get it. The AI is really good; the enemies actually move from cover to cover and will attack you from multiple vectors. And it's one of the creepiest games I've played in a while. But not just in the Doom 3 "OH THERE'S A MONSTER BEHIND THE DOOR!" way. It really establishes a creepy atmosphere, and it seems to have a decent story which is slowly being revealed. My only complaint is that even on hard difficulty, it's still a bit on the easy side. I might bump it up to extreme difficulty and see what happens.
The system requirements are a little steep though. It runs rather badly with 512MB or RAM, with loads taking a few minutes and a bit of stuttering during gameplay. Now with 2 GB in my system, the initial loading time is down to under 10 seconds and it's nice and smooth. So everything's fine graphics-wise, but the sound was certainly not. Creative's SB Live! drivers suck. There's no other fitting description. I first encountered problems in Splinter Cell 3, with certain spots causing a great deal of static that just wouldn't go away. That time, I was actually able to fix the problem by downgrading my drivers. Strange, but it worked. So the problem surfaced again in FEAR. No matter what options I tweaked, going around a certain corner always caused horrendous interference, and with the newer drivers there was a rather rhythmic clicking in the sound output.
So off to CompUSA to get the newly released Soundblaster X-fi sound card, said to be the best consumer sound card in years. And it sure is nice, now that I got it working. At first my system would only boot once, then every boot after that it wouldn't start unless I changed the PCI slot the card was in. Upgrading to the newest beta BIOS for my motherboard fixed that, though the most recent official release still had the problem. Oddly there was no mention of anything that would be related to the problem in the release notes, but it fixed it anyway. So then there was just the problem with the occasional crash, at a level so low that the Blue Screen of Death wouldn't even come up. Sure enough, on some systems you have to use a utility to change the PCI latency. So with these two tweaks, everything is finally working. I hope. I'm surprised that such serious issues that a number of people (mainly Nforce users it seems) are experiencing would get by testing.
The Crystalizer feature on the card is actually pretty cool. Sure, it might reduce the dynamic range of the signal a bit as some reviewers complained, but I like what it does to the music. Trumpets sound brighter, and sounds that normally just fade behind the rest of the music are more audible. They're certainly putting those 110 million transistors (yes, that many in a sound card!) to good use. The card comes in multiple versions. I got the cheapest one (at $130, still not too cheap), while more expensive versions come with the drive bay input/output expander and other things I don't really want. There's even a Fatality (with a 1 in there somewhere) edition, named after that kid who's really good at FPS games or something like that. What do you get for the extra $70 for this card? 64 MB of RAM on the board. Yeah, that's more than $1 per megabyte, compared to the average retail RAM price of about 12 cents per megabyte. (That's for a top-of-the-line high-performance 1 GB stick which would use 64 MB chips. Creative undoubtedly is using a lower performance version.) And of course you have to get the drive bay too, so the total cost for that version comes to $280. Now the 64 MB of RAM is so that games can store sounds directly on the card, which they say increases performance by 10-15% because you don't have to send the sounds to the card every time. But I don't buy it. The PCI bus is nowhere close to saturation when playing a game, so you probably don't benefit from reduced bus traffic too much. The only game out that supports it right now, Battlefield 2, saw performance gains of less than 1 frame per second when using this feature. Sure, there could be greater gains in the future when its better supported, but I doubt they'll be get much better, and I can't imagine paying more than 8 times the retail price for 64 MB of RAM.
Incidentally, the programmers that wrote the BIOS update program are either insane or stupid. Nforce platform motherboards store the MAC address for the built-in Ethernet controller in the BIOS, and the update program displayed my MAC address when I ran the program. So, it would seem logical that since it knows about the MAC address, it would preserve it, right? Well, instead it overwrote the MAC address to 0xFFFFFFFFFFFF, a quite illegal value. Oddly, my router would give me an IP address, but then nothing else worked. With a bit of tinkering I was able to restore the original MAC address, and the update program, it turns out, is able to write a real MAC address to the BIOS, but seriously, who in their right mind would make a program that defaults to making your network card useless unless you know how to fix it?
Speaking of BIOS updates, there was this option in my BIOS for smart CPU Fan speed management, and it seems that the new BIOS I flashed had some updates to the algorithm. Now this would normally be a good thing, but in this case, the update had the effect of making my CPU fan not run. At all. I guess this is where my giant heat sink and case fan pay off, because the temperature still stabilized at around 70C. Hot, but not in the danger zone yet. Anyway, I disabled the temperature management, and now things are even a lot cooler than before all this craziness ensued. And if you're even looking for a CPU fan to go with your new heatsink, I definitely recommend the Panaflo brand. They're some of the quietest fans around (so quiet I didn't even notice it wasn't running) and they move a quite decent amount of air. They cost about twice as much as other fans of that size, but that's only about $5 more so it's easily worth it.
On the subject of noise, it turns out that the old 12 GB drive in my computer was about twice as loud as everything else in the computer, so out that went, and in went the 120GB drive I bought on Woot a few months ago but never got around to installing. Much better, and I'm sure I'll put the extra space to good use.
Hmm, my router is suddenly crashing a lot. I seem to have bad luck with that. This one is only a year old, as was the previous one when it died.
I also reinstalled Morrowind, and downloaded the fan-created texture enhancements. I haven't tried those out yet, but the screenshots looked pretty nice. Perhaps playing through that will mitigate my disappointment at Oblivion's delay. And I haven't tried the expansion packs yet, so there will be some new content for me.
Anyway, that's probably more than anyone ever wanted to know about my computer. Time for bed. | | comments: 6 comments or Leave a comment |
| The good: Patrick Stewart is voicing the emperor in Elder Scrolls 4. Having just seen the demo from E3, the game looks like it'll be amazing.
The bad: It's delayed until at least Spring. | | comments: 6 comments or Leave a comment |
| | Forgive the overly obvious pun in the title. Here's a review from someone who saw a screening of the Doom movie. It's pretty much what we all expected. | | comments: 1 comment or Leave a comment |
| I never realized that D20 Modern has so many funny add-ons.
For example:
The Cheerleader, who can use Valley Girl speak to communicate without eavesdroppers being able to comprehend their... secret plans... to go to the mall...
The Former Child Star, complete with feats such as Catchphrase.
And the Blaxploitation handbook, with such classes as Foxy Lady, Hustler, and Preacher. | | comments: 7 comments or Leave a comment |
| Nintendo finally revealed the controller for the Nintendo Revolution today. My first reaction was some laughing and wondering "what the hell?" But after the initial shock over its TV-remote form factor wore off, and more thinking about how it could be used, this actually seems like it could be really cool given the right games.
Ninja games and the like would never be the same. You could easily do something like that arcade samurai simulator (there's one at the FFA arcade for those of you in the Valley) without even trying to take full advantage of the controller. The possibilities for immersion just seem huge. If Nintendo can get some really good games that make excellent use of the controller paradigm, they could have one of the most, erm, revolutionary home experiences out there.
IGN has three articles and Gamespot has a bit of coverage too.
And don't forget to watch the video. I can't wait for that dentist game. | | comments: 6 comments or Leave a comment |
| So I managed to get my hands on a longer demo of Fahrenheit for the Xbox, and it's only managed to reinforce my perception that this is going to be one of the best games in a while. There are four "levels" to this demo: the first one from the PC demo, the next scene in which you play the detectives at the diner, then two more in which you play as Lucas again.
As PC vs. Xbox goes, I like the walking control on the PC much better. On the Xbox, you can use the joystick to move around in the standard fashion, and you can use the D-pad to move in a character-relative fashion similar to that of the PC, but the keyboard arrows just seem to be the best for movement.
I'd say the Xbox has the advantage in the gesture system since you don't have to click for a gesture so things feel slighly more natural. Also some back and forth motions are more natural on the Xbox because you know when the joystick is back in the center so you won't go too far on the back swing. But those are small advantage IMO, and aside from that they're about equal. The action system is nice and natural with using the joysticks on the Xbox controller. Since it's not used in the PC demo I can't really compare it though.
Graphics-wise, the PC is the definite winner. While the Xbox has all the same features as the PC version graphically, the aliasing is rather bad. Or at least it is on my LCD. Might not be so bad on a CRT, but either way the PC can hit a higher resolution. The Xbox demo only supported 480p, which didn't help the aliasing much. I don't know if the final version will support 720p or 1080i also. I imagine texture quality is nicer on the PC, but I didn't pay much attention.
We also see another type of decision making system in the game. There are a few situations in which you have to make some sort of decision or prepare for something, and a timer slowly eats away. Definitely makes tense moments, though it does leave me wondering if it would be more effective to not have the timer displayed. It's more realistic, and probably would give an even hgih ersense of urgency, but perhaps it's less fair to the gamer? I don't suppose anyone will release a mod to make the timer not display. It would be interesting to compare playing with and without it.
I'm not sure if the main character is supposed to be Asian or not. He looks like it in the intro screen and sometimes in-game, but at other times he doesn't, and his brother is clearly Caucasian. Not really important, but a bit confusing.
As the storytelling goes, I remain impressed. The voice acting was still good, and the story and characters really drag you in. I wouldn't be surprised if this game becomes a contender for game of the year. It looks like one of the rare ambitious games that actually succeeds in its ambitions.
In conclusion, get this game when it comes out Sept. 21 (it'll be called Indigo Prophecy in the US). You'll be happy you did.
edit: Fixed some bad spelling and double words. Added a few sentences to the timer paragraph. | | comments: 7 comments or Leave a comment |
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