December 2001
- 31 -
Don't eat yellow snow
If snow is a strange color, such
as yellow, it's probably not a good idea to eat it. Even if the snow
is white, it could have a foreign substance such as limestone or anthrax
in it, so just to be safe, don't eat any snow you find on the ground.
Don't do drugs, kids. Seriously,
they're no good.
Well, I saw the first Lord of
the Rings movie, Fellowship of the Ring, today, and I really liked it.
In fact, I liked it so much that a movie I previously kind of liked, Waterworld,
now seems like a mediocre and bland adventure in comparison. I guess
I'm now part of the majority of people regarding my newfound feelings about
Waterworld. Yes, the Tolkienites' Ex-Waterworld-Fan Ministries have
converted me from a heathen fan of a bad movie into a Lord of the Rings
fan who has seen the light, and I repent my old wicked ways. It was
like an addiction for me, and I had deluded myself so badly into believing
that there was really something to Waterworld, but now I see that I was
only lying to myself and that the only movies worth being a fan of are
good ones like Lord of the Rings. Seriously though, it really was
a good movie and I'm glad it turned out well. The special effects
were great, of course, and the plot was really interesting. I'll
have to turn in my rights to be an elitist about this in any way (in other
words, I have no "natural liberty" in this department - see? Even
my incoherent ramblings tie in with my normal entries sometimes) because
I haven't even read the books yet. Yes, I saw the movie before I
read the book, even though Lord of the Rings is such a classic and I've
seen so much stuff spun off from it, so naturally I should have read it
already, but I'm just too lazy, I guess. And now that the movie is
out, and more are still being made, I would be afraid that reading the
books at this time could be perceived by many people as a simple jump onto
the Hobbit Bandwagon, akin to how many people suddenly became interested
in swing music when that Gap commercial was being shown on TV. But
since I've decided not to let other people's perceptions rule my life anymore,
I don't care if I'm jumping on a bandwagon, and even if I am, it's a luxury
wagon with comfortable seats, first-class dinner service, and a super-high-speed
Internet connection for every passenger, so I'll be too drenched in the
waters of gratification to pay attention to any scorn that might drift
my way.
So anyway I really have this
fear that people hate me and I need validation that they don't. Please,
I really can't stand knowing that there might be someone out there who
has a less than favorable opinion about me. I try to please everyone
but I just can't, and some people are just mad at me by default because
it's part of the culture they've been raised in and I'm just part of a
faceless and probably soulless horde to them and so they see no problems
with wiping me out in a big terrorist attack along with other members of
my horde. Well, let those terrorists know that I've had it!
Why do they hate me for no reason? What have I ever done to them?
Sure, you can criticize American foreign policy all you like but realize
I don't make that policy and I probably never will so don't just come here
all decked out in your portable bomb suit looking to scatter me all over
the place because I've never done anything to you, you stupid terrorist!
Yeah, I said stupid. And you know why I did that despite my belief
that I don't want anyone to hate me? Because you already do hate
me and it doesn't matter what I say. When I say "you" in this case
I refer not to you, the reader of this fine wonderful site, but to the
terrorists who are probably not reading this site because it goes against
their oh-so-precious religious beliefs to read American drivel such as
that which I spew. Yes, I said religious beliefs. Yes, you
read right, I'm stepping beyond my fear and I'm criticizing them.
Not religion, because I don't think about religion much so it's no place
of mine to criticize religion. But like I've said many times, I do
have plenty of beliefs and even though they're not religious beliefs, they're
still beliefs which I have just like others and so I have the natural liberty
to criticize all beliefs including religious ones because they're really
no different than any other kinds of beliefs. Maybe I should write
a thesis or something on the concept of natural liberty because it's something
I imagine some people just don't get, and so they might accuse me of sitting
up on a high horse or something and not realizing that in a naturally liberated
world, all figurative horses would be of equal height. Not literal
horses, of course, because we don't have that kind of genetic engineering
and cloning technology just yet. Maybe in a few years.
We all have our fears.
Some are afraid of the dark, some are afraid of spiders, some are afraid
of public speaking, some are afraid of speaking to a group of spiders in
the dark, and the list of phobias goes on and on. For me, the greatest
fear of all is that someone, somewhere, is thinking unkind thoughts about
me. I know that I've acted like a jerk many times in my life and
that someone probably remembers me in a negative way and they hate me and
think I'm a bad person just because of something I did in the past that
I would never do again and I just had a lapse in judgment. There's
not a day that goes by where I don't feel pangs of regret over evils I
have done in the past and will probably be forced to do in the future against
my better judgment because I just get these urges. I have terrible
willpower to resist the urge to say something stupid and I think it is
that lack of willpower that makes me suited more than other people to criticize
smokers and alcoholics and anorexic people and other people like that who
have an addiction, because someone with really good willpower wouldn't
know what it feels like to have evil urges all the time and I do know what
it's like, not with smoking or drinking or anything like that but with
plenty of things that are just as bad in my opinion but sometimes I just
can't help. For example, when my brother starts talking about a mall
he likes to visit and the design of the mall and how he likes to keep up
with new developments in the mall, I just get kind of exasperated and I
get the urge to make a joke like I'm pretending like I'm really interested
in the mall but I'm really not so it's really out of character for me and
so it's funny to me but it might not be funny to other people such as my
brother and as a result my parents don't think it's funny either because
when my brother doesn't find something I say funny but rather offensive,
in a way, they always anticipate my brother saying something to me that's
bad and perpetuating a continuous conflict, and I just get the urge and
sometimes I make the joke instead of suppressing it even though making
it is selfish. So you see, I know perfectly well what it's like to
have no willpower and so I'm perfectly justified in criticizing smokers
and other addicts because I have experience in that department and I recognize
my faults and I'm not just speaking from an ivory tower. I'm keeping
it real.
For Christmas, I finally got
Half-Life to see what all the fuss was about. It's a good game with
a lot of really cool stuff, but it falls prey to some faults inherent in
most first-person shooters. You can save anywhere, and while that's
a good thing and I wouldn't change it, I tend to rely on it too much.
Battles often come down to a simple numbers game, where I fight some enemies
and if my health ends up too low, I keep repeating the battle until I'm
satisfied. It can get very frustrating, especially when fighting
enemies who have fast weapons, such as machine guns. I hear the last
part of the game has a lot of jumping puzzles which require a lot of saving
and reloading, but I don't see how there could be any more of that than
there already is. The level design is really good, and I like how
you have to find different ways to defeat big enemies instead of just going
in with all your firepower. For example, you have to turn on the
power in a lab and activate a weapon to destroy a multi-headed snake that's
in your way, and you can call in an airstrike to defeat a giant flamethrowing
monster after it chases you.
Well, it turns out I did get
that Playstation 2 after all! Hooray! Don't hit me. It
won't just be useful to me, it'll be useful to my brother because he likes
to play Crash Bandicoot games, and it can be used as a DVD player so my
family can watch movies with it. I got Final Fantasy X and my brother
got Crash Bandicoot: Wrath of Cortex. Drakan 2 isn't out yet, but
I've got my eye out for it. The only problem is that I got the Playstation
2 but I didn't get a memory card, so I'll have to replay the first part
of FFX. I can use a PS1 memory card with PS1 games, which are playable
on the PS2, but PS2 games require a different memory card.
Well, it's Christmas once again.
It looks like I won't be getting that Playstation 2, so I won't be able
to catch up on the latest Final Fantasy, but that means I'll have more
time to work on other stuff. I watched Drowning Mona today, and it
was mean but really funny. Lately I haven't been able to figure out
what to do with the rest of Azenera level 3, especially to make it so there
aren't any big open expanses of nothingness, and I really should come up
with some kind of standard for a good number of health items to put in
a particular area. Design is everything, and I don't want most of
it to just be guesswork like it has been.
Even with the fog limit set to
18 instead of 30, the frame rate on level 3 of Azenera sometimes slows
down to less than 20 frames per second on my old computer, the one with
the TNT1 video card. With the way Azenera is going, that generation
of card will probably be obsolete by the time I'm finished, but I should
have had some way of checking it. I tried turning on anti-aliasing
on my new computer at college but that doesn't quite slow it down to a
TNT1-level frame rate. And to think, I used to not be able to see
a difference between the performance of the two computers in Drakan because
object-intensive levels like Atlantis wouldn't run very well on either
of them. I guess even if the new computer can give me twice the frame
rate of the old one, a level that slows down to 3 frames per second on
the old computer won't do much better on the new one. The level's
still playable, and most of the frame rate slowdown is because there are
many enemies in some places, so I'll keep it like it is. Other than
testing level 3, I didn't really do much today. I saw the movie Head
Over Heels and it was pretty funny, and my parents finished a book on tape
called Bandits that they had been listening to in the car. It's by
Elmore Leonard, and it's about an ex-con mortuary worker who gets caught
up in a plot involving a nun and a bunch of people involved in the conflict
in Nicaragua. My parents have decided that books on tape are the
best thing to get them through the ten-hour trip from Minnesota to Madison,
Wisconsin and back. I just wish I hadn't had that final on Saturday
so I could have gone back on the bus and not put such a burden on my family.
I like to think of college finals
as a sort of final boss in the game that is a semester. My computer
science final boss, Computron, was a piece of cake, and there wasn't any
environmental studies final exam, but there was a final paper so I guess
it was like solving the final sliding block puzzle in an adventure game
or something. My Japanese final boss, Shiken-Akuma, almost defeated
me at the very beginning of the battle but I think I got the advantage
somewhere along the line. That's the thing about final exams, you
don't know how you're doing if you're not sure about some things.
My economics final boss, Econo-Boss Plus, was kind of hard and I think
I could have studied for it a bit more, but I think I beat it as well.
I guess my vacation at home now is kind of like a month-long ending sequence.
Where are my CG-rendered dance sequences and celebrations? I just
defeated the final bosses, and now I want a celebration!
Let me tell you the tale of the
time my head swelled into the clouds. It was just last month, when
I said that one of my less serious entries caused a Drakanite to leave
the community forever because I, and by association all of them, are a
bunch of deceptive goons. Well, I was wrong about that; perhaps someone
really did leave but it wasn't like I thought. Let us end this melodrama
on a high note.
Lately I have contracted a serious
case of designer's editor death because I haven't really been doing much
with Azenera. Mostly it was because of studies, but laziness also
played a major part. Yes, I was able to finish Final Fantasy 8, Final
Fantasy 9, Outcast, and several freeware games, but preparing a completely
new Azenera version has been just a little too daunting, I'm afraid.
I keep having visions of cool things to put in the series but first I have
to face the reality of having to do some mundane busywork just to make
a complete environment, and I always get distracted. But over this
holiday break I will try, really try, to get some major Azenera work done
because besides a few games I might get over the next few days, I'll have
few distractions to keep my mind off this project. It will be my
winter challenge.