October 2003
- 31 -
Happy Halloween everybody!
Most sites right now would have
pumpkins and ghosts all over their pages, and possibly a new color scheme,
but I'm not the webmaster of most sites. Specifically, I'm lazy.
I haven't even moved this site off my mother's Web account and gotten my
own domain name yet. But you have to give me a little break, because
I've been doing midterm exams like all week, and these were the tough computer
science exams. It was a pretty uneventful Halloween for me, unlike
two years ago when a bunch of crazy stuff happened on State Street and
stuff got destroyed. I did make a Shalo Kitie mask (really, I did!),
but I didn't put it on even once today. I did get my numerical methods
homework done, and that included some Householder reflections. Those
are sort of scary, I guess. "Woooooo... I'm a Householder matrix
and I'm here to diagonalize you! You don't know which way my norm
is going! Woooooo!" Maybe I'll play System Shock 2 for a while
so I don't feel like I totally missed out on the fright.
Current mood:
not particularly scared. Yeah, I'm not scared at... WHAT WAS THAT???
uh, yes, not scared.
Current music: "Monster Mash" by Bobby "Boris" Pickett
I've been working on the ship
section in level 5 of Azenera, and so far it's looking pretty good, but
I won't be making any screenshots until I get the landscapes textured and
the major objects placed. Earlier I mentioned that one of the succubi
minions of Queen Pesirra will be aboard a fortress near a group of ships
in the sea, and I've created the ships and the fortress and they look good
so far, even with the full-brightness lighting and lack of underwater texture
diversity. The ships consist of a combination of landscape-constructed
sea platforms and object ships that use the winged pirate ship model that
you see in every other Drakan level. In addition to the ships, I'm
adding a cave that has a stream going through it and volumetric fog obscuring
your view, so you have to follow the stream to avoid getting lost.
Yes, Azenera level 5 is coming close to having a diverse bunch of challenges
and environments.
Current mood:
glad to be back to Azenera
Current music: "Orinoco Flow" by Enya
Back in September I talked about
the Automatic E/N Site and mentioned
how it might seem a little dated because of the Napster references.
Well, right on cue, it seems Napster is in the news and on TV again because
it's back as a pay-per-download service, and I even saw an ad for it on
TV today! At first most of the major labels and artists were reluctant
to take part in any kind of file-sharing, including pay services, but now
they seem to be embracing them. iTunes looks like the most successful
service so far, but it still has program limitations. For example,
all the files are in AAC format, and if you want to convert them to MP3,
you have to go through a series of convoluted steps involving burning and
recopying a CD. This calls for some clever programmer to come up
with an AAC to MP3 conversion utility. I wish I could just come up
with programs like that, but unfortunately I don't know enough about compression
format analysis or computer architecture to do much good with music file
formats. I'm learning about Fourier transforms and data interpolation,
which I understand are used in compression, but there's not much I can
do with them right now.
Current mood:
stumped by that sound math thing
Current music: There's no music anymore. It's all waves
and data plots.
A few days ago I talked about
how Congress passed an anti-spam bill, but what would happen if that bill
started to become enforced as strictly as anti-drug laws? Let's say
the government started to crack down on spam operations in the United States.
What would happen next might go like this: Spammers would have to move
their operations underground and out of the eyes of the law, using IP scrambling
techniques, or they would have to move to other countries and spam from
there. Then the government would create a Spam Enforcement Agency,
or SEA, and it would send agents to infiltrate spam rings. Consequently,
among spammers, people who were suspected SEA agents would become known
as "sparcs" and their lives would be in jeopardy. Anti-spam ads would
start to be shown on TV, and they would spread propaganda about how spamming
will kill you and everyone you love while propping up terrorist regimes
all over the world. This anti-spam operation would run at full capacity,
but no matter how hard the government would enforce the anti-spam laws,
spammers would always find a way to get their spam into people's e-mail
inboxes. To show how serious they are about fighting spam, the government
would train militant groups in known spam-producing countries to overthrow
any spam-friendly leaders and replace them with anti-spam puppet regimes.
The intro to every arcade game would include a message saying "Winners
Don't Send Spam," and in children's TV shows, there would be special episodes
in which one of the characters either gets in trouble with spam and suffers
terrible consequences, or else is tempted by a spammer but is saved by
the moral guidance of a good spam-hating citizen. A movie called
"Spammer Madness" would be required viewing in middle-school health classes,
and this movie would explore the lives of several innocent teenagers who
are ruined by spam, culminating in a scene where one of the teenagers gets
really involved in writing a spam-generation program and as a result gets
lethal carpal tunnel syndrome. This propaganda program will go on
for a while, but soon the public will become jaded and disillusioned with
the spam war, and this disillusionment will grow when it turns out that
a certain vehemently anti-spam talk radio host is actually one of the biggest
spammers around. Yes, I see great things for this War on Spam.
Current mood:
ready to battle spam
Current music: "Walking on the Sun" by Smash Mouth
Yesterday I was talking about
how good it is to find a spam filter, and before that I had a Shalo Kitie
message that praised Mozilla Thunderbird. By the way, if you haven't
tried it yet, you can move your mouse over the cat image in the "Current
Mood" section of all my October posts and hold the cursor there for a while,
and you'll see a short message from the cat, Shalo Kitie. Anyway,
after all that praise, today I was checking my e-mail and suddenly I got
a Blue Screen of Death, and when I rebooted and opened the mail program
again, all the spam information was gone. I downloaded Thunderbird
0.3, which they say is a more stable build based on better Mozilla code,
so I hope this one either doesn't crash or at least has some backup for
the spam information.
Someday I think it would be fun
to have a large notebook in front of me and spend a few years writing in
it in public, staring intently at it with a determined look on my face
and muttering so that people would get the idea that I'm working on something
really important, but it would really turn out I was just wasting my time
filling the notebook with random scribbles and gibberish. I would
be like Jack from The Shining, who was really just writing "All work and
no play makes Jack a dull boy" over and over on his typewriter, except
my notebook would have stuff that looks like it might actually be something.
When I finally get done filling the notebook with scribbles, I'll lurch
up to random people and blurt out at them, "Hey, you, you wanna see this?
You wanna see what's in this book? It's my magnum opus! You
understand? Opus! Magnum! Mopus agnum magpus onum!"
Most people will back off nervously, but if I keep at it, someone might
take an interest. When they do, there's a chance that they might
think my gibberish scribblings are really something special, so they might
spend a lot of time trying to decipher the notebook, and it'll become a
literary classic! Well, probably not. The best it could ever
do would be to become an Internet Meme of the Week.
Current mood:![Shalo Kitie says: \')--=%^bvaaaa!!!())^%[]]/.>](Sk_ico06.png){kind=small}
gibberified
Current music: The complete collection of Taco
the Wonder Dog songs
I've completed my latest batch
of algorithm problems, and boy were some of them doozies. There was
one that involved Toeplitz matrices and fast Fourier transform, and it's
a good thing I learned about that stuff in my linear algebra and numerical
methods classes because I don't think it's possible to get it if you don't
know about circulant matrices and eigenvalues and things like that.
Then there was a coin weighing problem where you had to have an equalization
loop nested inside a division loop and still perform fewer than O(n) weighings.
Then there were some other divide and conquer problems that I think I got
right, but I'm not sure. There's a test coming up for algorithms,
and also one for numerical methods, so I have to study for them.
I also have to get my technical Japanese homework done, and keep up on
all the reading I have to do for other classes, while still having enough
time to watch TV. Well, all right, maybe I don't need to watch TV
all the time, but I do need to keep up on my homework.
You know, I complain about spam,
but ever since I got the spam detection filter it's been much easier to
sort the real messages from the junk. I read in one of the student
newspapers here (no, not the Onion) that there's a law against spam now,
but if there really is one, then let me ask you, what is all that stuff
in my inbox? Legitimate messages from people who cleverly disguise
real messages inside sales pitch-looking things with plenty of random letters,
word breaks, and non-ASCII characters? I don't believe William of
Ockham would approve of that explanation, so it must be the case that the
spam bill *gasp* isn't working! Oh my god! I thought the war
on spam would go smoothly, just like the war on drugs, but... oh, wait.
I guess I'll have to live with spam, but as long as there are filters,
it won't be a huge problem.
Current mood:
brain overload, shutting down consciousness
Current music: Is there any such song as "Divide and Conquer"?
There has to be a song with that name.
No, I do not want to know what
Charlotte on Sex and the City was so obsessed about! Now leave me
alone! And by the way, "Dark Profits" is a really innocuous-sounding
name for a web site, isn't it? Nope, no scams there, no sirree!
One more thing: I don't want to know what "cu.rn" is, much less how to
shoot it, thank you very much!
Current mood:
sick of spam
Current music: Nothing. I've got nothing.
Wow, there sure are a lot of
people who visit my site. Take a look at this:
I'm not even in the top 100,000! Actually, I'm not surprised. Most of the stuff I write about on here is either an insane rambing commentary on nothing, a complaint about how I don't get much sleep, an update on levels I'm making for a game that only about 10 people play anymore, and occasionally there'll be a mini-review of some computer game demo, which is the only thing that might be of interest to the general public. Also, there are those trip logs and photos from high school, but no one's going to slog through those. By the way, that reminds me, there might be some images on the Utah section and some others that might have come from other sites, and I think I gave credit to all those sites but if I missed a few, I'm sorry.
One of the coolest things I saw
in the Halo E3 movie was when the Master Chief ran up to that alien and
stabbed it with a blue energy sword. It was like, that Master Chief
is so nonchalant about his killing duties, and he's not afraid to kill
with a little style. See what I mean:
When I saw that alien in the demo who was carrying the sword, I thought, "That sword will be mine!" Imagine my disappointment when I killed the alien but the sword just disappeared so I couldn't pick it up. Then I thought, "Okay, you can't get the sword in the demo, so that must be a teaser for the full game. The sword must be a permanent item that you can pick up later, so you can use it as your melee weapon instead of just hitting enemies with your gun." But I've been doing a bit of Web searching, and I'm finding out that you can't use the sword at all in Halo! What kind of deal is this where they show you something cool and stylistic in the preview and not even include it in the full game? I've heard they might let you use the sword in Halo 2, but that'll take another 3 years to get the PC port and I'm not going to get an Xbox. Oh well, I guess there's always Jedi Academy for my energy sword cravings.
Current mood:
crestfallen
Current music: "Popular" by Nada Surf
Okay, I'm back to my old calm,
rational self. Wait a minute, I've never been calm and rational,
so if I'm that way now it means I'm forward to a new calm, rational self,
or something. I had to take a test and do some homework, and let
me tell you, during that test, I was feeling like a zombie. My eyesight
kind of went funny, like my eyes were dry or something, and my wrist got
sore because I had to do a lot of writing. This always happens during
long tests with lots of writing. The last time it happened was during
my African Storyteller final last semester, and sometimes during linear
algebra tests before that. I got more sleep, like 7 hours this time
instead of my usual 5, but it didn't seem to make much difference.
I was able to stay awake in my numerical methods class, but then, I always
am. But yesterday during my algorithms class, I was really having
trouble staying awake. The subject matter was interesting, but I
just couldn't keep my eyes open or pay attention some of the time.
I hope I don't have this problem when I become president or a secret agent
or something, because it would be really embarrassing to be known as the
Dozing President and have all the editorial cartoonists draw pictures of
me with exaggerated features sleeping as the economy and national security
crumble in the background. Oh well, I guess being a sleepy president
whose worst fault is not being able to concentrate on anything wouldn't
be the worst thing in the world. On second thought, I don't think
I want to be president because I can't take criticism very well.
I'd read something negative about me on Guess what I've been doing!
No really, guess guess guess! No, not that, you gutter-minded
fool, I've been playing the demo of The
Hobbit. To be honest, I didn't think it was that good.
The gameplay seemed promising at first, but the slow movement and reflexes
of your character during combat soon became annoying. Also, the path
was too linear, and you can't save the game anywhere, so if you die during
one of the combat or jumping sections, you may have to repeat a large section
of the level all over again. Some parts were fun, though. The
combat involves a small amount of strategy, because the best way to defeat
many opponents is with a jump attack that has to recharge before you can
use it again, so you can use the jump attack to knock them down, get a
few hits in, and back away and wait to recharge. Some treasure chests
are locked, and to unlock them you have to solve a series of timing challenges
where you press a button when a green circle shows up or the spinner hits
a green mark, and you get a limited amount of time to do all the challenges.
I wish Morrowind had used a skill-based system like this, maybe making
the challenges easier or giving you more time as your Security skill improves,
instead of just making it based on luck. Maybe the next Elder Scrolls
game can have skill-based challenges like this, not just for lockpicking,
but also for speechcraft, alchemy, enchanting, and other skills that are
currently based on chance in Morrowind. As for the Hobbit, I think
there are a lot of other games I'd choose over it based on what I've seen.
Current mood:
calm and collected but not rejected
Current music: Something by the Presidents of the United States
of America. The band, not any actual presidents.
Oh my god, it's insane!
Those tobacco companies are getting away with so much evil and horrible
stuff, it really is something that belongs in a theme park called Crazyworld!
Now I know the Truth. You could say I've been infected with the Truth.
Now if only someone would come up with a Truth ad about the negative effects
of watching too much TV. It would be ironic, because they would have
to show the ad on TV for the most people to see it, and that would be like
if Truth ads only appeared as holographic images in the smoke made by cigarettes.
Everything was a repeat tonight except for a few shows on Comedy Central,
so I'm suffering from severe new show withdrawal. Sure, I could watch
an old episode of Conan O'Brien, but instead I think I'll try to go to
bed early tonight. By the way, television, I get it! It's "oh
zhoo," and yes, I know that oven mitt is trying to kiss the woman.
Hey, if that oven mitt and the Microsoft paperclip got into a fight to
the death, who would win? Well, I'll tell you: we all would!
And another thing: ha ha ha that guy really was raised by wolves it's so
funny! I am just thrilled as all get out. Well, it seems as
though this update has become a self-fulfilling prophecy because the title
says I'm going to Crazyworld, and I just (there I go saying "just" again)
realized I'm sounding kind of crazy in this update. Well, it's true,
but only because I really didn't get much sleep last night because I kept
waking up in the middle of the night for no good reason. If it's
not one thing that hinders my sleep, it's another. Well, this time
I mean it, I am going to sleep and staying asleep and that's that!
Current mood:
sloopy. That means sleepy and loopy at the same time.
Current music: "Crazy" by Patsy Cline
I have an addiction. I
never thought it could happen to me. Every day I would scoff at the
various smokers, alcoholics, and junkies I saw or heard about, saying,
"Never me." And then I would add, "And no, I am not going to dub
thee Unforgiven." But it turns out that as I was scoffing, I was
scoffing at the clothespins in everyone else's eyes while ignoring the
wooden stake that's in my heart because I was mistaken for a vampire once.
True story, one day I was walking home with blood dripping from my mouth
but it wasn't really blood, it was cherry pie filling, but people thought
it was blood so an angry mob chased me into an alley and put a wooden stake
through my heart and... no, actually that's not a true story. But
there is a true story here, and that story isn't really a story but more
like an observation that while other people have their addictions, I have
mine too, and my addiction is television. Starting at 6:00 or 6:30
PM every day, I watch TV until 12:35 AM because there's stuff that I just
have to see. First I see the Simpsons, and sometimes before that
King of the Hill, and after that there are the prime time shows between
7:00 and 10:00 PM. Then from 10:00 to 10:30, there's the Daily Show,
and then I have five minutes of free time before I switch over to the late
night shows. Because of this excessive TV habit, I have to do my
homework late sometimes, and I miss out on sleep because of that.
When that happens, I can't pay attention in class, and I yawn the whole
way through. All the time I'm struggling to concentrate, but I can't,
and for the whole time the smirking, sarcastic face of Conan O'Brien is
right there in front of me, mocking me and beckoning me to watch his show.
"Come on, my follower," he says, "Thou shalt set thine eyes on the box
of luminosity and take in the images of me, your Elder Idol." No,
I don't know why Conan talks like a character from an amateur Dungeons
and Dragons session in my mind; he just does. Tonight I'm going to
skip watching the late night shows... well, it's mostly because they're
repeats, but it's a start. Now I have to finish my translations and
do a bit more reading on those Greek plays.
Current mood:
humbled
Current music: "Addicted to Love" by Robert Palmer, or possibly
something by Jane's Addiction.
Well, I'm going to take a break
for a few minutes today and do some stuff on the computer. I've been
working more on Azenera level 5, this time putting in more rooms in the
lava cave. I have a room where you have to avoid lava streams that
shoot out into the middle of the passageway and another room where you
have to step on pressure plates to raise and lower blocks in the lava to
form a bridge. In other words, this part of the level series is actually
going to resemble a real computer game instead of just a bunch of repetitive
fighting and walking sections thrown together haphazardly. In addition
to my Drakan level editing, I've been revisiting the Halo demo and seeing
all the cool things I can do with the weapons and the Warthog vehicle.
I've seen that Warthog jump video on the Internet, and while I can't reproduce
it in the demo because there's no cooperative play so I can't do the grenade
trick, I can still take the Warthog into places it's not supposed to go,
like into the indoor places. It's pretty cool that they made it so
you can take the Warthog into there and they didn't put down an invisible
barrier that only stops the Warthog at the entrance to all the indoor places.
For example, I would often take the Warthog into the area with the Silent
Cartographer, and if I used the other Warthog in the level to ram the first
one through a narrow door, I can get that other Warthog farther into the
underground area. If I go into the big area where the ledges overlook
a deep pit, I can make a jump from the top ledge to one down below, and
I can even get close to the Silent Cartographer holographic structure.
I took a screenshot that shows the Warthog inside the indoor place, and
you can see the holographic map in the background.
Current mood:
silly
Current music: "Stuck in the Middle With You" by Stealer's Wheel
I'm afraid I won't be able to
share any real information this week because I have a lot of homework and
studying to do. I have two quizzes on Wednesday, a test on Thursday,
and a few more midterm tests next week. I have to have three Greek
tragedies read, as well as a comedy, and I have to translate more Japanese
technical documents. And then there's the energy resources reading,
where I have to figure out the oil consumption and the carbon cycle and
the chemical reactions and the porosity. It's too much. It's
just too much. I'm off to bed.
Current mood:
worried
Current music: I am hearing a Greek chorus... in my mind!
Ha ha ha...
Well, I just tried the Halo demo,
and let me tell you about it. Okay, first things first: performance.
You may have read that Halo has a low frame rate compared to games with
similar graphical complexity, and this was certainly true on my system.
I have to play the demo at 640x480 resolution, or else the frame rate becomes
unplayable. The specular highlighting, shadow, and decal settings
don't seem to affect performance much on my system. From what I've
heard, Gearbox or Bungie increased the polygon count on the models and
made better-quality textures, but it might be the case that Halo's engine
is like Drakan's in that its performance doesn't scale in proportion with
hardware improvements so it might not be able to take the extra polygons
no matter what kind of system you're running on, but if that's true then
Gearbox should have optimized the engine to accommodate the higher detail.
Still, even at 640x480, the game looks good, and the weapon effects and
character animations are nice. I like how the needler weapon shoots
homing projectiles that stick in the enemy and cause a chain reaction that
can turn into a big explosion, but I just wish the weapon was more powerful
or could hold more ammo or something because I'm always running out.
The zoom effect when you use the sniper scope on the marine's pistol is
kind of strange because while most sniper scopes in games just show the
area in front of you in a lower field of view, so that everything looks
closer, Halo's scope puts the screen in a lower resolution and blurs things
out around the edges of the screen, and it doesn't look too good when the
original resolution is 640x480. The sound is pretty good, and the
opening theme music is as good as I remember from the preview videos I've
seen. The gameplay is really good too, although it could use a quicksave
system rather than the closely spaced checkpoint system it currently uses.
The enemies really fight with good tactics, hiding around corners and behind
obstacles and jumping out of your way when you're riding in a vehicle,
and they can be really tough on higher difficulty levels. You can
only carry two guns and a limited number of grenades, but most of the enemies
have weapons you can pick up, so you won't run out of things to attack
with if you make sure you've got plenty of ammo left for the next encounter.
I know that one of the complaints about Halo on the PC is that there's
no cooperative mode, and while I don't play online that often anymore,
I can tell that it would be a lot of fun to be able to fight the Covenant
alongside teammates, especially when you're riding in a vehicle together.
When you're in the Warthog, one player could be the driver, one could be
the gunner, and another could be the passenger, and you could have fun
working together, fighting enemies as a team, and saying it's someone else's
fault if you end up getting everyone killed. But alas, it is not
to be, unless Gearbox comes up with a patch that adds cooperative play.
Some people have the idea that this game is similar to Metroid Prime, but
it's not at all, because Halo is a mission-based linear game with large
outdoor areas where you can drive vehicles and fight with a team of marines,
and Metroid Prime is a more non-linear exploration-centered game with mostly
small valleys and indoor settings where you progress through the game by
gaining abilities. If Halo is like anything, it's Unreal and its
sequel Unreal 2, with a bit of Giants: Citizen Kabuto thrown in.
Some aspects of the Halo demo reminded me of the Unreal 2 demo, such as
separate shield and health bars (although Unreal 2's didn't regenerate)
and the way you can pick up weapons dropped by enemies. The enemies
seemed similar as well, because you have both the small, agile monkey-like
aliens who attack you in swarms, and then you have the larger lizard-like
aliens who are fewer in number, but they swiftly dodge your attacks and
use the terrain to their advantage. The aspect of the Halo demo that
seemed like Giants came right at the beginning, where you and your squad
run across a field near a beach fighting Covenant forces just like the
Meccaryn squad fighting Sea Reapers, and the Banshee in the multiplayer
part of the Halo demo is kind of like the gyrocopter in Giants. All
in all, the Halo demo was pretty fun, and I might pick up the full game
when I get home if I can't think of a better game I want to get.
Current mood:
tuckered out
Current music: The Halo theme song. Ahhhhh ahhh ahhh ahhhhh
ahhhhh.... da da da DAAA da, da da da DA DA DA, da da da DAAA da, da da
da DA DA DA...
People seem to hate jump puzzles
in games these days. Back in the olden days of the 8- and 16-bit
consoles, jumping between platforms was an integral part of many games,
and Super Mario Bros. 3 is considered one of the best games ever, but ask
anyone about Half-Life's Xen or Turok's many jumping sections, and you'll
get little but hate. So, what's the difference between the old jumping
puzzles and the new ones? Is it that jumping puzzles don't work as
well in 3D? Maybe, but not necessarily, since Mario 64 is a 3D game
with lots of platform jumping and it's considered to be really good by
a lot of people. Is it when jumping puzzles appear in games that
aren't meant to be platform jumping games? That's probably a big
part of it, but there are a lot of Half-Life players who also enjoy Mario
64, so it's most likely not that entirely. I think a lot of it has
to do with the quality of the jumping sections themselves and how frustrating
they are. If you're playing a game with slippery, unresponsive controls
or you can't see where you're going sometimes, then any jumping puzzles
that appear in that game will probably be really annoying. But if
you're playing a game with tight controls and an agile player character
where you can see where you're going, then a well-made jumping section
can be fun as long as it doesn't go on too long or you don't have to repeat
it too often. Now, I agree that jumping puzzles can be frustrating
and take away from the enjoyment of a game, but there are lots of other
things that are just as bad. For example, sections of games where
there are snipers who hide in hard-to-see places and can kill you in one
hit are often annoying. You're walking along, looking for danger,
when boom! you're shot by a sniper and you die. Time to reload and
look in a different direction, seeing if you can see a muzzle flash.
Then there are stealth sections where you have to sneak around enemies
and keep them from pressing an alarm, and the game is over if the alarm
is pressed. There was a part like this in Jedi Outcast and one in
Return to Castle Wolfenstein, and they were both frustrating because I
would always end up quicksaving just as a guard was about to hit the alarm.
Finally, there's a problem that most games are good enough to avoid but
some player-made levels fall prey to: places where you have to backtrack
through areas where you've already defeated the enemies, and there aren't
any respawned or new enemies, so you end up having to walk across terrain
without anything to do. A few Drakan levels have this problem, especially
if they don't give you any clue as to where to go next, and I'm afraid
some parts of Azenera might suffer from it as well. This can be a
problem in Morrowind sometimes, but you can avoid it by using teleportation
and jump spells to get where you need to go quickly, and there are multiple
paths you can take to get to a place, and the enemies respawn pretty quickly,
so it's not so bad.
Current mood:
jumpy
Current music: "Jump" by Van Halen
It's always the most violent,
ruthless warriors who pine the loudest for softness and comfort.
They imagine what it must be like to be surrounded by unearthly beauty
and peace, and they strive for that ideal in all the wrong ways, so they
are never able to escape their warlike ways. They are self-loathing
and filled with a rage that keeps them from believing they are able to
come close to the peace they desire in the world as it is, so they often
create fantasies of fountains of transformation or magical forces that
they can search for instead, or some ultimate enemy to kill, because that
is more heroic to them than the often daunting task of making peace with
themselves. I can sympathize with such feelings because I, too, feel
an overbearing unease with the world sometimes, and I occasionally think
that it would be so much better if every ageless problem could be solved
by finding and striking down some unseen eternal enemy so that the world
may be at peace. In a way, that would make life like a video game,
and I would be the protagonist, always vigilant of danger and a bringer
of peace despite my violent ways. It is comforting to think that
way sometimes, but in the end it is unproductive, because life is not like
a simple video game with simple conflicts that can be resolved by defeating
some final boss. Another problem I have is that I always have the
feeling that every problem, every tragedy, every disaster in the world
is my fault because I was not there to stop it. I imagine myself
at the scene of every horrible event I hear about and I imagine myself
coming in as a hero and stopping it from happening, but then I realize
that it has already happened and I wasn't there to stop it and there's
nothing I can do about it now, and I become gripped with an overwhelming
sadness and anger. In my heart I look for someone to blame, someone
to strike down, but in my mind I know that the problem is not mine.
Meanwhile, the more trivial but more real problems in my life build up
around me. I've been trying to put things in perspective and realize
that not all problems are my concern, but it's hard sometimes.
Current mood:
conflicted
Current music: "War" by Edwin Starr
You know, I've been doing a lot
of complaining about my computer, but now I think I have many of the problems
fixed. I haven't had to use the floppy disk drive for years, and
now that I have one of those USB flash memory storage devices, I can use
that instead of disks. It can store 250 MB of data, which is more
than enough to back up all the latest versions of Azenera, not to mention
all the Sine Wave files and the tired running gags
I've been running into the ground on this site, so you're not going to
see any situations where a hard disk crash causes me to lose all my data.
Norton SystemWorks is good for a lot of stuff, but it interfered with some
of the graphic processes on my computer and I think it's what has been
causing Internet Explorer to crash sometimes, so I disabled it on startup.
I spent a good portion of the day working on Azenera, particularly this
one lava cave where you get to push a brick bridge over so you can cross
some lava. This lava cave isn't in the volcano, but it is close to
a volcanic-looking tunnel you go through with Arokh at the beginning of
the level. I'm working on the landscape structures for the three
succubus territories. There's the lava cave, and then there'll be
a swamp cave with volumetric fog and glowing plants like they have in Alwarren,
and then there'll be a place where you can take a ship out to sea and fight
one of the boss succubi. I haven't used a moving ship in one of my
levels since Dragonmech Mountain, and that only had the ship go around
an island in the middle of a lake, so it'll be good to see one of those
winged ships again. Later in the series I have to make some kind
of airship model, and I might use a retextured variation of the winged
ship, but without the wings.
Current mood:
relieved
Current music: "Volcano Girls" by Veruca Salt
Today I discovered that even
though my computer is a bloated crash-prone mess, it can still play Duke
Nukem 3D with hardly any problems. I mention Duke Nukem because since
the DOSBox FAQ mentions
it, there must be a lot of people with newer computers who have trouble
running it. I encountered the PCI sound card problem, but there's
a patch available for that, so now I can play with no problem. The
game has actually aged better than I thought it would, especially with
support for resolutions higher than 320 by 200, but the Build engine source
hasn't been released so there's still no fan-made engine update that improves
the graphics and adds better mouse aiming control like there is for the
Doom engine games. There's mouse aiming in Duke Nukem, but I can't
seem to keep the y-axis from being reversed, so I have to move the mouse
down when I look up and up when I look down. I can't really play
now because I have a lot of homework and reading to do, not to mention
my Azenera levels to work on, but it's nice to be able to revisit those
old games so many years later.
Current mood:
swamped
Current music: "Duke of Earl" by Gene Chandler
Well, here's what happened today.
I tried to do my Numerical Methods homework, and I got started, but it's
been going really slowly. I have to do a lot of thinking and consideration
to put all the matrix stuff into place, and it's tricky to get everything
right. It's due on Thursday, and I also have to read those Greek
tragedies by tomorrow so I can discuss them, so I can't afford to be slow.
On top of that, the network on this computer has been really slow lately.
Pages just sit there for several minutes before loading, and even simple
things like tables with a small amount of text take a long time to load.
I tried checking how well my network cable is connected, and it's firmly
secured, so I think it's a problem with the network here on campus.
Also, I got that new floppy disk drive, and it fixes a few problems, but
I still can't actually read or write disks using it, so I guess the problem
is with Windows or the BIOS or something. To install the drive, I
had to take off the front plastic cover and remove the front part of the
button that ejects the disk because the front of my computer case already
has those two things integrated into it, so I probably won't be able to
take it back if it turns out I don't need the drive. My computer
has still been crashing sometimes for various reasons, from graphic driver
freezes to problems getting the Norton utilities I installed to work with
other programs. Maybe what I need to do is get a new computer, ditch
this old buggy Windows ME operating system, and make a fresh start with
a better, faster computer that uses Windows XP and doesn't have so much
stuff bloating up the system. But then, I still have my Drakan stuff
to work on, and I've heard that Drakan and its editor tend to have compatibility
problems with Windows XP, so I can't give up this computer just yet.
Current mood:
relieved, but at the same time frustrated
Current music: "Crash" by Dave Matthews Band. Or something
by the Crash Test Dummies. Or that beep sound I hear when my computer
reboots.
I keep trying to uninstall this
floppy drive, but I can't do it even when I have it removed from the computer.
Whenever I try to do it, Windows gives me an error or freezes up, and when
I restart, all the floppy drive stuff is installed again. It seems
to be integrated into the operating system. Maybe my floppy disk
drive really isn't bad, but rather Windows has some problem that makes
the whole system crash whenever it tries to do anything with the drive.
Still, I'm going to try a new drive, and if that doesn't work, I'll know
that the problem is with Windows ME.
Current mood:
tired
Current music: Some of the tracked music from here.
A few of those songs are used in Seiklus,
a fun adventure game.
It's yet another stressful weekend
for me. I found out that the problem with my computer is with the
floppy disk drive, which is broken. Either that, or all my disks
have gone bad, but I think a better explanation is that the drive has a
serious problem. I don't think I can fix it, so I'll probably have
to get a new drive. The startup process stopped making me press Delete
after I unplugged the disk drive from the computer, so at least that's
an improvement. Since my floppy disk drive no longer works, you could
say that I'm one step closer to owning an iMac. Now all I need is
for my right mouse button to break, and I'm all set. In addition
to my computer woes, I still have some algorithm problems to take care
of, and I don't know if I'm doing them correctly. We're going into
dynamic programming for this assignment, but the next assignment should
deal with the divide and conquer strategy, which is easier to visualize,
but it'll probably still have some challenging problems. This time
I don't have a clever "current music" choice that coincides with this update
so I'll just choose something I've been meaning to say for a while.
Current mood:
stressed
Current music: The soundtrack to Dungeon Explorer for the Sega
CD, which is not just a bunch of bleeps like this
reviewer says. Here, listen for yourself.
The game itself is still pretty mediocre, but I have to defend the music.
Crimsonland
is a top-down arcade-style shooter made by Reflexive and 10tons Entertainment.
Early versions of the program were free, and they're still available, but
the latest versions have gone commercial. There's a shareware demo
available, but it's limited in the worst sort of ways. The number
of features is limited, which is standard for shareware versions of games,
and there are nag screens all over the place telling you to buy the game,
but the worst limitation on the game is the fact that you can only play
the game for an hour. I don't mean that the game automatically shuts
down after an hour and then you can start it up again, I mean that after
you've played the game for a total of one hour, no matter how far apart
your playing sessions, you can't play anymore after that hour is up.
Since there's no online registration for the shareware version, the information
on how long you've played the game is all stored on the local machine,
so there are ways to get around this limitation. However, since the
terms of the shareware specifically state that you can only play for an
hour, such circumvention methods are most likely illegal. The question
of the legality of circumventing shareware time limits seems to be pretty
clear, but such matters become complicated by the existence of operating
system regression utilities such as GoBack,
by Roxio and Symantec. Utilities such as this can do a "time warp"
on your PC, reversing any changes made to files or the registry since a
certain date. While normally to circumvent shareware time limits
you need to pay close attention to the registry and system files or track
changes to your computer using a program like InCtrl,
GoBack and other regression utilities let you simply set your computer
back to a time before you even installed the shareware program, giving
you a chance to use the shareware for as long as you like. Let's
say there's a shareware multimedia creation program that only lets you
save files for 10 days, and then you can't save anything anymore.
To get around this, you could install the program, create some files, save
those files to an external storage device such as a CD-R, and then use
GoBack to revert your computer to the state it was in before the multimedia
program was installed, and then you can repeat the process all over again.
It would be a nuisance to do this, and probably more trouble than just
paying for the full version of the program, but the legality of such an
action would still come into question. I think that from now on,
if software creators want to impose a time limit on shareware versions
of their programs, they'll need to implement some kind of online registration
and authentication on a remote server, but it would be better if they didn't
impose a time limit at all but instead release a limited or incomplete
version of their software, as game companies do with demos. However,
time limits are still a good idea for applications that require you to
be online to use them at all, such as Planetside and other massively multiplayer
online games.
Current mood:
intrigued
Current music: "The Good Life" by Weezer
My computer has been acting funny
lately. First of all, I have to press the Delete key every time I
want to boot up the computer. That's right, I have to press Delete,
because this is a Dell and that company likes to remind us of that every
time we use their computers. Is this normal? It can't be, because
it used to not do it, and then it just started making me press Delete all
the time. I've looked on the Internet and apparently it's some kind
of BIOS problem or something. In addition to that, Windows has been
acting really screwy sometimes, with the video card drivers just going
bad whenever Drakan crashes and randomly when I exit some program that
uses fullscreen mode in a different resolution. When that happens,
Windows freezes whenever I try to run something that uses graphics acceleration,
and I have to reboot the computer and press Delete all over again.
Sometimes owning a computer gets so tiring!
There might have been a fly in
my salad the day before yesterday, but yesterday and today my salad was
fine so I'm better now. But I still think I'm going to eye the lettuce
suspiciously if I think of it from now on. The weekend is coming
up, and yeah, it'll be nice not to have class, but it's still going to
be such a pain because of all the homework I have to do. Seriously,
it's just too much. It's not easy homework either, it's really hard
stuff like complicated algorithms and Matlab programs. And then there's
the reading. We've started with the Greek tragedies, with the chorus
and the gods and the fate and the lamentations. There's the Oresteia
first, and then the what do you call it, the Oedipus story and Antigone,
and then you've got what else let's see oh yeah there's Euripides.
I'm not cut out for all this reading and math, really I'm not. I'm
much better at trivial unsubstantial things like making doodlesof
random stuff and poor attempts at running gags.
Why can't there be a class where we get to do that kind of stuff all the
time? Why isn't there a class where instead of competing for grades
through quality of work, we compete to see who has the shortest attention
span? I'd ace that class for sure.
Current mood:
mixed up
Current music: "Fly Away" by Lenny Kravitz
Yesterday I was eating dinner
at Frank's Place, the local cafeteria, and I got a salad and was eating
it when all of a sudden I saw this weird-looking fly crawl out of the salad
and onto my fork. I shook it off the fork and it landed on the table
on its back, where it just wriggled there for a while trying to stand upright,
and it finally succeeded and crawled under the table. It seriously
freaked me out seeing that fly just appear out of nowhere like that, and
I couldn't finish my salad. I feel kind of guilty about wasting food
like that, but I couldn't get the thought out of my head that maybe there
were more flies in there and that I would accidentally put one in my mouth
and eat it. Seriously people, I'm just a college student trying to
eat dinner, not a contestant on Fear Factor, so I don't want flies in my
food! This is making me wonder just what the sanitation record is
for Frank's Place. I mean, they've got these compartments filled
with various sauces and dressings exposed to the outside air where anyone
can spit in them, and it looks like they let them sit for days, and then
you've got the salad ingredients also out in the open where flies can sit
in there and lay eggs. I'm just glad they left the Thousand Island
dressing in bottles this year. Usually the food is pretty good, and
sometimes they even get good salad ingredients like eggs, olives, and field
greens like romaine lettuce and endive, but sometimes they just have old
stale stuff. Maybe I need to go there earlier before the cheese shells
start to harden and the eggs are all taken.
Why do I use the word "just"
so much? Just just just. Is it insecurity? Am I just
(there I go again) concerned with justice a little too much? What's
going on with me and my thought processes? And another thing: I have
to make a conscious effort to keep all my sentences from beginning with
the word "I." There are probably lots of other annoying habits I
have, like starting that last sentence with a conjunction and using too
many run-on sentences that just (shut up!) drone on and on and on and confuse
things up and just (okay that's it!) bore people and make them say "Get
to the point already!" and talking about things where I don't give enough
information for people to know what I mean because I just (grrr) assume
everyone knows what I know. Now I have to go over all the text in
Azenera and eliminate all unnecessary usage of the word "just." That
ought to save a megabyte or two.
Current mood:
distressed
Current music: "Fly" by Sugar Ray
Most people would say something
about the California recall election right about now, but I don't have
time for that so I'll just talk about other things. I had a test
in my classical literature class today, and I'm not sure how I did.
At the end, I had to write an essay on the quest for immortality in several
cultures, and if it's graded as strictly as the essays for the African
Storyteller class I took last semester, I probably didn't do very well.
My parents have said that they really don't care how well I do in these
breadth requirement classes, but I have a more personal reason to want
to do well. If I do poorly, I would have the nagging feeling that
if I just put all of my time into my classes that I currently spend on
computer games or the Internet, I could have done much better, whereas
if I do well in my classes and still have time for other things, it means
I'm not wasting my time here. Either that, or it means I can afford
to spend my time on some non-academic productive activity, like getting
a part-time job or something.
I've been working on Azenera
some more, adding some new passageways between the top and bottom parts
of the rock bridge valleys so Rynn can get to the volcano passage and then
to the top of the eastern rock bridge place and defeat the goblin boss.
The volcano passage itself hasn't been added yet, but it shouldn't be too
hard to make. There's also going to be an underground river that
goes through the mountains to the north that you can use to go back to
Arokh quickly, but I have to add some indication to the player that such
a river exists. Maybe I'll have Tuiri say something about it while
she's telling you to pick up the Tracker Gauntlet and Meteor Blast spells
so Rynn can defeat enemy dragons more easily. In addition to all
of that, I need to create a town that includes the same river that goes
through the mountain, to give the level some continuity it so desperately
needs, and the town also needs a tower that has the rift vortex trapped
in it because it's important to the story. Then I have to find some
logical excuse to add an ocean passage with a boat that takes you to a
ring of ships, a cave of lava and fire that's different from the volcano
passage, and a swamp section that makes use of that volumetric fog object
I made. Those will be the places where you fight the elemental succubi
to get the three keys to get to the town.
Current mood:
exhausted
Current music: "No Time to Kill" by Clint Black
I said level 6 was going to be
the big plot-shifting level, and it still is, but I'm going to add a few
hints in level 5. This might be a spoiler, but I don't know if I'm
going to get Azenera finished to the very end so I guess I can tell you
that the final boss of the series is going to be someone named Tesunas
who rules over the rift world and is planning to destroy the world Rynn
lives in. Tesunas was once in the Order of the Flame, and he was
actually the one who forged the Runeblade, but when Navaros rebelled and
formed the Dark Union, Tesunas joined him. After the final battle,
Tesunas disappeared along with Navaros, and it was believed that he was
dead, but he was actually inside the rift world watching and waiting.
For a long time, he had no power outside of the rift, but when Rynn went
into the rift world to save Delon, Tesunas reached out with his evil power
and absorbed the Runeblade that Rynn was carrying, gaining back its energy,
and then he ejected Rynn and Arokh out of the rift and over the sea near
Azenera. Now it turns out that all the goblins you've been fighting,
who have been casting spells at you and trying to kill you, are part of
a cult that wants to help Tesunas destroy the world. Originally I
had planned to make Seerlik the final boss, but I decided he doesn't have
a menacing enough presence to be an ultimate enemy, whereas Tesunas is
more ominous and mysterious because you don't see him until the very end.
So in my e-mail I see this offer
for some kind of new product, and I go over the first sentence word by
word and consider the sum total of all the words I've read. Let's
get started: "As Seen on NBC..." Well, okay, it's been on NBC.
Big whoop. Lots of things have been on NBC. Good Morning Miami
is on NBC. So is Fear Factor, and you don't see me going out and
eating spiders and cow eyes. Try harder please. All right,
next word: "As Seen on NBC, CBS..." All right, now it's on two networks.
What does CBS have going for it, again? Yes, there is the show CSI,
and Everybody Loves Raymond, but you can't live on that alone. Next
word: "As Seen on NBC, CBS, CNN..." Okay, okay, it's appeared on
CNN. I guess that is one of the biggest news channels out there.
But it's only one of them. Has it appeared on MSNBC, or Fox News,
or C-Span, or CNBC? It doesn't say yet, but at the rate this is going,
I don't think I'm ever going to be convinced. I suppose I'll suffer
through a few more words before giving up completely: " As Seen on NBC,
CBS, CNN and even Oprah." Wait a minute! Did you just say that
it has even been seen on Oprah? Oh my god, this changes everything!
I wasn't interested before when I thought it was just those three-letter
channels that had featured this product, but now that I know Oprah has
featured it as well, I'm intrigued! I mean, wow! Oprah!
Well, I am just going to look into this amazing new product now.
I'm sure it will change my life forever and make me a better, more enlightened
and fulfilled person. I sure am glad I got this offer... hundreds
and hundreds of times, over and over again. It just fills me with
glee.
Current mood:
excited
Current music: "I'm So Excited" by the Pointer Sisters
Lists! You know what I
mean. Whenever I'm reading a message board thread related to video
games, and it's a question like "What are the best endings ever?" people
always just rattle off a list of games whose endings they like without
actually explaining the ending or why they like it or anything. Hello,
I don't have all day to spend playing every single game in the entire world!
When you say Super Explodo Reptile 2: Explode Again,
I have no idea what you're talking about! I have even less idea what
you're talking about when you just abbreviate it SER2EA, by the way.
And it seems like most of the time, the same things come up on the list.
Worst section of an otherwise good game? It's always Half-Life's
Xen and Max Payne's dreams. Best story in a first-person shooter?
Everyone says Deus Ex, and maybe the Marathon series or Halo. Come
on people, tell us about a game we don't already know in and out!
That's not the only problem I have with lists. There are also those
"humor" books you find in the bookstore, you know the ones I mean, with
titles like "10,000 Things That Make My Stomach Gurgle" and the content
of the book is nothing but a big list, with such gems as "mothers-in-law"
and "tofu hot dogs" and "faulty wiring in a submarine radar system."
How many of those books do we need, really? Finally, my latest reason
to hate lists is not universal, but rather very personal, because it involves
my Intermediate Technical Japanese class. I have to translate these
technical passages, and most sentences are all right, but there are some
sentences that are just huge lists of fields related to a particular technical
idea. For example, one sentence was a list of about 15 uses for high-speed
processing, like physics modeling, image rendering, and artificial intelligence
techniques. The grammatical structure of these sentences is usually
pretty easy to grasp, but the lists almost always contain an excess of
new kanji and vocabulary that I have to get through and write down all
the furigana for before I can get to the end of the sentence. Yes,
I know parallel processing is a great advancement in science and computing,
and I know it has all these positive ramifications and stuff, but get to
the point already! All right, that's enough ranting for me today.
Current mood:
listed out
Current music: Anything but "Kiss On My List" by Hall &
Oates
I've made a few more plans for
level 5 of Azenera. The level is called Bright Passage, and it consists
of a central valley with a volcano in the middle, and to the east of that
will be another Kavoh town that holds many secrets and the key to a few
mysteries. Also in the east, there will be entrances to level 6,
which will be a Rynn-only level like the swamp, and level 7, which will
be a very long trek across a huge desert. It will be kind of like
Dragonmech Desert except the path won't be as twisted and you can fly across
most of the time, although there will be one section where the winds are
so strong that Arokh will have to walk across the sand. It'll be
fun, you'll see. But as for level 5, the first part will involve
going out with Rynn to activate a door and let Arokh into the main valley.
During that part, you'll get to pick up the Tracker Gauntlet and use it
to defeat flying enemies such as dragons more easily. After you get
Arokh into the valley, you'll need to defeat three elemental succubi who
will say cryptic things to you, and they'll drop keys that you'll need
to get to the eastern part of the level that has the passage to the town
and the way to future levels. I've planned more sequences for level
5 and also level 4, but I'm not going to reveal them now because level
6 is going to be a very pivotal level in the game, containing many events
that bring some plot threads to an end but at the same time widen the entire
scope of the story. Let's just hope I can pull it off without having
to sacrifice anything. Now, I'm feeling tired, and tomorrow I have
to review all my Western Literature readings and finish the Histories,
so I'm going to get to bed.
Current mood:
sleepy
Current music: Nothing. I'm trying to sleep!
The whole Drakan system is buggier
than I remember it. I no longer seem to be able to test levels while
the editor is still running without some memory error or blue screen crash,
and the editor still uses up all the system resources and makes funky things
happen after about half an hour or so. I've gotten a good portion
of the landscape done on level 5, but it's still slow going, with lots
of repetitive steps to take. I've been flipping divisions and drawing
blank triangles all day. How do professional level designers deal
with all the repetitive landscape and geometry design without getting tired
of it? It seems like I can spend so much time trying to figure out
how to align all the layers and vertices to make a simple 3D structure,
and then I find out there's a problem with it so I have to fix it, and
it's so much work for some little thing that no one will see because it's
some obscure cave that most people will just pass by. After the layer
design, I have to put down the textures, and then place the objects, and
then I'll have nine more levels just like it to work on. I have the
basic theme and storyline elements planned out for all the levels already,
but not the little details or even the structure and scale of the levels.
In August, one of the paragraphs
I wrote was a hastily done commentary on perspective rendering in computer
games and how you can't get a field of view of 180 degrees or more.
Well, I could try to give an example of possible alternative rendering
systems, using diagrams and mathematical formulas, but I'd rather just
show a few examples of the real thing. Thanks to the release of the
Quake source code, many cool experiments have been done with the game engine,
and two of those are PanQuake
and Fisheye
Quake. PanQuake gives you a panoramic view of the action with
a cylindrical field of view, so you can increase the field of view enough
to see behind you, and Fisheye Quake uses renderings in six directions
to display a fisheye view of the world around you. Right now, I see
PanQuake as being more useful, because it works with hardware acceleration
and you can see objects behind you as they really are instead of having
to interpret a ring at the edge of the screen. Now that I've seen
these examples, I realize that implementing this kind of system would be
slower than the current real-time rendering method, and it would be hard
to implement effectively. Still, I'm sure developers could find some
use for a panoramic or fisheye rendering system. Maybe the X-ray
visor in the sequel to Metroid Prime could use it in some form, since it
doesn't have to render as much detail as the other visors and its view
distance is limited.
Current mood:
feeling bombarded
Current music: the Conan O'Brien theme song. Nuh nuh...
nuh nuh nuh... nuh nunuh... nah naaah... nah naaah... naaaaa-a-aaah naaah!
Weeeeeeeee! Weeeeeeeee! Wee!
My computer isn't going to last
forever. It's going to break down or become obsolete one of these
days, and when that happens, I'll have to get a new one, and that new computer
will probably use Windows XP as the operating system. Now, XP is
a decent OS from what I've heard, but there's one problem that affects
me: Drakan editor issues. It seems the 3D window crashes the editor
under XP, and this is a major problem as long as I have Drakan levels left
to work on. Therefore, I'm going to get started on level 5 and above
on Azenera and I'm not going to stop until it is finished or my computer
breaks down. Drakan is only getting more and more obscure and unknown
as time goes on, especially with poor sales of both the original game and
The Ancients' Gates for the PS2, and little chance of a third game, so
I'd better get working on Azenera before no one cares about it anymore.
It's been over a year already since my last update of level 4, but I think
I still know my way around the editor. This time, it's for real.
Before I work on level 5, I'm
going to finish refining levels 1 through 4. I've added a few orcs
that use cannons that shoot fiery shrapnel that spreads out at you, and
when you kill them, you can pick up their cannons and fire a few shots
from them yourself. Also, I'm adding some new dialogue to reflect
changes I've made in the plans in the game, and to provide more information.
Now Arokh will say something when you're near an important cave or landmark,
like the entrance to the Wisp's cave. There are two caves with grimstone
in front of the entrance, so now Rynn and Arokh will say whether or not
the cave you're going into is the right one. I've come up with some
new explanations for certain game elements as well; for example, I'll explain
away the fact that only yellow orcs get to wear armor by saying that the
yellow armored orcs are at the top of the command structure, so only they
get to wear armor, and also their yellow scales are caused by drinking
a special chemical made from a local plant which heightens their senses.
Maybe I'll add some of that chemical for Rynn to drink, but don't expect
it to do much good. It'll be no more than a minimum-effect speed
potion for a human.
No wonder I'm so strange all
the time. There's a conspiracy to keep me that way, and I have proof!
Just check out this picture that came with the Sports Illustrated On Campus
edition today! (In case you didn't know already, my real name is
Austin.)
All right, maybe the shirt really does refer to the city of Austin, Texas. And maybe this is a terrible scan with a distracting pattern and bad JPEG compression. But I won't let either of those facts get in my way!
I did some searching on the Internet,
and it turns out there's an actual web
site dedicated to keeping Austin weird. There's a weirdness test
but I think you have to live there in order to get some of the references,
and I don't live there. Not even close. There is the city of
Austin, Minnesota close to here, which is famous for its Spam factory (I
mean the actual meat called Spam, not junk e-mail). I've never been
there either. From what I see on the Keep Austin Weird website, a
bunch of companies have tried to copyright the phrase. That doesn't
surprise me, since we're a nation of people who copyright phrases like
"Let's roll!" and "Suck it down!"
Current mood:
determined
Current music: I don't know! No time for music!
Well, maybe something from Drakan.
Well, it looks like it's October
already. September has come and gone, and oh what a month it was,
but now it is time to move on and get started with some new updates.
Have you ever heard of a freeware side-scrolling 2D game called Eternal
Daughter? It's made by Blackeye
Software and it's a good game with fun gameplay, but it's kind of difficult.
There are some enemies, especially bosses, that take specific strategies
to beat, and you can go back to old areas and explore further after you
gain more abilities. The Blackeye site might not have the games section
ready yet, since they seem to be going through a redesign, but you should
be able to find it somewhere on the Internet.
I've had so much work lately,
it's not funny. No, seriously, it's not. Stop laughing!
Okay, you can laugh just a little if you want to, I guess. Anyway,
I've had all the work to do and I want to get it done and watch TV as well,
but I can't read the Histories while I watch TV because I won't be able
to concentrate on either thing. I would stop watching, but then I
might miss a critical episode of some universal television phenomenon and
I'd be left in the dust while everyone around me is happily quoting from
the same show and I didn't see it so I'd be out of the loop, possibly forever.
That would just be too much to handle. Most quotes I've heard are
from the Simpsons, and I watch that show all the time, so I know what's
going on when people quote from it. But anyway, I've been doing so
much that I've been losing out on sleep. I've been trying to get
more sleep than I did during previous years at college, but it's hard.
Right now, I'm not particularly sleepy, but I have been before, sometimes
even during class.
Current mood:
moody
Current music: the Enterprise theme song