I have nothing to do!

Yes, that's right, I'm on a one-week break from class. I've spent my time pretty much doing nothing - 'cept catching up on sleep, and playing games. I would love to do something productive, like some writing, but I keep stalling before I even begin. It's mildly irritating. So, yes, this has been a pretty lame holiday thus far, due to everyone else I know in NZ still being horrendously busy with university - as their year is just about to wrap up.

Anyhow, let's look at some things that I've been up to of late.

First-off, and most important of all:

The Protomen: Act II - The Father of Death

NEW PROTOMEN CD. It finally arrived a couple of weeks ago, and I've been listening to it a lot since then. It's a step up from their previous CD in terms of audio quality - whereas the previous one had a bit of a garage-band sound to it, this one sounds every bit professional. In terms of how fantastic the songs are. Well. They're fantastic. It doesn't quite have as stand-out songs as their previous CD, but as a whole, it's a incredible piece of work, and superior to the previous one.

In terms of its narrative, it acts as a prequel to The Protomen's first CD - detailing the rise of Dr. Wily, and the fall of Dr. Light. It culminates in Dr. Light's resolve to keep up the fight, and build Protoman, which segues into the first CD. One trait of the album, which helps emphasise the progression of the narrative, is that the musical style changes from a acoustic guitar-laden, Western-sounding theme at the beginning, to a high-tech, synthesiser-based rock opera sound in the middle, which faintly bleeds into the more harsh, electric-guitar driven sound of their first CD by the end of the album.

In other words, it's awesome. If you're interested in it at all, you should have a listen to the first track: here.

Team Fortress 2

Another thing that has been keeping me busy and entertained, is my clan (Ju1cy), and its involvement in various competitive ladders and tournaments. We do fairly well, though consistency tends to be an issue - we often have people not able to show, due to real life commitments or internet issues, so even though we kind of have a core team of players, we don't get to play together as a solid group as often as we would like. Our last scrim was hindered drastically by our Ventrilo server throwing a hissy-fit a couple of minutes after the game began, cutting our communication to near-zero. The final score was an ugly 4-1. Our single point came during the few minutes when our Ventrilo server decided that it would work, before cutting out again. Shows how important communication is for solid teamwork.

Still, we have a bunch of fun, and mayhaps soon one of our members will cut together an e-peen boosting frag vid that we can show off to people. Good times, good times.

Death Note

After a discussion with Tim about anime, he convinced me that I needed to watch Death Note with great expediency. He was right, of course. I know I'm late to the bandwagon on this, but it's a fantastic anime, even if the second half doesn't quite measure up to the first. I'm always keen for stories that involve intelligent megalomaniacs trying to take over the world. Especially with the astounding amounts of Xanatos Gambits that go down.

Pool Game

So, for MDS, we had to code up a game of pool (8-ball), for the culmination of our maths section. Everybody in the class hated this project. Coding the game itself was a simple task, it was just a matter of endlessly fiddling with the collision detection mechanics to try get it working right.
I underestimated the amount of work this task would take, and kinda left a lot to the last minute (as in, a lot), which meant that last Thursday night I got all of thirty minutes of sleep. Good times, good times.
I got it into a working state by the time we had to submit it, so I'm not too bothered about it. Will be glad so long as I scrape a pass. There's only one obvious bug in my code that I can think of. It's pretty obvious - the balls sometime clip into the cushions, and zoom along them, popping back onto the table at one of the pockets, and traveling at a ridiculous velocity. It's rather amusing to see, but not quite realistic.

Counter-Strike: Source - Jailbreak

Something I was only just introduced to a couple of days ago, jailbreak mode for CS:S is a bunch of maps which have the terrorists acting as prisoners, and the counter-terrorists as prison wardens. It's pretty crazy. It involves the CT's ordering the T's around, and getting them to do silly activities, while trying to keep them under control. The T's follow along, so they don't get shot, and try to stage a rebellion at any chance they can get.

Basically, I imagine someone looked at the Stanford Prison Experiment, and said: "That would be lots of fun in Counter-Strike!"

And, well, it kinda is. The CT's are forbidden from just randomly shooting prisoners (freekilling), as there are admins on the server at pretty much all times, who will either kick you, or make you a T. Instead of being prison wardens, the CT's are more like.. well... kindergarten organisers, if you armed all kindergarteners with a knife and a thirst for blood.

The usual path of things will go something like this:
1. Cells are opened, T's are ordered to stand on a line for a gun check. (Some of the cells have pistols in them). Any T's who are moving during the gun check, or disobey orders, or essentially do anything to merit it, are shot. This isn't so much out of: "Hehe, killing prisoners is fun", but more: "Need to cull the numbers, otherwise it's too unmanageable to play games."
(Most of the times I've been on, there have been around 20-40 T's, and 5-11 CT's)

2. Once gun check is over, games are played until the T's are whittled down to a single man - all losers are shot.
Games tend to be one of the following: races, trivia, Simon Says, tell a story/sing a song, or an activity that has been coded into the map. (Soccer, diving, dodgeball, castle battles, basketball, boxing, water polo, etc).
Yep. Kindergarteners. With knives. And some of the worst attitudes you'll see outside of an actual prison (we are talking about CS:S players here).

3. Once there's one T left, he can challenge the remaining CT's to various duels - Knife Fight, Shot for Shot (take turns shooting at the other person), or Deagle Toss (throw your gun as far as you can. The person who throws the furthest wins).

Yeah. It's crazy. But often hilarious. The best of both worlds. If both worlds also involved racial epithets and nude sprays.

List of Interesting Links:

Hilarious rap song by CCP (the company who makes EVE Online). Icelandic rap ftw.

Two (one, and two) interesting articles about the largest mall in the world. It's in China, and nigh-deserted.

First person on the moon could've been a woman? I am disappoint.

Steampunk-ish web series? Might wanna keep an eye on this.

Also, as xkcd pointed out: Toy Story is older than my brother. Very weird and scary.

Tags: bored, epic rap song, i hate pool, jailbreak, links, mds, old, protomen, steampunk, stuff, tf2

 

Tarnish notte the majesty of my TOWER of HATS.

Tags: avoiding homework, awesome, hats, mentlegen

 It.

Is.

DONE!

(<insert favourite rejoicing profanity here> YEAH!)

Tags: complete and utter aweosme, gaming, mds, megacano, programming
Current Mood: SO HAPPY

That's right. MEGACANO is due in at 5:00pm tomorrow. Mondays truly are dire things. I'm in pretty good shape though - didn't get as much done today as I would've liked, thanks to a couple of hours wasted due to irritating shenanigans involving libraries (the computer code kind, not the full-of-books kind). Fortunately, the stuff I have left on my to-do list from today, after some brief experimentation, I've found that it shouldn't take me longer than an hour to do. The items I have assigned for Sunday all look doable in their respective time-frames.

So, yep. Everything's good on that front.

In other news, I got two hours sleep the night before last, and thirteen hours last night. Oh man, that's good stuff.

It's been a busy week, what with both MEGACANO needing to be worked on, and the presentation due Friday. Don't ask me how the latter went. The way they choose to assess things annoys me GREATLY. In a synopsis, I managed to blow the presentation part of the marking by describing something as: "Awesome as... shit," as my brain wasn't able to keep up with the speed my mouth was talking (due to the obscenely constrictive 7-minute limit, which I, or anyone else (as far as I know), didn't manage to stay under). Means I can get a maximum of 80%. Lovely.

Also, I tried to go to sleep an hour ago. As you can see, it's not working out too well. Brain is absolutely refusing to shut off. It's also refusing to think about code, which is vastly irritating, as it means I can neither be productive (sleep), or be productive (work).

Alsoalso, after reading Jim Rossingol's magnificent retrospective about his time in EVE Online (which everyone should read because it's fascinating and awesome), I'm getting a seriously bad gaming it to play it, but I'm stuck in the weird situation of my brain also realising that it doesn't have nearly the time nor effort to dedicate to the game, and countering all desire I have to play it. Which leaves me in the situation of not wanting to play anything. Though, providing all goes well, I may be able to get a similar fix when Chris brushes off his Freelancer CD, and we manage to get the beautiful thing working with multiplayer. Last time we tried, there were serious Vista-related issues, but now we have the wonderful salve-for-any-network-wound that is Hamachi.

Fingers crossed.

Tags: freelancer, gaming, mds, megacano, sleep would be nice

I was supremely grumpy today - probably due to the poor sleep I managed to get over the weekend. Certain members of my family think it's greatly amusing to go upstairs and jump on the floor above my room, as punishment for my not going to sleep at a reasonable hour. Har har.

Anyhow, it also didn't help that I found a couple of game-related things on the internet today, both which irked me greatly.

First-off, is some new info about Alpha Protocol - a spy-based RPG in the vein of Bond or Bourne - which is being developed by Obsidian Entertainment. This is the studio behind KotOR II, and NWN2 + MotB. They don't really have a reputation for producing anything but over-ambitious, flawed games, which means that a new release is a cause of excitement, as they might just produce a game which doesn't trip over itself. Some of this faith is founded in the basis that they have Chris Avellone on staff - a man who has a fine reputation in the gaming industry, considering he penned the entire script for the impressive Planescape: Torment.

Unfortunately, the info which cropped up in an interview with the senior producer on Alpha Protocol, Ryan Rucinski, doesn't sit very well with me at all. It paints an incredibly chauvinistic view of the game - the main part that I find despicable being that there's an achievement for "getting", as he puts it, all the women in the game.

There's an articulate and intelligent synopsis on the issue with this over here. Ergh.

A smaller issue I have with the interview, is the comment Ryan Rucinski made about Chris Avellone:

"Chris Avellone doesn't do 'goo goo' stuff," Rucinski said, referring to the chief creative officer at the development studio. "Sometimes he'd be like, 'No guy would say that!'" That included a scene of Thornton crying. Rucinski said that people around the office were like, "That sucks, he's crying, I don't like this guy anymore."


The more I read over that, the more it sounds like a comment taken out-of-context, but even still, it doesn't really give me any hope for the game in terms of engaging content, and it mires my perception of Chris Avellone a bit. Doesn't sound at all like the same fellow who wrote Planescape: Torment, and compiled the Fallout Bible. Disappointed.

The other item of note was that I finally got around to watching the gamescom footage of Star Wars: The Old Republic. Looks kinda "meh". I'm still not sold on the visual style - their "stylised realism" -  as all the characters look just a little too much like they're made of plastic. That, and the weirdly disproportionate figures look a little unnatural. I know that it's essentially trying to achieve visual simplicity of the likes of Team Fortress 2, by focusing on bright, bold textures, rather than detailed models, because it's a much more scaleable system, and is able to run on older hardware without losing too much visual quality.
But, they just haven't quite captured it. See:




Yes, I took that specific picture for a reason. Mostly also to complain about the pseudo-barbie-doll thing they have going on for what seems like the default female model. Sigh.
Also, what on earth is the point of those shoulder pads? Silly uniform designers.

Anyhoo, those are my quibbles for the day. I've got a TF2 scrim to play in, and a critique to format up, and then I should probably get some sleep. I have a secret plan - I'll pretend to ignore it, and then I will pounce on it, and pin it down before it realises what's going on. Mwahahahahah!

Oh, and as a side-note, if anyone wants to check out what I've been getting up to on weekends: see me get shot in the face!

Tags: i am annoyed with such things, indeed, mondays suck, neotokyo awesome, sleep would be nice

One of the most amazing things ever and you should watch it now. 

We had tutor-student reviews today, which means that my epic letter of displeasure lies abandoned in the dank recesses of my hard-drive, as I gave Steffan an earful about the issues I had with the marking system, and the specific issues with the marking of my paper. It's apparently going to be re-assessed, which is good. 

But, I'm still a little irritated at the marking system. My fears were correct in that we're being marked on an 'achievement'-esque system: we have to fulfill a set of requirements to get a certain grade. The problem being, this worked fine previously, as you could resubmit it as many times as you wanted. However, they changed the system for our class, because people who were unable to handle the course kept having their work pile up on-top of them - getting new assignments to hand in, even as the old ones needed to be resubmitted. So, they changed it, but didn't really analyse the implications this would have on the system.

I'm disappointed. I thought I managed to avoid this malarkey by not doing any more NCEA after Level 1. Gah.

What's even more irritating, is the reason that our marks were so late to get back to us - apparently, due to "one member of [our] class," they marks are being held up in some kind of bureaucratic process. I can guess who that person is, and I am ANGRY.

Grrr.

Tags: angry, grrr, mds, wrathful
Current Mood: angry

Or, more appropriately, I hate the New Zealand school system. No, hate is too weak a word. I LOATHE it. I loathe it like Fox loathes not cancelling Tim Minear's shows. I loathe it like Activision loathes not sucking the money out of consumers, leaving them as empty, rotting husks. Yeah, I loathe it quite a bit.

What is this loathing focused on of late?

Well, my class finally got back the marks for the first research paper we submitted - way back in June (75 days ago in point of fact) - and my mark was a little lower than expected. Just a little.

Try "51%" on for size. It doesn't really fit, does it - a little long on the legs, a little tight at the hips, a little staunch in the sternum. Uncomfortable. Aggravating.

The paper was marked in three sections - 60% for content, 20% for grammar/spelling/etc, 20% for having your citations formatted properly. Or, at least, that's what they say. The comments I got in the little 'tutor feedback' boxes aren't all that helpful, and don't exactly match. So, that 51% is from the content section. I got D's in the other two, which I assume to be 0%'s.

"Isaac, you sterling fellow," I hear you say, astonished: "But, you can spell, and format, and what?" Well, this was my reaction, at least. The issue being this - Each mark: A, B, C, D, has certain requirements attributed to it, and if you don't meet all of those requirements, you don't get the mark. Seems straight-forward enough. It's what's used in NCEA - our secondary school system - which is why I suspect that they also might use it here. It's the only reason I can fathom for getting 0%'s. Because, the thing is, I do have a handful of mistakes, the problem is, they're concentrated mistakes. And the sections have stupid requirements like: "The work may exhibit three to four missing commas." So, yep, you can miss three to four commas and still get a B. But if you miss five commas, then you cannot get a B. Even if you get everything you need for an A+, you'll still get a C, at the most.

The reason why I think this is the case with my mark, is because of my being marked down in the citations part. My bibliography is perfect. My citations are all perfect, except for one thing. We're supposed to write multiple citations like so: "[1, 2]." However, I failed to realise this, and wrote them like so: "[1][2]." According to our marking criteria, we're allowed "one to two mistakes" in that section. But, because my work is peppered with this one mistake, I get a D. Because that's a requirement for an A, B, and C in those sections.

Yeah, I'm a little irked. I wrote a lovely letter of grievances I have with the marking - both in regards to my situation, and as a whole - and am planning on presenting it to someone more in-charge on the 'morrow (or today, however you want to look at it).

Also, what makes my situation really amusing - guy who got the highest mark in the class (got an A+ in that specific section), ran out of time and never finished his citations. The thing is, all the citations he does have are correct. If you read his paper, you're like: "Dude, there's citations until the middle, and then there's none!"

A+! Gotta love it.

What's even more annoying - I'm pretty sure I made that same mistake on the second research paper too. Cause, well, how was I to know it was wrong if we only just got our paper back?

So many angry words to pick from. So many.

Tags: angry, i hate everything, i should be sleeping dammit, mds, wrathful
Current Mood: angry

It's 2:30 in the am.
I should be sleeping. I have every reason to be sleeping - the main one being that I have to haul my carcass out of bed in the morning at the rank hour of 7. As I'm sure you all will be able to figure out, thanks to a rudimentary knowledge of arithmetic, that leaves me with less than four hours, thirty minutes of sleep, if I were to stagger over to my bed right now, collapse on it like a deflated accordion, and sleep.

Unfortunately, I highly doubt that will happen. Mostly for one reason and one alone - the reason why I have, up 'til this point, also not been able to sleep (I did endeavour to cross over to the dreamy territories like some sort of Imperial colonisation attempt far earlier tonight, but it did not come to pass). I digress, that aforementioned reason being: I can't. stop. thinking.

Yes. Thinking.

My brain, like some aberrant student of Calvin and Hobbes-ian philosophy is trying to eke every last second of awake time it can, before facing the horrific monstrosities that make up a typical Monday morning (last week it was hours and hours of maths. Indeed. MATHS. ON A MONDAY. I'm pretty sure Satan himself is a little worried at the thought.) And because my brain can't realy do anything much other than think, think it does. At the present time, before I distracted it with this little morsel of productivity, it was trying to solve the conundrums of my future from now 'til when I finally keel over, and every subplot and subpath that may arise from decisions I may make within the next six months. It knows (or should do by now, I have berated it enough), that this is a foolish exercise, for even a supercomputer modeling all the possible permutations and outcomes would not be able to account for the sheer unpredictability that is human existence. But my brain doesn't listen. It soldiers on, doggedly gnawing away at problems, as if sheer persistence will reveal a "path of best fit and most happiness" for the graph it has sketched up of my future. I'd much rather it rocket-jumped itself off to bed, like a far superior soldier, but no such luck.

Obligatory: "SPY SAPPIN' MAH SLEEPTIEM", here.

What makes this whole situation even more unbearable, is that I just suffered through a somewhat terrible weekend, where my body completely rebelled against me, due to severe lack of sleep last week, and refused to function until I spent most of Saturday in bed, feeling like I had just been run over by an ubercharged train. Repeatedly. What a dick. I hate trains.

Well, it looks like the furious output of this blurb to let you all know how much my brain has been assimilated by TF2, or vice versa, and that sleep is off hiding in the corner with The Cloak and Dagger, is pretty much complete. So, it's time once again to run around issuing gouts of spy-checking flame, until I find his be-suited ass, and axtinguish him into a pleasant doze.

I bid you good night!

EDIT: OH LOOK IT'S 2:51AM BY THE TIME I FINISHED THIS. HATE YOU BRAIN.

Tags: i'm going to go sleep now, oh god look at the time, rambling, why do i stay up this late, wtf

The title pretty much sums up my day. Also, as of writing this, I should really be in bed. However, my adrenaline levels are a little shot through the roof at the moment, due to the intense nature of NeoTokyo scrims - of which we had two.

I'm a little disappointed with the results - the first one we played a little poorly, losing 4-7. Highlights included me blowing up people with cunningly-placed detpacks, and a sneaky nipplebot cap. Neph, Murm, Jez, and Shadow all played quite well, although we were lacking the pants-wettingly-terrifying Saffron, due to him being at work (PRIORITIESWTF!). Shadow definitely improved int he second game - he's jsut started playing with us for NeoTokyo, so he's still getting used to me yelling out things like:
 "Two bulletproofglass, one overpass, two basement. ShadowJezMurm push garage, Chris stick with me - detpacking basement," of which I do at a near constant rate. It's prety impressive the difference it makes when we don't have the nipplebot and I fail at issuing orders/info - it's a situation that can qutie well be metaphored with "headless chickens", or something of that nature.
We performed far better in the second game - pulling out to an early 4-1 lead. However, we managed to screw things up in such epic proportions - including two rounds where we failed to kill any of them - that we only just managed to scrape out a 7-6 win. There was also one round where we basically killed ourselves: Murm threw a nade, which bounced off of Shadow's shoulder, and landed at his feet. The result of which can only be described as SPLATCH.

In other news. I'm severely sleep deprived - enough so that I napped at MDS today. I managed to get about an hour undisturbed with my head on my jacket infront of my computer, before people returned from getting food, and Keegan thought it would be great fun to make loud noises with an inflated Subway bag. That is, until the tutor from a class in the room over complained.
I didn't know we could complain, cause although we can be pretty noisy at times, we're not nearly as bad as the GD (Game Development), artists on the other side of us. I'm convinced they spent the majority of their time on youtube. Slackers :P

In otherother news, I'm making good progress on MEGACANO (my sprite-based game). I have my volcano launching rocks around, and I have objects spawning that it can destroy. This means, tomorow = COLLISION DETECTION.
Oh, what fun. So much fun. Ludicrous amounts of fun.

In yet more news, Chris has introduced me to the wonderful sounds of Pendulum. They make for excellent programming music - upbeat enough without being too distracting, lyrics nonsense enough that you don't need to pay attention to them, and the songs have just the right amount of in-chair boogie.

Here's an example: LISTEN. Just in case you have yet to subject yourself to their auditory awesome.

Now, I desperately need to try (and succeed) to go to sleep. I can get almost six hours if I try hard enough!

Tags: i am such a drill seargent, mds, neotokyo awesome, oh god look at the time, programming