Running, Strikers, and WoW… oh my!

I just had a wonderful weekend with my family. For the last four years, at least two members of my family have run the Beach-to-Beacon, a 10k road race in Cape Elizabeth, Maine. This year we had three: my mom, my sister, and myself. It’s a really fun race on a fast course with loads of spectators. This is the second time I’ve run it, and while my time was lousy, I didn’t care because it was fun. I am an avid runner (avid /=/ good), and occasionally try to be a good runner. Lately, however, I’ve found that keeping track of my time made running stressful, which defeats my main purpose for running, that being relaxing and having time to zone out away from the modern world’s many distractions. Not focusing on speed has naturally led to an increase in my times, but it has also made running fun again.

In gaming news, I bought Super Mario Strikers Charged the other day, but have had only a couple of hours with it because of my trip this weekend. My initial verdict is that it is very similar to the previous Gamecube iteration of the game, which is far from a bad thing. It’s fast-paced, arcade-style soccer. The computer difficulty scales very quickly, requiring skill to win even at the penultimate difficult setting. The strategy for goal scoring is only slightly altered by two new game mechanics (passing charges the ball, making it easier to score and captains’ megastrikes can be blocked by adept goalkeeping), but not by much. The main difference is the option to play online. I’ve played a couple of ladder games, and while fun, the real attraction of the online component of the game will be playing against people you know (for me, that’s my brother). Ladder games will be fun time-wasters once you’ve really mastered the computer AI, but actually competing in the ladder won’t attract all but the most competitive and hardcore gamers. It is already easy to tell that there will be certain strategies developed by those who play a lot of ladder games that will be difficult, if not impossible, to defeat (similar to ’snaking’ in Mario Kart DS). I’ve already encountered several people who exclusively use the Hammer Bros. sidekick’s deke to clear everyone away and then score with a skill shot.

The pull to reactivate my World of Warcraft account is growing, and is made even stronger by the announcement about the upcoming expansion. I played rather heavily for about a year, but got bored with it awhile back once my main hit 70. End-game content is very time-consuming and requires help from several people. To clarify, all games are time-consuming, but end-game WoW dungeons involve 2-3 hours of straight play, which is a lot for me. The game itself, however, is really a perfect fit for me: Diablo 2 style gameplay, open-ended (or rather just open, since there really is no end), and with various levels of competitive play (raiders, casuals, PvPers, etc.). I think that my problem with the game started when I lost patience with finding groups of people with whom to play. I have only one real life friend who plays and was not personally very helpful or friendly in-game. Thus, I didn’t have people I could turn to for help. My new plan is to play more with my one friend and to play less selfishly generally. If (who am I kidding, when) I come back to the game, I will focus less on completing my own stupid quests and more on helping others, like my friend and his in-game friends. If you need the help of a friendly druid, PST Derevo on the server Garithos in the next few weeks. I may even spec resto to be even more helpful.

Another Vim lovefest

I know how often I mention this, and I know that no one cares. But I simply love Vim, and hate editing anything without using it. One of the fascinating tasks I have at my internship this summer is editing reports. These reports are often written by non-native English speakers, so require some pretty heavy editing. Of course, all the editing is done in Word. I hate editing things in Word. I constantly find myself hitting escape and then ‘h’ or ‘k’ or some other conveniently-placed character to try to move around the document, only to find myself with a lot of random letters in the middle of words. I am forced to use the stupid Ctrl + arrow key sequence or, heaven help me, the mouse. This slows the entire editing process and not just because this frustration causes me to write a blog post about how much I love Vim.

Double-post madness! “PS3 price-break” and “I can’t hear you”

PS3 price-break. Will my wife buy one for me now?

For the first time here, I’m going to write about something mildly topical and recent: the $100 price drop in the PS3. This is already old news measured in Internet time, so I want to say something about it before it gets legitimately old.

To quickly state my biases, I love Nintendo. I love the Gamecube (all four good games for it), the Wii, the GBA, and the DS (I own two DS’s and two GBA’s). My loyalty to Mario, Samus, Link, and crew is undying. That said, I admit that I saw value in the PS3 at the $600 price point and see even more value at $500. I don’t own a PS3, but that’s only because I don’t have any money and own more video game systems than I can use, not because I don’t like the system. Ask my wife what item I ask for more than any other, and she will certainly say a PS3. Sony’s defense for the high price of the console has been that it is more than just a console. There is a lot packed into this machine: 60GB hard drive, Blu-Ray player, wired/wireless Internet connectivity, 1080p capability, and a lot of potential I don’t understand (the Cell processor alone baffles me in a profoundly beautiful way). I know that gamers have not bought into this corporate line (sales of the system lag far behind the main competing system, the XBox 360, and lag even farther behind the system no one is competing with, the Wii), and I guess I haven’t completely either as I don’t own a PS3, but I understand the reasoning. It’s an expensive machine, but it does a lot of shit and will do even more shit once developers figure out how use it. But now, even before all 600 processors are used to their full potential (which will take years) it does enough to be attractive at a high price point. I know that this sounds like a great deal of agreement with what the U.S. CEO of Sony just said (see source below), and it is. I do think that the PS3 was worth $600 and is certainly worth $500. Now I just need to convince my wife of this so that she’ll lend me $500.

The information used to formulate this opinion is drawn from some posts I read on Kotaku and an interview with Jack Tretton over at Level Up blog. Jump to them yourself here and here.

Edit: I’m re-reading and editing what I wrote, and I just realized how hard it is to really review gaming news. My opinion is all over the place and is influenced more by my desire for a PS3 than by facts. At least this makes for good reading, since facts are boring and my hopeless longing for a PS3 is amusing. To qualify my opinion a little with some facts, from a relative standpoint (relative to the 360) the PS3 pricing argument is on unsteady ground, mainly because it relies on potential. The potential of the system is not entirely in the hands of Sony, so what their corporate schills have to say about it is pretty meaningless. There’s a lot packed into the PS3, to be sure, but all that’s only good if it’s used, and it does not seem like most of it is at this point. This does not mean that I don’t still desperately crave one.

I can’t hear you

Everyone should have noise-cancelling headphones. The advent of personal music players, dating back to the Sony Walkman, did much to advance modern misanthropy. Few things make you look less social in public than having headphones in your ears. If the fact that you are listening to something directly in your ear doesn’t discourage people from talking to you, the fact that you can’t hear them usually does. Before I had noise-cancelling headphones, there were unfortunately times that I could still hear someone trying to get my attention if, for example, they were yelling at me. Also, really loud people could distract me from my personal world of music. This would force me to jack up the volume, which is not an ideal solution (I blame my near-deafness on this). With my Seinnheiser noise-cancelling headphones, this is no longer an issue. Even with my iPod at a mild volume, the shit that people spew from their mouths, at my direction or not, is not even a whisper in my ears. There could be a person next to me on fire, and the warmth of their burning flesh would alert me to their issue before their screams (I still wouldn’t help them; it’s probably their own fault for catching fire in the first place). My headphones allow me to filter the outside world almost completely out of my life.

Finally, an update!

So I’ve been absent for a little while, though it doesn’t seem like anyone noticed. I’ve been a little busy, not with anything terribly important, but busy nonetheless. I actually have a job now, or to be honest a “job” because it doesn’t pay. It’s a government internship, which will hopefully help me get a paying job in the future. At least that’s the plan. I’m not promising anything.

What I have really been doing is playing a lot of games and thinking about this website. See, even if I’m not writing to you, I’m certainly thinking about you. Gaming has been where most of my time has gone. I finished Pokemon Diamond and am still playing it to build the ol’ Pokedex. I’m at 215 or so and just bought FireRed and LeafGreen to play through in order to get more Pokemon. I’ll never “Catch ‘Em All”, but I’m aiming for a close approximation. Even if I don’t, visiting Kanto for the first time since the mid-1990s will be fun.

I’ve also been doing some retro gaming. I obtained through black channels (witchery, if you must know) Tie Fighter, which is regarded by most, myself included, as one of the best space shooters ever made. I’m on the fifth battle and very much enjoying it. While the character development in the game isn’t great (you’re pretty much a faceless pilot the whole time), the plot is good and adds something to the stellar gameplay. The “something” is hard to describe, but can best be described by the imaginary word “Starwarsiness”.

The other retro game I started was Spellcraft: Aspects of Valor. This is one of my favorite and most-despised games from childhood. It’s an adventure/RPG/chemistry game, and is a siren call to my obsessive personality. Unfortunately, it cannot be won, or at least I haven’t figured out how to do so. Basically, you go through the game as a wizard, learning about magic and mixing new magic spells as you go. You use these spells to defeat other wizards and eventually reveal a plot to destroy the world. The problem I’ve had in the past (I’ve played this game very close to conclusion at least three times) is that the very last boss(es) will not die. I hit them with everything I have but they do not fall. Until that point, however, I find the game incredibly amusing.

Finally, in non-retro gaming I’ve been heavily playing Puzzle Quest for the DS. It’s a unique blend of role-playing elements with puzzle-based gameplay. Like any RPG, you start off with some base stats and can increase these by leveling up your character by battling monsters. The plot is also similar to other RPGs: your kingdom is under attack by swarms of undead, there is something dark and sinister behind it all, and only you can discover the truth and defeat the ultimate evil. The difference between Puzzle Quest and other RPGs is that the combat is accomplished via solving a puzzle, or rather solving a puzzle against an opponent. Combat takes place on a puzzle board with different colored pieces; match these pieces three or more in a row to gain mana, do damage, gain experience/gold, etc., as your opponent does the same with the ultimate goal of reducing your opponent’s life points to zero. The plot is solid and the gameplay is fast and addictive. I play it every day on my commute until motion-sickness overcomes me and it’s always worth it.

As far as this site goes, I’ve been thinking a lot about what I want to do with it. One thing I want to do is make it more complex. I don’t think this will be very hard. It’s complex now in a bad way. I hard-code everything, which is fine but makes it difficult for me to update it, archive old posts, and more. There are so many web tools out there that offer the flexibility to hard-code what I want while making managing the site easier. A site such as this doesn’t need much more than what I have here (static HTML), but such tools are very useful to know if I ever want to make a useful site or make one for someone else. I’ve got some books on Ruby and Ruby on Rails, and the Rails stuff is way over my head. My plan is to use my Mac mini as a web server to host a local site to play around with Rails. I’ve also looked at Drupal, which seems a little more my speed but also quite robust. WordPress would also certainly work. Basically, all of this requires a lot of research about web technology on my part, which is a big reason for why I haven’t done much on this site in awhile.

That said, there is still a lot I can learn by playing around with my static HTML/CSS site, such as how to use HTML/CSS, since I clearly suck at that. I mean, have you looked at this junk? I’m going to figure out soon how to archive older posts by year/month. I mean, whose site is one huge index.html file? Mine, and those of people who stopped developing their sites in 1993.

Behind the times

I am always behind the times. It’s a fast-moving world, in my own defense, but I still manage to be behind by years. I get all excited about trends in software and Internet long after they’ve peaked in popularity and everyone else knows about them and uses them. This has always been true, but what prompted this diatribe is my web site. My web site is such shit. I mean really, really awful. For one, I do things the hard way. All the ‘coding’ I’ve done myself, and I totally suck at coding. There are tons of programs out there that help with this sort of thing, and I’m only just figuring out that everyone else already uses them to make their nice sites. I also really want to host my site myself, but I’m far too retarded (as in slow) to do that. I spend all sorts of time reading up on hot new Internet stuff but never implement it myself. That’s got to change. It probably won’t, but it must. I’m going to finally start trying these tools to see if I can’t make this site a little easier on the eyes.

The death of a great man

Boris Yeltsin passed today. If one thing can be said about the man who laid the foundation for Russian democracy, it is this: that motherfucker could party.

Happy anniversary to me (and my wife)

It’s been a year, and it’s been great. I don’t know how else to describe it. I’m the luckiest guy in the world that I managed to find a beautiful, talented, accepting partner; you’re perfect, and I will love you forever.

Self image

I came to a realization today. People have two images: an outer one that everyone can see, and an inner one, a judgment on themselves. In my experience, this inner view of oneself rarely coincides with the outer. Either you see yourself worse than what everyone else sees, or you see yourself better. I fall into the latter category. When I hear myself in my head, I’m a very different person than what comes across to most people. I’m confident, I’m witty, I’m prepared for all sorts of eventualities. On the outside, I don’t come off this way at all. I’m reserved, easily swayed by others (a pushover, really), and I think that I sound dumb (mostly because I don’t say anything). I’d like very much to be more like the me in my head.

In less somber news, I like TextMate. I’m tempted to make the big switch from Vim, but it’s really hard to move from modal editing. Also, the neat things that TextMate does, like wrap text in HTML tags, can probably be done in Vim if I just spent some time learning how to script. I’m so torn. I doubt that I’ll really make the switch, now that I think about it. Vim is just too good. I actually just downloaded some HTML scripts, which do many of the things TextMate was doing. I’m going to play around with them a bit, but I think that I’m back on Vim. That was a short trip, huh?

A question for which your librarian does not have an answer

“There’s a book I need, and it’s checked out; if I kill the person who has it, does returning it become my responsibility or does their next-of-kin have to handle that?”

The Hunchback of Alexandria

I popped the zit on my shoulder and cleaned out my ears and am returning to normal. This is a very good thing, as my obsession with Gypsies was getting out of control.

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I think I am developing hunchback-itis. I have a monstrous zit on my shoulder. It’s begun to affect my shoulder’s range of motion and has given me a distinctive hump. I also got some water in my ear the other day, which combined with spring allergies has made me even more hard of hearing than usual. Then I found out that my attic is in fact a bell tower over-looking the Seine. Weird, I know.