Tornado watch! Thanks random GDOT sign!
Also, my apartment just announced that I get to experience my third management company. Goodbye, Milestone Management.
Hopefully it’ll be goodbye Poplar Place soon.
Posted in: newsI’ve had two crazy days at work that have involved Damn Near Everything going wrong, and on neither of those days have I had more than a handful of hours of sleep due to a recent bout of insomnia. If that doesn’t get fixed tonight I’m going to be a zombie tomorrow. And I want it to be fixed so that I can play more Fable II and spend less time attempting to go to sleep. Yesterday I listened to a book on ‘tape’ for many multiples of hours to no avail :(
On the other hand, Travis went to the emergency room yesterday, so my day definitely could have been worse.
Posted in: newsThere is always a slight hiss of background static in my mind, perhaps yours as well. I decided to transcribe what came to mind, while ignoring echoes (things that immediately come to mind that are directly related to the preceding phrase). The exceptions to this are the first two lines, which were the seeds of a poem I was thinking up earlier.
Perhaps it is a form of poetry:
sun in your eyes
wide open skies
Posted in: chaos , features , news , randomI’ve got a pepper farm in my mind
so long and thanks for all the fish
brett favre
jungle japes
grave error
dankmoor
chiseled features of his mottled brown maw
crablegs
go-to guy for household
sharp things
tidal waves
somnambulistic
graveyard
dillar a dollar a midnight scholar
chang’d
veritas
fluorine
davy crockett
diggsby
fealty
döner
shell game
trophy wife
delta
standard
carpulate
the gist of the navy, the many
frankly my dear, I don’t give a damn
churlish weasels
the sandlot
tympanic membrane
aldous huxley
sad man
a dirge for your night of scholaring
it makes pancakes
you always knew of the apostrophe
jacob’s disappointment
.
Merry Christmas out there in Juxland. I’ll be back soon (as always) to give my year end thoughts. For now I’d like to hope everyone out there is with their friends or family, warm, and happy.
On a surreal note: I’ve spent Christmas day with my traditional “A Christmas Story” marathon, but I’ve also been reading my new hardback of World War Z while a Dismember-Me Plush Zombie pokes out of a gift bag in my living room. A gift bag that also contains Dead Space.
And to think, last year was the year I wore my “Brains Brains Brains” zombie shirt to Christmas Eve.
Posted in: newsFinally! Merry Christmas me, have a 50″ plasma and a new home theatre setup!
The only thing ‘missing’ from most traditional setups is a BluRay player, which I don’t plan on getting any time in the near future. Allow me to illuminate why:
So yeah, I’m waiting on BafdddddddddRaaaaaaaaag a bit.
Posted in: newsFor the past few weeks we’ve been trying to get Worms Armageddon running with various areas of success. It sadly just doesn’t work well as a modern game. It runs, but it suffers from random graphical corruption and other strange issues that make it impossible to continue a match to its conclusion.
So, we looked for a free alternative. And yesterday, that lead us to Wormux. Wormux is fun in that it is so astoundingly terrible it is hilarious to play. It’s like a version of Worms submitted to the internet by Ms. Wilson’s seventh grade class. It is the Sorny to Worms’ Bravia line. If nothing else it will give you new respect for how hard Team 17’s job must have actually been back in the late 90s when they last wrote a decent new game.
This is not to disparage Wormux. It’s obviously trying, and we’ve had a lot of fun with it in the same way you might have a lot of fun with a B-movie. They have managed to incorporate one very important new innovation, too. Projectile tombstones! Upon death your mascot immediately transubstantiates into a grave marker in an exothermic reaction. Since this is not self-destruction as in Worms but rather an immediate change into another state of matter momentum is conserved; the results of this conversion can only be described as ‘hilarious.’
Posted in: newsThat’s right folks, today is the 553rd annual Juxmas celebration. I’m sure there will be pictures and such later.
Christmas is the only thing keeping the general malaise of everything going on from dragging me down. We had an office Christmas party yesterday, and today is the best of Christmas parties. It’ll be smaller this year than the previous three, but who cares: more fun stuff is planned than ever before!
Posted in: newsTonight Travis and I moved a physical server into an ESXi virtual machine for the very first time…while it was running. It was, perhaps, the most geekily awesome thing I have ever seen in my entire life. The amount of stuff you can do with virtualization now-a-days is just so friggin’ astounding.
And now that the first physical box has fallen, others shall follow.
Posted in: newsThe good: Christmas tree is up, Christmas decorations are up, and the season is here. Almost all of my Christmas shopping is done already. Good times, good times. Juxmas is in less than two weeks.
The bad: Everything work related, it feels like. I don’t want to devote all but two of my waking hours to work, so I’m not going to.
The really bad: This Saturday we’re moving my Aunt Polly in to an assisted living community. Hopefully, she’ll adapt well and maybe even like it. Or she may follow my grandmother’s path and just give up. I hope not.
The awesome: Liberty Prime. That is all.
Posted in: newsAm I the only one that sees crazy surreal huge fonts on this search result? Imagine if I hadn’t typo’d that specific search string?
Google Reticulates splines all day, but reticulaing splines? Now that's tough work.
I like to think I awoke some sort of sleeping grammar AI, and this was its dire warning.
Posted in: newsThis year, I’m already feeling the spirit.
As you all well know, Christmas is my favorite time of year. Yet in 2006 and 2007 the feeling came later than it ever had…it didn’t feel like Christmas to me until the day was right up on me. Completely different than in my life previous. Sure, there were a lot of (valid) reasons for it, but it still bothered me.
This year though, the spirit has arrived already. Shit, my list isn’t even done, but I’ve already purchased a few gifts and I’m looking at cards.
Two Three things.
First, I went to church this morning for the first time in over six years. I plan on writing a full article on my thoughts on Christianity and why it’s still “special” to me as an agnostic, if not necessarily in a good way.
Second, I’ve been meaning to write about Fallout 3 for weeks. Instead of writing about it, though, I’ve been playing it. So it goes.
Third, if you search for “Christmas” on Jux you’ll find a very depressing post from October of 2007. I still feel that way, only now you have to replace “1 week” with “never again.”
Posted in: newsFor the first time in my entire life, I just chopped an entire onion without crying.
Posted in: newsThis is just more hate piled on top of my post from last night, which was made in haste and perhaps not up to my usual standards.
Last night leaving a friend’s house I was greeted with screeching terror from my radio dial. Puzzled, I checked to see if I had somehow shoved a cat where my car stereo normally goes. Sadly, it was nothing so pleasant.
The Sirius XM changeover had happened at midnight, it seems. Drunk on their own near insolvency the idiots had decided to merge the worst parts of both together. The entirety of XM’s rock “block” was erased instantly with the Clear Channel sameness of Sirius programming.
They drug Fred out behind the DC headquarters, raped him, shot him in the face, and then left him on the street for as an example to anyone else who dared to have an original idea. They built a shack around the decaying body and called it “1st Wave.”
Ethel and Lucy were drowned like unwanted kittens in a burlap sack. What emerged from that river of hatred were shuffling Stepford zombie versions of what had gone in. Lucy’s new name was Lithium, and Ethel inexplicably tattooed “Alt Nation” on her forehead.
Squizz, one of the most personality-filled stations on XM? Octane. Fucking Octane.
I’m going to give it a month or so to see if the programming ‘merges’ at all, but at the moment, I’m perilously close to canceling already.
Has anyone else been bitten by this?
Posted in: newsOn my way home from D&D tonight I noticed something absolutely, positively terrible had happened at midnight. All of the best stations on XM were gone. Ethel, SquiZZ, Lucy…gone. Why the hell would would they keep Octane of all fucking things from Sirius? I specifically never got Sirius because their music channels blew ass.
God I hope they at least kept the DJs from SquiZZ. And Lucy was one of the best stations ever. I cry.
They seriously might lose a customer over this. I’ll let you know in a few weeks.
Posted in: newsThey are CHEERING IN THE STREETS here in West Palm Beach. It’s a symphony of noise outside. I’ve never been so happy after an election.
As of 11:00pm EST, Barack Obama is officially the President Elect of the United States of America.
Cheering in the streets.
*sniffle*
Edit: Half the anchors and pundits on CNN are in tears now.
Posted in: newsI’ve had CNN on for hours and I’ve been compulsively checking the Ars soapbox and 538 while I work. I was all about 538 while in the airport earlier on the BlackBerry.
Om nom nom nom nom
Posted in: news
I found an awesome RC M1A1 Abrams tank at Target the other day for $30. The last major piece of the robot is now provided for. It has nice rubberized treads and a good hollow flat platform for the electronics to go in. I also have some H-Bridge chips coming in the mail so the robot can control the motors directly.
Excitement!
Posted in: arduino , news , ping , robot , robotics , tankLet’s chat, you and I. It’s been too long.
I’m still not sure what, if anything, I want to write about the ending of the Hefner family. I also still haven’t written about being behind a guy at the Target pharmacy who was asking the cute little pharmacist named Ha whether or not they had Enzyte.
Yes, seriously.
Today, let’s talk about Lost Odyssey instead. It’s actually a really good game. The problem is that it doesn’t start out strongly at all. For much of the first two discs you’re playing a good, but generic, JRPG. And to be fair I’m not sure if it ever really rises above that. It might merely become a “very good”, but not excellent, game. Disc 3 and Disc 4, however, are awesome in their own rights. If we treat them as acts in the story, as the game itself does, this one is very back-loaded. The story itself is more or less generic, but in a good way. The characters are what really sell it, particularly Kaim (through the Thousand Years of Dreams) and Seth (through actual characterization in the game).
It’s definitely Final Fantasy in all but name, though. On Disc 4, at the end, riding around doing every sidequest I could find…it was like finding an old friend. She’s not as deep as you thought she was a few years ago, but she’s way hotter, and you can still have a lot of fun together. Plus, it has New Game+. I will love any game with that option.
I forced myself to stop doing side quests and just beat it in the end. I fully intend to go back to it later. Why did I accelerate my enjoyment? Because after 7 days of talking about it non-stop, my resistance failed me. I am a fallen man:
There’s a whole lot of stuff I could write here about how I’ll never see quite a few members of that family again. Also, something sad happened, because I found out Nana’s “Pa” died. Maybe I’ll write about some of it soon when I feel like a lengthy post.
Posted in: newsThere’s been a phishing exploit making the rounds on Facebook. Someone just messaged me with it, so I’m putting out a PSA:
If someone messages you with the text:
“hey , check out this blog.. it’s hilarious [URL Omitted]“
Do not click it! It will take you to a fake facebook site, which will then steal your login information.
Posted in: exploit , facebook , newsI’ll be away for a day or two. Nanny was my last grandparent. I was never really close, but I’m going to be spending a good bit of time supporting my family. Gotta go pick up my sister from the airport in a few hours.
Posted in: newsThe winner of the company’s fall carnival poker tournament is…hell yeah, that’s right! *flex*
Posted in: newsZero Punctuation on Silent Hill: Homecoming.
Posted in: newsA few other things have been going on while I’ve been writing that Silent Hill feature, but for once I didn’t want my next post prediction to be wrong. Also, that thing was ridiculously long.
We had to let yet another person go at Swerdlin. This means Travis and I (and our coworker Eric) have now taken over the IT department from the inside. It’s our show now. This is much better, honestly. There will be no more random unplugging of the phone system…you know, rather than list everything here in public, let’s just say no more random crap in general.
Which doesn’t mean there won’t be our fair share of work insanity, it’s just going to be much more awesome and less “Whyyyyyyyyy.” For instance, this week we rack mounted our last two servers that we didn’t have rails for (long story). One of them was our main Oracle server that can’t be taken offline without, essentially, shutting down the company. Complicating the issue was the fact that this particular server had been mounted on UPS rails previously. The common joke describing the difference between doctors and mechanics is that mechanics don’t have to work on a car while it’s running. In that case, IT must be somewhere at the halfway point between the two, because we successfully moved this thing in the middle of the day, during production, without unplugging it from the wall or the network. The process involved slowly lifting it up and perching it on reams of paper, one at a time; the reams of paper would be placed on the top of the server below it. The old rails were then removed and the new ones screwed in. It looked something like this:
The overall atmosphere at work has already improved greatly. I apologize to anyone I’ve not spoken to as much out there in the interwebs during the transition, though. Lately the last thing I’ve wanted to do when I got home was sit in front of a computer.
I have one last funny story to tell, but that’ll wait for yet another post…
Posted in: blogroll , newsThis entire feature is going to be a bit of a bitch fest. Spoiler alert.
The short version: Silent Hill: Homecoming is a good game. It suffers mainly from being called Silent Hill. It does not even vaguely live up to the standards set by the first four games in the series, in any area. But my main thoughts can be summed up by saying:
It’s not Scary.
Sure, the atmosphere is still there, but in a paint-by-numbers way. The main thing that made the other games unsettling was a perpetual sense of unease. The world around you was really fucked up, and you had no idea what was around the next corner. The developers went out of their way to make this the case. The town was covered in fog, or just plain dark, and you had a radio that blared static when a monster was nearby, first at a low volume, then getting louder as you got closer to it. Something was out there, but what?. And where? If one of them found you, or you it, you were a normal human being, and your only recourse was to flail about with whatever weapons you had or try to shoot it with your notoriously bad aim.
Silent Hill: Homecoming breaks all of this. The radio is the first problem. It’s completely pointless in Homecoming, put there only to make it feel like a Silent Hill game. Oh radio, how are you broken? Let me count the ways.
The most glaring issue is that the game insists on popping enemies right on top of you. There are several instances where you’re in a (verified) empty room, an event triggers, and suddenly the radio is blasting static and there’s a giant gas-bag thing tapping you on the shoulder. This is fine in, say, Resident Evil, where this kind of shock horror is expected. It has no place in Silent Hill, where it is against the established character of the series. Worse yet, it happens all the time. It’s not scary, it’s tedious, all the more so because they ruined the combat, as I’ll discuss later.
The environments in the game are all enclosed or limited. In previous games the radio was useful partially because it allowed you to avoid certain enemies. You only had a certain amount of ammunition, after all, and you were a normal guy or gal trying to stay alive. I have distinct (and fond) memories of the radio crying out in the dead of night in the original Silent Hill as I ran along its streets with my flashlight off trying to desperately to avoid screaming horrors from the skies. In contrast, the streets of Shepherd’s Glen feel claustrophobic. Instead of feeling dread wondering if you’re going to have to go to wherever that thing in the darkness is, you know for a fact it’s right in the middle of the alley that you’re about to walk down. More tedious combat is in your future.
Since it keeps coming up, let’s talk about the combat in the game. Some idiots somewhere, perhaps thinking they were buying Devil May Cry instead of a good game (idiots), complained about the (idiots) combat in the older Silent Hill games. And it’s true, the games were not focused on combat. This was intentional, and all part of setting the atmosphere for the game. The combat was fun for what it was: a small part of a larger adventure game. No, it was not as full featured as an action game. Do you know why? Silent Hill is not an action game, idiots. Yes, you were flailing at crawling chaos wildly with a pipe somewhat vaguely, but this is because Harry, Heather, James, and others were just normal people. Most people don’t grow up trained in Pipe-Fu. The first game even spelled this out explicitly in the manual: you, the player, are a normal person. Don’t try to be badass.
For Homecoming someone decided to take the “worst” (idiots) part of the series and focus an entire game around it. The result makes the game less fun AND less scary. If James walked into a room filled with nurses what followed would best be described as “frantic flailing with a blunt object” until they were all dead; essentially just pressing the X button a lot. It fit the series, it added to the environment, and it was fun. Would an entire game focused around that combat system have been endlessly entertaining? Probably not, but Silent Hill was a story/puzzle game first and a combat game second, so it worked. In Homecoming this is reversed. There are so few puzzles in the game that those that are there resemble nothing so much as an afterthought, tacit recognition from the developers that the game was supposed to have puzzles but they just couldn’t be bothered. Instead of complex puzzles requiring knowledge of Shakespearean literature or actual deductive reasoning, Homecoming has a Lights Out variant that my cat could do.
This might be acceptable if the combat system in Homecoming was fun. After all, Resident Evil 4 basically reinvented its series by replacing the horror with boatloads of pure awesome. But the combat system in Homecoming is actually worse than what it replaces. First, the developers made all of the enemies way more durable. At first this doesn’t sound like a bad thing at all: it’s a horror game, after all, and monsters that are harder to kill are scarier, right? Not at all. All the increased hardiness of the various creatures in the game does is make combat take longer. Much, much, much longer. Heather, a 17-year-old girl who might never have even been told what food was, could dispatch the exact same enemies Alex would later face in about a fourth of the time using about an eight of the effort. On my scale Alex thus comes in at -5 on melee weapons, firearms, and special abilities. He’s essentially walking around a town full of impossible horrors smacking them with pillow cases stuffed with marshmallows. It’s that bad.
But wait! Surely all of this extra time is so you can enjoy the increased depth of the new combat system, what with the dodges and counters and combos and the like?
Fuck no. Let me tell you about combat system “depth” here. First, the developers have exaggerated the speeds of the weapons to the point that you’re essentially playing rock-paper-scissors with some enemies, which means constantly going into your inventory to switch weapons out. This makes a certain minuscule amount of sense, and it was present to some degree in the older games, but the degree to which you have to do it in Homecoming is just stupid. Every enemy has a weapon that works best against it, fine. Every enemy has a weapon that works best against it, and the others might get you killed? Stupid.
Second, the system itself results in pressing the exact same combination of buttons over and over again, like you’re stuck with a demo version of Dance Dance Revolution that only lets you play Twinkle Twinkle Little Star on Beginner Mode. Each enemy has a rigorous pattern that can be exploited and thereafter never, ever deviated from.
A few examples. Let’s say you see a Feral, a sort of inside-out dog:
For every enemy in the game you simply have to swap out the weapon and your timing of the B button. Some enemies require following this exact combination of button presses four to six times, depending on if you’ve found the upgraded versions of your arsenal yet, before they finally, blissfully, stop bothering you. Except there’s probably two more behind you.
Of course, those are just the melee weapons. You also have a few firearms, which are aimed over the shoulder, take forever to fire, and deal just as little damage as anything else in the game does. Except for a few enemies that you’re obviously supposed to kill with firearms, they’re completely pointless. And the amount of ammunition the protagonist can carry is absolutely pathetic. For some reason Alex can carry a crowbar, axe, shotgun, rifle, pistol, and knife, but asking him to hold more than three magazines worth of bullets for the pistol is just too much. Someone played Silent Hill 4 and actually and honestly thought: “You know what would be awesome? If he could carry even LESS ammunition!”
No. Let me tell you the difference between what you’re doing, and what works in survival horror. Horror is when I’m hitting something three times my size with a piece of plumbing because I’m not sure when I’ll find ammunition again and I want to save my bullets for something even more horrifying. There is nothing scary at all about shooting something to death just so that I can pick up the bullets sitting on the table, since I know I’ll never be coming back to this room again. That’s stupid.
There is a bright side to this combat system, and that is that the boss fights, what few there are, are legitimately fun. If they’d stripped out all of the normal enemies completely and just added two or three more of those in the game would have been much better.
They (idiots) spent so long working on their new combat system that they forgot what Silent Hill is supposed to be about. It’s about so much suspense that you’re on the edge of your seat, so creeped out by your surroundings and what might be ahead that you’ve turned into a four year old girl.
Not scary: Instead of being worried about the possibility of what’s around the corner, I’m annoyed at fighting the same three dogs again.
Not scary: At points in the game there are even infinitely spawning enemies. Not in a “oh shit they’re everywhere!” way, but in an “I just killed you, and now your identical cousin crawled out of the exact same spot” way.
Rather than continue to rant about every little thing that’s wrong with the game (by the way: the flashlight is also completely fucking broken), I’m going to close this article out with a story. Once, long ago, my friend Samantha was watching me play Silent Hill 2. I was walking through Brookhaven. There were no enemies about. It was just James and the empty hospital. By the time a nurse finally appeared on screen Samantha was so creeped out that she jumped and grabbed me, something I had never seen her do before, nor have I seen her do it since. And this nurse didn’t come flying out the aether just because I triggered an event, nor did it pop up from behind a chair. It was just there, waiting.
Silent Hill 2 was the least scary of the original Silent Hill series, and it was still capable of having that effect on the player and any bystanders. Homecoming ruins this. There is nothing scary about walking the street killing lurkers just because they’re crawling out the sewers. The visual design is still there, and Akira Yamaoka’s music is still brilliant, but everything else is gone. Instead of wandering the city looting stores and looking for interesting things while dodging monsters Homecoming has a few streets, a couple of alleys, and nothing else. Instead of dread the player is given tedium.
I started this article saying Homecoming was a good game. Writing this has caused me to realize that this is not true. It might not even be average. It’s worth playing, once, but ultimately forgettable. Buy the soundtrack, rent the game, and pray for Team Silent to come back.
Posted in: newsAnother update. I’ve been driving and working for awhile now, but I’m still trying to limit undo time on the computer, so I haven’t had much time for Jux updates. My eyes are still not perfect but they are healing fine, according to Dr. Gabianelli as of this morning.
My next post will probably be a long one about what is wrong with Silent Hill: Homecoming compared to what came before it.
Posted in: newsI just sent this:
Mr. Biden,
Before the debate tonight I knew you as a solid senator, but no real ‘pros’ or ‘cons’ against you. I had little idea as to whether or not I supported you as one of the very few “good ones” or not. When Barack Obama, one of only two political candidates I ever donated money to, selected you to be his vice presidential candidate I thought it was a safe choice but more or less a neutral one.
After watching you tonight my opinion of you has changed entirely, and for the better. You answered questions factually, you answered them directly, and more importantly you actually care about your positions. At no point did I get the feeling you were talking down or sideways, even on those issues I disagree with you about.
I’ll keep this short since I know this will likely never get past your aides anyway, but I wanted to let you know that before tonight I was firmly and proudly voting for Barack Obama in November. Now I’m going to be proud that your name is also on that ticket. Seeing how well you handled yourself tonight, combined with what I knew as flat facts about your record, has convinced me that you are a person I want in the White House.
Thank you.
–
Graeme K. Hefner
Also, I can now use a computer for more than ten minutes at a time! I’m up to about two hours today, with eye strain rest. My eyes are getting better! I may be able to leave my apartment this weekend! Sadly, I can’t declare this my true return to the internet yet. Stay tuned for that.
Posted in: news
