06.30.08

Expect Regulation

Posted in Rants at 1:14 pm

On Saturday, scientists at the Large Hadron Collider announced they have discovered the Higgs Boson particle. While ordinarily this would be good news, discovery of the particle has triggered a freak collapse of the spacetime axis, resulting in massive worldwide time inflation. In international trading last night an hour closed at seventy-one minutes, and future futures traders are speculating that an hour could reach a hundred minutes by the end of the week, if “the end of the week” ever actually gets here.

06.28.08

Just A Note

Posted in Anime, Gaming, Movies, Shameless Self-Promotion, Site News at 9:18 pm

Today saw a great many chores being done, but the most interesting of all is the only one really relevant to the usual readership of the site: I updated the Collection page, over there to your right. For the first time since last July, you folks can see what I’ve got on my shelves. The picture came out a little hard to read– I wanted to get both shelves in one shot– so I added the helpful and very long legend underneath it. Granted, it is a little bit more show-off-ish than I usually am, but I figure that if it only gets one update a year, then it can afford to be a little showy. (Before you ask: yes, there is an organization system. I just haven’t figured it out yet.) Anyway, enjoy it.

06.24.08

Writing Tip: Avoiding Word/Phrase Overuse

Posted in NaNoWriMo, Rants, Writing at 9:30 am

Most folks I know tend to have a handful of words or phrases that they use with alarming regularity. Recently, I’ve noticed the word “actually” showing up in my work with a bit more frequency than I really want to see it. Overusing a word or phrase treads the fine line between a stylistic hallmark and a meaningless filler-word, and it can be the sign of a stagnating vocabulary.

I decided to avoid using the word unless it was absolutely necessary. So, in order to facilitate the negative reinforcement of using the word, I set up TextExpander to automatically replace the word once it was typed with an extra space. There are easy ways around it– for example, TextExpander can be fooled if you don’t type the letters all at once (for example, starting with “actu”, typing the next word, then arrowing back to finish up with “ally”)– but it’s more work than just typing the word straight-up. That thought process leads me to think of something better to put in its place– or, more likely, to rephrase my thought so that I don’t use it.

The principle can be applied to any text replacement program available on any platform, but it does require that you know what words you’re seemingly overusing.

06.20.08

So Here’s The Deal

Posted in Rants, Site News at 9:46 am

Hey. I’m still working on getting the MGS4 thoughts together, as well as a full review; also, I’m starting to compose some thoughts on Avatar. That might have to go over to the LJ just to have some content over there; the last post from there is dated the 10th, and while if I post it today it’s still technically following the “once per week” goal I’d set forth, it’s not exactly optimal, now is it? Anyway, content is content.

But this weekend I’m taking some time to clean my happy little craphole, and also to take care of a few bits of business that have been hanging over me for a while now. Fun business, mind, but business nonetheless. As for Panic Mode, it’s been shifted away from my work day and into my personal time during weekdays, so weekends are going to be hyper-valuable from here on out. I’ll keep you all advised as the situation warrants.

Catch you all when I catch you.

06.17.08

Rolling

Posted in Gaming, Rants at 6:50 pm

So, Fourth Edition D&D. Our DM took us through the sample adventure at the back of the Guide, so we could all get a pretty stable frame of reference. The adventure was being played with an emphasis on combat and the battle specifics; while roleplaying wasn’t specifically disallowed, I wound up being the only one doing it, in the interests of “breaking” the system. It was only very light roleplaying anyway, but it did wind up getting everyone a little more into the game.

Anyway, the biggest difference came in the first-level combat abilities. A character at 4E level 1 is roughly as capable as a character at 3.5E level 3 or 4. It is a bit of power creep, but it’s understandable: few people wanted to play a character from the very beginning under the old regime. New characters in this setup have two or so at-will abilities regardless of class, an encounter ability, and a daily ability. It is MMOish, but if I had to place it to any one online game I’ve played, I’d say it resembles FFXI’s skill distribution; the daily skills are instant-effects that can’t be put completely to waste if they miss. Some of the longer spells from back in the day have become what are called “Rituals”, which we didn’t get to use this time, but are strictly out-of-combat techniques– though I would be willing to bet that there would have to be a way to use the effects of a recently-used ritual in combat; after all, the rules are made to be broken.

Being first-level was not dull at all. While the dungeon was kind of cookie-cutter, the group moved fairly quickly through the encounters. We didn’t have any noncombat encounters, just because the DM didn’t add any into the trip, but in four hours of gameplay we got through three fairly tough battles. I can picture seeing a character through the first ten levels or so over the course of maybe five or six sessions; since this was a one-shot, we didn’t tally up XP. When I got home Saturday night I leafed through the adventure and figured out the general idea of how we did and what we’d have been awarded– we’d be splitting maybe 3500-4000 between the six of us just for the battles and traps we’d dealt with to that point, taking us a good way towards level two. If we’d managed to finish it off, we’d definitely had all hit 2.

Simplifying the skills made the game flow a little quicker. As part of my required abuse of the system, I tried to find a way up a 10-foot wall without having to use my relatively poor Athletics rating (only a +2 bonus; I had not been trained in it). As a Rogue, I had good Dexterity, and had been trained in Acrobatics, so I used a rope hanging from the ceiling to swing my way up the wall, aiming for a baddie on the wall. I missed the bad guy, but everyone was in agreement that that was much cooler than just climbing the wall normally (the DM dropped hints that it would be easier to do so, hints I boldly ignored).

Anyway. The point is that purists decrying the death of D&D should probably spend a little bit less time screaming at people to stop having fun and start hoarding their old-edition books. 4th Edition is fun. It doesn’t matter if it doesn’t “feel” like D&D, or that it changes too many of the more traditional things (remember THAC0?)– it’s fun for what it is, and while it will eventually succeed 3.5, it does not destroy it. I’m thinking this might be a good way to start up a story idea… I’d said in the Twitter line Saturday night that I was setting up a campaign, and so shall it be.

Catch you folks later this week, with thoughts on MGS4. Those… gah, I don’t know if I can put that in the LJ. I’d hide the spoilers behind a cut, but the RSS feeds dislike lj-cuts. I also want to talk, of all things, about Avatar: The Last Airbender, which has inexplicably captured my attention and subsequently throttled it. That’s very likely to be done on this side, and probably later in the week. See you then.

06.15.08

GAME CLEARED: Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots (PS3)

Posted in Game Cleared 2008, Gaming at 11:20 pm

At 11:20p, I met the win conditions for Metal Gear Solid 4 on the Playstation 3. This is the seventeenth game cleared in 2008. The next game that is queued for completion is Super Robot Taisen OG (GBA), followed by Super Mario Galaxy (Wii) and Band of Bugs (XBLA). Final clear time was 20 hours over four days.

06.11.08

John Is Still Doing Too Much Stuff

Posted in Coding, Site News at 7:26 pm

Sorry, folks, things are kind of weird. Circle folks know what’s up, and there are other concerns, too. But overall this post is just to say that yes, there was some downtime of the site for an hour or so there, and yes, it was on purpose. Everything should be resolved now, so hopefully things will be back to something relatively close to normal.

I’m horribly backlogged on a ton of stuff, so I have to cut this short– but I promise that I’ll get on a few of the things I’ve neglected for a while. Please bear with me, folks.

06.09.08

Policy Update: Trackbacks

Posted in Rants, Site News at 6:44 am

Due to an inordinate amount of trackback spam coming very close to getting through the comment filters, I’ve decided to disable trackbacks along all posts. This shouldn’t affect most of you but unfortunately it means that anyone who links to any of my posts won’t get an automatic link-back. It’s not necessary, it’s one of those nice-to-have features, but when the amount of “trackback awaiting approval” messages coming in starts to outnumber the real, important e-mail I need, that’s when I take action.

Catch you all later, then.

06.06.08

Whatchu Waitin 4

Posted in Anime, Gaming, Movies, Rants, Television at 5:26 pm

In certain cultures, the number 4 has unlucky or dangerous connotations. Some folks associate it with death, while computer geeks associate the number with loss (as in “404″). However, this coming weekend and the week thereafter, the number 4 is looking to come up with alarming regularity. To wit:

* I’ve just picked up the core rulebooks for Dungeons and Dragons 4th Edition, and will be reading over those to provide impressions at some point in the near future.
* I currently have four “active and new” series to watch: Avatar S1, School Rumble, .hack, and Veronica Mars S2. Furthermore, I’ll be starting Disc 4 of V.Mars.
* Metal Gear Solid 4 comes out on Thursday. There are 4 midnight launch parties at Gamestops in Pittsburgh (none of which are the store I pre-ordered from).
* And I’m thinking about taking a run through Wild ARMs 5 or XF. The connection’s not obvious until you realize that it would be the 4th Wild ARMs game I’ve cleared (I skipped 2 and 4 thus far).

There’s a fifth incidence as well, but mentioning it here would be bad. Anyway. I’m likely to be hip-deep in dice for the rest of the night, so I’ll catch you folks later.

06.04.08

Balancing Act

Posted in Site News, Writing at 5:39 am

So, I’m working on getting a post together, but I’ve been… well, what I’ve been doing lately isn’t worth talking about and what I’m doing in terms of games and anime gets shown on the LJ. Just hold out for a little while longer, please.

Though I can say that writing has resumed on the Blueberries draft.