Unpopular Opinions

Smash Brothers was meant to be fun, not a competitive game.

Final Fantasy and The Legend of Zelda are good but overrated.

The only good Metroid games are the 2D ones.

It's a shame they never made any Castlevania games after Super Castlevania 4.

It's a shame they never made any Call of Duty games after Call of Duty 2.

Chrono Cross exists as a sequel to Chrono Trigger, and is good.

We need fewer survival crafting games.

We need fewer zombie survival games.

MOBAs are overrated.

Collectible Card Games are a waste of money.

Mobile phones aren't a gaming platform.

Mobile phones aren't a proper internet browsing platform.

JavaScript frameworks are for n00bs that don't know JavaScript.

systemd sucks, sysvinit was better.

The second half of Bravely Default wasn't horrible.  Pay attention to the story, you impatient clods!

Anime sucks now.  Everything is moeblobs, idol shit, and fanservice.  Where did the plot and story go?

The best consoles were the SNES and PS2.

Full Metal Panic?  Fumoffu was a good series.

What makes a car "fun to drive" is entirely subjective.

Sports cars are not objectively better than economy cars.

The speed limit is not just a suggestion, it's the law.

The left lane isn't "the fast lane", and has the same speed limit as the right lane.

Manual transmissions are not objectively better than automatic transmissions.

Function matters more than form.

Clothing fashion just leads to overpaying for clothing.

Experience says more about skills in a field than a degree or a GPA.

Natural teeth are too much of a chore to maintain and should just be replaced with dentures at a certain age.

Dentists are involved in a really big conflict of interest: there's such a large gap between the equipment in your dentist's office and your home dental equipment because if you could get all the dental care you needed at home, dentists would be out of a job.  Every new "advance" in toothbrush "technology" is nothing more than a gimmick to make you throw your money one way or another.

Nocturnal people have the right to a good day's sleep, and the accessibility of common goods and services at night.

Sports get too much attention and precedence over other things like local traffic.

Comic book movies are overrated.

Good music pretty much ceased to exist after 1999.  Good new artists are a dying breed.

Change for the sake of change is bad.

You should never buy things in the store of a free to play game.

Mayonnaise is nothing but empty calories and doesn't belong in every sandwich or hamburger ever.

Onions are overused.

Techno sucks.  I use "techno" as a general term to refer to all music created without requiring any musical talent from the artist, which so happens to include the vast majority of electronic music created from audio samples, on computers.  Chiptune is an exception.  Learn an instrument, people!

Horse racing is overrated.

FPSes were never meant to be played with a controller.

Arena FPSes where you can carry all the weapons and ammo ever are better than FPSes with two-weapon systems where all the weapons are almost identical.

Advertising is a privilege, not a right.

Fats, salts, sugars, and oils are overused.

Entertainment industry award shows are overrated.  They're just parties thrown by rich people, for rich people, so they can pat each other on the back.

More Like, Main Screen Turn On

So, since I got a new phone, I've noticed something.

I get a lot better of a signal in my house.

Things are looking up.

Not quite sure why I get a much better signal on the same exact network I was on before, but hey, I'll take it.

Beck completion followup

I can't say much that I haven't already said, so this post will be short.

Somehow they cobbled together a good ending from the mess of fuck they'd written themselves into.  Whatever.

The show itself is pretty terrible, but it does try to highlight that not everything is happy all the time with bands.  I know that people have their differences in pretty much everything.  Rival bands and trying to undercut one another and all that, yeah, it happens.  I like to think that I watch anime to get away from reality, though.  Put in just enough reality to keep the series grounded, keep the rest entertaining, and you've got yourself a good show.

The thing is... I like the music in the show.  Right now the opening song is stuck in my head.  I always air guitarred during showings to one of their songs in particular.  The music alone doesn't keep the series afloat, unfortunately.

In the end, I'll just reiterate that I'll just stick to K-On! from now on.  It's true that nothing bad ever really happens in K-On!, but... they have setbacks, overcome them, there's comedy, and they play music and do fun stuff even when they're not playing music.  That's a formula I can live with.

Back at 100%

If you've been reading my Twitter, you already know this, but...

After over 12 hours of work last night, I'm finally back up and running with Windows XP SP3.

There's still some things left to install, but all the stuff I use on a regular basis is set up and configured.

Everything I was able to do before I was an idiot and went "herp derp me install plop to MBR this can never go wrong" is back, for the most part.  I've made some tweaks and changes as well.

I don't exactly have my full Firefox extension set back up and running yet.  I'm kind of running an experiment to see if I can get by with less than what I had.  I had to rewrite my UI tweaks CSS for Stylish because I didn't have a copy of it anywhere else, but the YouTube tweaks, well, I just went to my own blog post on the subject and downloaded it from there.  Speaking of which, there's a small change I just had to make that I haven't uploaded yet, so expect that before long.

In the install/update process I did manage to finally get a copy of the standalone Windows XP SP3 installer, which sped things up greatly.  The fun thing is, that's the only way I can get to Windows Update from a fresh install with my Windows install disc.  Windows Update refuses to accept WinXP SP1, which is what my install disc installs.  Yeah, I know, I can slipstream it.  I probably should.  And I should see about slipstreaming all the updates too, to try and reduce how long it takes to play the Windows Update game.

One major change is that I installed Microsoft Security Essentials as my antivirus, instead of AVG.  AVG and I have never gotten along well, it's always done nothing but report false positives.  Plus, AVG has a rather large install footprint and resource requirement, and craps itself all over your system installing browser toolbars and plugins and whatnot.  MSE is a lot simpler, a lot lighter, and just overall better.  And the best part: it's free to anyone that has a legit copy of Windows, which I happen to have.

I also changed my Foobar2000 interface around a bit.  Rather than doing separate playlists for each artist, I now just have all my music imported into its music library, and I slapped in the UI element that lets you browse through it and filter it and build a playlist from it.  This is one of the reasons I love Foobar2000, its interface is so modular.  Any time you want, you can go into layout editing mode and tweak things.  Even better, it has a scratchbox where you can play around with a new layout without having to change your existing one.  Then if you like what you end up with, it's simple to apply it.

In mIRC, I basically lost all my scripts.  I know I have a copy of one of them floating around somewhere, but it didn't show up quickly enough in a search of all my hard drives, so I just rewrote it.  I still have a couple more scripts to write (like my auto-identify script...) but overall it's back as well.

The final finishing touch that I added before going to bed was installing and configuring Winwall.  It's so sad that even though Winwall annoys me so much, it's pretty much the best wallpaper rotator available for Windows XP.  It could honestly do with having a much larger (or even resizable) interface.  It's just so cramped.

Anyway, I need food, so that's it for this post.  Hey, now that I have a computer connected to the internet, I can keep track of my Rogue Galaxy gameplay again, which means I can play the game again.  So much potential gameplay time lost due to having no OS...  Yeah, I could have done a session when I was running Ubuntu, but I spent approximately 99% of my time in Ubuntu either tweaking things, trying to get it to use a refresh rate other than 60Hz, or not using it because it would stop responding during periods of high disk access thanks to the fact that I was running it off of a hard drive in a USB2.0 enclosure.

Yeah.  Food.  Bye.

Edit: food's warming up on the stove (yay skillet meal), and I remembered that while I was installing Windows XP, I FC'd Ain't Talkin' 'Bout Love in Guitar Hero: Van Halen.  I think this is my first FC of a song that contains a pattern that I have to tap.  The song has two slider note zigzags, and I'm bad at zigzags one-handed...

Flatbread Melts

So for a while now I've been eating the California Pizza Kitchen ones.  A friend of mine said the DiGiorno ones were good, so I got a couple to try.

The first one, I believe it was the Italian Meatball variety, was great except for the bread.  The bread was without a doubt the blandest bread I've ever tasted.  I was about to just write off the product as the same as the rest of DiGiorno's stuff, but then I discovered a different variety with a different box design entirely that I hadn't noticed before.  It's the Chicken and Bacon Ranch variety.  It says it has artisan bread, much like the California Pizza Kitchen ones do.  I'm not entirely sure what makes artisan bread artisan bread, but I see herbs and spices in it and it tastes really good.

I had the second one before going out for my usual Saturday night events.  The bread was better, but overall, I think generally I'll just stick with CPK.  It kind of sucks that Giant doesn't carry any other varieties of either brand than the ones I've already had.  I haven't had the CPK spinach one, but fuck vegetables.

Actually, I need to eat something right now.  I just got home from a party where I had a fair amount of alcohol, decided I'd had enough, switched over to water to avoid a hangover, and as usual I forget when I stopped drinking but I know it was well before midnight and I didn't drive home until 5 AM so I think I was fine.  I dropped friends off at their dorm (including a sober friend who obviously felt like I was sober enough to drive), didn't run into anything, and didn't get pulled over, if that's any indication.  I had a rum and coke, a second rum and coke made with Captain Morgan's rum instead of Cruzan (because Cruzan is shit and there wasn't any Bacardi), the last shot's worth of the Captain Morgan's (it was 100 proof), and a beer.  So, not too much, and not nearly as much as some people had.  I'm one of the statistical minority that knows their limits and retains cognisance while intoxicated, which makes it difficult for me to know when it's safe to drive again.

Fuck, is it really spelled "cognizance"?  That's what Firefox's spellchecker wants to change it to.  I personally like it better with the "s", even though it's pronounced with the "z" sound.

Tales of the Abyss

Every Friday, several members of CAINE including myself get together and play Tales of the Abyss.  We just started a few weeks ago, and we only play on Fridays (except one failed attempt at trollage on a Saturday).

Tales of the Abyss (or really, the Tales series) is something that the world needs more of: Offline Cooperative Role Playing Games.  It's so fun to get together with friends and beat the shit out of some enemies.  The game is playable single player, but I can't imagine having to manage all that stuff by myself, there's just so much to manage.  In multiplayer everyone controls one of the characters and you just roll.  You can coordinate way better, there's laughs, WTF moments, and other fun.

I started out playing Luke, since I was subbing in for Citrus who missed a couple of weekends.  During this time I spammed the shit out of Fang Blade, which is easily Luke's most usable arte since you can combo into it from basic attacks.  However, I could never get the hang of the game's guarding mechanic (press X to guard, time it right for shorter guard stun).  I did the usual thing and blamed the party's healer whenever I died.

Then we got the bow-wielding character, Natalia.  I had been telling everyone the entire time that I was much better at ranged support than melee, and with Natalia's arrival I finally had a character to play.  I can sit back halfway across the battlefield and spam arrows to my heart's content.  She also has some healing spells and some buffs and debuffs, so I play her as more of a healer with a bow rather than a bow wielder that can also heal.  I pretty much always hover near full TP.

Also, when we got to Cheesedonia, which is what we've taken to calling Chesedonia, we gave a bunch of shit to Din.  After a while of giving shit to Din, we decided to get a bow (and some other stuff) and paid the best amount we could.  I got the best possible bow I could get at the time, the Hunter's Bow, which raised my physical attack by about 300.  So until everyone else catches up in weaponry I'm just pwning things from the backline.  I also manage to get the final killing blow a fair amount of the time, so a good portion of the battles end with Natalia in the middle of the screen saying "Oh my, is it over already?"

The only issue with Abyss is the, well, abysmal load times on the world map.  Seriously.  If we're in a dungeon or in a town, everything loads nice and quickly, but we have to wait forever if it's the world map.  To try and alleviate this I got there early last Friday and installed the game to my PS2's hard drive.  It worked, the world map load times were nonexistant, but we discovered that the game randomly freezes.  After getting home I did my resarch and enabled Mode 1 (and changed the HDD access speed in ToxicOS to MDMA0 as per a suggestion on a compatibility list).  I haven't yet tested this out, but I guess I should.

Also, playing a four player cooperative RPG on a PS2 means using a multitap, which was the entire reason why I got called in.  My multitap is basically living over at CAINE house until we beat the game.  I'm also bringing two controllers including my wireless controller.  For our room setup, three wired controllers and one wireless actually works pretty well.

The only other offline RPGs with coop that I can think of right now are Secret of Mana (even on Virtual Console!) and Final Fantasy 4 (select character slots can be changed to the second player, at least on the PSX version).  Champions of Norrath doesn't count quite as much since it's based off of an MMORPG as opposed to being originally designed for offline play, but it exists.

Virginia's new anti-smoking law

Finally, we can all breathe fresh air in restaurants. Smoking has been banned in restaurants across the state for a while now. I thought all was good, but the law has one exception: Smoking can still happen in a separate, ventilated room.

Seems innocuous, right? What do you think of when you think of a restaurant with a separate, ventilated room for smokers?

I think of a smaller space set aside for those less intelligent.

However, some restaurants are abusing this exception. One in particular is the Lazy Parrot Grill in Pantops Shopping Center. Their restaurant has three entrances, a bar, and some of the best wings in the city. Unfortunately, two thirds of their restaurant space is reserved for smokers. Those of us with a brain between our ears are exiled to the remaining cramped third of the restaurant.

It gets even worse. Their serving staff, whether they smoke or not (I don't know, I didn't ask) have to go through the smoking area to serve the higher lifeforms in the non-smoking area. This presents them with an unnecessary health risk.

This law needs to be amended immediately. It needs to require restaurants to devote no more than 50% of their serving space to smokers (this must be carefully worded to not have loopholes). It further needs to require an exit from the kitchen into both the smoking area and the non-smoking area. Last but not least, it needs to require separate serving staff for the smoking area and the non-smoking area; with no pay, treatment, or employment consideration penalty based on the server's preference.

Banning smoking isn't about taking away freedoms. It's about public health. People in America are notorious for not wanting the government to make their decisions for them. However, in most cases (this one included), those very same people don't have the requisite mental capacity to be making the decision for themselves.

On the other side (both the other side of Charlottesville, and the other side of the exception), Buffalo Wild Wings in Barracks Road Shopping Center is a fine establishment and thus gives non-smokers plenty of room.

Looks like I'll be going to Buffalo Wild Wings more often, because I want to support what's right.

i has cell phoen

But I'm not giving the number out to just anyone.

It's a Tracfone, so text messages cost me minutes. I.e. if I give you my number don't fucking text me. The phone itself is a Motorola w260g. Nice sleek black flip phone. No camera, but if I wanted a camera, I'd go buy a fucking camera.

Next step: get a job so I can buy a double minutes card and one of those 1 year/400 minute cards. Added in the right order I'll have a year of service and 800 minutes.

Can I still say "you kids and your cell phones"? I only ever really said that when people were talking about using cell phones do do things that pre-existing technology could already do.

Also when I got back from MAGFest I bought another bottle of rum. Rum is goooooooood.

MAGFest 8 Report

This post is inconsistently sprinkled with pictures as they're relevant. None were actually taken at MAGFest, because I don't own a camera and gank my dad's every time I take pictures of anything.

Also the tense I use randomly changes back and forth from present to past tense. This is because I wrote the post as MAGFest happened. Deal with it.

Thursday

Driving up went almost completely without a hitch. Trey (MAGFest's netadmin, lol) called Wednesday night asking me to pick up some PA speakers from Brendan's place but when I got there the door was locked. I said fuck it and drove the entire wrong direction on I-64 until I got to Ivy, then turned around and made my way up Rt. 20 to Rt. 3 and then I-95 to I-395 to MAGFest.

After getting my badge, shirt, program, room (free staff rooms yay!), etc. I set up my computer in the LAN room.

After that, a friend and I drove to a nearby ABC store and got some liquor, then bought some random soda to mix it with from the Giant next door. I ganked a glass from my hotel room, went back to the LAN room, and got pleasantly drunk on Bacardi Gold Rum and Cherry Coke Zero.

I have this weird ability to do better at games drunk than sober. It works for fighting games, it works for RPGs, and apparently it works for FPSes because I was tearing through things in Duke Nukem 3D.

If there are any major typos in today's transcript it's because I'm still drunk as I'm typing this. I hit my limit a while ago (I make a damn good rum and coke, so one was enough), so I'm getting more sober-er, but... I still have to use the backspace key occasionally.

The internet we have is kind of weird. Trey says it's 2Mbps symmetric, but sometimes it acts like it's 0Mbps symmetric. Blogger's post editor just started bitching at me because it couldn't contact blogger.com, but it'll be fine in just a few seconds. Weird shit is weird.

Friday

So Jon St. John brought in the new year. I don't really remember exactly what he said (too lost in the awesome), but he started with some quotes in Duke Nukem's voice and then said "Thanks a lot for coming, or however you reacted... HAPPY NEW YEAR!" (You can see video of this here)

Everyone lol'd.

Also the earplugs worked out beautifully. I entered the New Years' Eve party around 11:30 PM and exited around 12:30 AM, and I'm not deaf. Being able to hear is awesome. One pair will last me all of MAGFest, and I have nine more pairs. NINE MORE PAIRS. That means I can make nine friends and save their hearing too. It's all about spreading the love, right?

Spent way too long playing Rock Band 2. For whatever reason there weren't any drums. Some songs would randomly make the game crash during loading. We could exit back out to the dashboard and restart RB2, but... it was still annoying.

Among the Guitar Hero and Rock Band setups there was a lone projector with DJ Hero on it. So I played it on Medium for a while. I'm not really into that type of music (mixups with samples and scratching and bullshit) but the engine seemed pretty simple. I cannot for the life of me figure out what Euphoria is for though. You accumulate it like Star Power, and the game's loading screens suggest that you can use it, and a button on the controller lights up when the screen says "Euphoria Ready", but nothing happens when I press the button.

The crossfader switch works really well though. It will snap to each of the three locations required for gameplay and the game seems to recognize it as being in the middle if it's still slightly off, which aids greatly. My only gripe is that I wish the turntable were a little more sensitive in recognizing scratches. My right wrist already has a latent tendonitis from improper mouse usage, and the distance I have to move the thing coupled with the length of most scratches aggravates it. I could try lefty flip or something, but I shouldn't have to.

Around 6:30 or so I went to the staff food room to see what was up, and because I had neglected to eat lunch. All that was left of the lunch stuff was bread, cheese, lettuce, and mustard, so I made a sandwich out of that. Wasn't too bad to be honest. Shortly thereafter they kicked us out so they could cook dinner.

Steel Battalion controller

I watched the people playing STEEL BATTALION on the XBox for a little bit. The game's controller is insane, it has two big joysticks, a gear shift, and three pedals, as well as tons of other buttons, knobs, and lights. Then I went over to where Guitar Hero Metallica was hooked up, took my opportunity to sit down at the drums, and confirmed that I like the World Tour drum kit WAY better than the Rock Band one. It just feels better. It's way more intuitively laid out as well.

When 8 rolled around I went back to the staff food room and got my dinner: a hamburger with cheese, lettuce, and tomato. The room was so crowded that I took it to the tables nearby in the retreat wing to eat, where a large portion of staffers had overflowed from the food room.

After that I ventured over to the concert room for Rare Candy. There were plenty of nostalgic tunes, including some awesome Chrono Trigger music. Plenty of random merchandise was thrown into the crowd, I didn't manage to catch any.

Back to the LAN room I went. I noticed that some people were playing Unreal Tournament, after looking at it I decided it was UT2k4 and fired it up to join them. I didn't do too bad for using a trackball and what ended up being a kind of cumbersome keyboard location for jump that made it hard to jump and strafe at the same time.

I deathmatched for a while until UT2k4 started crashing. I had started seriously lagging by that point anyway, and my number of kills per match (goal: 25) had gone from 11 or 12 to 5 or 6. I actually wasn't last place, I was solidly in the middle. I kind of surprised myself.

Saturday

After doing my first staff shift I went to the FREE HOTEL ROOM that I got for being staff (which was a new thing this year) and got some fucking sleep. You'll notice I didn't mention going to sleep yet, that's because I didn't until 4AM today.

Once I'd gotten a solid 8 hours of sleep I went into the game room and got my drums on in Guitar Hero 5. It's kind of crazy, I'm beginning to have thoughts of moving up to Hard. I'm not hitting everything perfectly on Medium, but I'm dying for a little more correlation between what I'm hearing and the notes coming down the screen.

At 6 PM (and this reminds me, I haven't eaten yet) I went to Events 1 for Jon St. John's panel. It started a little late because the Iron Chef panel ran long since they blew a circuit at the beginning. "Jon St. Panel" as it was called ran late as well, I get the feeling nobody really wanted it to end. After the panel he signed things for people (random things for free, or his special prints for $5), so I got Duke Nukem 3D Atomic Edition signed.

Duke Nukem 3D Atomic Edition autographed by Jon St. John

I dunno what exactly happened, but around 11 PM the breaker on the circuit my computer was plugged into popped. It got reset and life was fine, except to get my computer to turn on again I had to reset the CMOS. That in itself isn't that difficult, but:

• I didn't have a screwdriver
• My case has a nightmare of cables inside, making it hard to get to the jumper.

So I unplug a couple of things, set that jumper to the reset position for a bit and then put it back to the normal position, plugged everything back in and sure enough it fired right up. Then I got to go reset all my options in the BIOS:

• disabled the floppy controller (floppy drive? lol)
• disabled the dead onboard LAN controller
• disabled the RAID controller (my case doesn't have enough room for the required hard drives to run RAID)
• disabled the 1394 (Firewire) controller (I have zero firewire devices)
• reset the system time and date
• fixed the boot order (my BIOS puts Removable Storage and CD-ROM boot before Hard Drive by default)
• set my BIOS password again (never go to a public LAN without a password on your BIOS, people are assholes and will try to hack your shit when you're not there)
• enabled legacy USB Keyboard/Mouse/Storage support (due to a nuance in Windows XP, necessary for USB keyboard/mouse support on the login screen)
• and some other miscellaneous things

I'm back up and running.

Sunday

I went to the panels for That Guy With The Glasses and Angry Video Game Nerd. After that, I played a ton of arcade games. There's this difficult one called Ice Cold Beer, where you have two joysticks for controls. They control both sides of a metal rod with a ball on top of it, and you have to maneuver the ball around the holes (bubbles) to the one with the light above it. As you do this the hole changes and it gets harder and harder (that's what she said).

Yeah, that's right. An arcade game with no screen. Old-school, I know.

The effects of having MAGFest basically be an entire day longer began to show as the night wore on. At one point there were 6 people in the LAN room. The stupid part was people were still coming up to me and asking if the Counterstrike Source tournament was still on. My only response was "dude, if you want to have a tournament with 5 other people, go for it!"

What else could I do? I went around the room and plundered all the food people left sitting around.

Monday

GTFOed my free hotel room before noon and elevators be damned, I managed to make it down to the LAN room just before my first teardown shift began. We work pretty quickly, so it was about 99% done about halfway through my second teardown shift.

During those teardown shifts I packed my computer shit up, checked out my monitor and tower, and took all my stuff to my car.

Also during those shifts we took a little break to get recognized at closing ceremonies. Just before closing ceremonies there was an auction that I sat in for the last 15 minutes or so of. After all the serious stuff went by there came a call for random stuff, and one thing that got auctioned was the privilege of beating Kroze (the Yu-Gi-Oh! The Abridged Series webmaster) with what I believe was a plastic sword (8 times, plus one more for good measure). That privilege ended up going for $200. Oh and all the proceeds from the auction went to Child's Play.

Anyway, LAN room was using the testing version of a barcode-based checkin/checkout system. Since it worked so well, it will probably be used for the rest of MAGFest at future MAGFests.

It's pretty simple: when you bring in your computer, you get a printed barcode label to stick on your badge. You check in important expensive items like towers, monitors, etc. that you don't want to randomly go missing. Barcode labels are printed for those, and you stick them on each item somewhere. When you want to check out, first the barcode on your badge gets scanned, then the system can get a list of everything you've got checked in. Pick an item, scan its barcode, and it's checked out. It's pretty neat, and is a lot less cumbersome than the "generate random ID, use label maker to print out stickers, bleh" system used previously.

After eating plenty of food at the after party in the food room I hopped in my car and drove back home. It's important to note that I did navigation to and from MAGFest entirely by memory of the route with help from signage. No Google Maps directions, no GPS, none of that shit. I still had a little tripup in Orange, but that's because Orange is retarded and doesn't say "HEY YOU MORON TURN ON CAROLINE ST. TO STAY ON ROUTE 20". At least I didn't have to deal with a train this year. Also in Orange there's a short stretch where Rt. 20 and Rt. 15 meet up. Both are north/south, but according to the signage if you're heading north on one you're heading south on the other. I'm still not quite sure how exactly that works.

I'm all set up at home, as you may have inferred from the wood floor background of the autographed Duke Nukem 3D Atomic Edition picture, and I'll probably migrate my shit back upstairs at some point. Another MAGFest come and gone. I can't wait for the next one.

/me stabs Bono

So CAINE had a meeting as usual tonight. Only difference: I had to park about a mile away and walk, instead of parking across the street from the building and taking the pedestrian bridge over. Why'd I have to do that?

Streets were closed because of a fucking U2 concert. These closed streets prevented me from getting to the parking lot I normally park in.

God dammit.

And so after the meeting we had our usual gathering to go talk about random things for a few hours, and then we left. And by left, I mean we sat in traffic for longer than it would have taken for me to just fucking walk to where I parked. Having friends who will give you a ride to your own car when it's far away is a great thing, but it just took forever to get away from Scott Stadium. This is because our city's traffic direction sucks dicks.

You know what city is completely awesome at directing traffic? Indianapolis, Indiana. Seriously. For almost the past 100 years, they've hosted the Indianapolis 500 at Indianapolis Motor Speedway. This event draws hundreds of thousands of fans who all need to leave the city right after the event. So what do they do? They take all the roads around the track (including a four lane highway) and make them one-way out of the city. You can leave a race and negotiate the traffic in no time.

What does Charlottesville do? Block off random left turns and straight lanes, no roads are made temporarily one way, and critical intersections without traffic lights don't have traffic direction at all. It's a nightmare. If you're local traffic trying to traverse event traffic in Charlottesville, you're fucked. Nobody cares about anything other than the event and they assume that if you're driving on those roads you must be attending the event.

Bono really has very little to do with this as it's the same regardless of event, but U2 is so overrated that I'm not letting up.

At least on the mile long walk (or at least it felt that way) from U-Hall to Newcomb Hall, I got to hear Muse opening for them playing their one good song, Knights of Cydonia.

FPS controls

I'll start off by saying that I'm very much used to using a mouse (well, a trackball) and keyboard to play FPSes. But after the CAINE showing we were playing some Halo 3 and I had to adjust to gamepad controls, and holy fuck they're horrendous.

"Oh shit someone's shooting me!" is something that happens frequently. What do you do on each occasion?

Mouse/Keyboard: Flick the mouse to one side to face your newfound opponent and click to return fire. Maybe push S and either A or D to backpedal and strafe, consider jumping.
Gamepad: Move right analog, wait 10 seconds while you slowly rotate, die.

How the hell do people cope with gamepads?

"JUST TURN THE SENSITIVITY UP!"

Then it goes to "oh shit too far to the left oh shit now it's too far to the right oh shit now it's too far to the left oh shit now I'm dead"

If you're going to cripple capabilities by forcing gamepad controls on us, at least have the courtesy to give a 180 degree turn button and a "lock onto opponent" button so that facing your opponent and aiming become possible with any shred of accuracy and speed.

"BUT TAHT WOOD BR34K TEH GAEM!!!1"

So if having button actions in the game designed to make it playable with a control method it wasn't designed for breaks it, then you shouldn't release the game in that format. Plain and simple. First Person Shooters were not meant to be played with gamepads. Reaction time reigns supreme, and the only way to have a decent one is with a mouse and keyboard.

"gamepads are just as good if you get used to them"

Is there any way to actually prove this? Is there an FPS where you can pit gamepad fools against real players using mouse and keyboard? Show me that, and I'll show you an FPS where everyone plays with mouse and keyboard because otherwise you automatically lose.

Seriously. Lose the gamepads.

karaoke fun

♪♪ Life's a very sweet and bitter beauty song ♪♪

So yeah, CAINE had its second annual karaoke night. I took the song I took last year, Green Jellÿ's The Bear Song, which is basically The Bear Went Over The Mountain with guitars and some added lyrics.

I also took The Lonely Island's I'm On A Boat. That's the one I ended up singing. I really should have pre-mixed a rum and coke, because my throat hurt basically until I got home and started drinking. But then again, I would have needed a 20 oz coke for that to go well and bleh. I'm drunk now so who the fuck really gives a shit. My throat felt better as soon as the rum hit it.

It was possibly more awesome than last year but was marred by one thing: YouTube sucking dick. Seriously. We had to preload every video. When did YouTube get to be so fucking slow? It can't even send the video in realtime anymore.

Moral of the story: people need to run Firefox with DownloadHelper installed, and just gank everything they want to sing. If all the files are local we can just fire up a media player and roll with it.

So now I'm listening to music. Right now it's Escape off of the only Metallica album I own (and first album I ever bought), Ride The Lightning. Earlier as you may have figured (or may not, depends on how much of a weeaboo you are) I was listening to Sweet Bitter Beauty Song off of the K-On! Don't say "lazy" single.

Fuck my hands are all tingly

♪♪ Life's for my own to live my own way ♪♪

mixed drink idea results

I tried two slightly different recipes:

4 parts Breyer's Reese's Peanut Butter Cup ice cream
1 part Bailey's Irish Cream

I did 4:1 instead of 3:1 because the blender had a 1 cup marking, so it was easier to measure out 8 oz of ice cream than 6. The result was delicious.

The second recipe:

4 parts Breyer's Reese's Peanut Butter Cup ice cream
1 part Bailey's Irish Cream
1 part coffee liqueur (I used the Caffé Lolita that I bought, if making this drink for serious, you'd probably want Kahlua here instead)

This had a different taste due to the coffee liqueur, but it was just as delicious. I'm having a really hard time deciding which one I liked better. The first one was sweeter due to the lack of the bitter taste the coffee liqueur adds, but both were pretty smooth and tasty. Also a key factor is that the ice cream warmed up between the drinks, since I didn't pop it back in the freezer until after making the second drink, so the second one was warmer than the first, but still cold.

The one thing that didn't work out quite as I had hoped were the chunks of Reese's Peanut Butter Cups that are in the ice cream. They got ground up somewhat by the blender, but there was still sludge at the bottom of the glass. I was counting on the blender to make the chunks smaller than it did. Maybe it was just the blender I was using.

Also something you might be able to infer from the recipes but I'll go ahead and mention anyway: the first recipe was thicker than the second, and felt more like a milkshake. If you want the thickness of the first recipe with the coffee liqueur from the second, you'll have to adjust the amount of ice cream accordingly. I'm too lazy to do the math, but just add a couple extra scoops of ice cream and you should be fine.

As for serving this drink to others, you'd probably want to serve it in a chilled glass, perhaps with a straw since it's pretty much a milkshake. If you want to get fancy you could garnish it with a Reese's Peanut Butter Cup. Floating on top would be cool if it works, or alternatively you could carefully slice a small bit out of it with a knife and slide it over the edge of the glass like a lemon slice. Also, the usual drizzling of Hershey's chocolate syrup around the edge of the glass would compliment the drink well.

This is basically yet another variant of the mudslide. If anyone ever finds something like this for sale in a bar or restaurant, definitely let me know, I'd like to see the difference between my attempts and those of an actual bartender.

Last but not least, if it wasn't obvious already, I really like the combination of peanut butter and chocolate.

mixed drink idea

It's kind of a takeoff of a mudslide, but whatever. My whole idea is to take a delicious liquifiable food item (Breyer's Reese's Peanut Butter Cup Ice Cream) and a delicious creamy alcoholic substance (Bailey's Irish Cream) and mix the two in a blender. I have procured the ice cream and the Irish cream. Mixing time is after dinner (a frozen Red Baron pepperoni pizza that I'm adding bacon to) tonight. Parents are conveniently out of town, so I can use the blender (and clean it myself too).

I'm wondering about the proper proportions to use. For a single drink I was thinking a cup of ice cream, but how much Bailey's do I add? I don't want it to be undetectable, but I don't want it to overpower the peanut butter+chocolate goodness either.

I would start with the mudslide recipe off of Wikipedia, but it doesn't list proportions, only the ingredients.

When I think about it, no matter how I mix it, it's going to be delicious.

Also, at parties and gatherings with CAINE I encountered a cheap Kahlua knockoff called Caffé Lolita. Being that I'm more or less an anime nerd at this point, I laugh a bit to myself every time I see a bottle of it, so I picked one up while I was at the ABC store. It's bottom shelf liquor and tastes like it, but whatever.

Hmm, all of the mudslide recipes I'm finding to try and cross reference the ingredient proportions have coffee liqueur in them (specifically Kahlua, but whatever). Maybe it's good that I impulsively bought the Caffé Lolita after all.

Just noticed a separate recipe for "frozen mudslide". Maybe I should have been searching for that instead. It's 2 oz Bailey's and 6 oz Ice cream, or exactly 3:1::ice cream:Bailey's, which was exactly what I was thinking. This is just flat dropping the vodka and Kahlua.

Last but not least, I don't know if this is bad, but when I stopped by Taco Bell to grab some lunch I got order number 256 and laughed. You know, 0x100. 2⁸. I guess it's just a computer geek thing.

Disrupted signal in the radio song

Seriously, GH3? SERIOUSLY? I really dropped combo THREE FUCKING NOTES from the end of Radio Song?

Song is easy, SP path isn't. I don't seem to get the same amount of SP from the half-beat whammy bullshit that the path says I should.

Rum and coke Radio Song FC incoming? Updates as events warrant.

Edit: THERE WE FUCKING GO. 191963, 627th on PS2. Activations a bit shorter than optimal because whammying a half-beat sustain and getting all of its SP is impossible, but whatever.

Double Edit: I should combine rum and coke with Guitar Hero more often. I just got Ruby forfuckingfinally. 205646 points, 151st on PS2. Now I just need some 151 proof rum. lol.

Remember kids: Winners don't do drugs.

Triple Edit: Holy crap, I just 5-starred One again. Alcohol FTW.

HOLY HELL WINDOWS MORE LIKE WINBLOWS

I'm not using VistAIDS, but I feel like Windows is giving me the middle finger and this is the best image I have to represent that with.

This is now the second time I've had to start over typing this, so it'll be short and sweet. Well, not really.

I woke up yesterday to discover that my computer couldn't access our local network, or for that matter the internet. I tried everything I knew and nothing could get it working, no amount of rebooting, release/renew, etc. would fix it.

So I overreacted. Honestly I don't know what else I could have done, but whatever.

I opted to wipe my OS hard drive and reinstall Windows. It had needed it for a while, what with all the posts about my computer shitting bricks and whatnot a while back.

At first I tried to put the Windows 7 beta on it, but even after a successful install I couldn't get it to refrain from BSODing upon reboot.

So I reinstalled XP, then went through hell getting it up to SP3. What hell did I go through? First off, after a virgin install of SP1 (what my XP Pro disc contains), you can't just grab SP3 off of Windows Update. Microsoft can't make anything simple to save their lives. You have to update to SP2, reboot, and then update to SP3. On top of that, every few minutes it goes "lol what's a network connection?" and I have to run XP's uber-hidden network diagnostic tool to fix it.

For reference, this tool is xpnetdiag.exe. Search it up. You'll have to allow windows to search in system directories to find it.

I'm typing this on my crapass laptop that's basically fubar but can still boot an Ubuntu livedisc.

Actually, the network connection might have relaxed a bit. I don't know if it's because I'm not using the computer or what, but I haven't had to run the diagnostic tool to fix it in a while. I've got Azureus going with a few torrents and they're still active. (inb4 it craps out again)

If it's directly related to user activity, which seems a little weird, I'll have to shift my use pattern around to my other computers, perhaps using this laptop a bit more. I hate laptop keyboards though, I've had to backspace so many fucking times already.

The problem that forced me to type this on my laptop isn't the intermittent connectivity issue. It's one that's far more aggravating (and just happened again). The computer will simply just stop accepting input. The keyboard doesn't work, my trackball doesn't work, nothing fucking works. The screen doesn't even update if things should be changing. Yay reset button.

What all this boils down to is that my desktop in its current state is unusable. I'll have to replace it with a brand new computer a little sooner than I'd predicted. Which means going out and getting a fucking job during a fucking economic recession just got a little more fucking important.

Shit really? It just fucking stopped again. No more than a minute after rebooting, logging back in, and starting Azureus again. What the fucking hell. Shit's definitely unusable.

You know what forced me to have to type this again? Pretty much the same fucking issue, only this time on my laptop. I got out my USB flash drive to store the file on, plugged it into my laptop's only USB port, and it froze. What the hell. After rebooting my laptop I immediately made a text file on my USB drive and have been saving every so often. I can deal with the line ends being unix format. I'd just like to have something to fucking post.

I need a lot of alcohol. Now. Found a bottle of rum (not spiced, sadface), made rum and coke (zero).

"Alcopops"? Seriously?

Relevant link: Bill Would Make 'Alcopops' Less Available (go here if it bugs you to log in)

So I gave today's Washington Post my usual glance to see if anything would catch my eye besides the comics. Lo and behold, I saw a small blurb on the front page of the Metro section talking about fruit-flavored malt beverages and how they're trying to limit their sale or some bullshit.

They call them "Alcopops". I'm not making this up. I couldn't come up with anything half as stupid if I tried. When you make up a diminishing name for them like that, it's going to be pretty easy to get whatever legislation you want passed in regards to them. That name (made up by opponents of the drinks!) does more of a job of making it look like they're marketing towards underage people than any of the actual official marketing does.

Basically, they contend that somehow these fruit-flavored malt beverages are contributing to drunk driving and underage drinking. You know, moreso than all the other fucking alcoholic beverages out there. They say that "Alcopops are not beer" and therefore they need a higher tax and can't be sold in places only licensed to sell beer, meaning that right away the only place we'd be able to buy these things is at an ABC store. The only times I want to go to an ABC store are when I need more whiskey, rum, or vodka. Because a 5.5% alcohol by volume malt beverage is so on par with something that's been distilled to be 40% or higher.

They're actually right about the "they're not beer" thing, though. From a technical standpoint, they're not beer. However, they're similar enough in alcohol content (fucking weak) and form factor (bottles, sold in six packs) that they should be treated the same.

What this boils down to in my eyes is the government trying to take parental responsibility into its own hands. If parents would be vigilant about preventing their kids from drinking, preventing them from hanging out with the people who supply them with alcohol, and teach them about the dangers of drunk driving with an emphasis on "DON'T DO IT OR YOU'RE FUCKING RETARDED" (okay, maybe a little sugarcoating on that), we wouldn't have this problem. We don't need laws to do what parents should have already been doing.

It's true that this is happening in Maryland and that it doesn't affect me since I live in Virginia, but if it passes, it will set a legal precedent and other laws like it in other states are sure to follow. I'm not a lawyer (lol disclaimer), but being the offspring of an electrical engineer (with two patents) and a computer science major, I can think logically.

I'm playing around with stuff

Trying to get my MyAnimeList signature image in here somehow in a manner that's easily visible but also looks good. Haven't quite arrived at it yet, but I'll keep working on it. I'm kinda tired, and I'm sick, so I think I'll go get some sleep.

I say I'm sick, but it's really just a (rather nasty) combination of seasonal allergies and chest congestion. Several of us were coughing periodically throughout the showing earlier tonight, dunno if we all have the same thing or what.

I'd kinda like to get better soon, since I just found out last Thursday that I am indeed going to Nekocon with CAINE, after all the effort I'd put into ignoring the planning for it. The group needs at least one more car (we're all friends, but I don't think we're friendly enough to try and cram everyone plus everyone's bags into Tom's van) and they offered to cover gas/hotel/con badge, so I can't really complain, right? My original reason for not being able to go was lack of money.

As long as Tom brings alcohol and there's a decent selection in the game room I'll be fine. Rum tends to make my throat feel better, I'll have him mix me up something with that. As long as I can stumble from the hotel to the convention center without getting arrested and start playing games, I'll be fine.

I had an idea on how to work the MAL sig in here, using some Javascript to dynamically hide/show it with the click of a button. I'll have to tweak the CSS of the widget so it doesn't have the red line beneath it also.

I suppose I'll need to eat at some point during Nekocon, we'll see how that works out. Maybe my NEET gene will kick in and I can get my mom to give me some money for the weekend. I really should get a damn job.

Hitting Publish Post now before this becomes really long.

Drunkenness is good

I went out bowling with some friends earlier tonight. Didn't do that well, but managed to break 100 on a round. Anyway. On my way home, I stopped by the store and picked up a 6 pack of Smirnoff Ice Raspberry Burst, which I finished off fairly quickly.

Smirnoff has this thing going with codes under their caps, so I figured I'd go ahead and enter them and see what I got.

I ended up with two of the three codes I entered getting me download codes for music from emusic.com. Apparently they only let you enter in three codes a day or I would have entered the other three. Anyway.

Turns out emusic.com is getting digital distribution right. No DRM. This means that, unlike other similar services like Rhapsody, if you cancel your subscription, you can still listen to the music you've legally obtained. Unfortunately, the only available format is MP3, but they'll learn sooner or later. I redeemed my codes, and had a look through their library to see which two songs I'd download.

Upon registering an account, they'll try to get you to download their software. They assert the claim that it's free of spyware, and even have Mac OS X and Linux versions (wow, Linux support, I'm amazed). In small text next to the download links they mention that the software is completely optional and that their service can still be used without it, albeit less conveniently: you won't be able to download an entire album with one click. Since I was only there for two tracks, I declined to install it.

After much debate, I ended up downloading Clarence Carter's Strokin' (the Long and Dirty version, for those who care), and Wesley Willis' Fuck You, which was the only one of the Wesley Willis tracks they had whose preview I immediately laughed at upon hearing, probably due to drunken amusement more than anything else. Sadly, they don't have The Bloodhound Gang's A Lap Dance Is So Much Better When The Stripper Is Crying or I would have downloaded that instead.

Most of emusic.com's service is a monthly fee-based service, but my small preview let me see how nice it was. Tomorrow I'll redeem these other three caps and see if I can't get any more downloads.

The verdict: A step in the right direction. Now to get legal Ogg Vorbis and FLAC downloads...

Friday edit: The other three caps gave me three more download codes. Now to figure out what I want...

Much later edit: emusic's glaring problem is that their library is almost devoid of anything mainstream.