Auto Racing Bucket List

I know, if you read this blog, it's inevitable you'll run across one of my posts about it, most likely The Day of Racing, as I've termed it.  However, I have actually spectated races from the venue in person, as opposed to just watching on TV, and I do have a list of races I'd like to watch in person sometime.  I even looked all of them up on Google to be sure I had the right names and locations.  So if there's any inaccuracies, blame Google.

But first, places I've been to watch races in the past:

• Richmond International Raceway, Richmond, VA - I forget if it was an IndyCar race or a NASCAR race, to be honest.  At oval courses, you always prefer to get seats higher up in the grandstands, so you can see the entire oval from one spot.  The only thing that sucks about having seats that high up?  The longer walk to concessions/the bathroom.
• Indianapolis Motor Speedway, Indianapolis, IN - I've been to a few of the Formula 1 races they held there.  This is where I got my Ferrari hat from.  Our seats were in Indy turn 4, which was the perfect place to sit because you could see the entire front straight and first several corners leading onto the back straight.  Thankfully, I was at home watching on TV during the six-car farce thanks to Michelin not bringing durable enough tires that year.

Now, places I'd like to go to see a race at some point:

• Bristol Motor Speedway, Bristol, VA - The shortest track on the NASCAR calendar, and always a great source of entertainment.
• Circuit de Spa-Francorchamps, Stavelot, Belgium - One of the best tracks on the F1 calendar.  I'd love to have a seat at the first hairpin where I can see all the way down the hill to Eau Rouge.  This track is where this legendary pass for the lead happened.  In fact, here, have the onboard from Hakkinen.  Listen closely as he lifts the first time through Eau Rouge, but then not the second time.  Balls of fuckin' steel, man.  Fun fact: Hakkinen was the only person who was ever able to defeat Schumacher in his prime.
• Circuit Gilles Villeneuve, Montreal, Quebec, Canada - Another great F1 track.  I'd either want to sit at the hairpin just before the final straight, on the outside of the corner; or along the front straight, closer to the first and second turns, but where I can still easily see the cars coming through the final chicane.
• Indianapolis Motor Speedway, Indianapolis, IN - I still feel incomplete as an auto racing fan, having been to multiple races at Indianapolis Motor Speedway, none of them having been the Indianapolis 500.  So hopefully I can see an Indy 500 live and in person sometime.
• Mid-Ohio Sports Car Course, Lexington, OH - All jokes about being stuck in Ohio aside, this is one of the many great road courses in the US, and I'd love to see a race there.
• Road America, Elkhart Lake, WI - Yet another great road course in the US.  Dat elevation change on the front straight.
• Sears Point Raceway, Sonoma, CA - Because screw calling it "Infineon Raceway" or "Sonoma Raceway".  Another of the great road courses in the US, which gets used for a variety of forms of racing, including NHRA drag racing.  I'll take either IndyCar or NASCAR, though.
• Mazda Raceway Laguna Seca, Salinas, CA - While we're in California, how about yet another amazing US road course?  This course is where "the pass" happened, which of course was Alex Zanardi passing Bryan Herta in the corkscrew and going off the track in the process, which apparently wasn't against the rules at the time.
• Watkins Glen International, Watkins Glen, NY - The other NASCAR road course, but I'll throw a curve ball here and say I'd rather see a series that races the full International circuit, such as the IMSA Tudor United Sports Car Championship or the Rolex Sports Car Championship, or the Continental Tire Sports Car Championship, or whatever the name of that series is.  It's the Le Mans-style one.  It has about 50 different names.  Pick one.  Even if they're actually different series, they're all pretty much the same: endurance racing with driver changes.

As you can see, there's kind of a long and eternally incomplete laundry list of US road courses (there's New Jersey Motorsports Park (what exit?), and Circuit of the Americas, for sure), and then a few from other countries.

XT's Typical Day

☑ Rant about computer software not working the way I want it to
☑ Notice something weird and talk about it for a while
☑ Pet the dog
☑ Rant about computer programming
☑ Discover and/or cause computer problem, find solution, post solution
☑ Say bad things about something that I don't fully understand
☑ Wish I could get someone to hire me
☑ Stay inside all day
☑ Eat too much
☑ Drink a lot of soda
☑ Watch YouTube and/or play games
☐ fap
☐ Go to sleep

The Legend of Dark Witch

I just covered the demo, but as I stated in that post, I was going to buy the full game, and I did.  This post will restate some stuff from that post, just so it's a complete review.  So, with that out of the way, here we go!

The Legend of Dark Witch is a Mega Man-style action platformer.  If you've played a Mega Man game before, you know the drill.  You choose the boss you want to fight, work your way through their stage, and eventually confront and defeat the boss.  Upon defeat, you get their weapon, and another boss is weak to that weapon.  Once all the main bosses have been defeated, special boss stages become available, and getting through all of them gets you the game's ending.  One of the stages is typically a series of re-fights of the main bosses, and that's certainly no exception here.

To set it apart from your average Mega Man-style action platformer, though, the game provides a Gradius-style upgrade system.  Drops from enemies, called Tres in this game, fill up a gauge at the bottom of the screen.  When the upgrade you want is highlighted, you press a button and get the upgrade.  These upgrades will generally help you get through each stage, and certain parts may require you to have upgraded Speed.  If you get hit, you lose progress on this gauge, which can make another upgrade get selected instead of the one you had selected.  So basically, as soon as you can grab the one you want, do it.

The Tres you pick up during a stage are also added to a count shown on the lower screen.  Between stages, you can access a menu and use your saved up Tres to buy permanent upgrades.  One of the permanent upgrades increases the amount of Tres you get from enemies, which I highly recommend getting first.  Each permanent upgrade has three levels that increase in cost, so you'll really want that income multiplier maxed out before buying much of anything else.  The income multiplier also affects how long it takes to get upgrades within each stage, so it's megas useful nyoro.  Combined with one of the other upgrades maxed out, and you start a stage with enough Tres to grab a Speed upgrade right away.

Hidden throughout the six normal stages are crystals you can find.  These crystals increase your maximum upgrade levels.  Each stage has two of them, and once you've gotten all twelve, a secret one appears in the first extra stage, that adds a new upgrade.  For a first playthrough, I fully recommend getting all of them.  They're kind of tricky to find, as they're not visible, but you can shoot them.  So if you fire at a random spot and hear a weird noise, it's a crystal.  You can either shoot it several times to make it appear, or jump at the spot.

The graphics are sort of a halfway-point between NES-style graphics where the pixels are large and in charge, and the high-resolution graphics that we're more familiar with these days.  I guess a good term would be "high resolution pixel graphics", even though "pixel graphics" is a bit redundant because all graphics are composed of pixels.  Anyway.  The stages all have their own look and feel, and anything that needs to stick out sticks out so you'll notice it.  Heck, the game even displays a blinking red "DANGER!!" text on the top or bottom of the screen when there's an enemy just offscreen.

As one of the extras points out, the music sounds like it's a bunch of PCM modules, straight out of the 90s.  That's the style they went for, and I think it turned out well.

The controls are spot-on.  Control isn't slippery like in Mario where you constantly have to adjust with left and right to land your jumps.  You stop pressing the button, your character stops moving.  Period.  Also, the controls on the A, B, X, and Y buttons can be rebound to be more to your liking, which is nice, and unexpected in a handheld game.  There's also an option for how you want your jumps to work.  The default is that your jump height is the same regardless of how long you hold the button for, but you can change it so that pressing the button for less time results in a shorter jump.

As far as the other options go, volume levels of various categories of sounds can be adjusted, the camera distance and speed can be adjusted.  Then, there's the "install mode" setting.  This affects how the Gradius-style upgrade system works.  It defaults to Auto, and there's also Semi-Auto and Manual settings.  I haven't tried Auto or Semi-Auto, because from the start I wanted to be in control of which upgrades I got when.  Besides, if you're used to Gradius, you're going to want to set it to Manual anyway.

When you start the game, you can choose Easy, Normal, or Lunatic difficulty.  Lunatic is only unlocked once you beat the game once.  I hopped straight in on Normal.  Easy has health pickups, Normal and Lunatic don't.

Once you beat the game once, the main menu gains some extra options.  One is a hidden shop with extra upgrades and some unlocks and things, that uses Syega as its currency instead of Tres.  Various things throughout the game, including beating the game, give Syega rewards, to be used here.  Also available is a poker (5-card draw, not that hold'em cancer) minigame where you can bet your Syega and win more.

I originally had a list of frustrations here, but they can be summed up as "I blindly jumped in on Normal difficulty and things got challenging and I had to repeat stages a bunch to learn them".

Overall, it's a great game.  It's $4 on the eShop, and it's well worth the price.  I know for sure that I've gotten more than four dollars' worth of entertainment out of it.

Trying Some 3DS Demos

Some titles on the eShop have demos, so I've tried a couple that looked interesting.  Of course, the existence of this post means I'm about to tell you what I tried, what the games are like, and my opinions of them.  If your opinion is different, then... good for you!  If you read this post and decide you want to purchase either of the games, do note that they will both transfer save data from the demo to the full game.

Witch and Hero

I downloaded this demo because the game looked similar to Protect Me Knight on the Xbox 360.  It's got the same retro graphics style and the same occasionally broken English.  The graphics and music are quite good.

However, it's a defense game.  Typically, I don't like those.  Yet, here I am giving one a try anyway.  Unfortunately, I still don't like it.

The difficulty seems to follow an exponential curve, wherein it gradually goes up for a while, and you'll occasionally have to repeat a stage due to some stupid error or whatever, and then suddenly on stage 8 it becomes a brick wall.  You know what doesn't help?  If you fail a stage, your rewards get cut in half.  At first, it seems like it's there to provide a penalty for losing, which is fair.  However, when you lose, it's because you need better stats, and the loss of half of your reward means it takes you twice as long to get better stats.  I must have played stage 8 for about 15 minutes, upgrading whenever I could, and I still couldn't beat it.  Because I couldn't beat that stage, I don't know how far through the game the demo will take you.

Also, the game has no sense of accomplishment.  As you power up, so too do your enemies.  You'll never reach a point where you feel powerful because you're always struggling to complete a stage.  The game's battle system compounds this issue by having you run into enemies in order to attack, despite the mass of unused buttons on the system.  As you run around the screen nudging everything to death, you gradually take damage from some indeterminate source.  Once you die, you stay down until your health bar refills, which takes an annoyingly long amount of time.  Occasionally an enemy will leave a chest behind, but they're annoying to open.  This is because every time you nudge something, you get knocked back, seemingly a random distance.  Usually it's pretty small, but sometimes it's upwards of half of the screen.  The chests seem to always knock you back a long distance, making getting their contents difficult at best.

The witch stays at the center of the stage and can't move because she's been turned to stone.  If she dies, you fail the stage.  However, past a certain point, you can power her up with enemy drops, and when powered up all the way, she'll momentarily revive and perform one of two attacks, either an area-of-effect storm, or a fireball that you have to aim using the L and R buttons.  Powering her up so you can have these attacks going constantly seems to be key to victory.

However, I just didn't find it fun repeating the same stage over and over again, only getting half of the reward, and trying to upgrade myself to the point where I could beat the stage.  The shop where you buy upgrades also charges you more and more for each level of each upgrade, so it takes longer and longer to upgrade each time.  Now do you see why I disagree with the whole "half rewards on failure" thing?  It really only serves to add tedium.  It's just not fun.

The Legend of Dark Witch

This is an action platformer in the style of Mega Man, where each stage ends with a boss fight and you get the boss' weapon when you beat them, and each boss is weak to a specific weapon.  However, it also has a powerup mechanic in the style of Gradius, where drops from enemies fill a gauge and you press a button when the upgrade you want to get is selected.  There are also permanent upgrades that can be purchased between stages.  One of them basically acts as an income multiplier, which I highly recommend grabbing (and maxing out) first.

The graphics are great, the music fits, and the controls are perfect (and re-bindable!).  The character designs are anime-style, which may turn off some of you out there.  For the open-minded, though, it's an excellent blend of two classic games.  The demo has one stage available.  I jumped straight in on Normal difficulty (the highest, Lunatic, isn't accessible in the demo) and had a good experience.

The game has a number of extras that are unlocked by doing various things in-game.  Only a select few (I believe only two) are obtainable in the demo, and I've gotten one of them, for defeating the one boss available in the demo without taking damage.  The way the unlock methods are chosen seems to encourage replaying the game with different strategies, to make it different or more challenging.  For instance, one of them is obtained by completing the game getting no upgrades other than speed upgrades.

Overall

I think I'm gonna buy The Legend of Dark Witch, and delete the Witch and Hero demo.

Common Dream Themes

I'm sure this happens to everyone, but hardly anyone ever really talks about it.  Some types of dreams or themes within them tend to be more common than others.  I'm going to cover what I personally experience.

Elevators

For some reason, elevators are a really common occurrence in my dreams.  Usually, unexpected things happen in them, like the buttons looking or acting really weird, the buttons not being there at all, or the building suddenly having way more floors than it previously had.  Sometimes the elevator just does whatever it wants.  Sometimes the building has lots of basement floors.  Sometimes the elevator car is a cylinder rather than a rectangular prism.  When it's a cylinder, it also has a chance of falling.  When they fall, weird things happen, such as bouncing back up off the bottom of the shaft, or the elevator car suddenly rotating in ways that it shouldn't normally be able to.  Hardly ever am I in an elevator with someone else in a dream.

One of my first recurring dreams, that I had as a kid (in elementary school), actually involved a strange elevator that I'd never noticed before in our old house.

Hovering

I'm fairly certain this is a common theme for a lot of people.  I can often hover in my dreams.  It's not flight, I'll just be moving close to the ground at walking speed, but not actually be touching the ground.  Usually, the people around me can't hover, and don't think it's weird that I'm hovering.  Maybe they don't even notice.

Things that weren't there before

As I mentioned in the elevators section, this happened in one of my first recurring dreams.  More recently, I'll be upstairs, and go downstairs to find that my dad has suddenly and without warning obtained a bunch of stuff.  This most recent time (last night, actually), it was a bunch of old game consoles and games for them.  Except that none of the consoles looked like they should have, and none of the games were recognizable titles (except for one case where he had all three Donkey Kong Country SNES games).

Not being able to punch with any kind of force

This might also be a common theme for some people, and in particular is one of the things you can use to recognize that you're dreaming, while it's happening.  Sometimes I'll just want to punch people in a dream, it seems.  Kind of like in real life, but without the consequences that cause me to avoid doing it.  Except in my dreams, the force behind each punch disappears mere inches from my target.

Driving a car, but not being in control

This is different from reckless driving.  This is more along the lines of "no matter how hard I hit the brakes the car doesn't slow down in time".  Also, sometimes the steering doesn't work right in my dreams, or it's a manual transmission and that's doomed from the start because manual transmissions hate me.

Things that spark creativity after I wake up

Stuff like Jungle Planet and the Peaceful Town song, mostly.  The rest of the "weird dreams" stories posted here under the "dreams" tag don't really count because they're too random.  There was actually another dream that resulted in some dream fiction a bit more recently, that I spent a few days fleshing out into a more full story, but haven't posted anywhere public yet.  The still-unfinished result would be too long for a single blog post, and that's saying something given all the walls of text I have here.  I can easily post just the portion that happened during my dream, though, since the majority of it was extrapolated from there.

Generally being random

Again, I think everyone gets this to some extent.  Hardly ever does a dream form a coherent narrative.  It's usually just a chain of events that have no relation to one another.  And then when you wake up and try to tell your parents/roommate/friends/whoever, it fades away.  In fact, when a dream has formed a coherent narrative, it usually doesn't fade away nearly as quickly.  It's like my mind has to work really hard to make these absurd sequences of events, and doesn't have the energy left over to remember it for very long; and making something coherent doesn't make it have to work as hard, so it's easier for my mind to remember what happens.  Or maybe it's the opposite, in that my mind works really hard to make something coherent, and so it remembers it; whereas with the really random stuff it's just throwing things at the wall to see what sticks, and it all slides off of that metaphorical wall rather quickly.

Things being sexualized

I think this is just because I'm a pervert, but... I can't deny that things can get a bit sexualized in my dreams, even when such things would be considered inappropriate at best in real life.  You know what, I'm not going to go into this one in any more detail.

Timing of me waking up relative to events

With the random dreams, that never make much sense anyway, I'll wake up after one whole completely random section of it has played out.  With the more coherent ones, it always tends to be at the most inopportune time, such as when something awesome or amazing is happening.  Try all you like, going back to sleep never results in a continuation.

Actually, I think that's a good point.  In the vast majority of these dreams I'm drawing from, if not all of them, I wake up at the end of the dream, or me waking up interrupts the dream.  Maybe it's something about the stage of sleep right before I wake up that causes this stuff.  I kinda want to have some sort of magical "dream imaging" device hooked up to me while I sleep sometime, except that I wouldn't want anyone else to see the contents without me okaying it first.

Venting About Ultimate Angler's RNG

Earlier today, during a six-hour-long HomePass session, I finally found a duplicate of the 6+ Anglers Gauge Boost skill that I got halfway through the game, a few months ago.  I still need one more to get it to level 3.  Whoever designed this game's RNG is sadistic.  I can farm rods like nobody's business with HomePass, but 90% of them don't have a skill, and the ones that do have useless things like Lake/Pond Strike Boost and 2 Anglers Time Boost.

In the meantime:

• I've caught five UFOs, put them in a Cosmic Tank, and set it as my favorite.
• I've caught five Bloopers and two Cheep Cheeps for a similarly-themed tank. I still need three more Cheep Cheeps, which will be difficult given that I hardly ever have enough bait for them when I get a sighting.  I usually have two bait, and it takes me three at minimum, if the RNG plays nice.
• I've caught all but one of the 160 species in the game.  The sole remaining one is a mysterious fish.  It's the rarest one, it seems, and it's on Mysteria Island at Sellbrook River.  Nobody on HomePass seems to have seen it, and the only way to be able to catch it is to StreetPass someone who's seen it (or someone who doesn't have the game, a specific number of times).  Then you have to hope that you have enough of the correct bait(s) to catch it in that single session, or you lose it and have to start over with the next sighting.  If your sighting isn't "I heard a rumor..." or "I caught a...", then its stamina will have already been worn down somewhat by the previous person.
• I've wasted a lot of money improving my UFO Rod +25 with the level 1 6+ Anglers Gauge Boost skill that I'll eventually upgrade to level 3 and have to re-improve if I don't get the 160th species for the final plaza ticket and give this game the old "12-gauge to the back of the head" mercy kill treatment it deserves.

I've already talked about the difference between tedium and challenge, and at this point in the game, it's nothing but tedium.  You keep farming, and eventually you game the RNG enough that you get what you're looking for, but you don't have fun in the meantime.  I didn't pay for a StreetPass game to get MMO levels of grinding.  StreetPass games are only supposed to be tedious in that they take a lot of StreetPassing to complete.  Everything else about them is supposed to be friendly and accessible.

To draw a comparison, the RNG on weapons from chests in Monster Manor was a lot more player-friendly, and the weapon skills were a lot more common.  You still had to play your cards right, but doing so involved learning the game mechanics.  Getting a good weapon was basically your reward for learning how to make the game spawn gold chests.  In Ultimate Angler, the only mechanic to getting fishing rods is that you have to catch a fish you've already caught before.  There are zero game mechanics you can learn to get fishing rods basically whenever you want, it's entirely down to RNG.  Then, it seems it's an entirely separate RNG (a die roll, for the D&D nerds) for whether or not you get a skill on that rod, and ANOTHER RNG that determines what that skill is.  Everything else in Ultimate Angler is fantastic, but the RNG begs for an update to make it more player-friendly.

Distinction: Geek vs. Nerd

I was going to post this on /r/mindcrack in response to this week's Mindcrack Podcast where the difference between geeks and nerds popped up during the AskCrack segment, but I went off on an incredibly ranty tangent that probably would have been downvoted to all hell, so I posted it here instead.  Also, having to edit it from being formatted with Markdown to being formatted with HTML kinda sucks lol.  I regex'd it and had 100 problems.

Also, I'm going to do something I've never done on this blog before, which would be using the horizontal rule tag.  HOLD ONTO YOUR BUTTS!

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In my mind, it goes like this:

Geek and nerd: both incredibly knowledgeable about something they have a passion for.

Nerd: Pedantic as fuck, and whether they realize it or not, everyone hates them.  These are the typical overachievers, the 5.0 GPA people whose entire life when not in school is spent doing homework and sucking up to people like a sad puppy.

Geek: Cool person.  Chimes in with facts as appropriate, saves corrections for when people are repeatedly completely wrong, otherwise stays out of people's hair.  These are the people you see in advanced-level or honors-level classes getting by with Cs, but they get straight As in their AP classes.  They may even drop down from advanced-level classes to regular-level classes just to get a workload they can handle.

Reference for non-Americans who don't like the fact that we have the gall to do things differently:

• regular-level class: course designed for anyone, high concentration of rednecks, pregnant teenagers, and troublemakers, weekly workload comes from a two-bag trip to the local grocery store.
• advanced-level class: course designed for intellectuals, weekly workload comes out of the back of a dump truck.
• honors-level class: course designed for intellectuals, weekly workload arrives via cargo plane.
• AP: Advanced Placement, basically a college-level class that can let you skip some freshman year college class requirements if you do well enough on the exam at the end of the year. You have to specifically enroll in these and the workload varies wildly by subject.  I did AP Computer Science and it was the best class I ever took in high school.  And I got that 4.0 on the exam.
• IB: International Baccalaureate.  The pretentious version of AP, offered in snooty northern-Virginia schools and nowhere else.  I actually had people in college ask me what AP even was, and they were surprised my school didn't have IB classes instead.  Meanwhile I was going "what's IB?".  I wish I was joking.
• College: Synonymous with University.  Did you like your 12 years of general education?  Congratulations!  Now you get to go tens of thousands of dollars in debt to get more general education, and without doing so, nobody will hire you!  *grumble*