Gaming

I recently bought Rez HD for my XBox 360, which is an XBox Live Arcade game that costs 800 (about US $10).

The game is very heavy on synæsthesia-inducing effects, at least for me; Colors just grow in intensity as the sound grows, with bright lights flashing around when things go pop! on screen. Finishing a couple of areas leaves me feeling wiped out, but in a good way. Not like running a marathon or what have you, but just drained of most types of energy in a pleasant way.

I think Rez is hard to explain without videos, but once you play it, you’ll either get into it and understand, while the controller is thmp-thmp-thmping in your hands, or you just won’t understand it, and pass.

For the oldschool Rez players, your 360 controllers double as trance vibrators; You can have controllers 2, 3, AND 4 just buzzing away on your lap if you’d like.

The best thing about it being on XBox Live Arcade is that you can download a demo of the first level, play it through to the boss at the end, and half-kill the boss before it tells you that to finish this up, you’ll need to pay for it. So, uh, if any of you have a 360, I’d suggest downloading the demo, putting on some headphones or cranking up that 5.1, and enjoy this in widescreen mode. It so, so makes it worth it.

The other day, I went to log in at SecondLife.com, so I could download the software to my laptop for an experiment (Would I be able to run SL on the laptop I just recently bought? The answer was “Heh, not really.”).
I noticed that I had been gaining L$ (That is, Linden Dollars) at a rather steady rate since I went homeless, and I wasn’t sure how.

I checked carefully, and it seems that somehow, someone signs up with my Referral URL (which has been posted on numerous sites, including here, as part of my signature, among things), and they go for premium accounts. Those premium accounts turn into many L$ for me, and I can turn said L$ into USD$ legally.

I checked on the current conversion, and it seems that I’ll get USD$62 from the L$18100 I have, so I’m feeling pretty perky about that.

I finally caved in.

Since I wanted something else to play on my DS, and I came to the realization that we only live once, I decided to buy the R4 card for the Nintendo DS.

I simply wanted a card that had better compatibility than this Datel Games ‘n Music card I got at Wal-Mart a few weeks ago. Some of the homebrew stuff just does not run on the GnM all that well (DSLinux, for example), and I think it’s because of an artificially imposed bottleneck on the card itself.

So hopefully, I’ll be having some kind of fun with this thing next week.

So, the other day, I was sitting around with the guys, playing Xbox360.

They talked me into trying out one of those shooters with them, despite my relatively firm stance about first/third person shooters and consoles (I don’t like them to be together, bob. They should not touch~). It was this game called Gears of War.

When I started playing, I was a bit unsteady with the controls, because I’m used to having omnidirectional aiming in one hand, using the mouse. It took a little to get used to the sticks, since I can’t whip around to kill nearly as fast on the controller AND retain my fine aim that I’m used to.

But, I plowed forward like a trooper, and my first experience on ‘Insane’ settings impressed the guys.

Apparently, I’m good at: Getting to objectives without dying, Tossing the grenades, Conserving ammunition, Finding answers to puzzles that I’ve never seen.

I didn’t have to be picked up by my partner (the only way to get up when facing death in the form of a large red gear plastered in the middle of your screen is to be tagged by your partner. It encourages you to communicate with the partner to get things done) very often, though I did have to help one of the other partners up off the ground a lot.

Jason was pretty good with this, but Zeke is a bit death-prone.
Both of them communicate their part of the plan with me well, and I try to do just as much in return (eg: I told Zeke not to move until I exclaimed that “I am the Light” in one level, because traveling in darkness will almost immediately kill you, instead of letting you face death), but it’s kinda different for me to actually be playing a shooter in a cooperative mode.

Still, I was actually impressed by the game play, and the need for tactics, dodging, wall-crawling, crouching, and overall just staying alive.

It’s like, we’ve come so far since Unreal Tournament, Doom, and Duke Nukem 3D.

I’m gonna miss my shield belt, though.

Even though I officially left my constantly paid status in Anarchy Online a while back (I do renew the subscription for a month, every few months, simply because I can’t bear to let go of Araiya so easily), I still like to play online games.

I think I’m strange in my methodology of playing them. I seem to like to go online to usually play in an area by myself. I don’t like to share with anyone else that often, unless the benefit to myself is greater than playing alone (eg: teaming with someone to be able to deal greater damage to greater enemies, to gain extra experience, such as when fighting Hecklers in Anarchy Online’s Elysium region).

I think it’s because online content can change on a whim, and the trade marketing can fluctuate on a heartbeat. There’s almost something new every time I play some games online, and that keeps me playing.

Fallen Sword, for example, is a game I just started playing recently, thanks to a coworker who talked me into it.
I’m getting into it more and more as a substitute for Kingdom of Loathing, since I need to do something after my 200 turns burns off.
While Fallen Sword is fairly simple to play, it has enough of my interest to keep going to see what’s there. I’m finally getting some experience, and earning a few of their bonus currency, called “Fallen Sword Points“.
* Note: Both of the Fallen Sword links will earn me a few of their points if you were to sign up with the game.

I can’t neglect my old favorite, Kingdom of Loathing. I like the constant potshots at various things, and enjoy laughing at the pain of others. The entire game is dirty jokes and poking fun at various things, as well as some genuine humor.

I also like to play Nowhere Else and Beyond, but it’s a little rough on my laptop to play it, or anything else, lately. ;(

So, I’ve been playing NetHack on my USB stick lately, since I’m getting bored with the internet (just a little).

Unfortunately, the computers here at the Salvation Army keep me from visiting the NetHack (I don’t think it likes the word ‘hack’ in the domain name, really) homepage, so I can’t go there and find out if there’s a way to get NH to stop prepending the name of the computer I’m on to the save files. I have to go in and change the name of the save file to get NetHack to realize that I have a valid save that I’d like to continue playing with.

Perhaps one of you reading this would know the answer to my question?

[tags]NetHack, Save Game[/tags]

A random topic for a random post, or so it would seem.

I’ve spent my days at work playing Nowhere Else and Beyond, simply because I’m waiting on phone calls to come in. All I do when I’m not bothering with quests, is farm for ingots of raw material. The ingots I farm for get sold to someone for large chunks of in-game gold, which makes me happy as a clam.

I use that gold to buy better equipment and spells so that I can go longer in my quest for thousands upon thousands of ingots. By thousands and thousands, I do mean that I farmed up 2050+ Iron ingots alone yesterday. I don’t even remember the gold or platinum count, and I know that I need to switch dungeons to farm up any mythril. It’ll happen eventually. I’m even playing the mini-game that deals with running a mining rig, and I’ve got 5th or 6th place for everything, on average.

What saddens me is that I’m basically being paid to play games while waiting for phone calls. I sort of feel like I’m one of those Chinese Gold Farmers we joke about in most MMORPGs.

I actually hope for more phone calls today, and I hope they’re the short kind. A whole mess of 10 minute calls would do wonders for me. I mean, back to back to back to back 10 minute calls.

Lately, I’ve been playing a lot of Tower Defense, a little flash game based on something from Warcraft 3, as I understand.

The essence of it is, you simply build towers, and upgrade them to do more and more damage to your enemies as they come running through what I can describe easiest as a ‘gauntlet’ of sorts. While you’re haranguing your enemy with volley after volley of pain, they’re trying to capture your base.

There’s someone working on another variant of this genre, currently named Flash Circle TD. I’d like to give this one a try when I get a spare moment, since I’ve become enamored of the type of game. It’s short enough, plays fast, and I can easily start and finish with it in a single session.

Seeing the Nintendo Wii launch this past week made me want to play some older Nintendo games again.

When I was a kid, my uncle had left us his NES, with two or three milk crates FULL of games for safe keeping while he traveled with his wife to Germany. Between me and Mom (Dad never wanted to touch the thing), we spent all day playing things like Duck Hunt (Mom’s favorite), Super Mario Bros., and The Adventures of Lolo.

Moving forward, my love of puzzle games grew, as well as light gun shooters to a lesser extent.
Tetris became my gaming crack while I was in middle and high school, and I fell in love with it as well as many offshoots and variants. When I had my own Nintendo 64, Tetrisphere was perhaps one of my absolute all time favorite games.

Then, I got on the Internet, and what I knew about Tetris was blown away by one thing:
Tetrinet.

Imagine a frantic six-way competition, fighting with cascading blocks.
Add in specials that can be targeted at a specific person to give them a disadvantage, or an advantage.

For a while, I was in deep love with Tetrinet.

It was a simple to play, easy to learn online playable game that works well even on Dial-up, which is what I was on a long time ago.

I still love Tetris, and its offspring, but it’s not so competetive there now.

So few people remember my old friend. ;(

Okay. I still want that Free Wii.

With the new offers they have (ones that are actually better than the offers I got stuck with), there’s no reason that someone in the USA cannot sign up and complete just one measly offer for me.
They don’t even spam your inbox, so that’s not an issue.

If you were looking for an excuse to get a copy of your credit report, use my referral link, sign up there, and take the offer they have.
Quite seriously, I want that free Nintendo Wii. I want it bad, and I have to avoid spamming for it.

Hook me up, okay?

What have I done with some of my PayPerPost money?

I was speaking with a friend about the arthritic conditions in my hip and shoulders, and how they’re a bit more present now that the cold weather has begun. My friend suggested that I eat egg yolks, which contain sulfur, to help with the healing process on the joints, and watch out for too much calcium, which can create deposits.

I like eggs, but they give me terrible gas.

So, I find myself on Vuru, and finally giving it a spin.
I ordered myself a 28 day supply of vitamins for a tad over $20, and they contain the stuff I wanted, which is:
MSM (Methylsulfonylmethane, OptiMSM™, which is a sulfur compound that I mentioned)
Mixed Carotenoids Beta Carotene (For eye health, and an immune system boost going into the cold season)
Magnesium Citrate (digestion, and other benefits)
Copper (amino acid :))
Nettle leaves (joint health)
Potassium (muscle support — potassium helps to lower the chance of cramps).

I’ll have my supply in a couple of days, and I’ll let you know how that goes.

If you’re interested in Vuru, comment here. I’d love to be able to give you a referral to Vuru. I’d earn a $20 credit if you sign up and make a purchase. That would make it less expensive for me to maintain my health.

I’m still trying to earn that Free Nintendo Wii over at FreeWii.com (yes, those are referral links). I just need 10 people to complete their offers. If the completion flag doesn’t appear after a day, you should prod their support link and tell them about it.

I just want to have a Wii for Christmas. :/
Please help. Thanks.

Also, a fun gag for the holidays is this USB Vibrating Apple that I spotted on Instructables.com
That would be amusing to stick in someone’s hand.

Lik-Sang’s dead.

Incidentally, this hoses my attempts at earning a free Wii, unless the guys behind that site have alternate plans.

Don’t bother buying from Sony ever again. Any division. Any company that just bullshits their way like that to close a site like Lik-Sang is truly not worth my cash.

And I thought they were evil back in the days, with the release of the PS2. This just cements my dislike of Sony.
Read it, Digg the article. Cancel your PS2 Preorders. Get an XBox360 or a Wii, or just upgrade your PC.

I have finally come to the decision to, pretty much, quit my current MMORPG, Anarchy Online.

There are many reasons that I am leaving behind the one MMO that I actually can say I enjoyed for a while.
The major reason is budget constraints. I can’t keep forking over $36 every three months for a game that I’ve stopped playing that much. $36 is two tanks of gas for me.
The second reason is that I came to a realization, after reading another blog entry that Dan linked to. For some odd reason, I decided to go monetize the number of hours I spent in Rubi-Ka and the Shadowlands… and realized that if I had spent those play hours working another job…

At $9 an hour, I’d have $13,000 at my disposal, before taxes.
At $12, I’d have had $17,000 before taxes.

It’s strange that it takes the concept of monetizing time spent to get the idea that maybe I’m wasting my life doing something useless, instead on focusing on the important things. I need to focus more on getting a better job, or two of them, so that I can make sure it’s not ME who loses this house.
I need to earn the money to get insurance on the car I have — Haven’t been able to afford it just yet.
I need to earn enough to pay off the debts I owe, or have them all flushed down the toilet, whichever comes easier.
I need to earn enough, so I can go see a doctor, and finally have my health issues hacked, sorted, and patched with the latest bugfixes.
I need to have money, so I can go out, have social time with other people, and get out of the house more.

With the only MMO that I really gave a rat’s ass about out of the way, I have less incentive to sit down and waste my life playing a stupid game.

What bothered me is, I said I’d never get involved with an MMO, and largely, I was true to my word.
Ragnarok Online, I got bored with in a couple of months, even with private servers, GM abilities, and a Balmung to rape everything with.
Mu Online, I never really got into — I don’t think I ever leveled a character over 21.

World of Warcraft, I couldn’t stand, and it deserves a story to explain:
I was doing a lot of trash talking about WoW a long time ago, but I had never played it. I caught myself being a hypocrite, too, in telling someone that they can’t trash talk a game that they’ve never played. So, I stopped talking trash about WoW, and said, “Okay, I’m going to try that free trial of World of Warcraft. I won’t talk trash about your game until I am done with the trial.”

So, I downloaded 2.5 GB of Blizzard, unpacked and installed the monstrous game — 5 GB, installed, mind you — to give it a whirl. Then it wanted to patch. An hour later, we were good to go.
I started up the game, created a mutant cow thingy (she was cute, I’ll give you that), and tried the game.
I started to suffer from near-instant grinditis, but there was this odd, lingering effect that was happening at the same time. It was the Train Wreck effect. The game was horrible!, but there was that nagging, “Don’t stop now. See if it gets better with a few levels?” effect dragging its way through my brain.
I found myself burning about 25 hours into the trial, with that mutant cow girl thingy, and with a human, before I snapped, and uninstalled the game in disgust. I went back to AO, and said, “How the hell do people play that shit?” while doing stuff that was quite similar to what happens in WoW, but didn’t really mind it so much there.

Maybe it’s just the community that some of us get absorbed in. We make online friends here and there, but never really get to know each other outside of the game environs that well, either by instant messenger, by phone, by actual snail mail, or, God forbid, in person. Yet, many of us are willing to ignore our significant others, our families, our friends, just to sit down and collect three dimensional objects that “give us bonuses”.

I admit, I let myself get sucked into AO. I started enjoying it when people were willing to talk to me, and give me advice on how to become a better Martial Artist in game. I learned to raise Brawl, Martial Arts, Bio Met and Sensory Improvement, so I could hit harder, heal more, and generally dance on the shoulders of the gods themselves in the game. I was good at taking damage, despite my breed (Nanomage are suited for support roles, not direct action roles), and I was just as good at delivering damage. I actually topped out at nearly 11,000 Damage Per Minute, fully buffed, with a trader running an Umbral Wrangle for level 100+ characters.
I had First Tier Martial Artist Armor on, by level 100 on her.
I started joining regular teams and Kite teams, to get some heckler exp under her belt, since everyone was flying past her to level 200 and above, leaving fewer and fewer in teaming range to play with.

I had a Keeper, and had a Frosty on her before she hit level 30.
I had a Styg on her by 39, and it was only over-equipped until she hit 40.
I kept her under level 60, because I was going to burn creds to twink her out, so she could go kill Aztur the Immortal with very little outside help (She was able to solo Guardian of Tomorrow, a BIG HORKING ROBOT THING, with an Essence of Behemoth, and the best First Aid kits she could use, combined with her dual Heal Over Times).

I realized that this was all stupid, because I was proud of the wrong things.

I have friends who make more in two weeks than I make in two months.

I have something I cannot let go of. This house is almost all I have left of my mother, who gave her blood, her sweat, and her tears, and ultimately, her life, to make sure my aunt and I have somewhere decent to live. I don’t want to be the one who is responsible for this house going by the wayside.

I have my morals, and my standards, though. This is why I haven’t bombarded you all with PayPerPost entries that don’t fit here. This is why I’m heading out to drop off my resume with a couple of staffing services, so that hopefully, I can do some work that fits on my days off, and my mornings off from my day job.

I will succeed, and this is not an option.

MMORPGs be damned. I’ll stick to something I can pick up, spend a little time on, and then easily put it down without feeling left behind.

I want a Nintendo Wii.

There is a website that claims they’re offering them.
The offers look ’safe’ enough: Four of them are “Download a ringtone”, one is “Download a screensaver”, and one is “Apply for a credit card”.
I do recommend, however, reading and reading again on the ringtone offers — one of them is quite literally too costly ($6 a week?!) to be worth it.

My goal: To get 10 referrals.
Help me reach my goal?

So, I hear the puppy barking his head off a little earlier, and I was wondering just what the heck he was going at.
I get up, go to the door and ask, “Who is it?” with a hammer in my hand. With no answer, I look out the window, and see the FedEx guy driving off.

So, I pop out the door, and shout, “Hey!”, but it’s too late. He’s gone.

I look on the porch, and there’s a small box.

I see,

From: Draco
To: Xial

… and I end up giggling. lj:dracoemberwing:, a good, long time friend of mine, sent me his spare video card, so I can finally get away from the whole “DirectX enabled video card required” warnings of all my games.

I was running an old nVidia Riva TNT2 32 mb card.
Lump of ancient junk, really. Good for a machine that doesn’t need anything special, like a shell box or whatever, but that’s not what I needed.

Draco, thanks very muchly for the card. :3

I’m sitting here tonight, just listening to random music out of my playlist.
December 4th / Jay-Z + DJ Danger Mouse [The Grey Album] came up while I was working on my blog a little.

It reminded me of Second Life, when I used to enjoy the world. I used to sit there for hours, with my own music playing as I dicked around with a bunch of prims, moving things and trying to build. It reminded me of when I used to be a ‘dancer’ for a club in Second Life. Never did anything really, really dirty, but I would buy something new to change my look each week when I danced, to give people new, interesting things to look at.
I spent a lot of Linden Dollars when I was getting started in SL. Money that I’m trying to make back now, though it’s not working so well, when I can barely get into the world to even build new things.

99 Problems / Jay-Z + DJ Danger Mouse [The Grey Album] reminds me of when our club was griefed for the first time. Someone thought it’d be cute to drop push/particle bombs through our roof onto the dancers, since I was the first furry dancer in that club, I’d wager. Didn’t do much to me, though I learned to turn particles down after this. I was sitting on something, and already had learned how to ‘throw’ my camera very well. I had spotted the guy, and asked the boss if I could give the guy chase, and a taste of his own artillery.
I was the owner of a M72A2 LAW in-world. If you know your weapons… that should tell you what happened.

Dirt Off Your Shoulder / Jay-Z + DJ Danger Mouse [The Grey Album] reminds me of the time just before we closed. We had moved to a new sim, hoping to escape the lag that was generated by being near not only a telehub, but right on the edge of one sim, and cornerwise from Netherbeck, a simulator that had a GIGANTIC mall owned by Anshe Chung gracing its presence. Sadly, that didn’t quite work, and our club was being strangled by some of the bigger players in Second Life.

Eventually, our owner expressed the difficulty that comes with having to foot the bill for large sums of land, losing the Linden bonus for hosting events, and having very little income since no one was shopping as a result of the economy change. She downsized, selling her land off, and closing down the club. I can’t say I blame her at all, given that I am downsizing my own holdings in Second Life.

Moment of Clarity / Jay-Z + DJ Danger Mouse [The Grey Album] defines, in my eyes, how things must come to a close as you figure out what is going on.
From that point, I stopped drifting around. I used to be a heavy events attender, but now, there’s not that much to attend.
I may hold my land in Second Life for a while, unless there were someone I could trust to hold my $8 land tier + $9.95 per month premium fee, but it’s pretty solid: Second Life, with all its changes, really isn’t for me anymore. I don’t have that much I enjoy in-world, save for talking to the few friends I talked into joining when it was fun, when there were events beyond Tringo, Blood 21, and Best Ass contests. I miss things like Primtionary, mostly due to timing constraints — seems that Primtionary events are held when I’m at work to pay for this damn account — and upstarts trying to get something new into the world.

If I could handle being in-world (that is: If I could double my RAM to 2 * 512 MB PC-2100, and get a better Video Card than this Geforce 4 MX 4000 sometime soon, without spending a fortune) for more than 20 minutes, perhaps I would finally try acting on my ‘Iron Chef’ like instincts. When someone held an ‘Iron Chef’ event clone (aptly named Plywood Chef), there was a large turnout. But I have yet to see that event reappear in the events list, which is pretty sad.

I’d love to have my very own ‘Kitchen Stadium’, with three ‘Iron Chefs’ of my own in Second Life. I’d love having lavish outfits designed for me for the weekly show. I’d love to be able to schedule it, guaranteed, for the same time, same day.
Perhaps this music is speaking to me: Allure / Jay-Z + DJ Danger Mouse [The Grey Album].

Then again, that would be awfully expensive for even me to pull off.

A short list of things I wanted to see (more often):
Prim, Lose or Draw (ie: Primtionary (Pictionary; Win, Lose, or Draw)
Jeopardy (The boards seem to all be gone now, and no one holds events pushing ‘em, it seems)
Scavenger hunts (spanning several simulators - Perhaps asking each participant to snap a picture of various landmarks, or seek out a number of landmarks all over the world, and giving them 90 minutes to do so).
Skydiving events. Enough said.

But, I ramble onward.

As a few of you may remember, I started playing Anarchy Online when they opened up the game to free players, perhaps to get them addicted and sucked into the storyline enough to want to pay to play.

They’ve nearly worked their magic on me, but my budget says “Hell no”.

When you play the game, you start reading the descriptions. Sometimes, the descriptions just play with your noodle. For example, an attack I picked up for my Martial Artist today is named “Blessed With Thunder”. Here’s the flavor text added to it:

Just keep running, falling, till you reach the border. There you reach out, find out: Blessed with all the Thunder of the World.

Feels a bit poetic, and perhaps enigmatic… but it also feels pretty satisfying when you’ve smashed the face of your enemy with this attack.

Okay. So everyone’s been ranting and raving about Final Fantasy 7: Advent Children.

I have a bit of advice for the crowd that is very non-keen on Squaresoft (now Square-Enix):
Before you judge this movie, go and watch it as if you were under these conditions:

• You have never seen The Matrix.
• You enjoy high-action anime.
• Neither Dragon Ball Z, Matrix Reloaded, nor Matrix Revolutions ever existed. (Original Dragon Ball and Dragon Ball GT may exist.)
• You have at least a basic grasp on key points of the storyline presented in Final Fantasy VII, a Playstation only title by the company then known as Squaresoft.
• You ABSOLUTELY DO NOT go with:
  • Anyone that is a Square or Enix fanboi.
  • Someone who has seen the movie, in its entirety, at least twice.
  • Someone who goes into drooling fits at the mere mention of the trailer, never mind the movie itself.

You may find that your money to see this movie will be well spent.
Yes. I said money.
I do intend to actually visit a theatre, and watch this in English.
I do, also, hope that they don’t screw the everloving hell out of the Americans with shoddy voice acting.
No grating voices, please (And heh, RedXIII’s Japanese voice acting seemed to have a bit of a … homosexual? overtone to it).

Other than that… enjoyable flick.

Aren’t you amazed? Not a single definitive spoiler in my gloss-over, lah!

Seems the value of the Linden Dollar is dropping further and further.

However, IGE is here to make the day pretty funny.

<@Xial> Hey, one of you try to make sense of this:
<@Xial> source: ige.com, a site based around trading game money for cash, or one game’s money for another game
<@Xial> You give: Second Life Linden: L$5000 (about USD$17 or so)
<@Xial> You get: Anarchy Online Credits: 48,000,000
<@Xial> You give: Anarchy Online Credits: 100,000,000
<@Xial> You get: Second Life Linden: L$3000 (about USD$10 or so)
<@Xial> Does anyone see anything going on in this picture?
<@Xial> Notes: The minimum you can give is SLL$5000; AO CRED 100,000,000.

Is it just me, or am I just missing the key to this whole thing?
(Also of note: The page, when you test the exchange pool reads as “3K L$”, which I take as L$3000, as it’s the only thing that makes sense.)

If I weren’t juggling my bills right now, I’d consider the conversion, so I can actually afford things in AO.

* Second Life now has free basic signups for first time users. Tell your friends about it. Send them through my referral link.
* I’m seeking additional employment or methods to earn funds, as always.
* I am currently disabling my instant messenger access. If you need me, there’s always email.
* I only poll email twice an hour now.
* I’m taking a break from real life, so I can get some of my worries and angsts off my chest. I owe too many bills this month, and with gas prices constantly on the up trend, I really can’t afford all of them. Hence me asking you all to have friends sign up for SL using my referral link. 12 signups, once cashed out is USD$41 or so. I’ll be able to afford my land tier and my account for a few more months if you do this now now now now now.
* I don’t want to worry all of you, nor do I wish to burden you all. This is why all I’m asking of you is to get any of your friends who have yet to ever sign up and play SL to sign up, and sign in at least once. They can hate the game and ditch it thereafter, if they’d like, but it costs $0 to sign up if you’ve never signed up before. They even take PayPal accounts for verification now.

Right. I’m gonna go dork around with my sleep clock.

For those of you who have been holding out forever for whatever reason, be it that you don’t have a credit card, or didn’t want to spend USD$10 for it…
Second Life now has a FREE basic account signup.

If this is your absolute first account at Second Life, you get the account for free.
Else it’ll cost $9.95 (like normal) to get the account. It’s still honking awesome.
Sign up, get your friends to sign up — just pass out my links, please.

Start your Second Life on Orientation Island (http://snurl.com/sl4xial)
Start your Second Life at my place in Solway (http://snipurl.com/sl4ara)

斑鳩 is love.

I’ve been fighting with Flickr since yesterday, after someone in #secondlife suggested I use that to post to my WordPress powered blog from within SL itself.

I’ve been wanting to post images from SL, but with the lack of an easy way, I’ve not been doing it.

All Flickr is right now, is a fucking headache. If there’s anything else that will take an email, strip all HTML, discard all gifs, and rename the lone JPG to something more useful (datestamp, anyone?), then post it to WordPress… for fuck’s sake, PLEASE tell me about it. I’m just getting irritable over thinking about this.

Well, for the past several days, Second Life has been mostly down for people like me. Can’t get logged into the world, and there was a big ol’ explanation telling us why.
Part of it is growing pains, and part of it is inefficient scripts caused in part by a lack of a complete XML-RPC implementation in-world, making it that much harder for objects to talk to each other.

Here, let me quote the Linden Lab CEO:
While we are trying to figure out the specific cause of the problems, the next patch (1.6.5) has some changes that MAY provide some temporary help. The big change is an improvement in the efficiency of the way we check email for scripts. There are currently thousands of scripted objects in SL which are checking for email a total of several hundred times per second. This was something that we didn’t anticipate - content creators in SL are way overloading the system with these email checks, so we need to redesign for a better approach. Hopefully this will drop overall database login load, because profiling suggests that this call is where the database spends most of it’s time.

So, does that mean I’ll finally see them add a complete XML-RPC implementation in?

Thusly, during our SL downtime, I got in some time on PSO:BB during the open beta (stress test, mind you).
Things have changed a fair bit since my last trip down to Ragol. You actually have to do government missions in multiplayer mode to unlock the next portion of the game.

Ah, well. Enough on games for now, at least. Back to work.

So, here’s why I’ve been quiet as of late:

* Haven’t felt like blogging.
* I’ve been in and out of the hospital twice in the past week or so.
* Pneumonia.
* Viral Infection.
* Vertigo.
* I’ve been in and out of Second Life a fair bit.
* I’m expanding my house.
* I’m adding a gallery for Furball to my house.
* I made the ‘clamshell’ image holders, with lights, for her gallery.
* I need to ask her how many horizontal pictures does she have, so I can compensate with horizontal frames along walls.
* I need to re-wallpaper her gallery floor.
* I need to export lj:mousran:’s commission, which I’m still working on.
* I’ve been perusing F-Chan and 4-Chan.
* I’ve been trying to put together a resume.
* I want to apply with Stream (AOL Call Center, Tech Support), since they offer better money, and probably 20 times less physical grunt work.
* I want to apply with any local businesses that’re looking for someone geek enough to handle some of their troubles.
* I’ve been helping Gushi out some.
* I need to get to where I’m sitting and focused again.
* I’ve been chewing on logical web development.
* I have an idea for a resume generator. It’s very ajax in its implementation.
* I haven’t decided on whether I want to try to eke it out in PHP, or wait for a couple of Perl books and do it that way to show I’ve learned something.
* I’ve been avoiding everyone on IM.
* Sorry, guys, but until I get better, and get less scatterbrained, it’s hard for me to handle conversation in a timely manner.

That sorta sums up everything for now, I think.

Right now, I’m just going to bed.

Some of you may know of my addiction to Second Life.
I’ll go there, and play for hours on end, just wandering across the world, or hanging out with friends on my property.

Sometimes, I’ll visit one of the world’s sandboxes, and see what users have built there.
On occasion, I’ll see some truly amazing or awesome builds in the box.

I’m dropping in a request for feature or enhancement on the SL forums for a blogging client in-world, so that I could actually make entries about this stuff without exiting the client, and could paste a few lines of conversation with these amazing builders.

Anyhow, have a look at this image:

Varick Eisenberg (I hope I didn’t mutilate your name here!) was building this a few days ago in the sandbox, and I stopped to have a chat with him.
This dragon is 47.5 meters long, and would probably have been longer if his tail wasn’t coiled at the end. He even blinked, breathed smoke, and could speak, too. When I asked Varick how long he spent in building it, he simply told me that he finished it in two hours.

I’m sad that I didn’t take more pictures - A couple of aerial shots would have been cameralicious for showing, but I never snapped them.

This is why I spend so much time there…
Just to see fabulous things like this.

I have strained my MCL and may have a meniscal tear, says the knee specialist, who recommends that I have an MRI.

I just lost my 60 GB hard drive. I can no longer get this system to post with it connected.
That’s a lot of shit I’ve just lost.

My mother’s car is about to give up the ghost, and I can tell it.
It hardly accelerates, and stutters a LOT.

I’m going to go play SL.
I’m going to whore myself out for in-game money, and convert it to cash. Then maybe I can afford a replacement drive.
This just isn’t my month.

A note, though:
The commenting system has changed now.
You must now register (look up, or look down. register links at both ends), and be logged in to comment.
Just give me time to approve your first comment, then the rest won’t be moderated.

Okay. I know some of you post things.
Some of you might even post stuff because I’ve posted stuff.
Livejournal does not offer Pingbacks or Trackbacks to you.
I am. Meet the solitude.dk Pingback Client.
It’s simple to operate:
“Send a manual pingback” to target “whatever entry of mine that you are discussing” from source “whatever post of yours talks about my entry”.

I might have to look into writing my own pingback or trackback plugin of some sort, though.
Make it even easier for you: You click a link here, enter your URL, and submit. It’d be interesting, at least.

I’ve been working a lot lately. Working, sleeping when I get a chance, and being generically bored without my ‘cube and PSO. I’ve stopped playing my GBA, because all I have is Megaman Battle Network 2 and 3 White, and I’m sick of them.

I’ve just about completely given up on trying to get out with the local furs here. They don’t seem to understand a “Can we have a couple of meets during the week, instead of Saturday and Sunday only? I’m always working then.” So screw it, I don’t really care.

I’m going to start eating more often. I have a nasty habit of eating one or two times daily.
The guy at GNC said that this is why I have nearly no metabolism, and I should try eating 4 or 5 small meals a day to help raise it. I know he’s right, too.
I’m amazed that he didn’t try to sell me a miracle pill to fix it all.

I’m going back onto my Melatonin regiment, starting this evening. My sleep pattern is all shot to hell, and what little sleep I get leaves me even more tired than I was before sleeping.

I curse myself, because I can’t meet my own deadlines on a commission.

I’m going to go eat once — something not-McDonalds for once — and come back, to see what I can do on lj:mousran:-who-now-posts’ commish.

I’m going to stop in, and say “Hi. I have a sinus infection. I wish I could stay home today, but I really could use the hours. Then I can afford to mail lj:forsolei: moneys, and get my ‘cube and two ‘casts back. I miss my Dreamcasts.”

See you all later.

So, today, while I was at the library, grumbling about the stupid CD burning application they use (Roxio Easy Coaster Creator 5), I decided to check out the Chankast forums for a few tips.

I’m rather tired of being able to only play Ikaruga in that emulator, so I looked around. Sure enough, I found out that I just needed to add an ASPI layer so that the new CD plugin would actually WORK, and thus let me see if these improvements exist.

So, I grabbed the drivers, stuck ‘em on my USB stick (didn’t want to repeat the hell I had last night; thank dog for IsoBuster!!), and headed home. When I went to install, I remembered what the forums said:
Install the 4.7x drivers, reboot, then install the 4.6x ones.
I tried to do it the other way around, being that I’m still such a nerd about having the Latest Version of almost Everything installed (there are exceptions), but Adaptec’s older ASPI layer won’t install unless ASPI already exists.

Fine.

So, I install the 4.7x series, and reboot. I fire up Chankast, the 4.6’s forgotten for the moment, and find myself trying out several different games, all loading nicely on my PC. Sure, a few of them had issues (hiccups, graphical glitches, etc), but for the most part, I found that Chankast had quite literally kicked it up a notch.

This makes me quite happy, really. Now I can sit around and play SoulCalibur tonight, between working on my commission (which I dumped to a text file from its blogged position, and am working on adding a few hundred words per hour, rather than trying to go straight through. Helps the creative juices if I can mull them first :)).

(and yes, those are screen caps from SoulCalibur, running on my PC. Yeah, I forgot to turn off Z Write during Exhibition Mode, so that’s why the little squares around the sun flares.)

Anyhow, just gonna update here and update IsoBuster, and then head on home.

Later!

As some of you are aware, In a week, I’ll be moving to Minnesota to be with lj:forsolei:.
This means I have a bus trip rolling right up, in 8 days or so.

And I want this and this. I want to get it before I ship my computer off, but I don’t think it’ll be possible. All I want is to be able to tote a few games on the bus with me, since I’m going 1777 miles via Greyhound, and I’ve yet to check what the battery in this GBA SP is.
(If I find that I hate it, I’ll likely trade the thing in. I think the back just screws on to keep batteries from falling out at a drop…?)

So this is where I beg. Read the rest of this entry »

First off, educate yourself on Ikaruga, if you’ve never heard of it, much less played it.
Ikaruga is a shooter made by Treasure (probably to be Radiant Silvergun 2, as one of the opening screens in the game seems to hint at), that has a very interesting, and rather difficult play system.

I love this game, and that love was magnified by this site:
http://www.interrupt.ne.jp/~vtf/anime.html

Grab either of the _WH_ videos there for Chapter 5, and watch it.

Tell me what you think after seeing that.
I won’t describe it, because it’ll take away the purpose of this entry.

Oh, and for those of you who remember my other foray into the bulletstorm, my score has muchly improved.

Well, with the advent of Chankast, and the new PC my lj:forsolei: gave me, I decided to try my hand at Sega Dreamcast emulation.

The result is this:

Me, playing Ikaruga.
I haven’t tried much of anything with Chanka-Chanka-Chanka-Chankast, but Ikaruga *will* run, if you use the new_gfx version, and reduce the display size a bit, on my PC.

Now, to try other things. :3

News : Nintendo Launches Classic NES Games For GBA SP

The first in April Fool’s jokes?
I think so. This is my birthday we’re talking about here, folks, so I have a good feel for a joke on it.

Okay. I like shooting games quite a lot. There’s nothing quite as good as dodging a million bullets and blowing up the bosses.
So, when I heard that Warning Forever had been updated to version 1.01 (at the time, I only had 0.93 - I hadn’t checked for updates in a while), I had to go check it out.

The gameplay has been much improved, and made much more difficult at the same time.
Its premise is simple: Blow up the boss ship. Don’t get blown up.
There’s no defined number of ships. Instead, you have a timer that starts at 120 seconds. Each time you die, 20 seconds are sliced from your clock. Each time you defeat a boss, it adds an amount of time to your clock.

Though the game’s author is Japanese, almost every aspect of this game is in English. One could install and play this with almost no effort, and it’s a small download, for those of you on 56k.
Have a look: SOFTWARE - HIKOZA’N-CHI 9.

Okay. Here we are, headed into January. Blogathon’s only a few months down the line from there. I’m wondering how many of you who’re reading this are actually going to participate, and if those of you who I talked to about this a short while back are still up for the group effort.

I’m hoping for WordPress 1.0 to come out in the next month or so, so that I can install it in a separate directory, set it up nicely, and then make it pretty.
Now, given my affinity and love for animals, which of the charities should I support? If there’s a smaller charity, such as one animal shelter who is in want of money, I’d be glad to put my ball-and-chain on for that block of time to raise money.
Hell, I’m curious: would the folks at Blogathon allow me to run two entirely separate blogs, with completely different entries, to help two separate charities? If they would let me do that, it’d be one hell of a challenge, but I would gladly do my best at it.

However, my biggest difficulty lies at me finding a client that I actually like to use. Zempt is irritating, at best. w.bloggar irks me to hell and back.

I really like the web based form that WordPress provides. It’s clean, efficient, and works very damn well with Mozilla, including Mozilla Firebird.
Maybe someone would be nice enough to make an ultra-light version of Mozilla that can be minimized to my systray, and is locked to one specific set of URLs or something. …nah, too much effort.

Ah, well. Off to eBay with me - I need to leave feedback on a seller who sent me a Sega Genesis 1 RFU that I really needed. ^^ After that, I might go play my old Sega.
Speaking of Sega, I picked up a Gen1 + SegaCD + 32x for $20. :3
Is that a good deal or what? ^^