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Jan. 6th, 2010 @ 09:23 pm I really thought I'd watched more anime than that.
Happy birthday to [info]jesse_dylan, as promised.

Today's Bridge: Ken and I were partners again, and again, he seemed to fear that he'd make a mistake, but from what I saw (having declared about half of the hands), the only mistake he made was failing to correct a 3H contract to 3S when I'd bid spades first and his holdings were A-x-x of spades and J-x-x of hearts. However, it worked out for the best, because my heart honors were much better, and I think the hearts were a better trump suit. There was a hand where we ended in 4H after Ken had opened 3C... he had six clubs to the A-K-10 and I had the doubleton Q-J, so I felt comfortable bidding my five-card heart suit with only around 13 points. He happened to have four-card support for me and raised to game, and the opponents failed to take their two diamond tricks before I could set up the clubs. Ken had a singleton spade opposite my four to the ace, and I ruffed to the board to cash the clubs and take all 13 tricks. We pretty much dominated the rubber otherwise as well... the opponents got 80 in two hands before our first game. Dan eventually got stuck in a 3D contract with four losers, but we set up a heart ruff that finished their chances.

Today's Work: For me, invention is pretty much 99% inspiration and 6% forgetting completely about what I'm doing while I wait for inspiration. I know that's 105%, but that's how hard I work at what I do. I'm awesome. And there's a winter storm warning tomorrow for the areas south of the city, through which I need to drive to get to work. Fortunately, I don't have to go there tomorrow. I've got a meeting here in town. Waffo!

I think I've got enough time left to work on a meme that [info]sugarspicykitty posted quite a while ago, purporting to describe how much of an obsessive anime viewer I am. I think we all know what the result will be, but to add a bit of interest, I'm going to change things up just a bit by adding my own directions. Also, since I read so much manga, it'll look more impressive if I mark down which series I've read, but haven't watched. I'll still stick to just anime that I've watched for the totals, because to do anything else would be cheating. If you want to know how my reading habits stack up, count for yourself, slackers. In addition, I'm going to try to pick at least one series that I've watched and one that I've read from each genre, but again, owing to the significantly higher number of series that I've read than watched, I reserve the right to name two series that I've read instead. This is a condition I'm putting on myself, so it can be whatever I want.

( Meme about watching anime that I'm doing instead of actually watching any anime. )
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[info]nidoking
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Jan. 6th, 2010 @ 03:45 pm Who?
Current Location: Work
Current Mood: amused
Current Music: Doctor Who theme
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According to The Doctor Who News Page, this question appeared on Jeopardy! just three days after David Tennant's Doctor regenerated on BBC America:


(Image stolen from The Doctor Who News Page)

Nice to see they're keeping up-to-date on their British science fiction, especially since that particular episode had to have been taped weeks (or months) in advance!
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[info]kurohawk
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Jan. 5th, 2010 @ 11:14 pm Meeting new people is always good
Today's Bridge: ( Introducing one of the new people )

Today's Work: I had occasion to think about programming, talk about our system software, and even bring up some things that happened during a test. It's almost like I'm working on software again. Nearly makes up for all the documentation. Nearly.

Then I spent the evening working on the next King's Quest 7 bonus video. Watched a few more episodes of 30 Rock, though. That's a good show.
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[info]nidoking
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Jan. 5th, 2010 @ 11:28 am The not-so-fun part of my job...
Current Location: Work
Current Mood: bored
Current Music: Sound from the trailer for the new Doctor Who series
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I spent this morning working on end-of-month and end-of-year paperwork for the library. Not the most fun job in the world, but at least it's over. And I even got a jump on this year by getting the spreadsheets for this year's computer use ready to go! (Admittedly it involved changing the headers and clearing the data before saving the existing one under a new name, but still......)
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[info]kurohawk
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Jan. 4th, 2010 @ 11:17 pm "Still not ginger..."
Current Location: Home
Current Mood: impressed
Current Music: The music from the above trailer ^_^;;
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And so the new Doctor begins. I'm eagerly looking forward to spring, especially after David Tennant's finale.

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[info]kurohawk
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Jan. 4th, 2010 @ 11:18 pm Was this really what my life used to be like?
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Today's Bridge: It was not our day by far. The opponents underbid two slams (one of them a putaway grand slam), bid haphazardly in two other hands (and Kelly screwed up the defense in one, ruffing a top card from me that might well have been the setting trick), and I don't even remember what happened in the last hand, but we managed one three-trick set early on, and that was it.

Today's Work: I'm pretty much caught up now, after a day of trying to figure out what happened in my absence. I know what's going on now. And the Gatorade machine was unlocked... full of drinks, unable to vend. I forgot how much I missed that piece of crap.

Ignoring the usual boredom factor of my average work days (in terms of not having anything worth writing about, not that the days are boring... but who wants to read about me watching a bunch of videos?), someone pointed me to the ABC show "Conveyor Belt of Love". I didn't have anyone to ask at the time, but... are women really interested in this "window shopping" approach to finding a man to date? Watching men slide by on a belt, asking a few questions, and calling yea or nay with the option of trading up if a better man comes along? Part of me wants to say that it's even more superficial than "Singled Out", but really, all Singled Out ever did was remove appearance from the equation. It's hard to call that superficial... aside from the practice of collecting a hundred desperate singles of each gender and putting them through Singled Out. With Jenny McCarthy. Okay, so at that age, I was watching her more than the rest of the show. Heck, at that age, I was thinking it would be cool to be on that show, in either position, just in the hope of ending up with an actual date with a girl I had something in common with. Now I know better. Still, I definitely don't want to be on a conveyor belt. Watching the girls go by and choosing one...? Well, maybe. But probably not. She already found a date.
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[info]nidoking
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Jan. 3rd, 2010 @ 10:21 pm At least the vacation is officially over
Wait... that's not good. Let's try that again.

At least Curt brought me more Christmas presents. Chris and Jade got me The Office (the original British series), Loveless, and Up on Blu-Ray, as well as a bag of stocking-stuffer candy and a Best Buy gift card in an amount I have yet to determine. Awesome. I can only hope they enjoyed their gifts as much. Somehow, I managed to get commentary done for a King's Quest 7 bonus video, but I spent a good portion of the day watching more Majora's Mask and taking advantage of the last day of Steam sales to get the complete Telltale Games pack and Left 4 Dead 2. I may someday figure out what's going on in that game. I like the new gameplay style, particularly the various new panic events I've seen, but there's stuff everywhere... except where I'm shooting. It's going to take a lot of practice, but I'll probably be really good at the first one by the time I can play the second one.
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Jan. 2nd, 2010 @ 11:35 pm At least I made an entry
Today's Manga: Samurai Harem 3, Ninja Girls 2, Inu-Yasha 44, Negima Neo 4, Only One Wish (rather hard to pass that one up), and Itazura na Kiss 1, which sounds interesting enough. I even made the trip to Greenwood, despite one of those horrific bouts of coughing starting up just as I was leaving, and traded my defective copy of Thief for Samurai Warriors 2: Extreme Legends, which doesn't look that interesting to me, but was the best game I could find for about the same price as the one I traded in. I didn't find any manga that I wanted, though, so I stopped at the board game kiosk to buy a new Rubik's Cube (my old one is only holding together because it's meant to come apart, and it gets stuck all the time) and a copy of the board game version of Munchkin, which seems really involved but will probably be fun if I can ever find people to play it with. Other than that, I did most of the editing for a King's Quest 7 video (I want to speed up some parts and possibly add different music, because the raw video is about 45 minutes long - lots of good stuff, though), and watched a lot of the Majora's Mask LP, which is incredibly amusing mainly because I know what those guys are doing nowadays, LP-wise, and this is a huge contrast in both quality and skill. Also, the gimmicks are good. No horses dancing to Freebird along with drinking birds and then shooting themselves.

Only one more day left before I have to go back to work, and it's shaping up to be a pretty typical Sunday except that Curt won't be around. That's not entirely atypical, anymore.
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[info]nidoking
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Jan. 1st, 2010 @ 07:42 pm Nothing is true; Everything is permitted.
For Xmas, my brother gave me a copy of Assassin's Creed II for the XBox 360. I had originally been intending to pick it up for the PC, but the 360 is a fine place for a platformer. Luckily, my brother had brought his 360 home from college, so I began to monopolize it to play through the game. I ended up finishing it about 5 days later.

The game mostly plays quite similarly to the previous. Gameplay wise, there's been little done to alter the mechanics, though they do feel more polished and combat seems less like countering is the only option (though it mostly still is). They've also severely deemphasized the framing device story. Although you do begin the game in the "real world", unlike the former, you cannot exit to the "animus world" at will, nor are you kicked back into the "real world" whenever you complete a chapter. Overall, I think this makes the actual game flow better.

The game added a new "money" dynamic that had a relatively large impact on gameplay. In the early game, money is mostly obtained via pickpocketing, completing missions, or finding chests. About a third of the way through the game, however, you gain access to a "Stronghold". This should more accurately be called a city in your charge. You're given the ability to remodel various buildings in the city, open new establishments and otherwise make the place better. Doing so will cause the city to periodically produce money. Unfortunately, the amount of money that it generates quickly becomes ridiculous. I was able to completely finish the non-plot-related upgrades about half-way through the game. Collectively, they caused me to earn about 15,000 florins every 20 minutes. Until that point, the most expensive item that I'd seen was about 12,000 florins. The most expensive item in the entire game is only about 50,000 florins. As you can see, money is of little need once a certain point is reached.

I ended up deciding that I would get a perfect gamer score for the game. This was relatively easy due to the fact that there were only a few things that I wouldn't have gotten otherwise due to the nature of their achievement choices. Honestly, the most annoying part was probably the collecting of the 100 flowers. They aren't marked on any in-game map, but Games Radar politely provided a map of them all.

Overall, I'd say that if you liked the first Assassin's Creed, you'll probably also like the sequel. It generally improves on most everything about the first while removing most of the largest annoyances (such as repeated, extended travel over long distances). Of course, we do have another Halo 2 situation wherein there is quite obviously going to be a sequel and thus ends without resolution.

Published by XPostGTK+
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[info]guyblade
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Jan. 1st, 2010 @ 09:31 pm Video editing takes time
I spent pretty much my whole afternoon finalizing the game footage for some videos. It wasn't too difficult, but there's a lot of footage. I had to convert all of the music files, preview each clip I had to see whether I wanted to keep it, extract the sound, merge the music with the sound, then merge the complete sound clip with the video. Other than chopping out a few parts of the videos that I knew I didn't want, I didn't do any of the actual editing yet, but when I do that, it'll just be a matter of putting the clips in order and transcoding them, assigning file names that have consecutive numbers so I can finalize them in a single, automated step. Possibly with additional edits, but that'll just be trimming. After that, I add my commentary, and I'm done.

Most of the rest of the day was watching the Majora's Mask LP. Fun stuff. I did even less than normal, but what did you expect? Today was a holiday.
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Jan. 1st, 2010 @ 08:01 pm The Absolute Sum of All Evil: 001
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Originally published at Ludus Novus. Please leave any comments there.

I’ve always meant to put this online, and now I finally will. The Absolute Sum of All Evil is a weekly comic I did for my college newspaper, the Rose Thorn. It features Cthulhu, the Lovecraftian elder god, and his escapades at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology as a Computer Science major. I’ll be publishing these weekly in the order they were originally drawn.

A warning here: there are a lot of Rose in-jokes in these comics. I’ll try and explain them as they come up, but I have no guarantees that these strips will be funny to a general audience.

Read the rest of this entry »

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[info]feveredwritings
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Jan. 1st, 2010 @ 12:08 am (no subject)
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The Persona 4 comic is still in the works, but I figured today would be a good day for an intermission. Spoiler warning for Persona 3!

s-so there's this guy in a scarf at the door and i don't think he's going to go away

( maybe you should find out what he wants )
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Dec. 31st, 2009 @ 09:30 pm Procrastination Released
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Originally published at Ludus Novus. Please leave any comments there.

My final game of the year is done, and boy did I delay it to the last minute. “Procrastination” is an abstract experimental game, my attempt to communicate purely through game mechanics. It’s my tribute to Rod Humble, if you must.

Play “Procrastination” at Ludus Novus.

Astute fans will notice that I have only released eleven games this year, despite my resolution to do a game a month. Fear not; the twelfth game is done, but “Babies Dream of Dead Worlds” will wait until it is sponsored before it gets released. Does it still count? Sure it does. I set the rules for this thing.

My other work-in-progress, the procedurally generated metroidvania with the working title of “Millions of Space Stations,” will be released in early 2010.

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Dec. 31st, 2009 @ 08:56 pm At least I beat King's Quest 7
Not that there was much I could do to be productive, but I did most of it. Still no Greenwood trip, but I unpacked my suitcase and tried out the new DS games. They're fun so far, although playing 358/2 Days is making me want to go back and play the PS2 Kingdom Hearts games again. I spent most of the rest of the day getting the rest of my footage for King's Quest 7, and a bit beating the Shift games again, mainly as a buildup to beating 4, which I'd never gotten very far in before. I beat it this time, though, and got the good ending without running out of time even once.

Curt and I even did the traditional Chinese dinner, buffet style. And with that, Happy New Year, everyone. Here's hoping 2010 is another year.
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[info]nidoking
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Dec. 31st, 2009 @ 01:45 pm Back Home
So, I've been in Indiana for about a week now. I flew out on Xmas Eve and arrived later that day without any particular incident. Since then, I've mostly been relaxing and playing video games. I will talk about those games in the coming days, but first I would like to talk about the game that I finished most recently before leaving: Viva Piñata.

Viva Piñata is an open-ended game. I would compare it most readily to Harvest Moon or Animal Crossing. In the game, you are given a plot of land which has grown fallow and are instructed to make a beautiful garden capable of attracting all manner of piñatas. To that end, you can plant various forms of flora, you can dig lakes, and other such things. Once you've managed to attract some piñatas to your garden, more options open up to you. You can "romance" piñatas. Romancing forces a small minigame, after which the piñatas go to their racially designated house and perform the "romance dance" which in turn leads to the delivery of a piñata egg by the large woman wearing a stork hat. Also, some piñatas can only be attracted by having other kinds of piñatas in your garden for them to eat. For instance, the Lickatoad will only join your garden if you have a Taffly and it kills and eats it. This sort of progression continues on and up to even the very high level piñatas.

Since the game is open ended without any real victory condition, I had to choose my own. There were two obvious answers. First option: get to level 108. Level 108 would mean doing every possible thing in the game which provides experience. Second option: get all of the achievements in the game. I ended up choosing the second option.

Ultimately, I would say that the game is quite good at being what it is. It is an open-ended time-waster that manages to have a very good sense of humor. It is also old enough that the game can routinely be found for next to nothing. I believe I picked it up for approximately $15 from Newegg several months ago and would expect it to be similarly priced or lower elsewhere.

Published by XPostGTK+
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Dec. 30th, 2009 @ 11:31 pm A Post?
Current Location: apartment
Current Music: psy trance
Happy New Year all!
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[info]blitzcon
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Dec. 30th, 2009 @ 11:31 pm At least I finished LOOM
I didn't make it to Greenwood today, which is a good thing, because there were a couple of deliveries that it's fortunate I was home for. It snowed just a bit this evening, but if the roads look good tomorrow, I might make the trip. Or I can save it for Saturday. I've finally started working on a King's Quest 7 video, and I should keep up that momentum. I also tested the new Wii games, and they both seem to work - Rygar locked up the system the first few times, but I think that's because it was downloading messages at the same time. After giving Klonoa a run, it worked just fine.

I should probably have done SOMETHING productive, but... no. Just no. I haven't even unpacked my suitcase yet. Good chore for Friday, since my new DS games are in there. I need to play those.
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Dec. 30th, 2009 @ 12:42 am 12/30/09
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At what point does customer service become a joke? It only took 1 1/2 hours on hold to get ahold of somebody at Microsoft, and that was after my first try and getting disconnected after 1 1/4 hours, calling back and getting a recording that just hung up on you, and sending an e-mail that got a "We will get back to you in a week or two" response. I am glad that the server that is down is just a dev server and not anythin production, because even after talking to them, I still hve to wait 24 to 48 hours for the information I need. Any type of SLA would be down the drain there. And how many potential days of business? WTF?

Is it bad when the Muzak on hold has a beat that subtly reminds one of a pulse and inspires the emotion of having your hands wrapped around somebody's neck feling I throbbing as you choke them?
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Dec. 30th, 2009 @ 12:22 am At least I made some progress in Phoenix Wright
The first real, full, official day of vacation that felt like part of the vacation and not full of responsibility... so, predictably, it didn't seem like I got much done. I did test most of my new used games - one of the ones I got at 3D Games doesn't work, but I believe they had another copy of it, so I'll call tomorrow to make sure, then hopefully be able to run up to Greenwood to make the trade. Worst case, I'm stuck with a useless game, but it was free anyway, more or less. I've got lots of other new games to make up for it. Katamari Forever offers considerably more variety than I expected, Demon's Souls offers... some of the most annoying deaths in the history of gaming, and Too Human runs. I still need to test the Wii games, but my controller needed charging, so I watched more 30 Rock and logged into Steam to check out the holiday deals. Definitely some primo stuff... I got Braid, Mr. Robot, and four classic Lucasarts games (only one of which I still have on disc... I've probably run The Dig under DOSBox before, but I also got a talkie version of LOOM, a replacement for my lost copy of Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade... which is probably crap, but I got all four for the price of the cheapest one of them), for seven dollars. TOTAL. I spent most of the rest of the evening playing Braid, although I eventually stopped for dinner around 11. Ish.

I wasn't completely unproductive... I called the insurance company to have the bank removed as a lienholder from my auto insurance. And probably did some more unpacking and cleaning up. Also, it's way past bedtime.
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Dec. 29th, 2009 @ 12:59 am Holidaze
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Christmas was Christmas. Went back to the parents and had a very late breakfast on Christmas Eve day. At least this year there was no drama about bringing anybody home because I don't really have somebody. Potential, but stilll trying t get a feel for things. It's nice to get to se everybody and always, good food, but just seems like something is missing.

By the time Saturday was rolling along, I just felt like I wanted to be back home in Madison.

Just been in an odd mood the last couple days. The gut feeling unhappy this morning and a damn alergic reaction that has me itching like crazy does not help much, either.
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