ravenworks

2006-08-15T09:53:00.000-07:00

My scrollwheel's starting to get a life of its own. Recommendations for a good brand of mouse? Life is amazing and full of surprises.

Well god damn, that cinches it :)

2006-08-15T09:23:00.000-07:00

Microsoft to release free PC/360 game development tools

and add a section to Live called the "community arcade"...

Brilliant, honestly. Tapping into the same bank of people who are developping flash games already... Man. This might push me to get a 360.. (then again, it sounds like you can play them on PC anyway, so maybe not ;P)

Anyway. I still think Microsoft are criminals for holding a monopoly with some of the most poorly-designed PC software available, but damn, they seem to be doing this 360 business right. (Time will tell if this software is actually remotely useful, of course, but big ups for the concept at least ;P)

After all that

2006-08-15T08:30:00.000-07:00

DDR = postp0wned :{ More Chris News.

Fatboy Slim Juggling

2006-08-15T04:06:00.000-07:00

= Pretty Swanky. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aEb3YknGUks

(also, cute juggling guy ;P)

I need to get back into Fatboy Slim. Also, did Sufjan Stevens ever release that Illinois B-Sides or what?

It's Here.

2006-08-14T10:32:00.000-07:00

o shi, arfenhouse 6 D:

gotta plug the goodness, it's been, what, three years? ;P oh also I'm in it tutorial 21.

Foint porm

2006-08-14T08:01:00.000-07:00

Carlie is fun! We have stuff in common. I bought We ♥ Katamari today :D The controls are frustrating but I'm sure I'll adapt. DDR is harder than I remember!

It is now my intention to sit around and roll up objects for several hours.

I now have a gig of RAM!

2006-08-10T18:59:00.000-07:00

Appreciable difference = NIL :D

X3 But I'm sure it'll start to be apparent once I actually do processor-intensive stuff, instead of just checking LJ ;P Holland America Alaska Cruises.

Star TREK

2006-08-08T22:08:00.000-07:00

Is there some RULE in Star Trek where you always have to accent the wrong word when you're using a technical term (fictional or otherwise)? "Now, access the power modulator and adjust the phase discriminator to scan for tachyon particles." Every single series...

2006-08-08T00:32:00.000-07:00

Oh man, Lemon Demon's new CD is out too. X3; I've gotta start keeping up with these things!

2006-08-07T22:52:00.000-07:00

Three tracks into Zero 7's "The Garden". So far: does NOT disappoint! :D

edit:
Hot damn. I think that might've actually been better than Simple Things...

ahgalghalghalg

2006-08-07T20:10:00.000-07:00

New Zero7 album!! And I only found out because I went to their site to look up lyrics X3;

2006-08-07T19:50:00.000-07:00

Three tracks into Zero 7's "The Garden". So far: does NOT disappoint! :D

This is me, and this is the Fourier Transformation. We're married.

2006-08-07T18:02:00.000-07:00

a.k.a, ever wanted to poke at your laptop screen but didn't want to deal with getting a new laptop?

http://www.plasmapong.com/
(found by ku_mi_ho)

I've seen some games with fancy graphics, and I've seen some games with fancy gameplay, but I'm impressed, in this one they genuinely complement each other... I think they've actually improved pong, and they did it with fluid dynamics, of all things ;) Give it a whirl, it's as fun as it is pretty... this thing needs to hit XBLA, seriously. And it's starting to seriously make me want to get into OpenGL... there must be some template that would let me get into it without having to dirty my hands in Windows application development.... maybe Python would have one? I keep hearing good things about Python...

Been cleaning up my room and stuff all day :) Feels good to have nothing pressing. On monday, I start working on the website of the guy who got me my job at MomentFactory... it should be a much shorter job, but still. I also gotta start looking into what school I'm going to go to... so yeah, for now, yay relaxing ;P

Aw man

2006-08-07T11:23:00.000-07:00

Hell. Yes. *rawk*

2006-08-06T22:10:00.000-07:00

2:00 PM - "Naw, the site's looking great, nothing I want you to change. Thanks for asking though."

5:55 PM - "OK, here's everything I need you to change..."

XP I ended up taking a bit of it home with me, because he had to lock up X3; Nearly done though :P Geez ^^;

On an unrelated note... I really think I need to make myself a shirt that says "Give Me My Sweater Back Or I'll Play The Guitar". My raw admiration for Lemon Demon continues unabated (although maybe a reference to one of his pre-lemon-demon works isn't the best way to show it? :P Still, it's his most shirtable lyric...) Thinking about it, though, what I REALLY need is a way to print masked white areas onto a t-shirt. The only process I can think of that does that is silkscreening, so like forget that -- but the iron-on transfers which are transparent where ink hasn't been applied could surely be adapted to a printer that contains white ink, couldn't it? Someone must have done this by now, mustn't they? Anyway!

My dad found a sale -- 512 MB DDR400 ram for $50. I pounced ;D Got one for my compy, and one for his (which we hadn't realised was trying to run Windows XP on 128 MEGS OF MEMORY, holycrap). Gonna install them tomorrowish :) Also tomorrowish: DDRing (the OTHER kind of DDR this time, not the ram ;P) with Bob's friend Carlie -- my friend now, I guess :) It's been so long since I've made an RL friend! Are.. are there papers I have to sign?

Best dog smile ever

2006-08-06T01:47:00.000-07:00

http://dashing.livejournal.com/1773309.html?mode=reply

Close runner-up

You are shitting me :D

2006-08-05T22:28:00.000-07:00

Symphony Of The Night, downloadable on Xbox Live Arcade

Hot gosh darned diggity damn XD They've said it's the PSX version, but I wonder if they'll add Maria and the extra areas?

64-bit processors; still annoying?

2006-08-05T16:16:00.000-07:00

My dad's got his eye on a laptop (same specs as mine, but with a smaller screen but a real video card, for $50 more...). THe only thing is, it's got AMD's 64-bit mobile processor... Are 64-bit processors still a pain, basically? Or have all the major programs got 64-bit versions by now? How much slower is it to run a 32-bit program on a 64-bit processor, exactly? (In particular: my dad wants to use it for recording his band, and recording over played-back tracks, so latency's a biggie.)

Oh, snap (I mean, hand clap)

2006-08-04T22:06:00.000-07:00

I dunno how many of you know The Cheat's KoT remix, or how many of the people who do also listen to Fantastic Plastic Machine, but.... yesterday, iTunes shuffle mode made the greatest pairing ever.

I couldn't have done this if I'd tried

THERE.

2006-08-04T19:40:00.000-07:00

WWW.MOMENTFACTORY.COM

Uuuuuuuuuugh, it's barely finished, half the links don't work, and the admin interface is bare HTML, but IT'S RUNNING. XP

Gonna work this weekend, getting some of the remaining pages working, maybe de-uglying the admin side of things if I have time.... but this is the meat and potatoes of what I've been working on for the past two months :P And trust me, it's more complex than it looks. ASYNCHRONOUS DATA DOWNLOAD IS HELL. X3; I'm actually tempted to rewrite the entire bloody engine this weekend if I can, because the way it is now it's just patch upon patch upon patch... I rewrote a large chunk of it in the past two hours, but I could tighten it way up if I ... oh who am I kidding, I'm so sick of this XP I'll be glad to come back to it when my boss gets back in a month, but jeez ;)

So yeah. Don't mind the bugs and the dead links. I've got a busy weekend ahead of me. ^ ^;

2006-08-04T08:22:00.000-07:00

I dreamt about birds last night! A budgie, a parrot, and an archaeopteryx :D In the opposite order, though (it was an anticlimactic dream ;P) I also dreamt that I was hanging out with the guys from 1up.com, who knew me from somewhere and tolerated my presence, but it was clearly one of those situations where my presence annoys people, until I start making them laugh, which diffuses the situation to a varying degree for everyone present... it's funny, because I've never dreamt about that situation before, though it has been on my mind. Where do I stand on the "cool" ladder that determines how easily people higher-up can tolerate me, how do I climb the ladder, and is it even worth climbing a ladder with no top... stuff like that. And just, why do I find myself in situations where I'm unable to stop being annoying, when I know that in other situations I'm perfectly capable of being 'cool' (in the relaxed sense, not the leather-jacket-and-cigarettes sense). Anyway, I'm late for work! Three days left :o

2006-08-03T19:55:00.000-07:00

Sssssssooooooo, ummm.... my boss is going to China on monday :P And he wants the site up before he leaves ;) It's practically ready, I've just been all busy squishing bugs and so forth instead of implementing the last few features, not realising that the deadline is THIS CLOSE (he'd mentionned it before, but a while ago, and it'd slipped my mind...). So yeah, he's said he'd rather have a complete but buggy site, so, so be it... if all goes well, I'll be able to show you all what it looks like tomorrow night :)There are some very unpleasant bugs in it if you go looking for them (which isn't hard, but they aren't too easy to stumble onto either). Still, I'm pleased with it :) Anyway. Crunch time this weekend (I might take Sat. and Sun. to fix bugs.)

Which highlights my other problem. Turns out that Ubisoft's university-level game development program isn't second-YEAR, it's second-CYCLE, i.e. it's for people who already have a Bachelor's in information technology. So now it's like, ahghalghalg. Do I:

a) Study 3(+?) years just to get into Ubisoft's official game programming program
b) Find a different game school (that one in Toronto looks wicked, if the ads are to be believed)
c) Try to get a game-development job based on my abilities and hope they don't mind my lack of a university degree (probably starting in a shitty debugging job and crawling my way up as I prove myself)?

or d), dance like a monkey.

If you chose D, you're correct :D No, seriously, I'm not sure what to do now. I genuinely don't think I could take three more years of school, especially doing crappy abstract theoretical stuff instead of getting my fangs into any actual computer programs... I hate to think that I'm giving up simply because it looks hard, but nose-to-the-grindstone without any output at the end of it has never been my specialty, ESPECIALLY now that I've tasted the outside world. If I could instead try a "techinical college" kind of approach, the kind of thing where 3 years of CEGEP might actually be overkill... that might be pretty cool. Hands-on approach and whatnot; strikes me as the kind of place I'd get contacts with smaller members of the industry, which is where I want to work anyways. I think (after this weekend?) I'll look into both local jobs, local 'technical' game schools, and maybe even some more remote ones. Who knows...

So yeah. Got some other stuff going on in my life, but I don't feel like typing about it, if only to prevent my LJ from becoming the big dramatic fountain of whine it was a couple weeks back. Might make a 'friends' post about it soon (you lucky guys! ;P) Been looking through Cave Story's source lately, though... it's fun, because at first it was intimidatingly huge (1.4 megs of code in 87 files), but now that I've looked through most of the major ones, I'm starting to get a picture of how the program works, it's starting to make sense :) Of course, this is mostly of intellectual interest since I'll be rewriting most of the program anyway, but I need to figure out how the original works in order to make sense of his NPC data. I think I'm almost there ;P

Enough blabbing! *dives into .cpp files like Scrooge McDuck into an enormous safe full of coinage*

2006-08-03T13:56:00.000-07:00

I finally figured out why all the Beatles MP3s I encode sound so shitty. It's all that hard-left/hard-right stuff they do with the pan values on each of the tracks :P Joint Stereo was never meant to handle stuff like that... Curse you, Beatles, for not thinking about compatability with technology that wouldn't be invented for another forty years! ;P

For the curious!

2006-08-02T23:30:00.000-07:00

I might as well cut this...

First, lemme say this, it is NOT a tunnel-style rail shooter, the game consists entirely of dogfights. If you've always dug the dogfights, then good for you, you'll be enjoying this one. Personally I liked the rail-shooter segments better, but that's just me.

The graphics are STUNNING for a DS game, I was really impressed, it's crazy to think they're getting all this out of 512k of texture memory. The music is fun, the sound effects are clear and pretty useful. The controls take getting used to of course, but are fine once you do. I'd have preferred if they'd mapped barrel roll etc. to the D-pad instead of making touch-screen buttons for them (where we're busy trying to steer), but again it's all stuff you can adjust to.

Sucky points: Y'know that whole interface you've seen in videos, where somebody draws paths for the ships on a map? That's for the RTS-style portion of the game; you're trying to simultaneously make it to a goal, AND keep enemy ships away from the Great Fox (which is apparently made of tinfoil). Everyone sits still until you draw a line, and then everyone moves at once, and when you intersect an enemy ship, you go into a dogfight (if you've played StarFox2 on SNES, you know what I'm talking about). This is a massive pain because it's really hard to intercept guys (since you have to predict their movement) until you've tried and failed a campaign a few times... and only one guy has to reach the Great Fox for the whole bloody campaign to fail. Worse still, all your dogfights are timed cumulatively -- you have a bank of roughly 200 seconds with which to clear ALL the dogfights of a given mission; there are +25sec bonus items, but you really have to know what you're doing to track them down without losing more time than you gain, especially since they seem to be randomly placed. It's also frustrating to spend 45 seconds of your time just trying to find the guys who you have to kill to clear the dogfight -- you have a radar, but *every* enemy in the fight is on it, including all the turrets, and drones, so it's just a wild goose chase trying to find your actual quarry -- which I wouldn't mind, if I hadn't lost the campaign so many times from getting to the final dogfight with, like, five seconds on the clock. Anyway, I'd say these things are a pain, but not a game-ruining pain.

Last but not least, there's of course the Wifi, which would justify the purchase of the cartridge even IF the single-player's shortcomings ruin it for you (which they well might). It's just SF64-style dogfighting awesomeness in your pocket. Nothing negative to say at all, except that Mario Kart DS has spoiled me, and now I want icons in every game ;P (All this gives you is a name.)

So, yes. Very fun single-player when it's fun -- and WiFi seems to be everything you could've hoped for. :) But will I be getting it? NO! :D Because man does this game stress me out X3; I'm ditching the rom right now, I'm all tense just from playing as long as I did. XP That's just me, though ;P If you're new to this blog, videogames stress me the fuck out, especially if they're at all twitchy... there can be something a bit hypnotic about a well-paced shooter-on-rails, but something that's all dogfights, with the turning and the firing and the near misses; it's well-made but it's just not for me. I highly recommend it to sane people, though ;P

"Computer Gaming World"

2006-08-02T23:00:00.000-07:00

Kindof an antiquated name, right? 'Computer' instead of PC, 'World' to describe a particular 'scene'... Still, kinda catchy, they used a nice active verb in it.... what am I getting at, you ask?

Microsoft recently bought the magazine. And, in their wisdom, they Microsofted the product. It's now called "GAMES FOR WINDOWS".

Games For Windows. That sounds like the name of a magazine that they give out free on airplanes, seriously X3 Oi. I'd almost contemplate that Microsoft's names for things are so shockingly bland that they can only be part of some orwellian attempt to limit the minds of their user base by limiting their vocabulary and so forth.. ;P

o snape

2006-08-02T21:02:00.000-07:00

Look who just downloaded what ROM :-*

Impressions coming soon :D

It's not the heat

2006-08-02T20:39:00.000-07:00

Could this insane humidity be hurting my lappy? I haven't noticed any problems, but it just occured to me as I sit here boiling in my own juices that maybe I should leave my laptop at home in my airconditionned house until this crazy weather passes... thoughts?

2006-08-02T15:28:00.000-07:00

Had a dream last night that I got so proficient in PHP, I acquired the ability to break into PHP execution at any time, in the real world. Everything would freeze, and I could do whatever calculations I want, and then I could go back to real-time just by closing the tag. I guess that's like how Yomiko learned to stop bullets with paper just by reading often enough. Actually, the best part is, it wasn't actually me who learned it in the dream; it was Osaka, and she taught Chiyo how to do it, and the two of them used their powers to do things like sitting on the bus and then suddenly they'd be wearing hats, just to weird people out. X3

Illustration:

8D
:)

...

...

(|8D
d:)

I guess it's a "had to be there" thing but it was pretty cute that causing subtle eerie double-takes is what Osaka would use an ability that powerful for :P This beats last night's dream about Google Earth getting a scripting API hands-down ;P

2006-08-01T21:59:00.000-07:00

HAH, go ~~UPCs~~UPSes, I'm posting this even though the power went out 30 seconds ago ;P

Wooo, giant stooooorms ;P

2006-08-01T21:37:00.000-07:00

HAH, go UPCs, I'm posting this even though the power went out 30 seconds ago ;P

Wooo, giant stooooorms ;P

IT IS TOO HOT TO WORK

2006-08-01T12:55:00.000-07:00

http://www.theweathernetwork.com/weather/cities/can/pages/CAQC0363.htm

THAT IS ALL

uuugh XP

So just incase you were curious, which you weren't :D

2006-07-31T00:20:00.000-07:00

I can't just spend all that time installing crap in my room and not upload pictures ;P

BEFORE:

NOW:

Woooooo :P

Got some poster rearranging to do, of course. But at least my plushes can live near my computer now ;P

Feels a bit weird putting all this effort into further installing myself into this room when a while ago I was just trying to get out... I really doubt I'm going anywhere for a while though, for better or worse. :/ Anyway, whatev, woo shelfspace ;P

Oh, and one last thing; this is just weird :P

This is a picture of the underside of my subwoofer :P I'd like to point out that those two 'misplaced' rubber stoppers are still stuck firmly on. I guess the vibrations just gradually propelled them across the surface, without moving fast enough to ever make them actually detach? Anyway, weird :P Man I'm tired. XP

One more thing

2006-07-30T23:26:00.000-07:00

I found a bunch of ancient Gameboy manuals in a drawer while I was cleaning. XP Anyone know any good manual scan sites?

Krystal and the Enormous Forehead

2006-07-30T21:31:00.000-07:00

http://www.starfoxcommand.com/_dloads/stfx_wp1_1280.jpg

Woo, character art. :D They're actually looking pretty good now... unlike previously... man I wish there was an easy way to search earlier posts :P More importantly the gameplay doesn't look half-bad either :) THe turning seems a bit lackluster, but that could easily be attributed to the halfwit who's playing in that video.. ;P I'm looking forward to this now :D

Supposedly it's by the guys who made the ORIGINAL Starfox? Can anyone confirm this?

(all this stuff stolened from http://www.ds-x2.com/ btw)

So yeah, just cleaning my room and so forth; got the new desk installed, and it gives me tons of shelf space which is kewl :) UNfortunately, it seems to have completely changed the acoustics of my room; my speakers sound like crap now. I'm toying with the EQ as best I can, but it's not helping... weirdy! Anyway, pics soon. CLEANING IS BORING

edit: oh, man, it makes a titanic difference whether your speakers are at or below ear level x_x So much to learn...

Hot damn :D

2006-07-30T17:58:00.000-07:00

http://www.apple.com/trailers/wb/teenagemutantninjaturtles/

Call me overly optimistic, but... this does not look half bad :)

Seriously, how new is this trailer?

2006-07-30T12:38:00.000-07:00

Man. Today just... I barely remember it. It was just a huge, sweaty, muggy haze, I think my brain shut down. Anyway, in the few hours of lucidity I had before my inner monologue became slurred, I wrote this post :P

----------------

OK, time to remember everything I wanted to write down on my way stumbling around the house this morning. Seriously, where the hell are brain-top computers, sitting down and opening a piece of plastic is too much effort D:

I figured out how to have all my comics stored up on the bus, for one thing; I open them in tabs, let them all load, then shut my lappy and put it in my bag X3; Duuuuuh. The most obvious answers are always the slowest to come, eh? ;)

I was sure there was more. XP Maybe it's significant that I can't remember any of it :P

Ah, right :x I'm starting to think I shouldn't have posted publically about the whole Play Symphony thing. Now when I think about it, it's like "hey, everyone's watching you now! Don't disappoint them, don't screw it up!" It's mainly just when I think about calling off the trip -- which might not be a bad idea, because here's this whole convoluted covert thing to allow me to stay alone in a strange city and try and find my way to a concert, and take some eight-hour bus ride both ways... do I really want to be in the same building as Nobuo Uematsu that badly..? Obviously being in the same building as Jonathan would be nice too.. :P But it might be better to just wait until we aren't just trying to spend time together in the spare fifteen minutes his parents aren't expecting him home and stuff x_x I know I'm not going to get anywhere wimping out of stuff, but this is a long trip for an awkward stay in a huge city for a concert I'd just LIKE to see, and a chance to see someone I've been wanting to see again, but for like fifteen minutes. I dunno. I know I'm passing up the experience of a lifetime; I just don't know whether it's the good kind, or the stressful harrowing and disappointing kind. Man, I REALLY don't need to be unloading this all over everyone else. What I wouldn't give to know how ordinary people do that thing they do... y'know.. living without taking a committee consultation on everything? :P

I'm always apologizing for being such a milquetoast and so indecisive... maybe if I just accepted it instead, I'd be better-off; if I just said "hey world, I'm a wimp, quit trying to make me act otherwise", then I could come to terms with it and start facing the causes (instead of just trying to push my way through it, which has met with notable but only partial success). I dunno, it took me a long time to get as 'together' as I am (seriously, you should've seen me before) and I dunno if it would be a good idea to go back on all that just because I think I might have done it wrong?

I wonder what's happened lately to make me so moody. I haven't been this bad my whole life, have I? Just these past couple of months or so.. I guess I'm feeling guilty for not going back to school in the fall. I think my parents are like "I can't believe Andrew's going to be the one who DOESN'T go to university", but how long have I been employable-but-stuck-in-school for? Maybe I should just get out and work for a while. If I find out I'd rather have some more math or advanced programming under my belt, then I can take some university courses, but man, I wanna take my chances before my chances pass me by. But, as evidenced by feeling sorry for asking the talking man in the the theater to please keep quiet, even being certain of my decision doesn't make me feel any better about it if I know it's not what someone else wanted. (There's a whole subset of problems along those lines in my life right now.) The really frustrating thing is how I'm going through a bunch of changes right now, and I simply don't know whether my mood is a result of not liking my new conditions, or just not liking that they've changed! I'm basically electing to go with the theory that my moodiness will pass as I get used to things... let's hope that's the case, and that I'm not just getting myself used to my life being a way I don't like ;P

Anyway, I think this post's been as useful as it can be. Time to roll today's problems under tomorrow's carpet, and spend a while pretending to be productive. :P