Baud Attitude

What’s the opposite of a “Sophomore Slump”?

Posted on January 14, 2019 by baudattitude

Yeah. Let’s get one thing out of the way right up front. Uncharted 2: Among Thieves commits the same unforgivable sin as its predecessor, in that it has multiple waterfalls with absolutely nothing cool hidden behind them. I checked. Not all of them, mind you – there are a lot of waterfalls! – but enough of them to be profoundly disappointed. There was even one waterfall that had an enticing little tunnel that led behind it and… wound up in a dead end. What’s even the point, really?

So there’s no way that this game could ever get a ten out of ten in my book.

Still, it’s an amazing improvement over the first game, and I’m glad that I’ve finally gotten around to playing it, even if it did take me a decade. It’s right up there with the Assassin’s Creed series for Best Improvement In A Sequel. The opening train sequence – the tutorial level, for crying out loud! – is one of the best set pieces I’ve ever had the pleasure of playing through, and I didn’t even mind needing to repeat it about five hours later.

On the other hand, Uncharted 2 does represent some of the worst aspects of early-gen-7 game design, in that there are a lot of places where it’s not sure whether it wants to be a game or a movie, and the camera whips around and locks into the perfect angle to spotlight whatever the director thought you should be looking at at this precise moment in time rather than trusting the player with control. Usually it’s pointing the way you SHOULD be going, which is maybe a little easier than designing levels that naturally draw the player towards the objective. On the plus side, this lets some of the platforming be legitimately challenging – there were a lot of places where I would try and fail a particular jump over and over and would probably have given up on if the camera hadn’t been insistently saying “no, really, you CAN go this way.”

Then there’s the combat, which initially bugged me with the number of times I’d wind up repeating an arena segment over and over. It took me quite a while to stop thinking of the firefight sequences as though I was playing a traditional 3rd-person-shooter and start thinking of them as puzzles, where figuring out the right order to fight enemies was way more important than any actual skill at aiming. Once that happened, I discovered that I quite liked the shooty bits, and I’m looking forward to playing the next game in the series with that understanding already in place.

The final boss fight suuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuucks, though, and I do not often type over a dozen consecutive “u”s so you may take that as extreme emphasis on the degree of awfulness represented by the last boss. Also, I am astonished by the sheer amount of punishment that the opponents in this game can absorb. In one particularly egregious case, I had a HUMAN opponent absorb seven .45 caliber bullets to his unarmored head from point-blank range before finally giving up the ghost.

I have never been shot, but I’m reasonably sure that it would be quite difficult to survive the first bullet, much less the first six.

Hmm, that’s been a couple of paragraphs of me whining. Let’s offset that a bit by praising the story, because it’s a great pulpy adventure. I went through a Doc Savage phase in my youth, and Uncharted 2 pushed all of my happy buttons. I also liked the return of familiar characters who weren’t forced into the exact roles they played in the original game, and I’m looking forward to seeing more of them and of Chloe in the future.

So, huge improvement, but let’s take off a half point for the bullet sponginess of the enemies and the final boss and another point for the continuing waterfall disappointment.

Not that I give points. I don’t do that kind of thing.

Next up is NOT Uncharted 3, because I have a ridiculously pretentious post title that is stuck in my head and won’t let me do anything else until I’ve written the post to go with it. That has me working on an Overwatch project, the details of which are probably left in the crazier parts of my brain until I’ve actually finished it.

Posted in PS4, videogames | 7 Comments

A Perfect 7.

Posted on January 10, 2019 by baudattitude

While I talk a lot about specific games on here, I don’t really consider my posts to be “reviews”, and I certainly don’t assign scores to any of the games I talk about. If I finish something, I think it’s probably worth playing, unless of course I am finishing it just out of guilt for having spent money on it.

Also sometimes – often! – I will play a game just because it has cute characters. I’m not particularly deep.

Despite my no-score policy, sometimes I find myself playing something that is just so definitively the example of a specific number that I can’t help myself, and that’s my rather mediocre segue into a few paragraphs blathering on about Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune, a perfectly enjoyable game but oh-so-much the archetypical example of a 7/10.

I am, to be sure, a decade late to this particular game, but in fairness I DID try to play it back when it originally released. I downloaded the demo from PSN, cheerfully walked through a lush jungle environment for a couple of minutes, and then was asked to cross a log while balancing myself with the Sixaxis controller.

Three or four attempts later, I came to the conclusion that, even if I ever got across the stupid log, there would probably be plenty of other opportunities to be asked to do similar things later on in the game and that I should probably not even bother playing it.

On the other hand, people rave about Uncharted 2, and to a lesser extent Uncharted 4, so I’ve always been a little curious to go back to the series. Just, you know, not with the dumb logs.

The dumb, dumb, DUMB logs. My vocabulary today is not especially varied.

Then came the “Nathan Drake Collection”, which bundles up shinier and prettier versions of the first three games and takes out the balancing bits. I could not have asked for a remaster more closely in-line with my interests, so I waited until it was on sale for 8 bucks and bought it so it could sit comfortably in my backlog.

Now that I’ve actually taken the first game OUT of my backlog and given it a run-through, it’s… well, it’s OK! I think I’ve covered that with the whole seven thing. It’s very much an example of a game trying to be Cinematic, and there were a lot of times where I felt that I was just pressing forward and occasionally hitting X to jump on my way to the Next Big Scripted Moment, but it has enough Cool Scripted Moments that I didn’t mind the sensation of being on an amusement park ride TOO much. I got into scrapes, I met some suitably villainous villains, I was startled by the Big Twist about 2/3rds of the way through, I eventually Saved The Girl and sailed off into the sunset.

I’ve heard the series described as “Dude Raider”, so I was expecting a lot of clambering across the walls of tombs and jumping from one precarious handhold to the next and falling off things and dying a lot. I got that in spades, by the way, and by and large it was pretty enjoyable stuff. I’m knocking a point off here, though, because I didn’t feel like the platforming followed a consistent set of rules. At times, it felt like whether or not I could make a particular jump depended entirely on whether I was doing what the game wanted me to. That’s a personal sensation, so I may be being unfair.

I also wasn’t QUITE expecting the game to have such an …emphasis on combat.

Basically, for a lovable scamp, Drake spends an AWFUL lot of time playing “insert bullet A into bad guy B” and there were a lot of times when I’d wind up replaying a combat arena for the nth time, knowing THIS time that after I killed THESE four guys that another guy was going to spawn on THAT ledge with a grenade launcher so I needed to be ready for him and oh god can we JUST GET BACK TO THE PLATFORMING ALREADY.

So, that knocked another point off the score and took it down to an eight.

It lost the final point for committing the greatest sin you can commit in a game:

This is a waterfall. I am in a cave behind the waterfall. There’s nothing cool back here. It’s just a little depression in the cliff face that you can walk through the waterfall to get into. Seriously? Put something cool in here and we’ll talk about getting you your eight back. For now, you get a seven.

Posted in ps3, PS4, videogames | 8 Comments

Ashen: I couldn’t think of a funny post title.

Posted on January 6, 2019 by baudattitude

Let’s be clear. I had a wide variety of post titles to choose between, but in the end I couldn’t decide between making a funny play on words involving “ash” or making a Souls reference that would be ever-so-clever but probably hopelessly opaque.

So, let’s set that aside so I can talk about Ashen, which is the latest “Like Dark Souls, only…” game to hit the market, and which gives us nutters something to do between now and whenever Code Vein and Nioh 2 come out.

Like Dark Souls, Ashen takes place in a bleak and dying world. If you watch the introduction, you’ll learn that the world was created by a dying raven or something and its final breaths gave birth to the ages of man and, uh, honestly it seems like someone put an unusual degree of thought into their world’s mythology and I would be doing it a disservice to try to describe it.

Anyway, that raven died, a new one is about to be born, this is a Generally Good Thing but of course there are some Bad People who are quite happy with the whole bleak and dying world status quo and would like to keep it that way. Enter you.

Setting the lore aside, some of the writing is exceptionally odd.

As you may-or-may-not get from the only screenshot I took during my play through, Ashen has a very interesting low-poly aesthetic, and I quite fell in love with it. It’s also populated with NPCs that are much more talkative and generally less depressing than your average From Software game, and part of the appeal of the game is that you start out in a tiny encampment that you have taken over from a bunch of bandits and eventually turn it into a bustling and happy town full of all the people you meet on your travels.

So it’s Like Dark Souls, Only Hopeful.

It’s also Like Dark Souls, Only You Play With Someone Else. You will always – unless you turn them off – have an NPC accompanying you on your slow quest to make the world less awful, and these NPCs are generally very helpful. It’s good to have someone along to take aggro from a boss while you’re desperately trying to heal, or to help you on to ledges and so forth. They’re not always going to be NPCs, though – part of the way the game works is that other players on the same quest as you will automatically be put into your game and you will see them as the NPCs that have suddenly mysteriously decided to start running around and picking fights you weren’t quite ready for yet. Likewise, they will see YOU as the NPC in their game who is now hanging back and not supporting them as they charge into a bandit camp.

I turned the passive multiplayer off after a while. I turned it back on eventually. More on that later.

It’s also Like Dark Souls, Only A Lot Smaller. It’s a very flat world and is split into a handful of very contained areas. There aren’t any clever shortcuts between zones, and it basically divides into “The world you can get to before the third boss” and “The world you can get to after you get a movement skill from beating the third boss.” There are five big-health-bar-dramatic-music encounters in the game, and the first four of them are, frankly, kind of on the easy side. Two of them are located at the ends of a couple of long and very nasty dungeons, so the process of getting TO the boss is the real challenge. You also can’t save and quit in the middle of a dungeon – if you need to exit the game for any reason, you will load back in at the checkpoint outside the dungeon on your next play session.

Fortunately, both of these dungeons come with a convenient checkpoint just prior to the boss door.

The fifth boss fight, well, it’s a real corker. The last boss is a real front-towards-enemy affair, where if they are pointed at you then you had best be dodging. You don’t have very big windows to actually retaliate, and the line between landing a hit and getting too greedy and getting slapped down for 80% of your health bar is a very fine line indeed.

There is also no going and grinding up a bunch of levels somewhere to trivialize bosses. Your health and stamina upgrades almost all come from quests, and there are a limited number of quests. If you’ve done all the quests and a boss is handing you your own ash on a platter, you have limited options outside of getting better at dodging.

Sorry, couldn’t resist.

Anyway, this is why I turned the multiplayer back on, because the NPC companions were getting flattened and I wasn’t up to doing all the heavy lifting on my own. I sat at the boss door for a little while, another player came along, we teamed up and played Boss Aggro Tennis for a good ten minutes and emerged victorious.

Other It’s Like Dark Souls, Only include “Only with no magic” and “Only without extensive build customization” and of course “Only rather less expensive” which is a nice thing to see in a marketplace of $60-and-then-there’s-a-season-pass-of-course releases and which makes up for the smaller world and the rather shallow skill options. The game throws a variety of pointy and bludgeoning toys at you – no swords, though – and the entirety of your “build” comes from playing around with all of them and picking a moveset you like. In my case, I started with a simple club, picked up a SPIKED club a few minutes later, and then just kept upgrading that spiked club until the end credits.

Side note on that whole “Only rather less expensive” thing. The Xbone version is available on Gamepass. So, if you subscribe to Gamepass, or if you picked up the $1-for-a-month deal over the holidays, or if you still have that free month of Gamepass voucher kicking around in your Xbone box, Ashen is an exceptional value. It’s 40 freedom dollars otherwise, or roughly 40 of whatever your local currency is.

A final note on Ashen, specific to the Xbone version: It has many 17-point achievements, and quite a lot of them are entirely optional and yet VERY easy to knock out when you decide to do them. What I’m trying to say is that if, say, you played Otomedius G back in 2010 and wound up with an odd gamer score afterwards…

…you can follow it up with Ashen…

…and suddenly you have a multiple-of-5 gamer score again and it can stop gnawing at your soul like it has been for the last eight years not that I’m anal or anything and not that I would be troubled by such a minor and inconsequential thing as a number on the corner of my TV not ending in a properly round number and err…

Hey! Look at the time. I gotta go. Play Ashen, it’s pretty good.

Posted in Souls, videogames, Xbox One | 5 Comments

On Steam Erasure

Posted on January 2, 2019 by baudattitude

Steam has gotten a little weird lately. It’s gone from being a place to buy major games that occasionally had really good sales to being a place that’s… well, something of a dumping ground for indie games, and also you can buy games from major publishers unless they have their own storefront. Which most of them do now.

There’s been some major confusion in the last year as to what exactly is allowed on Steam, since the concept of “curation” appears to have flown right out the window at about the same time as they ditched the Greenlight concept. Right now, the rules seem to be that almost anything goes, and the result has been a ton of pretty low-effort games. I’ve actually bought a few of these when they show up in my recommendations list, mostly because I respect the hustle of taking a Unity coding example, slapping some art on it, and marketing it as a real game.

This brings me to “Fist of Love”, a game where you play rock, paper, scissors against a small selection of attractive opponents. It’s not much of a game, more of a quick way to get a bunch of Steam achievements, and it’s not surprising that it got delisted.

It was also only 24 cents. So, really, it’s hard to expect a lot of game for that.

More interesting than the actual game, though, is what I noticed after playing it, because it’s basically invisible. It doesn’t show in the “recently played games” on your profile page and you can’t see the achievements list unless you’re actually in-game. I did get a trading card after playing it, though, and this had attributes I’ve never seen on a card before:

For the record, here’s a trading card from another game I have, “Afterfall InSanity Extended Edition”. This game was likewise delisted – you can’t buy it any more and it doesn’t have a store page. Still…

…this game’s cards can still be bought and sold on the marketplace. If you want an “Afterfall” badge, there are a couple hundred of every card available right now, for about a nickel per.

So there are apparently a couple levels of delisted games – ones that Steam acknowledges in at least some sense, and ones that it wants to pretend didn’t ever exist.

Still, you can use the Booster Pack maker to make a pack of trading cards for Fist of Love…

…and there is a trade forum…

…and between these, I was able to throw together what will probably remain my rarest Steam badge ever:

So that’s a very odd little accomplishment.

The strange thing is, it’s not particularly unusual for these sorts of barely-games to show up on Steam and then get taken down after a few days. What’s unusual is that they’re not normally supposed to get trading cards. There’s a waiting period after any new game is published where it has to hit a certain number of sales and a certain number of actual players before the cards get turned on, so at some point Fist of Love hit that threshold and got the Valve blessing of “OK, you’re a real game now” before falling down the memory hole.

Still, I can download and install and run it. So even if Valve wants to pretend it never existed, they’re not yanking back the rights I paid for with that quarter. And it did inspire me to use the trade forum, which was a new experience, and I got a blog post out of it. So all around, I’ll call that a win.

Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments

The Baud Attitude GOTY 2018, and some other stuff.

Posted on January 2, 2019 by baudattitude

So um I only really finished one major 2018 release, and it was Far Cry 5. Let’s hear it for the unanimous game of the year winner! Woooooo fictional Montana crazy cult killing simulator!

Honorable mentions: Dark Souls Remastered (PS4) and Dark Souls Remastered (Nintendo Switch).

Other 2018 releases I played: Some Destiny 2 expansions, and a handful of smutty visual novels that mostly started with “Sakura”. Also a 2-D action game called Icey and a game called “Nostalgic Train”, all about walking around an abandoned Japanese town interacting with the memories of people who used to live there.

I would also like to switch the positions of my top 2 games of 2017. A year ago, it was Horizon Zero Dawn (#1) and Nioh (#2) and, well… I spent the last couple of weeks of December and the first day of January getting back into Nioh so I could play the DLC expansions, and then wrapping up miscellaneous trophies so I could add the Nioh platinum trophy to my virtual trophy case and in retrospect I think I liked it more than Horizon.

Major gaming accomplishments of the year: I spent a solid month wallowing in Halo lore and now understand just what the heck happened in the latest couple of Halo games. I replayed the Mass Effect trilogy, this time with all of the DLC. I got four platinum trophies, though admittedly three of them were for really kinda forgettable Love Live! rhythm games.

Oh, and I finally got over the grudge I’ve held against the Assassin’s Creed series since 2013 and played like four Assassin’s Creed games.

I finished off my backlogs for PS3, Vita, Wii, WiiU, and Xbox 360, so I got to unhook a bunch of systems and stick them in a footlocker. Sadly I then bought three more Xbox 360 games but they are backwards compatible and are even Xbox One X enhanced so I can pretend they’re really Xbone games.

I played a bunch of 2017 Switch games in 2018. Most notable was probably Xenoblade Chronicles 2, which could have been maybe a tiny bit shorter and could have explained its combat systems just a little better, but whatever. It had a lot of heart to it. I also had a surprising amount of fun with Mario Kart 8 DX.

I also made a blog post almost exactly one year ago where I detailed the eleven games I was going to let myself buy in the new year, and as of last week I had actually played through all eleven of them. I have mostly stopped buying games that I’m never going to play!

I also stopped buying physical games, which has definitely helped somewhat with the clutter and which also saves me a few minutes at the grocery store each visit since I no longer find myself mysteriously checking out the home entertainment aisle looking for sales.

I played a ton of Overwatch. From the back of an exercise bike. And got my blood pressure down from “hey, you know how you have a family history of heart problems? You’re right on track to have your own!” to “wow, you’re actually in a healthy range. Keep it up!”

And I bought a scooter.

So 2018 was a great year all-in-all.

So, goals for 2019:

Well, honestly, I should probably play fewer games. Fortunately, I have fewer to play! There are 64 games in my backlog and many of them are quite short. Nine of them are Kingdom Hearts games since I got all of the pre-KH3 games by preordering KH3, so some of those may get written off since I played them on the PS2 and PSP.

Instead, I should get back to actually working on my Japanese. I spent a solid four years of school getting my degree in the language and I’m still… reasonably competent but I have not pushed myself to practice. So that’s one goal for 2019 that’s a little more noble than playing video games.

Posted in videogames | 1 Comment

I’m ready for Nico-Nico-Nioh-Ni

Posted on December 28, 2018 by baudattitude

Coming up on the end of the year here, and I’m ending 2018 in the exact way I ended 2017 – playing Koei Tecmo’s Nioh. I bought the expansions in, oh, March or so and I had been putting off playing them because they have a reputation for being rather brutal even in the context of Nioh, which is itself a pretty difficult game.

Still, Nioh 2 was announced just a few months ago and that made me want to get over my trepidation and give them a shot.

For the record, their reputation is 100% deserved. I booted Nioh, re-ran a couple of early missions to remind myself of how the controls worked and then dove into the very first expansion mission, which didn’t go well. It took me ages just to get to the last checkpoint shrine before the boss and then he absolutely ruined me on every attempt. He was taking me out in two hits and I was not scratching him. I wound up having to summon a visitor to help me kill him, which was a first.

Obviously I was not ready.

So I ground levels for a bit in co-op, which was fun and all but didn’t really seem to be making that much of a difference in my ability to survive the DLC missions, and then I decided to buckle down and push through the “Way of the Strong” mode which is Nioh’s NG+ difficulty. It doesn’t work quite like the NG+ mode in Dark Souls, though – in those games, when you start NG+ you are probably overpowered for at least the first half of the game and only start feeling the difficulty ramp up at the midpoint. Nioh’s NG+ starts with levels designed to challenge players from the word Go, and it’s made more difficult because the gear really doesn’t scale all that well over the course of NG+. Gear for the first play through stops at gear level 150, and “Way of the Strong” introduces the notion of plus-levels, where you get gear that drops as 150 (+1) or 150 (+2) and so on, up to the last levels where I actually saw some 150 (+5) drops.

On the other hand, you can kind of blow through Way of the Strong fairly quickly just because you don’t need to do the optional sub-missions and because it turns out that if you know the way through the levels you can absolutely skip 90% of the fights in some of them and rush to the boss fights. Not all… but enough to make it pretty quick.

It’s when you finish Way of the Strong that things change. Drastically. It unlocks a mode called “Way of the Demon” which is an even harder mode, but has a serious carrot.

Yeah. Running missions on “Way of the Demon” makes all of the enemies harder, as you’d expect, but also adds random versions of NPCs that are bright red and load themselves up with all kinds of buffs while also debuffing the player. They are very, very good at killing you… but they also explode into a beautiful shower of loot when you turn that around on them.

One of the drops I got from the introductory Way of the Demon was a level 180 (+11) piece of armor. By the time I was done with all of my farming, I was decked out in some very shiny gear indeed, and I’d gotten much better at not dying. Souls and Souls-like games all reward aggressiveness but will kill you if you go a hair over the line that separates “aggressive play” from “greedy play”, and fighting stuff on the harder difficulty level taught me exactly where that line was and how to push right up to it.

With THAT done, I went back to the DLC, which was pretty brilliant stuff. It introduces two new weapon types and has some pretty kick-ass missions if you’re ready for them. I almost felt bad for some of the bosses, because they just melted. (And, yes, I went back to say hello to the one that had made me summon a helper the first time around. I didn’t need help on the rematch.)

The very last boss in the third and final DLC did manage to kill me once, because I stood still just as the fight started while casting a buff on myself and she rewarded my immobility with a one-shot-one-kill attack.

So, there’s the extent of my strategy guide for the Nioh DLC:

First, don’t play it until you have played through the base game at least twice.

Second, when you get to the last boss… dodge.

Posted in PS4, Souls, videogames | Leave a comment

On the topic of toothpicks

Posted on December 22, 2018 by baudattitude

There’s a bit in “So Long, and Thanks for all the Fish” where the main character is asked to reflect upon a society that feels the need to include instructions in a box of toothpicks. Nowadays we have actually regressed even further, to the point where that would probably be replaced by a URL to a Youtube video where one could watch a five minute presentation on proper toothpick use, of course, but it’s still one of those little absurd moments that sticks with you.

I find myself looking for toothpick instructions a lot. Not specifically TOOTHPICK instructions, mind you, it’s a metaphor. I think it’s a metaphor. I’ve never been great at categorizing literary devices.

Take, for example, this package of “Chip Star” brand potato chips from Japan. I was recently making up an order with j-list and they had an offer where spending slightly MORE money than you otherwise intended to spend would result in a discount on your entire order, meaning that you would spend less money by buying more stuff. Something like that. In addition to my issues with literary devices, I’m also not particularly good at math. Anyway, I wound up padding out my order with assorted snack products from Japan – mostly CalorieMate, which I can’t find locally, but also a couple of packages of Avocado & Mayonnaise-flavored potato chips because they sounded delicious.

For the record, they are amazing, and Lay’s needs to get right on stealing the formula for something I can buy off a shelf here. Or maybe they shouldn’t since I should probably be watching what I eat a little more carefully.

I am not, however, here to review the chips themselves, though I suppose I’ve already mostly done that. I’m here because I was putting one of the packages into the recycling bin and happened to actually read the top of it while I was doing so.

If my Japanese degree is of any use to me, it’s a warning to be careful not to cut yourself while taking off the lid. On examination, I can report that the bottom edges of the lid are… well, they’re cardboard, and a little sharp I guess. It’s not entirely unreasonable that you might twist it and wind up with a paper cut.

On reflection, I’m not sure whether this is closer to toothpick instructions or whether it’s more along the lines of the “may contain hot liquid” that you see on the sides of paper coffee cups. It’s possible that someone accidentally cut themselves on the packet of crisps they were opening on the train on the way to a MAJOR client presentation and wound up bleeding all over their suit and didn’t have time to change before they got to the client site and the executives they were presenting to were so weirded out by the whole bloody shirt thing that they just threw the guy out and then they lost the contract and the company went under and hundreds of people were out of work and the CEO wrote a very strongly-worded letter to the potato chip company as a result.

I mean, it’s within the realms of possibility.

Or maybe someone just said “hey, we should put a warning here” and everyone secretly thought it was a little silly but nobody could come up with a really good REASON not to have a warning here and it came to happen. A lot of design decisions happen this way, from my admittedly jaded experience.

Or it’s entirely possible that I have spent more time writing up a post talking about this safety instruction than I really should have and I should get to finding something productive to do with my day. No, I think that’s a certainty.

Posted in food, Japan, random | Leave a comment

Old Soldiers Never Die…

Posted on December 19, 2018 by baudattitude

No posts in a while. Should say something.

My first tech job was working for a sound card manufacturer, and we bundled several… you’d call them codecs now, but we didn’t use that term back then. Little shim programs that let our sound cards play back different audio formats for various educational applications. One of them was for a weird IBM audio format used by an encyclopedia application, and we only had one sound file in that format to test with – that being the closing lines of MacArthur’s famous retirement speech. As a result, I heard it several times a day.

It’s been on my mind a lot recently. I’ve been working on a project for the last couple of weeks that has had me revisiting a lot of my bookmarks folder, and I have found that many sites and blogs that I used to enjoy have closed up shop or simply stopped posting. At some point, I’ll probably run out of things to say on here and follow suit.

But, speaking about that project.

I’ve mentioned that I work in a technical field, and that one of the side effects of this is that I accumulate a lot of computer hardware, which allows me to have specific computers that fill specialized roles. The biggest negative to that is that I had a ton of documents, photos, other personal files all spread across, well, at least seven different computers.

It’s been the cause of a quite a bit of frustration, because I have been on a bit of an uncluttering kick for the last few years and every time I get rid of some clutter, more appears to take its place. It’s bad enough that it happens in the physical realm, but I have been losing things digitally as well.

So, my project has been to gather all of the data on to one well backed-up laptop and to consolidate the functions of several of those single-purpose machines I talked about. It’s been going well enough, with the exception of dealing with a couple of decades of browser bookmarks. All of the virtual machines now live on our media server instead of on a dedicated VM host, the two gaming PCs we have are now basically consoles with all non-gaming applications removed, etc. I have a very large stack of hardware that I am going to stick in the garage with post-its on each computer, and a year from now anything with a post-it on there is going to electronics recycling.

Some of it is old enough that I may skip the post-it step.

I’ve also stopped buying any PC games that actually require a “gaming PC”. Low-spec stuff that can run on the Iris Pro graphics in my consolidated laptop, maybe – but high spec stuff I’m sticking to console on.

One weird side effect of this is that my office is much colder now. I didn’t realize just how much waste heat the various computers were pumping out and I am needing to actually run our central heating more often now. It’s going to be interesting to see whether that raises our electric bills or whether they will drop now that I’m not running a bunch of essentially very inefficient space heaters.

Anyway, I’m still alive and that’s what I’ve been up to. I have some other uncluttering stuff I’ve been doing, and I’ll probably farm that for a post or two in the near future as well.

Posted in organization | 1 Comment

On Resurrections

Posted on November 16, 2018 by baudattitude

I’ve spent the last thirty years or so working in what I’ll vaguely define as the “tech industry”, which has included jobs doing everything from grunt-level helpdesk work to being a build engineer and some light development work. It’s not a great industry to be in if you like stability – there is always someone younger and smarter than you lurking in the shadows, and that’s ignoring the very real threat that whatever you’re doing could be moved overseas to be done by someone for half the price.

So, one of the best things you can do to keep your job is to find a really good niche to be in, and my niche has traditionally been “working on that one weird piece of tech that nobody else wants to.”

As an example, I once got a three-week contract job for a company that had a Windows application that plugged into an ancient IBM AS/400 mainframe, and I managed to show enough enthusiasm for the AS/400 that I turned it into nearly three years of regular paychecks.

In my current job, I am one of a few “Mac guys”, and it’s not a terrible niche to be in. It lets me play up the stereotypical Cupertino Snob image and everyone gets a good laugh out of that.

Anyway, I keep up on all of the technology I need to know for my job by, well, having far too many computers around. I use Windows PCs for gaming and heavy-duty video encoding, I have a Linux server that hosts VMs and is used for backing up all the other computers, and I always have two Macs around – one to serve as a media server and one to serve as a productivity machine. I’ve been cycling through Macs every few years, and that brings me to the entire point of this post.

Essentially, every few years I buy a new Mac that becomes my work box, and the last Mac becomes the new media server. This started in 2006 when I bought one of the first Intel Mac Minis, then continued in 2009 with a Macbook Pro, 2012 with an i7 Mac Mini, and most recently a late 2015 21″ iMac.

The iMac was not a great purchase, but it’s not entirely its fault. I went for the model that had a traditional hard drive, just as applications were starting to be designed around SSDs, and the result was absolutely glacial performance. Doing something as basic as launching Outlook or Excel meant that I was staring at a bouncing dock icon for over a minute, seething and willing it to LOAD FASTER. The iMac has a decent CPU – it’s a 2.8Ghz quad-core i5 – but it is just painfully bottlenecked by the drive.

At any rate, I eventually got so frustrated that I bought Office for Windows, installed that on my gaming PC, and relegated the Mac to being a scanning station for my paper reduction project.

Then, just a couple of weeks ago, I needed to get some screenshots of Mojave for a presentation… and I didn’t have any Macs handy with Mojave installed, which was a problem. I didn’t especially want to upgrade the version of macOS already installed on either my media server or on the iMac, because I was worried that it would break applications that I need.

Still, I had a spare SSD lying around, and an Inateck external drive enclosure that I’d picked up because it was kind of cool.

OK, drive enclosures aren’t “cool” by any means, but this one has a neat feature – a built-in USB3 hub.

All of the ports are wrong-side-up, so I need to remember to plug things in face-down, but that is a small price to pay for the extra functionality.

Anyway, I did a clean install of Mojave to the external drive so I could boot off it and get screenshots, and then I needed to install Office and… wait, this thing is actually not painful to use. I’d launch Excel and it would bounce twice and open.

Hmm.

That seemed a pretty good start… but I only had 250GB to play around with on this SSD and that just wasn’t going to work for the long haul.

I had a second drive enclosure hanging about, this one a Sabrent 4-slot enclosure that is basically designed for the career geek who has a lot of small drives stuck in the parts bin. It is sadly not bootable, but it works well to consolidate a bunch of disks.

I put in a 250GB SSD and a pair of 500GB traditional hard drives, with a slot to spare. I put Steam and Battle.net on the SSD and am using one of the 500GBs as an iTunes drive, with the final 500GB drive just kind of there for… well, I’ll find a use for it, and there’s an empty slot in case I need even more room.

It feels rather silly to have an internal hard drive in this Mac that isn’t being used for anything – everything I’m doing is running off an external drive. On the other hand, a computer that was one step above paperweight status is suddenly useful again.

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This is all Ian Fleming’s fault.

Posted on November 11, 2018 by baudattitude

I was not a particularly good student in my High School days. To be quite honest, I developed a bad habit of not actually attending classes. Our school district had an automated system which would call the houses of truant students to inform parents, and this probably would have worked much better if they had something in place to prevent students calling the school district head office to let them know that “we have a new phone number now, and can they update their records?” after which all of the calls went to my modem line.

On the other hand, I wasn’t very good at being a truant, either, since I would mostly skip school and walk to the local public library and read books.

Since I was a boy-type child, this eventually led me over to the “Fleming” shelf in fiction, and I systematically worked my way through all of his James Bond novels. This is where I found “The Spy Who Loved Me”, which is an absolutely terrible book and which barely features Bond at all. The only thing I took away from it was that the main character – not Bond – drove something called a “Vespa” and that it was Super Cool.

It wasn’t until some years later that I actually saw a Vespa dealership, and had the following three thoughts:

Wow, those are real things and weren’t made up for the book.
Those ARE, in fact, Super Cool.
Oh my god, those are also super expensive.

To be fair, Vespas aren’t that much compared to a car… but they are still a little pricey. So, from that point on, I would occasionally wander past Vespa dealerships, look through the windows, confirm points (2) and (3) above were still true, and sadly move on.

It doesn’t help that living in Oregon means that the practicality of any vehicle without a roof is somewhat limited.

Visiting Japan and China opened my eyes to the existance of an entire world of things that looked like Vespas but that were not Vespas, but I kind of sorted them into the category of “oh, those are only available in Asia and I will still never own one.”

Then came Yuru Camp.

If you haven’t seen it, it’s one of a thousand “Cute Girls Doing Cute Things” animes – in this case, the cute thing being camping. It is full of helpful tips on how to camp in the winter and how to choose camping gear and I imagine it has inspired many a tent purchase.

One of the characters has a not-Vespa, and I was curious what it actually was and threw some words into Google. It’s a Yamaha Vino, which isn’t itself all that important. What IS important, however, is that one of the first results from my search was the product page.

The American product page.

The sudden discovery that there are many not-Vespas that ARE sold in the US and that are much more budget-friendly but still Super Cool.

One thing led to another, and I found myself waking up at a ridiculously early time to stand in a cold parking lot with a dozen other hopefuls trying to earn their motorcycle licenses. I was, unsurprisingly, the only one taking the class on a scooter, and there were one or two snide comments about this. As they clunked their way manually shifting up and down gears, I tried not to be too smug about the automatic transmission I was enjoying.

Three days later, I had my motorcycle endorsement and could begin the process of, first, purchasing safety gear and second, finding a not-Vespa to call my own. The Yamaha Vino, sadly, was right out. It’s designed for a smaller and lighter person. The Kymco scooter I eventually bought, on the other hand, is actually big enough that a 183cm guy can fit on it without his knees bonking the steering and LOOKS rather like the Vespas I had an unhealthy attraction to from an early age, but was roughly half the cost of buying one.

1000km later – it just had its first service – this may be one of my best purchases ever. I am not a very confident driver in a car, because I have a very poor notion of where the corners of the car are. On a scooter, there is absolutely no question of what space you are occupying. There’s certainly a great deal more to worry about if someone else decides to make use of the space you are occupying, but that’s why I ride a brilliant red scooter and wear enough hi-viz gear to blind a careless onlooker.

I think it is far more normal for teenage boys to develop a crush on a red Ferrari and dream all their lives of eventually owning one and then finally afford one when they are in their mid-life crisis and also pick up a blonde ~~twenty~~ thirty years their junior to go with the Ferrari. For all I know, the blondes are actually stocked at the Ferrari dealership.

For me? I prefer my own take on the whole mid-life crisis thing.

Also I should buy a tent.

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