Desk II: The Deskening

Posted on September 23, 2012 by baudattitude

I wound up back at Ikea picking up the last pieces I convinced myself that I needed, and now I have one side of an office that is in pretty good shape and two other rooms of the house that are in a complete shambles as they have been used largely to hold the overflow from this.

I won’t put up pictures of those other rooms, but here’s what I got accomplished.  Warning: Many Ikea product names will be used, though I will probably leave out the umlauts.

To start with, the overview shot.

 

After I originally mounted the Lack shelves, I realized that the top shelf cast a really quite vexing shadow on the bottom shelf, and that I couldn’t make the main lights in the room any brighter to counteract it.

Enter “Dioder” lights on the bottom of the top shelves and attached to the back of both monitors:

 

A better picture of the PC side of the desk:

 

My PC is in a Cooler Master CM690 case, which is an awesome case but which has intakes on the bottom.  I made a riser for it out of a drawer front and some Capita legs:

 

The cat is not from Ikea, though they may carry them in some of their stores.  I can’t disprove that.  I now have an image of a bin full of identical grey cats with a label saying “Kat: $5.99”

Here’s the Mac side of things:

 

I would really like to frame the Tron poster one of these days, but it is an impossible size.

Lastly, I bought an Expedit bookshelf to replace a pair of older bookshelves.  I was a bit nervous to put the thing together, to be honest – the last time I was up at the Ikea, there were a pair of employees trying to get one assembled and having no end of trouble with it.

Therefore, I went looking on the web for advice and found one crucial tip:  The instructions say that you should assemble your Expedit on the ground and then tilt it up against the wall when finished.

The tip I found was to attach the sides to the bottom, stand THAT up and then fill it with the interior shelves, like so:

This turned out to be a terribly easy way to put one of these together, and the end result was rather nice.  I made another riser out of a Lack shelf and some Capita legs to give it a little extra display space for stuff:

 

I like the backless look of the Expedit, it makes the side of the room where it is a lot less gloomy than it was previously.

All in all, it was a good use of a couple weekends.  Now I just need to take the rooms that I turned into disaster zones and make them functional rooms again before I get throttled in my sleep for not having done so.

 

 

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New Desk (work in progress)

Posted on September 16, 2012 by baudattitude

Went to Ikea on Friday with an eye towards redoing my “office”.  I have a new and lasting hatred for Lack shelving, but it’s coming together nicely.

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Ramen revelations

Posted on August 13, 2012 by baudattitude

Dear Diary,

Today, after a couple of decades of being just a little too interested in Japanese culture, and after several trips to Japan proper, I learned – in a ramen shop in Oregon, of all places, that Cha Shu is NOT just the Japanese pronunciation of char siu.

It is, however, still tasty. Just rather unexpected.

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Comics, actually Comic:

Posted on August 12, 2012 by baudattitude

I used to have a bit of a comic book problem.

Back in the mid-to-late 90s, I lived in Los Angeles about a mile away from an absolutely amazing comics shop run by a pair of guys who were very good at talking me into trying new series and checking out old ones that I’d missed.  At the same time, I was going on a bit of a nostalgia kick for the comics I’d read as a kid.

The end result was that, by the time I moved OUT of Los Angeles, I owned about 7,000 comics, all neatly cataloged in a database, all sealed away in protective bags and boxes and the like.

I kept collecting for a year or two, but not with quite the same fervor.  This was a period where DC was actually doing me a favor by canceling titles that I had read and enjoyed and I wasn’t picking up new things because I didn’t have the same pair of pushers talking me in to trying new things.

After that, my interest kind of waned.  I’d pick up the occasional graphic novel from Barnes and Nobel, but that was about it.  I stopped doing THAT after I bought into the Infinite Crisis hype, read it and realized that DC had gone screaming off the deep end in an effort to be, I dunno, gritty or something.

Then I hit a point where I needed to move again, this time for school, realized that moving 7,000 comics represented a startling amount of both space and weight, and started purging the heck out of them.  The first batch, carefully screened to make sure that they were all-ages appropriate, went to Goodwill.  Subsequent batches have gone to comics shops or into recycling bins.

Yes, recycling bins.  When I was a small child and buying comics that cost 40 cents each, the local comic shop had a standard buyback for any comic book: They would give you a nickel each in case or ten cents in credit.  Now that I am a grown man and comic books cost $3.00 each, they still offer the same nickel each or ten cents in credit.  I’d rather get nothing and put the paper back into circulation.  But I digress.

I still have a single plastic storage bin full of comics that I haven’t been able to replace with digital versions.  Some of these I may never be able to replace, but it’s still a lot less to move the next time.

Anyway, I have written an awful lot of words here about how I have completely kicked the comics bug, which makes the following just a little vexing:

I was browsing a forum thread about the latest Bat-movie and someone posted the following page, taken completely out of context, and I thought it was brilliant – it was actually FUNNY, which is something that I don’t take for granted from comics any more, and  I may just have to track down wherever this came from and read the rest of it.

Seriously, there’s just something about the faces in this.  Must read more.

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Tony Stark made me buy it.

Posted on August 11, 2012 by baudattitude

A couple of weeks back, I had occasion to go down and wander around my university’s campus.  It’s only been a year or so since I graduated, so there honestly haven’t been a lot of changes, but I did notice that the Mediterranean restaurant near campus had replaced its kebab special – which had remained unchanged for the two years I went to school – with a schwarma special.

I’m not going to come right out and say that this was a direct result of the gag in the Avengers, but I’m going to point out that the timing is rather coincidental.

Anyway, since I was, thanks to the Avengers, rather curious as to what schwarma actually was, I went back yesterday to see for myself.

 

Turns out it’s basically meat and veg in a pita with a nice tangy sauce, very much comfort food and something I’ll get again.  Sure, it’s become a bit of a meme, but if you’re going to eat memetic food anyway, better this than bacon.

Apart from feeling like I’d had a good lunch, this had one other effect on me – it reminded me to go and check the Wikipedia page for schwarma, which has now become my go-to page for pointing out just how silly Wiki’s editors can get.

See, immediately after coming out of the Avengers, this is the page I went to in order to find out just what this schwarma thing WAS, and I was amused to see that someone had already added an “In Popular Culture” thing with a one-sentence mention of the gag in the movie.

A couple of days later, I was chatting with a friend who mentioned that he’d done the same thing but that there was no such mention on Wikipedia.

Fortunately, Wikipedia keeps detailed edit histories, which I went back and read through.  This is the geek equivalent of getting a prime seat on the sidelines at a hair-pulling-sissy-fight-tournament.

If you’re anywhere near as geeky, I recommend doing the same thing.  Basically, there are one or two Hard Working Editors dedicated to Keeping the Schwarma Page Pure who have been trying to Beat Back The Heathen Masses ever since the Avengers came out.  This fairly insignificant page devoted to a fairly obscure bit of fast food has become an Edit Battleground of reasonably epic proportions, with one particular editor being so pedantic about everything needing to be sourced that it has, as of this writing, FIFTEEN source links for a single page worth of text about schwarma.

It’s a thing to bring tears to your eyes.  Bring popcorn.  Or, I guess, schwarma.

 

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The TERA! The TERA!

Posted on August 10, 2012 by baudattitude

Hmm.  Maybe a little too much Joseph Conrad.  Anyway, moving on.

So, I fell absolutely in love with TERA for a couple of months, and now we’re going through a rocky breakup.  This sort of thing happens.

I still can’t say enough good things about the first, oh, 55 levels of my TERA career.  The story quests were engaging, I was loving my jaunts into dungeons, I felt like I was getting progressively more and more badass as I got new skills and new gear, and in general I was loving running around as a cute bunny girl with a massive axe.

After 55, though, things started kind of declining.  I was still loving the combat, but it was starting to take longer and longer to fill up the experience bar.  Quests were rewarding less and less experience proportional to the amount of experience needed to level, and the stuff that I was having to kill for them had turned into massive bags of hit points that needed to be slowly whittled down.

It got worse at level 58 or so.  The dungeons available in your late late 50s are pretty tough.  They have to be, really, because you can have level 60 players in your group, but it also means that people get discouraged a lot.  Discouraged players leave, and all of a sudden you’re looking at having wasted a couple of hours with no real progress made.  I stopped doing dungeons and focused on questing and grinding my way up.  I’d gotten to level cap in much tougher MMOs, after all, so I knew that I had the patience for it.

Eventually I hit level 60 and rewarded myself by hitting up the auction house for a new outfit.  There’s not a lot to spend money on in Tera as you’re leveling, so I had about 3 grand in the bank.  As a result, I managed to put together a full suit of really high-end armor at the cost of about half of my available funds.

I was, and this is a term that I do not use lightly, PIMPIN’

This is where I suddenly had a vision of the future, and it wasn’t a good vision.

See, the best armor in Tera is all enchantable, which means that it’s OK when you get it, but you can make it REALLY good through a process which involves sacrificing one piece of gear for the chance at making another piece of gear better.

So you can start with a plate breastplate, say, and melt down another breastplate that you’re not using, and you have a chance of getting a plate breastplate +1 out of the deal, and you can keep throwing spare bits of gear at it with the hopes of getting to +2 and +3 and so on and so forth.  The chance of actually getting a new bonus goes down as the piece gets better, of course, and there are horror stories of people needing to melt down 50 or more items just to get their +8 sword or breastplate or whatever up to a +9, which is the highest you can generally achieve.  (Some pieces, quite rare, can actually go up to +12, but that’s an even worse undertaking)

This, then, is the reason to run dungeons once you’re at the level cap.  It’s not getting better gear, because you can afford great gear off the auction house for, basically, peanuts.  Rather, you are running dungeons for the chance that gear will drop that you can melt down for the slim chance of making what you’re already wearing marginally better.

Compare this to your traditional MMO.  When you run a dungeon in one of those and an Awesome Plate Breastplate Of Ultimate Tankage drops, you get to cheer for the tank who gets to loot it because you know that he has just gotten a new piece of gear that will make him a Better Tank so your group can take on bigger and nastier challenges.  This is the sort of thing that has made Blizzard and Sony Online Entertainment about a gazillion dollars over the last decade and a half.

In Tera, in the same scenario, it’s kind of “Well, Leroy, congrats on the breastplate, stick it into the furnace and let’s all cross our fingers for another +1!”

I tried to put a good face on things at this point.  I took all the spare gear in my bags and bank, and then spent a few hundred more on the auction house to buy some more stuff, and I threw all of it at my shiny new armor and prayed for it to stick, and I actually had pretty decent luck with the enchanting lottery.  I wound up with all of my stuff enchanted up to +5 and still had money left over.

And that’s where I logged off.

I am kitted out to the point where I can credibly walk into any dungeon in the game and have a good shot at pulling through it, but I can’t muster up the enthusiasm to actually DO it.

I do, however, look awesome.

So, to sum up my two months of Tera:  AMAZING for the first 55 levels. There’s a ton of stuff in the game that I hope other companies steal for their own MMOs, particularly the combat and character customization options, and the localization team deserves particular acclaim for making some of the quests genuinely funny.    I firmly believe that it’s a game that anyone who likes MMOs should experience for themselves.

Just brace yourself for the heartbreak at the end.

Posted in MMORPG, PC Gaming, Tera | 1 Comment

Thanks for 200K Hits

Posted on July 27, 2012 by baudattitude

I just noticed that the site passed the 200K visit marker earlier this week.  That’s a lot of people who have taken a couple of minutes out of their lives to read something I’ve written, and that’s kind of neat.

Thanks for visiting.  🙂

 

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A Catgirl Saved Is A Catgirl Earned

Posted on July 26, 2012 by baudattitude

I really didn’t want to download Save Toshi, because it looked like a game designed specifically to cash in on people in their Oh My God Japan Is So Cool And Everything About Japan Is Just So Awesome phase.

I don’t like to use the “W” word, but it keeps bouncing around in my mind as I write this.

Still, iTunes kept recommending the damned thing, and I eventually broke down and dropped the two bucks on it.

As an aside, it is surprisingly refreshing to play a game where you can simply spend $2 and be done with it.  I think I’ve played too many freemium games of late.

But, to get back to the game, Save Toshi is an iPhone/iPad physics puzzler where you must get Object A, that being a cute pop singer, onto Point B, that being a dance floor.  If you get A to B, she dances for you and you move on to the next level.

The levels are made up of blocks of various materials – wood, stone, ice, rubber, a couple of others – all of which have their own properties.  Some can be broken, some are quite slippery so other things slide easily across them, that sort of thing.  Oh, and there’s dynamite for spice.  You manipulate all of these things by throwing baseballs at them.

Toshi dies immediately upon contact with water, by the way, and all of these levels take place in the middle of a lake.

 

That second picture there, by the way?  That’s an early and quite simple level. You simply throw a ball at the dynamite on the left, it explodes and sends the massive green ball flying.  It hits Toshi in the back and knocks her on to the dance floor, on the right.

Once she gets on to the dance floor, she cuts loose while the camera spins around her and music plays until you get tired of it and hit the next button.

Every twenty levels or so, you unlock a new outfit for Toshi.  Eventually, the end-of-level music changes.  If you persevere to the end, the spin around Toshi dips down and you get the inevitable panty shots.

None of this is why you should play the game.  Actually, there are some very strong reasons not to play the game, starting with Toshi herself.  She’s a caricature of everything that westerners think about Japanese pop culture, complete with horribly racist broken English of the five-dolla-me-love-you-long-time variety, and the first impression I had of the game – that it was a shallow and calculated cash-in on the Cool Japan fad – was also my second and third impression.

Then it started growing on me, because, well, this game may ostensibly be about saving Toshi, it’s actually about being horrible and abusing her.  She’s fairly durable, which is essential considering how you knock her around levels on the way to the dance floor, but she’s far from indestructible.  In addition to deaths by drowning, which are quite common, you can blow her up with dynamite, launch her into low earth orbit from mainshift seesaws, or simply throw baseballs at her if you’re not feeling inventive.  She dies a lot and she’s got a few choice phrases she uses when she dies and comes back to life, and without spoiling them I will simply advise that you download the demo version – if you can’t be arsed to drop the two bucks on the full game – and play it on a day when you are in a dark mood and need something to put an evil grin on your face.

There are even achievements for killing Toshi enough times:

 

I realized very quickly that this game, is, on the face of it, designed to suck a couple of bucks out of the wallets of the worst sort of anime fans, but it’s also a marvelously therapeutic game for people who are more than a little sick of the the craze and would like to, well, throw baseballs at idol singers with cat ears on.  This is, of course, a horrible, horrible thing and I should be ashamed of being such a terrible person.

The game DID give me countless chances to redeem myself, as follows:

You are, from time to time, faced with situations where you have obviously failed the level due to clumsiness but Toshi has somehow survived.  You can simply push the “Restart” button to begin the level anew, or you can bean her in the head with a baseball first.

This is a test of character which I frequently failed.

 

 

Posted in iOS, ipad, videogames | Leave a comment

Experiments in TERA

Posted on July 24, 2012 by baudattitude

Way back in “The Day”, I played Everquest over Ultima Online because, well, Ultima Online had full-on PvP combat, which scared the hell out of me, on all its servers, whereas Everquest only allowed PvP on one (later, four) of its servers.

I’ve spent the intervening 13 years playing various MMORPGs and avoiding PvP servers all the way.  I did get rather into Rift’s battleground things, but those were rather more like soccer matches with swords than “real” PvP, really.

For the love of God, I even played on the “Geharis” server in Dark Age of Camelot, the SINGLE server that game had that wasn’t a PvP server.

The whole time, though, PvP servers have had a little bit of a mystique.  PvP players always had a bit of a swagger to them, throwing around terms like “carebear” and “bluebie” to divide the world into Real Men and People Who Played On PvE Servers, and I’ve always wondered – could I make it in a PvP environment?  Could I manage to dodge hostile players while questing and leveling and all the other sorts of things you do in an MMO?  What would the world be like, with that extra bit of spice, that elusive drug known as Open World PVP?

That lead to me deciding, last Sunday, that I would make a character on Tera’s “Valley of Titans” server (reputedly, the single largest Wretched Hive Of Scum And Villainy in the Tera world), that I would play for ONE HOUR, and that I would keep a log of every time I got killed during that hour, what level the person killing me was, and how quickly I went splut.  I’d then log off, write up a quick post about it, and generally feel good about finally braving the PvP world.

Thus was born Riski, the Elin Berserker.  I figured I’d go with a Race/Class combination that I’d gotten familiar with.

10:11 AM: Riski arrives in the newbie zone.

It quickly turned out that my initial plan wasn’t going to work.  New players in Tera, even on PvP servers, are shielded from PvP until level 11.  They’re also safe as long as they stay on the newbie island or in any city or outpost.  I was going to have to level up if I wanted to get ganked.

An hour later, I was level 8.  That wasn’t bad.

12:07 (just shy of 2 hours after starting): I reach level 11 and can finally engage in PvP combat.  Also I was an adorable disco squirrel by this point, having picked up this particular outfit at around level 10:

I still had a couple of quick quests to finish up, though.

12:18:  I leave the newbie island and arrive at the first major city.  I get some quests that I didn’t get on a PvE server.  One teaches me about dueling and the other gives me a skill to flag myself an “outlaw”, able to attack other players without their consent.  Finally I feel like I’m actually ON a PvP server.

12:31: I leave the first major city and am finally in the wilderness, where anyone flagged as an outlaw can attack me freely.

12:42: Level 12.  No combat yet.

1:07 (3 hours after starting): I am level 13 and nobody has yet tried to lay a finger on me.  I take a break.

I log back in at 1:57PM, play for 40 minutes, and log out at 2:37 still untouched.

I log out and speculate about this.  Well, I think to myself, it IS Sunday.  Perhaps it’s a gank holiday.

I describe my predicament to my wife.  She groans at the “gank holiday” joke and I am pleased.

The next evening, I log in at 9:28.  Perhaps the late night crowd will be more prone to attacking cute, defenseless squirrel girls.

At 9:32, I make level 15.

At 9:57, Level 16.  Still without incident.

at 10:08, I’m in the middle of fighting a creature when FINALLY someone shoots me with an arrow.  Their first shot takes off a good 20% of my life, and their second knocks me down almost as much again.  I spin and face them – they’re a level 23 character, 7 levels above me.  I am DEAD MEAT.

I charge them anyway, because what else was I going to do?

They run away.

No, seriously.

A level 17 character sees this and decides to join in the chase.  Mr. Level 23 archer sprints back towards the nearest town and safe zone, so we can’t touch him.  Back to questing, though I am newly invigorated.  I have finally had someone at least make a token effort to gank me.

 

10:45.  Level 17.  While running around, I pass a person, about my level, flagged for PvP.  I stop and turn back, wondering if I should go and start something.

I waited too long.  He had already been jumped and killed by a couple of other players.

At 10:50, I log off.

Tuesday night, at 6:44, I log back in.  My new goal is to get to level 20 and run a dungeon that I missed when I was leveling my first character in the safe refuge of a PvE server, if I can possibly make it to level 20 in a world crawling with PKs just looking to cut another notch in the hilt of their sword.

There is just a little sarcasm there.

6:53, 7:17, 7:51, 8:33: Levels 18, 19, 20 and 21.

I look even more adorable by this point and have actually graduated from chain armor to plate:

At level 21, I queue for Bastion of Lok, the lowest level dungeon in Tera.  7 minutes later, I get a group and we merrily set about clearing the dungeon.

Shortly after 9:30, we’re done and I’ve gotten level 22 without a single death to player OR monster.  I did get a new breastplate and axe from the dungeon, which I cheerfully put on even though I’m not ever planning to come back to this particular server.  My final, most adorable state looked like this:

 

So, to sum up:  I played on a PvP server for about 8 hours and was eligible to be attacked for 5 of those.  I traveled openly, following roads, and went into safe zones only for as long as I needed to to pick up quests and sell my accumulated loot.  The worst thing that happened during that time was one guy sticking a couple of arrows in me and then running instead of finishing me off.  Heck, even the general chat channels, as full of testosterone as they were, were actually LESS annoying than the general channels on my PvE server.

At this point, you should actually be able to HEAR the sound of my illusions being shattered.

I’m tempted to log back in, set myself dancing in the middle of a busy intersection in the forest, far from safe zones, and walk away from the computer for a bit.  The only thing stopping me, really, is that it would be terribly, terribly depressing if I came back an hour later and was still dancing there.

 

Posted in MMORPG, PC Gaming, Tera, videogames | Leave a comment

Tera updates.

Posted on July 11, 2012 by baudattitude

My latest MMO addiction continues to consume a surprising amount of my evenings, though I have found a way to get at least some of my time back.

Simply put, I park my adorable butt in town, put myself into the dungeon finder queue, and then get work done while I wait on the chime that says I have a group available.

This has slowed my leveling way down. I made 52 last night, so I still have 8 levels to go until cap, and those are reputedly fairly slow even if you are making a concerted effort to chase yellow exclamation marks and grind quests. It’s going to take me a while.

This isn’t such a bad thing, however. I find that I’m really enjoying the dungeons, and rushing to cap would mean cutting myself off from many of the high-40s to low-50s instances. I already cut myself off from the low-20s dungeon before I realized it, so I’ll need to make one of those nasty alt things if I want to run it at level.

The instances definitely are getting a little more complex as I level. It’s still pretty basic stuff – this boss summons adds, this other one enrages and kills the whole party if he’s not defeated in time, this one drops barrels that explode, er, explosively if you hit them accidentally… It’s enough to make the fights interesting, but not so much as to be overwhelming. I’ve been able to finish every instance so far in a pick-up group with, at most, two wipes.

Compared to, oh, EQ2, where some of the “group instances” were nigh-impossible without having the perfect mix of classes and all members equipped with better gear than actually dropped in the zone, it’s night and day.

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