The wangs of London

Posted on November 10, 2011 by baudattitude

I do apologize in advance; this is the sort of childish humor I don’t normally like to lower myself to but it made me giggle like, well, a child seeing something a little naughty when I saw it and I am now going to share it with you.

Westminster Bridge spans the Thames in London, with Big Ben and Parliment at one end and a whole mess of touristy stuff at the other.  I like to imagine that the railings were designed by a very serious man, who took great pride in his work and was thoroughly satisfied to see the bridge completed.

Then I like to imagine him walking across the bridge at just the right time of day, looking down, and then smacking himself on the forehead.

 

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…and a little nod to British sci-fi

Posted on November 9, 2011 by baudattitude

 

Many years ago, when I was a small child, I remember watching and enjoying episodes of Dr. Who on PBS.  This was episodes from the Tom Baker years, with the improbable scarf and the robot dog and sets made from the finest cardboard.  I loved the robot dog.

I have never gone back to re-watch these episodes, because I think that it’s probably one of those shows best experienced through hazy childhood memories, or by actually being a child.

So a few years ago, when I became vaguely aware that there was a new Doctor Who series on the air, I didn’t exactly run out and start watching it.  I did catch an episode late one night while riding a stationary bike in the exercise room of my apartment complex, and it made no bloody sense whatsoever.

For the record, it was “World War III”, and I came into it about 10 minutes late.  If you are a Doctor Who fan, I recommend going back to that episode, fast forwarding to about 10 minutes in, pretending that you do not know who any of the characters are, and trying to follow along.

Some while later, a friend gave us the first four seasons of the show to watch, and I made it through the first two episodes before putting it aside for later.  I had the vague sense that I should probably watch it eventually because it was getting an awful lot of attention, but I didn’t have any real motivation to do so.

Then, we started planning a trip to the UK and were trying to plan some touristy things to do, and my wife ran across a mention of a Dr. Who-themed attraction, which sounded neat in a geeky sort of way but that also didn’t sound like it would make much sense without actually seeing the new stuff, so we went back to season 1, episode 3, and started watching from there, putting in a couple of episodes a night.

This meant that we caught up to the currently airing shows with only 3 episodes left in season 6, which was pretty good timing inasmuch as our departure for the UK was only a week after the end of season 6 was to air.  This is a pretty good way to watch the show, in my opinion, because while it turned out to be quite fun to watch when taken as a whole it does have some terribly, terribly bad episodes.  If I’d been watching it week-to-week, I’m not sure I would have made it through the Daleks-meet-1920s-showgirls episode, just as a for-instance.

What genuinely surprises me about Dr. Who is not just that it’s quite popular in the US, but that it seems to have become the king of the hill when it comes to science fiction.  Part of this, I think, is that Paramount did its level best to run Star Trek into the ground before giving it some well-deserved time off, the Star Wars franchise is under the thumb of a maniac who is trying to run it into the ground and shows no sign of giving it any time off, and Stargate, well, Stargate had a good run and then the producers looked at the numbers the new Battlestar Galactica got and we got Universe, which was one of those shows where running it into the ground might have been a mercy had it happened sooner.

That’s not to say that there are no good sci-fi or fantasy shows from this country.  Fringe and Supernatural come to mind, but Fringe is, for all its weirdness, relatively grounded; alternate Earth may have dirigibles and buildings trapped in amber but it’s still modern Earth and Supernatural started off as a monster-of-the-week show and has gone on to dance a merry jig through the weirder bits of the Old Testament.

When it comes to flying about in space, meeting aliens and blowing stuff up, the mantle seems to have been, well, ceded rather than formally passed I suppose, but passed to a quirky British show about a man in a blue box abducting innocent bystanders and trying to get them killed.

Or, in the case of Rory, turning them from a helpless geek into concentrated Awesome.

PS: The robot dog has been back a couple of times and I cannot properly express how annoying he is now, which is just another indication that I should not go back and try to relive my youth by watching the old stuff.

 

 

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You’re Scottish. Fry something.

Posted on November 8, 2011 by baudattitude

I recently returned from two weeks in the United Kingdom, split between a week in London and a week in Scotland.

It didn’t afford the same opportunities to make fun of the local cuisine as does a trip to, say, Japan.  Fish and Chips are, well, fish and chips anywhere, and there’s only so far you can go with making fun of Spotted Dick or Toad in the Hole or Bangers and Mash.  People have made fun of the names of British food for ages and there’s nothing really I can add to it.

What I CAN add, however, is this item which I ate in Oban, Scotland:

It’s a pizza.  Not a terribly big one, mind you, about what we’d call a “small” in the US.

It’s got cheese and pepperoni on it.

Oh, and it’s been dipped in batter and deep fried and it comes with a plate of fries – pardon me, “chips” – on the side.

This is not – NOT, I repeat, some kind of “fair food”.  This is on the regular menu, as something one might legitimately order as a meal on a regular basis if one were suicidal.

And yes, I ate it.

But just the once.

 

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Once more into the F2P world.

Posted on November 7, 2011 by baudattitude

A few months back, I tried my hand at a free-to-play MMO, Dungeons and Dragons Online.

By level 3, I’d been in some dungeons, and I’d seen a dragon, so really it lived up to the name.  I am given to understand that dragons were actually not a part of the game at launch, a design decision that was met with some scorn, but eh, they have dragons now.

Level 3, however, was also the point where playing the game started dragging, which is pretty early.  Granted, they have a level cap at 20 so they need to start the drag earlier than your average 60 to 90 level game, but it was only a couple of evenings into play before I started asking myself if it was really worth the hours it was taking to get anything done.  I could have put some money into the cash shop for extra NPC helpers and healing items and such, but I wasn’t invested enough yet to care.

More than that, though, the character models were a bit dull and the armor not terribly interesting looking, which is a shame since the environmental graphics and sounds were really immersive.

So, that didn’t last long.

I’ve been doing more of the EQ2 thing since then, with a new guild that does some low-key raiding three times a week.  Getting into a raiding guild as a fighter class is pretty unusual because fighters are (a) fun, so everyone has one and (b) not actually needed that much for raids. It also means that I’m able to gear up fast because fighter loot drops at about a 25% rate and fighters make up about 10% of the average raid.  I get to watch the rogues and mages squabble over drops while I get kitted out.  🙂

I’ve kind of hit the point where I’m not burned out on EQ2 but I also don’t see the need to put a lot of hours into it outside of raiding where I have a good chance at upgrading my character.  That’s a pretty healthy point to be with an MMO.

They are putting out an expansion soon to give everyone a little more grinding, so it will probably eat up a few more hours of my life once that comes out.

I was looking for information on that expansion when I came across a few blog posts talking about Lucent Heart, and somehow I wound up downloading the client and signing up for an account and making a character.

Technically speaking, I DID download Mabinogi a few months ago, but I just barely made it through character creation and the “welcome to the world, here’s your first quest” before quitting, so I guess this is my THIRD go with an f2p game but eh.

Like Mabinogi, Lucent Heart is an import from Asia, so my expectations were that it would come with a healthy emphasis on making a cute character that you can dress up in cute outfits while you grind away at endless streams of cute versions of monsters until your eyes bleed in a fashion that is rather uncute really.

From what I’ve seen so far, those expectations weren’t too far from the truth, but I haven’t hit the seriously grindy bit yet.  I made a mage and have been rather enjoying the way that (a) I can kill almost anything in two spells and (b) the game hands me a new set of clothes every five levels. Examples follow of the level 5, 10 and 15 outfits:

 

I LIKE the level 15 outfit.  Here’s an action shot.

I did get to level 20 before finally succumbing to the game’s pointed reminders that I’d been playing too long and should probably log off, but I didn’t get a screenshot of the level 20 outfit before doing so.  It’s blue and rather fetching.

Oh, and yes the game DOES tell you that you have been playing too long and should log off, both with a little flashing indicator and occasional messages that get more strident in tone as you ignore them:

Now, that second image up there has my level 13 mage standing next to a level 65 character, 65 being the level cap.  I am given to understand that Lucent Heart is pretty quick to level in until you get into your mid 50s, at which point things slow way down and actually getting a level 65 character takes weeks of grinding which is absurd in every way…

OH HAI EQ1

Anyway, the level 65 character next to me is kitted out in cash shop items, so they’re actually contributing to the keeping the servers up and running thing and also helping me make a slightly forced segue into this next bit:

Unlike DDO, there doesn’t seem to be a huge emphasis on the cash shop yet.  I DID get a quest at level 11 or so where I was given a cash shop item and walked through the process of entering the cash shop to claim and equip the item, but apart from that it’s more or less stayed out of my way.

Yes, I’ve gone in and looked at some of the for-pay outfits, but for right now I’m liking the free clothes I’m getting every five levels and don’t see the need to drop 17 bucks on a maid outfit.

Tempted yes, need no.

Anyway, I’ve gotten my little mage up to level 20 and don’t have any complaints so far.  It’s all very standard MMO fare; you get a quest from someone who needs you to kill 10 bees, you go kill the 10 bees and get back to the NPC and gain a level when you’re handing in the quest and all of a sudden an NPC who wouldn’t talk to you before will talk to you now and HE wants you to go kill bees too.  The “kill 10” quests are actually usually “kill 25”, which would be a bother if it wasn’t a matter of running into a field full of the right sorts of things to kill, hitting tab to target one, nuking twice, hitting tab again, nuking twice again and occasionally running back to the NPC to get the next quest to go kill wolves and at this point you’ve learned enough that you’re going to go to every single NPC and get the quests from EVERYONE who hates wolves before you go and kill 30 of them.

It gets points for not drawing TOO extensively from the stereotypical newbie monster pool while it’s sending you out to slaughter x number of y local wildlife.   I haven’t fought a single goblin, kobold, gnoll, giant spider, rat or skeleton yet.  Mostly lots of bees and wolves and violent animated corn.

Now while I do quite like the character graphics, the world zones are taking a little while to grow on me.  So far, it’s all been a blur of pastel colored outdoor zones and one of those techno-fantasy-mashup sorts of cities:

Eventually I hope to hit somewhere with a bit more foreboding atmosphere.  I expect it will be full of cute monsters, but as long as there’s some lava pits on the ground and the remains of doomed adventurers scattered about it should be fine.

Anyway, there are quite a few aspects of the game I haven’t had a chance to try out yet, but everything I’ve seen so far says that I’ll be sticking around to dig a little deeper.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Fighting the war on .avi

Posted on November 6, 2011 by baudattitude

I’ve had an AppleTV for a little over two years now.  That is, one of the original Intel-based AppleTVs, the ones that got dropped like a hot rock when they released the ARM-based AppleTVs much more recently.

I have one of those, too.  It was cheap after all and it does a lot more than the old one.

Anyway, it’s a great unit for playing back 480p and 720p video, with some frustrating limitations on format.  It will play pretty much anything that iTunes will take as input, and the nice thing is that anything you can make plan on an Apple TV should also play on an iPad or iPhone.

iTunes doesn’t actually take that many types of video files as inputs.

Anyway, a year or so ago I sorted out a way to convert mkv files into a format that the AppleTV would handle, with subtitles included, and I converted a few things just to make sure that it would work and then I more or less put that aside.

Recently, though, I decided to get serious.  A few months ago, I upgraded my gaming PC to a 6-core AMD 1090T processor with the justification being that a six core processor, while not really any advantage for gaming, is a beast when it comes to video encoding.

So, last week I found a tool that would look at every single media file on my server and spit out a list with the included codecs and bitrates and sizes and so forth.

It turns out that I have about 3500 video files on there, with about 400 of them being in formats that an AppleTV can play.

That’s when I decided to get a little less serious.  Starting a project of “well, I have a little over 3000 files to convert, let’s get to it” is insane.

Starting a project of “Well, let’s start by getting rid of the avi files because most avi files are encoded very poorly anyway” is a little less insane.

I whipped up a quick & dirty DOS batch file that iterates through a folder and feeds all the avi files in it to ffmpeg, and it works pretty well.  I’ve been able to encode folders with 20 or 25 avi files in them at once, and I’m getting 4-5 times realtime encoding speed which is nuts.

Now, then, flush with victory, I’ve just copied all seventeen seasons of Top Gear into a single directory and I’m letting the batch file go nuts.  That’s probably a 36 hour encoding job.

I’ll get back to you in a couple days to let you know if I still have a PC.

Update: Total run time before the encoding stopped was about 6 hours, encoding 33 episodes.  Some of these were extra-length specials, so call it 35 hours of video.  It didn’t precisely crash in any way I would have expected, ffmpeg was just sort of paused.  Let’s see how it does with the remaining 105 episodes.

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Keeping a gameworld alive

Posted on September 14, 2011 by baudattitude

I’ve been back playing EQ2 a bit recently. I put it aside a few months ago, after getting a character to level 90 and feeling a bit like the game had turned into an endless treadmill with no real opportunity for character development without devoting far more of my time than was worthwhile.

Then of course Sony got hacked, and I discovered Rift which was great fun for a couple of months, and then I kind of had to put all MMOs aside in favor of actually getting settled in at a new job, and I was pretty MMO free for a while there.

Then the EQ2 team released a major content update that reduced the amount of treadmill time required for a bunch of things and this happened to coincide with me realizing that I could still claim the 45 days of free game time from the “We’re really sorry” package, and I wound up giving it another go.

They did a pretty good job with the patch, and I was having fun playing, and then they had a long double XP weekend over labor day that let me log in and finally max out my AA points.

AA points, by the way, are basically EQ’s way of differentiating between two characters of the same level; they allow you to take, say, a priest character and make him either a strong offensive character with lots of damage skills or a strong healer with limited damage ability but who can keep a group alive better.

It’s nowhere near as flexible as Rift’s soul system but I wound up a little disillusioned with that after a while.

Also, and more importantly: it’s different from the AA system in EQ1 because there’s actually a limit as to how many you can have and you cannot take all the abilities. In EQ1, the only limit to the number of AAs and number of AA abilities you can have is the amount of time you grind away gaining them, so the developers have to design content for people with thousands and thousands of AA points and somehow balance the same content for people with only a few.

Anyway, digression aside, I took advantage of the bonus XP weekend to finally get my character to the AA cap and felt pretty good about it.

Then Sony did something even more brilliant: they made a vast swath of the game easier.

See, there’s a truism in most MMOs, that the game doesn’t actually start until you’re max level. As a result, some games can be split into content you do to get you to the level cap and content you do at level cap.

With some games – and I will pick on Rift again here – the level 1 to level cap game is extremely linear. If you are level 30, the only place you can safely adventure is X, but when you get to level 35 it’s time to move on to Y but you had best not venture into Z anytime soon.

EQ2, on the other hand, is huge and sprawly, with dozens of expansions and content updates and little bits bolted on to the side. They’ve put IN a linear progression path you CAN follow, but you can usually sidestep the path and go find your own way.

Also, since EQ2 got to inherit an awful lot of lore from EQ1 and didn’t have to start from scratch, there’s a lot of story woven into the leveling, and going off the path means that you get to check out new quests and new stories.

It’s pretty neat, except that much of the story used to be gated behind needing 3 or 4 friends to finish a lot of the quests in the game. This is where the “the game begins at level cap” thing comes in – there’s plenty to do before level cap but good luck finding a group to do it with.

So they’ve addressed this in a pair of ways.

The first, which they did ages ago, was to alter a bunch of quests to be more easily soloable.

The second, which they did in the most recent content update, was to improve most of the low level gear. It means that an awful lot of the game is now trivial, but it also turns some of the remaining impossible-without-a-group lower level quests into simply very difficult.

I’ve actually started a new character as a result, something I don’t usually allow myself in MMOs, and am happily climbing the level ladder once again.

Well played, Sony, well played.

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To Heart 2: A Minor Snag

Posted on August 20, 2011 by baudattitude

I’m so very proud of myself; I’ve actually made it through the PROLOGUE in ToHeart2.  That’s, oh, maybe a hundredth of the way thorough the game and it’s taken me 3 hours or so of fervent dictionary use.

Playing a game in a language you don’t fully understand has an interesting side effect, by the way: all the jokes have huge buildup because of all the time spent looking up kanji; I find myself honestly laughing at some of the silliest gags just because I’m FINALLY GETTING THEM.

Getting through the prologue revealed, unfortunately, a tiny problem. See, as the prologue ends you get an introductory animation.

On the Vista laptop I was playing it on, it displayed the first frame of the animation, played the music for the opening animation, and that single frame was all I saw for the next 90 seconds until it was out of music and continued on to the next screen of the game.

So I installed on an XP partition on my Macbook and… well, the video works fine.

Then, just for the heck of it, I threw the game onto a Windows 7 PC and had even worse luck.  Rather than getting a single frame of the animation, I just get an empty black window.

So, I could run the game on my Macbook, even through Parallels, and it works fine, but I went to the trouble of setting up a “Play Eroge here” desk with dictionaries and notebooks and so on and so forth and dragging the Macbook back and forth to the Eroge desk is going to mean a lot of plugging and unplugging components.

So now I’m taking the Windows XP MCE restore disk that I made on Day 1 of owning this laptop and blowing it back to its roots.  If I still don’t have video I’m going to be extremely put out.

 

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This is the sort of thing my wife has to put up with

Posted on August 18, 2011 by baudattitude

Her text is in white, my reply in green

It’s a wonder that she hasn’t strangled me in my sleep yet.

 

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Living In Just One Mind

Posted on August 17, 2011 by baudattitude

This is probably going to break me.

But first, some backstory.

I went through a period of a few years where I kind of fell away from being an anime fan, for various reasons.  Lack of money, lack of time, lack of interest in the shows I saw on retailer shelves, disgust with fandom, and of course playing MMOs every waking moment of every day.

Still, there was enough residual fanboy in me to make me fly to Japan for a vacation in late 2005 after getting a deal on plane tickets that staggered belief.

That trip was really a sort of rebirth.  MMOs started seeming a lot less important afterwards, I started getting in better shape, and I started trying to pick through the last several years of anime to find the gems.  It was a good experience.

Anyway, we spent probably too much of our trip in Akihabara, and we just happened to be there in the month when Leaf launched two big titles: the PC version of ToHeart2 and the PSP version of Comic Party.

The result was that you saw Leaf characters pretty much anywhere you looked.

Not, mind you, that I really knew what I was looking at.  I’d seen the Comic Party anime but didn’t realize that it was based on a game (to be honest, I’m not sure I knew what a visual novel WAS at that point) and though I’d heard of ToHeart, it was in the context of “hey, it’s that anime that they kept talking about in the Comic Party anime” and I certainly didn’t know anything about the original game or its sequel.

Thing is, though, I kept running in to ToHeart2 in various media, and one thing lead to another and I eventually wound up buying a copy of the PC game just so I could get around to seeing what all the fuss was about.

Now, I had learned what a visual novel WAS by then, and I knew that, while it did have a fair bit of the “visual” in it, it also had an awful lot of the “novel” and that playing a visual novel consisted of doing a heckuva lot of reading and occasionally pressing the enter key to continue and not much else.  In addition, at the time (August 2007), spending $70 on a Japanese visual novel was basically spending $70 on a pretty box.  I’d taken a term and a half of college Japanese 8 years prior, but that was about it.

Four years later, I have my bachelor’s degree in Japanese under my belt, I have enough dictionaries to choke a horse, I have a vague understanding of grammar, and I am terrified that I am going to forget the Japanese that I spent four years and $40,000 learning, so I have finally started to play ToHeart2.

As I started off this post by saying, it might just break me.  I played it for about two hours tonight and all I’ve managed to do is wake up, realize that I’m alone in the house because my parents are away on a business trip, and had my house almost immediately invaded by the neighbor girl who my mother has given a key to so she can take care of me while they’re away.

It strikes me that guys in Japan must be seen as fairly helpless for quite a while.

Anyway, the thing that really slowed me down was the crazy idea that, whenever I hit a word I didn’t know, I’d write it down in a book.

I’ve revised that idea somewhat.  Now I’m only going to write down words if I have to look them up at least 3 times.

It’s STILL slow going.

I’ll see how long I last. 🙂

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Again With The Zombies

Posted on August 17, 2011 by baudattitude

Before the recent boom in supernatural fiction, I never really thought much about the undead.  Sure, I’d hacked my way through my share of animated skeletons and zombies in many an RPG, but they were just sort of incidental monsters, the sorts of things you get thrown at you in the early levels of a game.

Since Zombies became The New Big Thing, however, it’s been hard to avoid them.

In the last few years, I’ve watched “28 Days Later” and “Shaun of the Dead”.  I read and quite enjoyed Mira Grant’s “Feed“, was somewhat less enthusiastic about Marvel Zombies, and I own a copy of the Zombie Survival Guide.  I’ve played games that took the whole zombie thing very seriously, games that take a bit of a lighter look at the living dead, and games that use the whole zombie apocalypse thing as an excuse to have half-naked girls running around with Big Damn Swords.

And yet I’ve barely scratched the surface of the whole Zombie genre of fiction, because I’m honestly not seeking it out – if I WAS seeking it out, I could probably spent every hour of free time on zombie-related activities.

Speaking of zombies as an excuse to have girls running around without many clothes on, I spent a few hours recently watching last year’s “Highschool of the Dead”, an anime which at first glance seemed designed to cater to the fetishes of, respectively, zombie porn, gun porn, and plain old porn porn.

Actually, it seemed that way at the second, third, and fourth glances too.  It centers around the struggle for survival, post-zombie-apocalypse, of a group of five high school students and their school nurse, with a male:improbably proportioned female ratio of 2:4, who manage to live through the infection of their high school and escape to find that the entire world is full of  groaning hordes of flesh-hungry zombies.

Through one contrivance and another, they stumble into a massive cache of military weaponry and a humvee – I’m not spoiling anything that isn’t in the opening credits, here – and spend the dozen episodes getting chased by zombies, killing zombies, dealing with the living who have used the whole zombie apocalypse thing as an excuse to shed the veneer of civilization and get with the murdering, finding the occasional refuge that is inevitably overrun…

You know, normal stuff for the genre.  There are a few tropes of the genre that seem mandatory in any treatment of the subject, and HotD does its best to hit them all.

I was also ready, four or five episodes in, to point out that it reused animation an awful lot – one episode runs through a 8-9 minute recap of What Has Come So Far before you get to any new animation, and in a show that’s only 24 minutes long and has to include an OP, and ED and a preview of next week’s episode, 8-9 minutes is almost half the episode.

Fortunately, the excessive reuse more-or-less stopped after that episode.

Toward the end, it gets quite a bit better.  With 12 episodes, it’s able to cover the main tropes, get the flounce and bounce out of the way and then get on to some actual character exploration and thinking about what it is that allows us to stay “human” in the face of extreme adversity.

Of course, that’s about when it ends.  Now, while the ending is actually a decent ending, rather than the “wow, you guys better hope we get to make a sequel” ending that has been rather prominent in recent years, it still somewhat grates that the producers could spend 12 episodes not really answering any of the questions that the story raised.

We do find out in the next-to-last episode why one of the main characters had to repeat a grade of school.  That’s something, I guess.

 

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