Next up, a remake of "Abbot and Costello Meet The Monsters!" starring Steve Buscemi as "Bud Abbot", Eddie Murphy in a fat suit and whiteface as "Lou Costello" with Ron Perlman as "Frankenstein's Monster", Britney Spears revealed to be the sexy "Mummy" and the digitally reanimated corpse of Bela Lugosi as "Dracula".

I can see it now.

( Here is how big budget bad movies are made... )

tags: oh god why

Journal of Sigun Amosteral [Townvessels], Mayor of Ropefight
2nd Felsite 227 (Late Spring)

Now that I have a proper office I can catch up on writing down the history of the fortress since Likot became one with the seam.  Udib and Kivish, may his soul rest in stone, did a good job keeping record with their engravings in the meanwhile.

( The Carp Cometh... )

location: Ropefight mood: fishy music: The Theme From "Jaws" tags: dwarf fortress, first carp war, ropefight

Journal of Sigun Amosteral [Townvessels], Mayor of Ropefight
2nd Felsite 227 (Late Spring)

It's the beginning of the 3rd year here at Ropefight, and as you can tell by the handwriting, this is not Likot.  Death stopped by and took our leader.  Watery, scaly death what swims beneath the choking, sobering waters.  But we showed them, yes, no fish can stand up to the might of dwarven engineering!

But that's not what took Likot, oh no.

I'm mayor now.  What are my qualifications?  Two solid years of swinging a pick means I can beat the snot out of any dwarf in the fortress.  And when the outpost liaison dropped by they found me in Likot's office going through his notes and just assumed I was the mayor.  Otherwise I am totally unqualified for the job, a growing tradition here at Ropefight.

For posterity, here's what I can gather from Likot's notes and the historical engravings.  They became increasingly nonsensical towards the end.  He didn't write down many dates, but they are in chronological order.


( The last words of Likot Kikrostvumom... )

location: Ropefight mood: loamy music: Goldfrapp tags: dwarf fortress, ropefight

[Oh god, I started playing Dwarf Fortress again.  The new graphics packs sucked me back in, makes it look a little less like The Matrix.  After reading the Epic of Boatmurdered I decided to write down my own chronicles of the first year, in character.  For all you who laugh at my dorkery you'll find it fascinating too!  MUHAHAHA!  With some light role play embellishment, all of this happened in game which is my I love it so.  Also KITTEN LEATHER ARMOR!]

Likot Kikrostvumom [Stockadesavants], acting administrator of Fortress Ropefight (nobody else wanted the desk jobs), built and manned by The Confining Cloisters.  We've just made it through our first winter and I want to get down some of our history before Kivish floods our fortress with her project.  The floodgates are in place, but we've had to replace the mechanisms so many times...

( Come, see the spiked harp! )

location: Ropefight mood: moist tags: dwarf fortress, ropefight, rp

I'm a fucking super genius.  College students around the world will sing my praises.  Poached eggs in less than ten minutes, no stove required.

The pictures tell the tale and have the details.

tags: cooking, dorm, eggs, food, foodening, hot pot, poaching

If you're like me you're constantly pondering, "what would make DEVO even more awesome?"  I know, it is a radical and sometimes dangerous line of thought as Disney demonstrated with DEVO 2.0.  But science, bless it's cold, mechanical heart, ever grows and devolves.

Polysics answers the question with another question... what if DEVO were JAPANESE?!  I know, it blows the mind.  It's like squaring infinities of awesome.  One can only collapse the paradox through observation.


But wait, it's a TWO PART video!




Still not convinced they're DEVO reborn?

mood: Devolved tags: awesome, devo, music, polysics, videos

I've been playing the Pirates of the Burning Sea open beta for the last couple days.  Now, I must say, it is pretty.  The possibilities for making some OUTRAGEOUSLY GAY pirates are many and manifest.   My character, Percy Ramsbottom on Rakham, illustrates.


WORST


DRESSED


PIRATE


EVER
















Obviously, he is an officer in Her Majesty's Royal GAYvy.

As advertised, the economy looks varied, interesting and entirely under player control.  ENTIRELY!  NPC vendors only buy at very low prices and sell absolute crap that only the most desperately thrashed pirate would consider.  Players must supply EVERYTHING, and this leads to some interesting shortages...err...opportunity for profit.  Players find plans, build structures in ports to gather and process raw materials and sell the results on the auction house.  You can even make a living simply moving goods from one port to another.  Some of the materials needed for ships are.... curious.  Apparently cheese is a critical component of all ship building, a totally true historical fact that I never knew.

Speaking of absolutely true history, period wonks will enjoy that the designers paid particular detail in ensuring that the game feels fairly realistic... flashy characters like Ramsbottom notwithstanding.  There's no magic, no flashy effects, no giant armored shoulderpads.  Ships and items all scale in a very sedate manner.  Your character cannot jump, so there's no bouncing idiots around town.

Alas, this also works against the game as a game.  Leveling up is not impressive.  It's sometimes difficult to figure out what's going on in a fight because of the lack of effects.  Different ships don't look all that different and don't act all that different.  And loot just isn't exciting.  Oh goodie, level 13 and my rapier does 6-12 damage instead of 5-10 that the newb rapier does.  Ho hum.

An MMO were you get to sail around in ships is fun and different.  If you've ever played Sid Meyer's Pirates! (either the old or new one) then you've already got the idea (and if you haven't, do).  Ship combat takes into account the basics of sailing... wind direction, tacking, sail management... all very simplified but still significant.  Guns have firing arcs and you can load different sorts of shot, though it all boils down to shot (destroy armor/hull), grape (crew) or chain (sails) of varying degrees of quality.  You can get special abilities like "decimate" which reduces their resistance to boarding or "destroy rudder" which wrecks their ability to turn if you get a shot in their VULNERABLE REAR.  Ahem.  One nice feature is that ships do mask each other's fire so in a furball allies can find themselves getting in each other's way.  But ultimately I've found NPC combat boils down to 1) wreck their sails to slow them down  2) get in close and fire a few doses of grape to put down the crew 3) pull along side, grapple and board.  Why bother taking all the time to sink a ship when you can just shoot their captain in the face?

This leads to the second major problem with the game, combat is bloody repetitive.  Since ships look the same and basically act the same combat feels the same with few surprises.  Get in close and board.  Boarding actions are the EXACT same fight every time with slight variations in difficulty.  Target the captain, kill him.  Swashbuckling missions, where you fight on land with sword and pistol, are almost a video game characture.  Groups of 3 or 4 eerly similar looking men stand around waiting for you to attack them.  Another group 50 yards away sedately looks on.  The very occasional and easily avoided patrol strolls through.  Your mission goal lies along a very pretty yet ultimately straight rail.  Sailing missions usually follow the pattern "destroy all enemy ships".  Maybe there's the variation where you "patrol" towards a fixed point and easily spot the "unknown" ship which SURPRISE turns out to be an enemy.  There's the usual mix of escort missions with the usual annoying problems keeping the ships you're protecting alive while having no ability to give them orders.

So that's all PVE, what about PVP?  Well, I don't know because I never got in any.  PVP is faction based like in WoW and there's four factions.  Pirates vs British vs French vs Spanish.  Players can flag themselves PVP.  There's an intricate port attack system which looks interesting, but I honestly saw so few non-British players that I never got into a fight.  Worse, there's no "dueling" system to allow players of a like faction to practice on each other.  Disappointing.

Now it's a massively MULTIPLAYER game so what about the other players.  Here's the third major flaw.  Other games have found that having lots of players running around doing missions in an open world leads to griefing and contention for mission resources and respawn queues.  The usual response has been to make important stuff in an instance, but you still have a lot of people running around in the world doing their thing.  This is a nice opportunity for players to incidentally meet other players and help out.  "Here, let me stab that slobbering, furry beast for you.  Do you come here often?"  Ahem.  PotBS does away with all that.  EVERY fight is instanced.  Every single bloody one.  Even fights that are supposed to be taking place in the town are instanced.  Even some non-combat missions are instanced.  While this guarantees you'll be uninterrupted by players while doing your thing, it also guarantees that you'll be uninterrupted by players while you're doing your thing.  If I wanted to fight alone, why am I playing an MMO?  This makes it difficult to actually meet anyone.  I also have no idea what other players are doing.  Is there a better way to fight?  What other tactics are there?  I don't know, I can't see them in action.

It doesn't help that there's no easy way to talk with the people around you, just a port wide chat.  On the up side this means no Ironforge style yell-fests.  On the down side everyone stands around being eerily quiet.  You can't overhear a conversation and join in.  There's little incidental social interaction.  Fortunately, a few of my corp mates from EVE Online came over to play so I have some built in friends.

Let's say you do finally get into a group and go out fighting.  Interestingly, combat scales to match your group which is nice.  A level 10 can usefully play with a level 20.  Also, since abilities scale very slowly, a level 20 doesn't slaughter level 10 enemies that badly anyway.  Now, this is ship-to-ship combat and you've got a fleet.  This means coordination.  This means a line of battle, an epic wall of ships lining up for a broadside, a commander flying flags to transmit his orders, balls smashing into the targetted ship.  Nope.  There is *no* fleet coordination.  No leader.  No way to call for help, issue orders or suggest formations.  There's not even a way to designate a primary target or even see who your friends are targeting.  You just have to sort of watch.  I suppose this is sort of realistic for the age, but even they could fly flags and use signal lamps and it doesn't make for a very fun game.   The NPCs don't fight as a fleet either and often get in each other's way.  Combat devolves into a furball every time.  I'm sure a group of well coordinated players could work all this out, and we tried using Vent.  But even with voice communications calling out primary targets was difficult as they're often all called the same thing.  I'm disappointed the game doesn't encourage fleet tactics.

Final analysis

Pros:  It's pretty.  It's historically accurate, for a game.  It's fairly unique.  The economy looks loads of fun.  It's relatively bug free.
Cons:  Combat is repetitive and isolated.  The social system is crippled.  Loot and advancement is not exciting.  Ships aren't differentiated enough.

Nice try at something different.  It's a shame that they got all the unique aspects (player economy, ship-to-ship combat) right and the basics of an MMO (social interaction, varied PVE experience, exciting progressions, play-style differenciation) wrong.  It feels like the basic MMO features were designed with the intention of countering known player interaction problems.  Unfortunately their solution is player segregation which defeats the whole point of an MMO.  On the up side this means that over time it should improve as they fix the basic flaws that have existing solutions.  On the down side, it gets very boring very fast.

I'll play it through until the Open Beta closes on Sunday, it's worth that much, but I would not recommend purchasing just now.  It has great potential, check back again in a year.

location: Rackham mood: I'm FANCY! tags: piratesoftheburningsea potbs gayvy mmo r

I went to the Found Footage Film Festival tonight and it was, in the immortal words of Dr. T, absoludirously funny.  It's done by two guys, who host the thing live, that go around to estate sales and thrift stores and public access TV and such to find some of the most awful footage you've ever seen, then splice them together into montages.  Exercise videos, cursing used car salesman outtakes, late night infomercials, bizarre home videos, awful public access talent shows... and, of course, celebrity public service videos like this one which teaches us the proper words for our naughty bits.

Since it's from a children's sex education video it's obviously safe for work, right?


DVDs are available from their web site, I highly recommend it.

tags: anus, film, found film festival, pdx

It's election day on an odd year and there's only two things on the state ballot in Oregon.

• Measure 49: A patch to Measure 37 to help small land owners or something.
  

Ok, don't really care about that one way or another.  Measure 37 pretty much destroyed the state's ability to enforce property regulations without bankrupting itself in the process anyway.  Putting a band-aid on shit still leave you with shit.  That said, I'll probably vote for it simply because big land owners seem to be against it.

• Measure 50: A constitutional amendment to increase the state tobacco tax and use the money for health care.

More money for state health care at the expense of smokers who add to the strained health care system?  Where do I sign up?!  But wait, it's a constitutional amendment.  Is a tax increase a constitutional issue?  No.  Then what the hell?

I'll tell you what the hell.  Oregon's constitution is fucked up in one serious way:  it takes just a simple majority to amend it.  Now, if it takes only a majority to pass a law, and it takes a majority to amend the constitution... what's the point of having a constitution?!  Why have laws when you can dump whatever you want into the constitution and trump any laws?

Ahh, but this is a tax hike.  In Oregon, tax increases need a 60% vote in the legislature.  But constitutional amendments only require 50%, so let's dump it in to the constitution, further watering down it's purpose.  ARGH!

As much as I hate manipulation of the legislative process, and as much as I'm inclined to vote no to avoid tacking another historical sticky note onto our constitution, I can't.  Government is like a sausage factory.  Don't look too hard at how it works else you'll be horrified.  Just think about the end result: tasty, tasty sausage.

Now I will fill out my convenient and informative paper ballot that my loving state government mailed out to their citizens weeks ago and drop it off at the local library or post office.  No lines.  No surly election workers.  No electronic voting machines.  Yay.

Last night I rewatched "Starship Troopers". I was bored and thought I'd give it a chance now that I'm over YOU SHAT ON ONE OF MY FAVORITE NOVELS YOU FUCKS!!! It's still about 15 minutes of political commentary in 90 minutes of bad movie. Anyhow, this means I had my TV on tuned, briefly, to actual TV. Late night TV. Local TV. And on comes this commercial for a local insurance agency, Vern Fonk Insurance.

Umm, it's better if you just watch.




Yeah. There's a ton of them on Youtube and on their site.

Also, Vern Fonk really likes cheeseburgers. A lot.

It's hypnotizing. The burger makes him so happy.

I want a cheeseburger now.

tags: pdx, tv, vern fonk, wtf

If I could breathe fire and have Japanese women dance around me in funny costumes I might sit around on the throne in my underwear looking smug, too.

I give you "Night Of Fire".

tags: music, video, wtf

The all knowing Facebook BandTracker has just informed me that THE FLAMING LIPS ARE COMING TO TOWN!

AHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!

Wednesday, September 19th at the Roseland.  Tickets are $39, guh... but so worth it.  Their concerts are supposed to be crazy extravaganzas!  Who else would like to go?

tags: event, flaming lips, music, pdx

The Hollywood Theater is showing "Labyrinth" for just one more night only!  I'm going, 7pm tomorrow (Thursday) night.

Myself, I'm in it for Jennifer Connelly.  Even if she is all whiney in this movie... and uhh, 16.  But we'll look past that and onto things like David Bowie's crotch.  Imagine, a 30 foot tall leotard wearing David Bowie on the big screen.  That would make his crotch about 3 feet high.



And they showed this to children.

tags: bowie, event, films, pdx

I've been working the Apple Store since before it was super-cool to have a Mac and when, like a Model-T, you got any color you wanted as long as it was black (read first edition Wallstreet). So here's some tips I've learned over the years that nobody ever seems to listen to.
( Don't listen to me, see if I care. )
Now go out and waste a whole lot of money!

tags: apple macbook economics rant

I am now officially without a car. I've effectively been without a car as mine has been busted for months and months, but now its official. No car. Three bikes, TriMet tickets, a Flexcar membership and friends will get me around now.

Today I was out on the sidewalk in front of my place talking with some friends, enjoying the sunshine when I noticed my car moved! You might be thinking "well duh, that's what the wheels are for", but my car doesn't move. Something wrong with the electrics. I never figured it out and couldn't be arsed to get a tow or try a pop start. It was sitting in front of my neighbor's place for months. Now suddenly it's sitting in front of mine, slightly out of kilter like a really bad parking job. Or like someone had put it in neutral and pushed the car while the steering was locked. The doors had been unlocked after all. It's a testament to both my neighborhood that a car can sit, unlocked, on the street for months and nobody took anything. Or maybe nobody wants a 1995 Saturn.

Then we noticed a note. I figured it would be an angry letter from my neighbors about leaving my trash in front of their house, and they'd be right. Nope, it's a note from someone wanting to buy my car! Fantastic! I was going to donate it anyway. Turns out he was passing by, noticed my car's ass hanging halfway out into the street, the layers of tree jizz all over it and the out of date registration and figured it was busted. Wanted to buy it for parts.

I asked $500, he offered $200. Considering that its out of registration, won't start, needs an oil change, has 100k miles on it, hasn't moved for months and I was going to donate it anyway, I took it. He gave me cash. We did the title transfer thing. He hopped in and I got a couple friends to push it up to speed. Pop the clutch and with a few sputters and a bit of foul smelling smoke the engine fired up just fine. Damn, should have done that *before* we talked price. Oh well. I'm not the best negotiator in the world. But now I'm rid of it and I won't get any more fines for keeping it on the street, unregistered.

tags: car

Since people were appalled at my false advertising of Freezepop singing Pi, I give you now "Hard 'n' Phirm" singing pi over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over...

tags: pi music ytmnd

I wrote out a long response to Jon's comment to Bush's Bizarro Vietnam. Too long for an LJ comment apparently. Rather than edit down a perfectly good rant, I'll just post it as a journal entry.

You're right, I have no doubt that we could have rolled over North Vietnam, eventually. But that's not the point.

Let's say we did. How many more dead and wounded US soldiers (not to mention Vietnamese) would it take? We took 350,000 casualties just in defending South Vietnam alone. What will they have bought? The Domino Theory turned out to be bunk. The original purpose of upholding the elections was long lost, South Vietnam was a democracy in name only. We'd have put in place another anti-communist dictator.

Once we marched into Hanoi what then? You don't get a "Victory!" screen like in a video game, there's a whole country of armed rebels to deal with who are all pissed off at the US. Let the South Vietnamese government take over? They were a corrupt mess lead by a military dictator who could barely hold their own country together. No, we'd have had to stay in Vietnam, police them and try to build up a working government on a very rotten foundation against a hostile and very foreign population which we held in contempt. These are things we were not good at. OTOH insurgency is something the Vietnamese were very good at. More deaths, more strife, more prolonging the civil war and propping up a government that didn't work, more people pissed off at us.

The US was already being torn apart by the war, socially and economically. Thirty years later and we're still dealing with the after-shocks. What would years more of fighting and the draft and riots and a war economy and counter-insurgency done to us?

In strategic military terms, fighting the war sucked up so much of the defense budget that the US military missed an upgrade cycle, just didn't have the money to allocate to R&D research, and we suffered for it in the 80s. Staying in Vietnam would have exasperated that jeopardizing our defenses against the USSR. Ironically we'd do that by attempting to fight communism in a side-show.

You can't just point to the bad stuff that happened afterwards and say "look, we could have prevented all that"; that's not how counter-factual history works. Thieu and Diem and Duong and Ngo were not nice guys. They were corrupt. They killed a whole lot of people. There's no doubt they would have kept on going if they were in charge of the whole country. The result of a South Vietnamese victory could have been as bad or even worse.

As for Cambodia, its questionable how that's linked to Vietnam. It certainly didn't help to have a protracted Vietnam War destabilizing the whole region. Did North Vietnam shelter the Khmer? Yes. Why? Because the enemy of my enemy is my ally. The Khmer were fighting a war against the US backed Cambodian government. Who eventually stopped the Khmer? Vietnam.

If we had stayed, could we have stopped it? By 1970 the Khmer were already well on their way to power. By 1975 they controlled the country. Could we have invaded Cambodia AND pacified Vietnam at the same time? Doubtful. Who, then, stops the Khmer?

Now what happens if you remove the US from that equation? The Khmer insurgency started in 1968. The US pull out began in 1969. What if it started earlier? What if North Vietnam won the war in 1968? No need to support the Khmer. Maybe it never happens? Maybe the Cambodian government deals with it? Maybe Vietnam, unified earlier, invades earlier?

What if we never invaded in force in 1964? What if North Vietnam won even earlier? Conflicts dragged out over a long period of time create a lot of bad blood. People get displaced, lives get destroyed, conflicts spread into adjoining countries. Adding in piles of foreign money and weapons makes it even worse. Throw in a few hundred thousand foreign soldiers who don't want to be there and things get really bad. A shorter, less intense civil war might have had a shorter, less bloody aftermath.

Point is: Vietnam was a mess. Whether or not we could have forced the North Vietnamese government to surrender is immaterial as that would not have ended the fighting. There was no clear goal or reason for us to be there except the flawed Domino Theory. Both the South and the North governments were bad guys. We didn't understand the people and the conflict. Our prosecution of the war was flawed and without a clear goal. Our people didn't support it and were tearing the country apart because of it. We were mortgaging our global defense against the USSR. We contributed to the destabilization of the whole region. We went into moral bankruptcy. We even botched the pull-out. We never should have been there and once we were in we never should have done it as we did.

After all that, all those "what ifs", to take the complex disaster that was the Vietnam War and to say the lesson learned is something a simplistic as "we should have stayed longer and it would have all been ok" is either criminally incompetent or just lying for convenience. Could we have done lots of things differently and succeeded? Plenty debatable. It would have taken a long, hard look at what we were doing wrong and changing a whole lot. But not by just plowing forward and continuing the same mistakes, only bigger.

tags: bizarro, bush, military, politics, vietnam

In one of the worst PR moves in the history of speech-writing, Bush compared Iraq to Vietnam! To a room full of vets! And he says we should have stayed longer! Really, I'm not kidding!

And what did he say the problem was? Was it politicians meddling with military policy? Was it the questionable pretenses in which we entered the war? Was it propping up a rotten military who didn't want to fight and a rotten government lead by a military dictator under the pretense of supporting democracy? Was it toying with the lives of millions of people over a geo-political pissing match between the USSR and the USA? Was it protracting a horrible civil war that should have ended in months for ten more years and engendered a generation of follow on hatred and genocide?

Nope, we should have stayed there longer, that was the problem! Resolve! Because no matter how bad an idea you can always succeed at it if you spend enough time, money and blood on it (other people's, of course). I'm sure the vets loved hearing that. And then he has the gall to say that the follow-on violence which was exaggerated by the US expanding and extending the war wouldn't have happened if we stayed longer!

It's bizarro helping!



The Guardian, Washington Post and Newsweek all have articles on the speech. The Post's is particularly interesting in that it sheds some light on the new attempts to revise history and whitewash our involvement in Vietnam in order to paint an upcoming report on Iraq in a better light. When someone suggests a pull-out of Iraq supporters of Bush can say, "look at the mess pulling out of Vietnam caused!"

And Bush had the gall to feed this BS to a roomful of vets. I'm disgusted.

tags: bizarro, bush, disgusted, iraq, politics, vietnam

So the new merkin carbon-copy of "The IT Crowd" just aired. I haven't seen it yet but I am prepared to be disappointed.

For those who missed it, "The IT Crowd" is a BBC comedy series about two BOFHs working in the basement of a big corporate office keeping their computers running. It's a pitch perfect parody of every computer geek and clueless PHB you've ever met. Its funny in the "oh god, it's true and it horrifies me" sort of way. In a way, its "The Office" for IT.

The mandatory BBC laugh track is appalling but we can get past that. The folks doing the show obviously know their shit, just look at the office:



I expect the American version will have copied it all down to the letter.

While looking for reviews of the merkin copy I stumbled upon two series. The first is "Reaper".

http://nymag.com/daily/entertainment/2007/05/the_cws_reaper_dont_fear_it.html

"Kevin Smith–produced comedy-drama about a slacker who is forced by Satan to
collect the souls of the damned who have escaped from Hell."

It stars Tyler Labine who you all know played the shrunk giant Croker in Evil Alien Conquerers!!!!

Ok, you all don't know that. And I'm the only one who that excites. Oh well, your loss. But Kevin Smith + Tyler Labine... I'm checking it out.

The other is "Darkplace" which I know nothing about but the IT Crowd fans seem to love it.  This promo shot has me sold:



They have the first episode online for your awesome viewing pleasure.

tags: darkplace, it crowd, reaper, shows