Look! Bigfoot!
Two of my co-workers were excitedly passing around an e-mail reprinting a quote from Chapter 9, Verse 11 of the Koran predicting that an enraged Eagle would cleanse the lands of Allah. Needless to say, the e-mail’s a hoax (as a quick online check confirmed), but they were pretty disappointed to discover so. I then had to inform them that no, neither Mister Rogers nor Captain Kangaroo were Navy Seals or Marine sharpshooters.
Hmmm… I think I need to make something good up for them and send it to them through an anonymous remailer. Any suggestions?
My anniversary was quite good… nice and quiet; raininva and I lead busy, interesting enough lives that a low-key evening counts as a welcome vacation these days. Invisifest was a lot of fun, too, though I discovered that it’s unwise to try to learn Amplitude while DDRMax is pounding away behind you. The XBox game with the full ‘Mech control panel was cool-looking, but I’d rather play it sometime when I can sit and actually learn what’s going on.
I’m almost finished (finally) Red Faction on the PS2; when I do, I can start the first episode of dot/Hack. Rain bought me all three for our anniversary!
I’m still not sure what my costumes will be this year for Halloween and Rising Star Emcee, though Jerry’s suggestion of a rather desperate Tokyo Civil Defense worker as my costume for the latter was pretty good. Less than six weeks to get them together…
Cinco ano
As raininva likes to point out, five years ago last night, I was extremely wound up, and hoping I was making the right decision for our future together.
I worked through the tension that night by playing Quake for quite some time. 🙂
These last five years have, without a doubt, been the happiest years of my life. I want to thank not just Rain, but all of the friends who have supported us.
Here’s to many many more!
Days of Labor
Quite a long weekend. A pretty good one in a lot of ways, but long nevertheless.
Thursday, raininva left for DragonCon to do some contracting for WizKids. Thursday night, after my afternoon nap, I yanked half of my office out into the living room for sorting and re-arrangement. I ended up with a huge plastic storage tub full of gaming stuff that I don’t want to get rid of, but I don’t have room for in the office. That went to the storage along with another tub of loose items; several empty boxes that were just wasting cubic went to the trash, along with two bags full of stuff that just wasn’t doing anyone any good.
Booklist
Finished reading the next Miles Vorkosigan book, The Warrior’s Apprentice, last night. I’m truly impressed so far by this series’ balance of humor and pathos. The characters are fleshed out very well, and the plot managed to surprise me a few times. I’m going to be smarter with this series than I was with the Warlock In Spite Of Himself books, and draw out my reading of them. I read so many of the Warlock series at once that I overdosed, and I haven’t been able to pick up another in over a year.
On that note, I’m back to Steven Brust, after giving him a vacation, and have started on the Book of Athyra (I may or may not be spelling that right). I think I’ll be all caught up on Vlad Taltos before I am with Miles Vorkosigan. That’s okay, though. I’ve still got those loaned Mercedes Lackeys to read, and yubbie tells me that there’s another Neal Stephenson coming soon.
Funny, I have a bunch of new Macintosh games as well as several half-finished PlayStation 2 games in the queue, but you still can’t beat books for portability and ease of use.
Speaking of free games…
The original developer of “Glider PRO” has released the Windows, Mac OS X and 9 versions of the classic game as freeware.
This is a game which can cause some serious productivity loss 🙂
Hako!
I love the old Ray Dunakin World Builder games. Sure, the graphics are quaint, antiquated, but the puzzles are fun, and the bad jokes just make it better. (Actually, the antiquated graphics add a bit to the charm!) Legend has it that Myst was inspired by games like these.
Unfortunately, the sounds don’t want to work right in Power Macintoshes. That’s why I was installing a System 6 emulator for OS X the other day.
SoftMac and Basilisk II can both emulate older Macs under Windows and Linux, respectively. Users of other systems probably know more about available emulators than I would.
Free games rule!
Puppet violence on the increase
A gentleman named Laz Rojas makes new character “skins” for the Voyager: Elite Force shooter game. Thanks to his work, one can clothe the Voyager characters in uniforms from any series except Enterprise, play Original Series, Next Gen, or Deep Space 9 characters, or even some unusual creations such as Tom Paris as a Blues Brother, or the feline Lieutenant M’Ress from the Animated Series. (trenn, take note!)
But with the upcoming Thunderbirds movie in the works, Rojas has apparently decided to go even farther afield… soon, Scott Tracy will be able to take out all those long-held frustrations on the other players!
(Click for a larger image)
All Rojas’ skins and practice bots can be found at his Elite Farce website, and most can be modified for use in Quake 3, No One Lives Forever, Medal of Honor, or other Q3-based games.
Of small interest
Yes, I too would like to have a 3-GHz Mac on my desktop for $899. However, despite the fact that OS X is quite capable of running on an Intel chip, here’s a nicely thought-out editorial on why that won’t happen soon.
And for those on my friends list who still need a PlayStation 2, Deals On The Web has a Sony refurbed PS2 with a subwoofer tossed in for $129. That’s only $30 bucks more than a PS1 if I remember correctly.
Two Warps to Neptune
The classical station at Virginia Tech is playing Halloween-themed music this morning (though they are stretching the definition in places). Unsurprisingly, they played “Tocatta and Fugue in Dm”… but do I free-associate anything involving Halloween? No, not me. I immediately start thinking of Gyruss.
Mmm… think I need to fire up MacMAME when I get home… play some nice emulated old-school games. “Red Five, standing by!”
Web-comic thoughts
I am jealous of Barb and Chris’ upcoming cartoonist fame, so I went and found the old Artificial Intelligence strips Tom Monaghan and I collaborated on.
*sigh* It’s not that I’m not still proud of the work, it’s just that the jokes all seemed funnier back in 1987.
Spent today catching up on Mac Hall… that strip can be pretty dang funny sometimes. Even smiled at the Digimon porn. Bad Boys of Computer Science just didn’t do anything for me, though. By the way, if a hi-resolution version of “Bob’s Quick Guide to the Apostrophe, You Idiots” was on a t-shirt, I’d own three of them.
The artist of Mac Hall did a total conversion, “Marathon: RED”, for Bungie Software’s Marathon Infinity shooter game – some of the best bitmapped art that game’s ever seen. I was hoping to get the Aleph One:SDL version working to show meiran, but the Windows port is still just too buggy. Maybe next time she’s close to a Macintosh.
While digging through my files, I also found the digital file of my game card… yes, I am a card in the Star Trek Collectible Card Game. The original artwork is by Chris Impink, and alert people can see where I got my default LJ user icon from.
