Linkstew

In addition to buying that snowboard, I also bought a new jacket. However, this caused an unexpected problem.

The snowboard is great. I felt far more capable than I ever had on rental equipment, and with that added confidence, I found myself willing to go faster than I ever had before.

However, while I knew I was going faster -- and subsequently falling harder -- than before, I was uncertain of how much harder I was falling. You see, I used to gauge just how hard I fell based on how much snow got into my clothes. But thanks to my new jacket, no snow got into my clothes all weekend.

So now I'm going to have to calibrate a whole new metric to estimate how hard I'm falling.

Okay, not to be too geeky, but... But I'm pretty sure I just watched one of the most depressing hours of TV I've ever seen in the Star Trek: Voyager episode entitled Course: Oblivion.

Read the long version in that summary linked above, or here's the short version: The crew along with the ship starts coming undone at the molecular level, and then they figure out that they're all copies of the real Voyager, and then they try to save themselves, and then they try to leave a message for anyone to find in order to validate their existance, and in the end they fail at leaving the message, and the whole ship disintigrates. No record was made of their existance other than a bit of stuff in space. And then real Voyager comes across the stuff and has no clue what it was.

And now I'm sitting here slack jawed, at a loss as to what to make of that episode. I think I'm going to be sitting here trying to think happy thoughts for quite awhile.

Oh, can I tell you how foolish I feel? I just realized tonight that for the last several weeks I've been using "it's" as a possessive form. Thankfully, before that, I was properly using "its" as possessive. I don't have a clue what changed in my head, other than having four wisdom teeth removed... But I don't think I'm quite ready to believe that my wisdom teeth held my knowledge of how to use "its" properly.

But this page set me straight. But that page linked to this article, which made me feel a little better by reminding me just how fluid english can be. It made me feel a little better, but not much.

I'll fix all the mistakes later. It's kind of hard to do a global search and replace to fix the problem, because while regular expressions kick ass, they can't distinguish between an "it's" in a possessive context and an "it's" in a contracted context. Which means I'm going to have to get sentient on my database's ass.

gratuitous - 1. Not called for by the circumstances; without reason, cause, or proof; adopted or asserted without any good ground; 2. Lara Croft: Tomb Raider

Predictably, going to Bakersfield resulted in me seeing a movie with my cohorts. And in my motivation to make no decisions this weekend, I just shrugged and went and saw Tomb Raider when it was suggested. It was either that or drive around trying to find something better to do than sit in an air conditioned theater when it's 105 outside.

Honestly, the movie wasn't as bad as I was expecting. It really could have been much, much worse. Sure, for the first fifteen minutes I was shaking my head at things that seemed irrelevant, and made no sense in the context, and were obviously there solely to show off... But after about fifteen minutes, I realized that the situation wasn't going to get any better, and if I kept shaking my head it was going to fall off -- so I gave in to the sillyness and just accepted it all.

And once I gave up on making any sense of it, I found three things: Neat-o sets, Angelina Jolie, and incredible action scenes (focusing on Angelina Jolie).

The sets were neat. From Croft's mansion, to the jungle temple, to the icy temple -- it was all very well done. And they were nice to look at and all, but thanks to some questionable cinematography, the architecture was frequently obscured or neglected. The crew was probably distracted, and the editors probably figured it didn't matter, because the audience would be distracted as well. It was all by design.

You see, the film-makers knew what their chief asset was. No, not the Tomb Raider license, but rather, Angelina Jolie. And her assets were exploited to their fullest in this role. She was stuntorific, shooting, dodging, running, and bouncing (in more ways than the obvious one pair) her way to victory. She had a whole range of outfits, all of which were intended to do one thing: Show off Jolie's body in every way possible. And all of her outfits met that goal admirably.

The story was average. No better and no worse than The Mummy Returns, for example. The difference between Tomb Raider and The Mummy Returns is that people who went to see Angelina Jolie in Tomb Raider got to see a lot of Angelina Jolie, while people who went to see The Rock in The Mummy Returns didn't get 1/10th of what they paid for.

And I'd be lying if I didn't admit that I didn't object to seeing the movie because the prospect of watching Angelina Jolie be shown off sounded like an entertaining way to spend my time, and I was right. 3/5.

Yesterday, I got a letter from some California income tax person. "That's funny," I mumbled. "I thought I wanted my $80 refund to be direct-deposited?" So I ripped open the envelope, and inside I found what seemed to be a check, but I wasn't sure, because it included lines named "balance" and "total payments". After staring at it for awhile, and listening to the phone message explaining what they'd done, and thinking about how taxes worked, in the hopes of figuring out whether it was a bill or a check, I finally determined that it was a check. The letter claimed that they didn't direct deposit my refund because they'd made an adjustment to my refund, because I'd mis-added something.

They claimed that my total tax liability for the year was $161, and that I'd paid $2646.02, so they gave me a refund of $2485.02 instead of the $80 I was expecting.

My total income last year was only $14,000. There's no way I paid $2646.02 to the state. I'm pretty sure I didn't even pay that much in federal taxes. I just don't believe it. But since I can't find my W-2 form to verify how much I actually paid the state, I guess I'll just drop the money into my savings account until they notice. It could take them years, but in the mean time I might make up to $12 in interest! Wow, that'd be swell!

I picked up Zone of Enders for two reasons: 1. It came with the Metal Gear Solid 2 demo. And 2. It looked like an amazing, anime inspired, mecha combat game. And having played and beaten the Metal Gear Solid 2 demo, I can say for a fact that it came with ZOE. And having beaten ZOE, I can say for certain that it's an anime inspired mecha combat game. As to whether or not it's amazing... Well, it depends on which scale you're judging.

Let's go with three scales, for simplicity. First, there's gameplay. How much fun is the game to play, how does it control, and how is the experience of beating the game? Well, it's a hell of a lot of fun to play. The game makes controlling the Jehuty feel like second nature, and it reacts like you want it to without getting in your way. In fact, at times it didn't even feel like I was consciously doing something, and it just happened. In fact, it's so easy to play that I spent a couple of hours just playing old missions over and over. Alas, there were only three different kinds of enemies in the whole game (not counting bosses), so I eventually tired of just beating up drones and had to actually play some of the game. The bosses, on the other hand, were moderately interesting, and each had a little trick that had to be figured out to beat them. Unfortunately, there were only three real bosses. Fun factor: 5/5.

Next, there's the story scale. And when it came to playing the game, I discovered the worst voice active I've ever heard, combined with the corniest plot I've ever seen and the most cliche Neon Genesis Evangelion rip off story ever. Little boy accidentally gets in big robot. Little boy kills someone. Little boy doesn't want to kill. Little boy has to kill. I want to kill little boy and whoever his voice actor was and whoever was the voice actor of the big robot's computer. Oh, what's this? Hitting start skips a cut scene? Ohhh... I didn't watch any of the story after the first 15 minutes (Which turns out to have been a pretty large portion of the game, but more on that later). Of course, it didn't help that the missions were all totally cliche, and consisted of any one of Protect everyone, Destroy everything, or fetch item allowing you to destroy everything. And to top it all off, the game was really short. Like three hours short. Story factor: 0/5.

And finally, Graphics and Sound scale. Unfortunately, because "voice acting" falls under "Sound", this scale break down does a huge disservice to both the Graphics and Sound Effects, so I'm going to pretend that the voice acting falls under the previous category. The graphics in this game are amazing, and the attention to detail superb. This game really shows what the PS2 is capable of doing that the PSX wasn't. From the trails that the Jehuty will scrape into the ground if you fly too low, to the countless buildings you can destroy and the cars parked in driveways, it's amazing. And the sound effects are nice, too. Explosions, explosions, everywhere! Graphics and Sound factor: 5/5.

My, what a dilemma we're faced with here. Amazing game play and amazing graphics, but amazingly horrible story and voice acting. So I guess ZOE qualifies as an "amazing anime inspired mecha combat game", as long as your definition of amazing doesn't mean amazingly good in every possible way. Now, normally I'm the story-whore and my roommate Keith is the graphics-whore, and I would have smelled a game with a story this bad a mile away... But the gameplay and graphics are so good that, despite the stinking story, I can say that this is a game you should play. I give it a 3/5, but with all kinds of asterisks and footnotes. However, it's also a game that you should rent and not buy, because it's so short. In the five days Blockbuster allocates you, you'll be able to play this game two or three times and spend plenty of time with the Metal Gear Solid 2 demo while you're at it.

But while I recommend you play this game, I urge you to remember that you can skip every cut scene by hitting start. And if you don't believe me, you can taste the waters yourself, but... I don't recommend that course of action, and don't say I didn't warn you.

Last night, I went looking for something which I thought was posted to LinkStew, only to find out that it'd never been moved over from my old site. So I went digging through my files, only to find five copies of my old site... And I only looked on two of the computers I have files stored on! So I've been on a mad file deleting rampage since last evening. I've never deleted a web page directory before, for fear of needing it again -- but today I threw out that notion and blew away thousands of files. I destroyed all of the various West High web pages I created but the one. I destroyed everything I ever did for Intelegenesis. I destroyed all of my programming projects from the classes I took at Bakersfield College. I consolodated seemingly hundreds of other directories. In general, I put things into one of three categories. 1. Things which should some day put into the stew. 2. Things which I want to keep, but don't belong in the stew and need to be incorporated into a new place. or 3. The Trash.

And if I hesitated, I trashed it. The reason I even had that much junk was because I'm normally so hesitant about trashing things. So the next step in my insanity is to add anything to LinkStew that's pending and delete the local copy. If my essay about Ford in Brave New World is in the stew, why do I need three copies of the original document? Why do I even need one?

The copy in the Stew should be the canonical copy, and there shouldn't be other copies. This saves on disk space, it saves on organizational difficulties, it makes the information safer, since the stew is backed up regularly, and it makes the information useful to everyone who isn't me.

And after I've done that, (which hopefully won't be this weekend) I'll incorporate everything that's left into an organized structure on one computer. I know where things are scattered between all of my computers, but do you know how much space that's wasting in my head? Think of all the other things I could remember with the space that remembers that I have school papers in hal:school, another:school, rincewind:Documents:School, and rincewind:/Luggage/Documents/School, and some other subdirectories which I don't actually remember.

For all intents and purposes, classes are over. There are a couple of classes I'll attend tomorrow, but my heart won't really be in it. I think I'll mainly be going because I feel guilty about missing so many lectures this semester. Well, that's a lie. One of the classes tomorrow is really a final review.

For all intents and purposes, another semester is over, except for the finals. I have five days before my first final. It seems an eternity away. And it's only been three days since I turned in my last homework assignment. It seems an eternity away.

I'm in a long moment of transition. A limbo. I've been waiting for something to happen, but nothing has. Tomorrow I'll get out and go to class, and maybe that will help. It probably hasn't helped that I've been incapacitated by allergies for the last three days. Between allergy medicine and the allergies themselves, my head has been spinning, making the limbo seem even more significant.

It's just been a long weekend. I've just been sitting around doing nothing. It hasn't been an eternity, just three days. My sleeping schedule is a little off, and my nose is still stuffy, and my throat is still sore...

But tomorrow, I'll get up, go to a few classes, focus myself and commence with the studying. In eleven days, the semester will be over. It may seem like an eternity away, but it'll be here long before I'm ready for the finals, and two weeks from now, my linguistics final, three days past, will seem an eternity away.

The GIA ran this story today about the security of Phantasy Star Online. It's a shame that PSO's been tampered with, but it seems like the architecture could have been easilly designed to make this sort of thing impossible. Hopefully they designed it extensibly enough that they'll be able to fix it.

What I found more interesting in the article, though, was the mention of the security measures in place to protect accounts from being stolen. While I respect the desire to protect the time investment of the players, the restriction that a character must be played on the Dreamcast it was created on strikes me as troublesome. What if my Dreamcast dies (as mine seems to be threatening to do)? What if I want to take my VMU to a friends to show off my character? What if my VMU dies? And there are so many possible solutions, it's a shame they didn't implement any of them.

The easiest is to allow the user to select what level of security they want for a newly created character. This way people who will only play from their cushy couch and broadband connection can feel safe, while wanderers will be able to play wherever they land. Still more complex systems could employ something based on RSA key pairs (which would also help prevent server spoofing). They could have even added a controller code pass phrase to a key-pair system (with the option of a zero length pass phrase) to allow even more security. It seems like limiting the security based on the particular Dreamcast is a big waste of the portability of the VMU. Well, I guess that as long as I can back up my character on to another VMU they didn't mess things up too badly.

Last night I watched The Avengers, which really wasn't a very good movie. Just consider this a warning: The dialogue attempted to be witty banter, but it wasn't, Sean Connery didn't really seem to care about his part, and the plot was completely disorganized. It felt like chunks of the movie were missing. In other words, it wasn't edited, it was blindly attacked by someone who thought it was too long. Thank goodness Magnolia didn't suffer at the hands of a deranged editor. Have I ever mentioned that I don't like editors? They want you do silly things to your writings, and at the same time let other people write stupid things, such as suggestions that the third Millennium began on January 1, 2000... Bleah.

So I had to cope for over a week without a Pilot, and I went totally nuts during that time. I had no idea what time it was, I had no where to keep track of my assignments, and I was generally lost. It was unpleseant.

But all of that is over now, as Thursday I got my Palm V.

So don't you hate it when you're tidying up, and you're picking up all the empty soda cans, and then suddenly you get to the NOT empty can, and the laws of gravity come into play? Yeah, I hate it too... At least in this instance there was a nearby desk, and it landed flat...

What I find amusing, though, is the Empty Full Can. This happens less often, but is always highly amusing as the can ceases to obey the laws of gravity as it flies from your hand... Always amusing, that. Keeps me laughing for hours.

Speaking of for hours... I found an Inverse Mouse cursor set for Windows which is totally cool. It'll keep me amused for hours... Jaw hanging slightly agape, thumb twitching slightly on the trackball, and eyes glazed as they watch the changing colors of the cursor...