Games, Geeks and Guns

Thanks for the editing tips Lucas! The word of the week is 'observant' just for that!

Nov 16 - Castle Battles

Yes, I know... I mentioned it last week, and I'll plug it good here again: Go watch Duncebucket, and vote! Crazy, crude and creepy all at the same time, this is comedic fun at the frenzied level of Jim Carey just after he's downed a dozen Super Slurpees and a package of PopRocks. Zowee!!!

I'm also watching Castle on Monday nights, which has Nathan Fillion at his best with a great dynamic playing off the other cast. Quite a few people like it, which is good to see as it means there may even be a third season after this one's done it's run.

Ah, Gratuitous Space Battles... how you taunt me. I've managed to win most of the battles on all three levels of difficulty, but I keep going back with new designs to see if I can do better. Plus, there's quite a few people on the GSB Forums who are modding the game, adding improvements to it and even creating total conversions to make it possible to battle with ships from the Stargate or Babylon 5. Check out this great( and brief )video review of GSB here – it's now available as of today on the Steam Network, from the same folks who brought us great games like Defence Grid and of course, Half-Life. Valve, we luv ya! I have yet to try the multiplayer aspect, as I want to tune some of my designs still...

Shhh.... I'm going to tell you a secret about online gaming, one that seems to be most prevalent in the massively popular shooter games like MW2: racism, predudice and worse. As the article link will tell you, if you've played online long enough, chances are you've experienced it firsthand. People are very quick to become emotional over voice chat, far more so than they would when face to face... and it's far easier for people to be nasty when hiding behind a video screen-name. I'm not talking about the squeaky-voiced teenager who disses yer' mama or calls you names that wouldn't make a nun blush; no, it's the hardcore jerks, whose foul mouths spout racist epithets like there's no tomorrow. Sure, you can mute them, report them and the like... but does that really solve the problem? How little effort does it take to be courteous to people, to have a modicum of sportsmanship or even just respect for other people? I find it fascinating that if you give some people the chance to be anonymous, it brings out the worst parts of their nature, rather quickly. Mayhaps it is a sign that the nEt PoLiCe are not all that far away from becoming reality; the thin edge is how it begins.

Nov 17 - What the frell were they thinking?

Hooray! Today is the day that Farscape: The Complete Series Megaset is released! For years I've had to content myself with the shows I've managed to hoard on VHS or my PC taped from on-air broadcasts, but no longer. I'll be watching for the series to come on sale in the new year, as I have a thing about rushing out to buy things, even things I really like, at full price right off the bat. Future Shop's "Get it First" slogan is an anathema to me, as I've come to like the "Get it for a bargain price" a lot more.

Speaking of cool TV series, I watched my first episode of the new 'V' series tonight, which stars Morena Baccarin of Firefly fame. The show had some interesting vibes to it, and the tech was definitely more 'real ' in its look, rather than the sanitized look of the 80's original. I still have all the novels I collected from the same time period, and just found out that there's a few more out there that I wasn't aware of. Time for a 'net search and a bit of eBay checking, I think.

I went into the BCAA for my local merchant meeting tonight, which was fairly well attended. It was a lively meeting too, with quite a few ideas flying around about how to make the open-air shopping centre more attractive to shoppers for the holidays. I'm really enjoying meeting with the other merchants in the plaza, as they're all very savvy folks and have quite a lot to share about the business world. Sure beats some of the dull reading I've done over the years from business texts – doing my research on various topics that way was like trying a game demo: great start, but I was left wanting more.

Nov 18 - Google gathering

I have a thing for bunkers, perhaps due to my love of all things apocalyptic. Which is why when I heard about the city-sized superbunker that Chairman Mao built under the city of Beijing starting back in 1969, I was intrigued. Check out some of the pictures here – there's not much left in use now, but just imagine the effort of housing nearly six million people underground . Also be sure to check out this great series of disaster-inspired works of art here – the artist has quite a range of topics, all of them rather spooky.

Did you know that Google Books is back on track? They've drafted a new version of their copyright agreement with various trade associations of publishers and authors. It's interesting in that it deals with orphan works, which include books that are out of print and whose authors are dead, leaving them in limbo. But until Google takes over the publishing world, you can get a free book fix at the places on this list of free online book resources, including Tor and Baen Books, two of my fave publishing houses.

One book I still have to get around to er, getting is the latest Robert Jordan novel, The Gathering Storm which was written by Brandon Sanderson based on the huge amount of material left by the late author. As it's the first of three parts, there's still quite a lot of reading ahead... and I hope they tie up the thousands of loose threads that Jordan's world ballooned into. Too... many... characters! To Jordan's credit, most of them were quite distinct and fairly memorable, but the sheer number made recalling who was doing what and when rather onerous. Anything over two dozen and they starts to blur...

As for my own work, here's a link to a few of the short stories I've written, at the archives over at FanFiction.com. For those who haven't been to my Nichneve n site either, there's quite a few stories with her character there too. I don't like to post all my stories "in the wild" as there's too many Copy/Paste Bandits out there, but what's there is more than enough for me to say I have a presence online.

Nov 19 - Thursdaze

Looks like the Christmas shopping season is starting off with a whimper, not a bang. Hence the news that retailers are chalking up deep discounts already in the hope of luring in shoppers. Not me though; I have a solid Shopping Season Rule: I do not set foot in any shopping mall after Dec. 1^st. I'll pop into the big bo retailers or the local plaza, but no incentive could lure me into the crazed insanity and parking lot mayhem that is a shopping mall in December. I remember driving by the Pen Centre some years ago about a week before Christmas, heading northbound on the 406 – the cars were lined up back onto the 406 southbound, past the train bridge overpass to exit at the mall. That's just crazy!!

Tonight I saw an episode of Flash Forward finally, and it wasn't bad. I'll have to catch up with the series as I can over the next few months, as the concept is rather intriguing: everyone in the world blacks out for 2 mins 17 seconds. When they wake up, they've had a vision of their future for that same amount of time. I had high hopes for Heroes too, but that show really jumped the shark and got away from it's original concept: ordinary people gaining superpowers and trying to discover why.

I'm a little put out that I haven't been able to fix my Vonage phone after rewiring my network a few weeks ago. It's a case of fix one thing and another breaks - my Xbox Live and the wireless connections are all working great, but not the my Vonage: there's no dial tone. When I get a chance next week I may phone tech support, though I doubt there's much they can do over the phone. Most places won't support home network troubleshooting, as there's too many variables and network techs don't come cheap.

Nov 20 - I Got The Shot

I was at the local flu clinic first thing this morning to get my H1N1 shot, as today was the first day they opened the immunizations to the general public without restriction here in BC. It was a surprisingly short wait, with only a few hundred people in total to be processed. I was in and out within half an hour, a far cry from the hours-long wait I had predicted – nice to be wrong in the right way sometimes.

It's also a good thing that I live in the southernmost part of Vancouver Island, as the heavy rains for the last 24 hours have caused severe flooding just an hour north of here. The cities of Duncan and North Cowichan were declared disaster areas today, as hundreds were evacuated in the wake of the rising waters compounded by the local tides backing up rivers. While not a disaster on a massive scale like New Orleans and Katrina was, it is still scary to think that here I sit, watching the lake waters rise to entirely cover the dock in the park next door and that only a few minutes north, people have had their homes flooded out. For an island about the size of Holland, it's surprisingly small some days.

The evening saw me play a fair bit of Borderlands, which I'd put down this week in favour of MW2 – obviously. I've yet to play co-operatively with anyone for any period of time, which is where a lot of the fun of the game is said to reside.

Nov 21 - Smatterday

Video on demand these days is still not up to snuff; I've tried out the Zune service on Xbox Live, and the bargain hunter in me cringes to 'rent' a movie for close to ten dollars, especially as the video quality is not consistent. While Zune boasts of having '1080p content' it tends to stagger, go jaggy or pause at times, which is in no way superior to a DVD. I'm the first person to propose going totally digital and to scrap the need to physically load media, but I'd much rather see things go onto a 'Home Media Server' than stream over flaky connections from a server thousands of miles away. I've got a fair number of network drives here already, albeit still without having a dedicated PC server to run them, so it's a little ad-hoc of a setup for the moment. But it's still better than Zune in 2 ways: it's free, and it works perfectly.

One show I may pick up on DVD is Harvey Birdman: Attorney At Law. It's got rapid-fire quips and jokes, with a great retro visual style. I like a show that doesn't lead you by the hand, and the advantage of DVD( or video on demand! )is that you can go back with that PVR and catch the quip you thought you heard but weren't sure about. Sure beats rewinding the VHS tape until it snaps. By then I'll have probably turned my old PC into a media server thanks to guides like this. Sweet!

After work, the evening saw me play a fair bit of Borderlands, which I'd put down this week in favour of MW2 – obviously. I've yet to play co-operatively with anyone for any period of time, which is where a lot of the fun of the game is said to reside.

Nov 22 - Online Day Off

While I was at Best Buy this morning to get a copy of Left4Dead2, I also managed to finally pick up SG: Atlantis Season 5, which I've been waiting a year now to drop in price enough to be worth it. I'm pleased to see that the show made it to five seasons, and I'll have to try to check out the new Stargate: Universe that's currently playing on the airwaves in the USA. Apparently it's quite a dark show, but it's been having writing problems that see it's episodes yo-yo-ing from great to garbage. Find the middle!

How smart is a cat? Apparently researchers have created a computer model of a cat brain in order to better study how living creatures deal with reality, which is pretty cool when you think about it. Though I could have given them a few pointers: just have it ignore you when you call, sleep a lot, and scratch the furniture at every opportunity.

I played a fair bit of MW2 today until the early evening, and it wasn't half bad. We had a group of five or six for most of the day, as guys left or arrived and our overall game was pretty good. I managed to rack up a score of 15 kills one game, which is a fair bit for me – must mean I'm getting the hang of things at the faster pace the game goes at compared to COD4. I've found that I do better sneaking from cover to cover and keeping low, as it means more folk pass me by or miss me long enough to let me get in a shot.

Gold prices topped $1173.00 today on Nov. 23, which is good for many reasons. Too bad I don't have any hiding in my couch...