What you don't have you don't need it now

Off to a party later this evening.

I hate to do one of those year-end reviews, so I leave you with these reviews from John Rogers and Steve Gilliard, who are far more talented at this sort of thing than I am.

This year has been OK for me personally, but very bad and the last year ever for quite a lot of people. Disasters all over the world, earthquakes, hurricanes, elections, the continuing airing of multiple versions of CSI, it all kinda sucks.

On the other hand, I have a new job pushing pixels in the Printer Mines, I kinda sorta helped cure a computer of its miggly, and my cats are all doing well. Plus, one can work out aggressions by smacking things on Maple Story.



I mean, seriously, it's cute and free. What more could you ask for, other than their site not demanding that you use IE?

Happy New Year. Peace, goodwill, and universal healthcare for all of us.

Memes: easier than thinking of something to write...

Seen a couple of places: looked like fun

Four things

Four stupid things you've done for a living:
Detasseling
Burger slinging
Data entry
Photocopying

Four places you've lived:
Across the street from the house in Bloom County
Above a movie theater
In a small town of 600 in Iowa
The City of Roses

Four movies you'll never watch:
Saw
Squanto: A Warrior's Tale
Most anything starring Adam Sandler or Rob Schneider
Valiant

Four bands that people say are great, that actually basically aren't:
Coldplay (Actually, I've not sure I can pick them out of a lineup...)
Chicago
Metallica
Guns N Roses

Four foods that you like, that other people are appalled by:
Unagi
Peanut butter and liver sausage sandwiches
That Voodoo Doughnut that's a maple bar with bacon on it
Cool Britannia ice cream from Ben and Jerry's (that's gotta be why it's discontinued)

Four TV shows that you've never seen but are vaguely familiar with, from folks talking about them all the damn time:
The Shield
Desperate Housewives
Everybody Loves Raymond
24

Four Web sites that you don't understand why a lot of people read them:
Drudge report
Slashdot
BoingBoing
CNN

Four places you've been on vacation:
Nebraska
England
Colorado
California

Four things you enjoyed that you never want to experience again:
Watching the film "Grave of the Fireflies"
Singing in show choir at a retirement home
Knowing all the episodes of Star Trek and being able to name a show within 30 seconds of dialogue
Hapkido

Four hopes for the New Year:
See friends in California again
Vacation in Vancouver, BC
Pay off debts
Blog redesign

Live without a net

I've been offline for a few days on vacation.

The new work is going well, and today I finally got a lot of the tools I need to actually do work. So my productivity should go up some more.

A friend of mine has introduced me to Maple Story, which is sort of like if World of WarCraft got together with Legend of Mana and had an 8-bit MMORPG kid. The game is free and I gather it has some annoying players as a result. Say what you will about pay-for-play games, there aren't as many annoying l33t h4x0rs without credit cards.

The business model is also interesting. The game is free to play, but you can spend money on extra clothing, pets, etc. Not sure how much that impacts the game, but it's kinda interesting.

One nice thing I noticed over the weekend is that Creature Comforts already has the first series out on DVD. Might be a good thing to pick up for a long weekend.

Triumph of the Flying Spaghetti Monster

Pirates and noodle-lovers around the world celebrated yesterday's ruling that smacked down the Intelligent Design people with great authority.

(I'm more of an incompetent design person myself. I mean, really, does anyone think our knees are the high water mark for joints? If so, I have some bridgework in New York to sell you. Now that they're striking, it's a license to print money.

Sorry I've been quiet lately. Trying to get up to snuff on working in the Printer Mines. I can't even remember the last time I cracked open a comic book. But when you spend 90 minutes driving 20 miles like I did last night, you lose enthusiasm for doing a lot of things. Smegging traffic.

Little red book

Be careful what you ask for from Interlibrary Loan. A student was visited by the FBI for requesting a copy of Mao Tse-Tung's book. Evidently that's the hot summer beach reading for terrorists, a book from atheist communists of the last century who have nothing in common with modern religious terror movements. Then again, perhaps I should listen to the wisdom of Fafblog. We'd be in anarchy without vigilance in the stacks.

Also, the Bush administration has basically admitted they've been spying on Americans illegally for years. The madness of King George should scare the shit out of everyone, liberal and conservative alike. Evidently there isn't enough time to go through proper channels to get a warrant, but there IS time to go directly to the President to ask for an exemption they just made up. (This is still a nation of laws, last time I checked. It applies to all of us equally. At least that's what I grew up believing.)

Been very busy closing up projects at my old job last week. Starting new work tomorrow, assuming that any place is open after the snow we've had this weekend. (The city does not deal well with frozen precipitation of any sort.)

If work were like the JLA

Been reading a lot of the DC Showcase Presents the JLA book, which is awesome reading for the bus.

The cold and the dark-at-4:45 stuff isn't quite so bad when one can count how often Superman and Batman are out hitting the bars while the rest of the Justice League fights the Weapon Master.

"Oh, last week? We were... um..."
"We were fighting the Joker."
"That's right, Batman. We were fighting the Joker."
(Sounds of suppressed giggling)

The JLA bylaws are a little weird, I must say. Nobody divulges their secret identities. There's a set of bylaws that stipulate in the absence of crisis-generated meetings, the JLA must meet every 30 days. They celebrate the birthday of the organization, but none of the members.

Man, the Secret Santa program must suck, too. What do you get Superman and what do you wrap it in so he can't see it? (There's an awesome Alan Moore story about this, come to think of it.)

Sorry that posting has been intermittent lately. Transferring jobs during the holiday season takes a lot out of you.

If only it was always this cute

It's always easier to destroy than it is to create. For example, it takes time to walk to plant a seed, wait five to ten years for it to grow, chop it down, drag it back to the house, throw some lights on it, and watch the needles fall on the carpet.

On the other hand, it goes up quite a treat if you let it dry out.

But content generation can be fun! Found this page on the Web site development process on BoingBoing today. Cute little figurines show you how to develop ideas, create prototypes, revise ideas, etc. Fun stuff.

Went to the comic shop the other day. The DC Showcase Presents Justice League of America is great stuff. Watch the JLA beat the snot out of Starro, Doctor Light, the Weaponsmaster, and more! Plus the magic of Snapper Carr!



Speaking of the Justice League, there's JLA Classified: Cold Steel. It's like Shogun Warriors had one night of passion with Hasbro's toy line. I still can't decide if it's worth picking up or not. Probably not. Do Superman and Wonder Woman even NEED a giant robot? Batman, maybe. In fact, I almost expect it of him. Wayne Industries totally needs a giant mech division.

More on the rest of my haul when I finish reading it. Spent yesterday evening at the fifth annual impromptu holiday beer festival at the Horse Brass. It was enough to throw me off all day, so more later.

Showcase presents

Superman in the 60s ran into crazy aliens bent on world domination, beings who couldn't quite figure out these crazy humans, and tons of refugees from the ex-planet of Krypton.

However, as strange as some of these stories are (I'm thinking of the "Superman's New Power" storyline, where Kal-El becomes jealous of his own powers when they take the form of a small imp that can do everything he can...), none of them involved looking for aliens like SETI@Home. The old project closes down next week, so if you're still running it, consider running BOINC. I must admit, the user interface is kinda bad, but the new project is far more flexible. You can model weather, look for gravity waves, or cure diseases, all with the same program.

But anyway, back to comics... I've got some of the other DC Showcase Presents titles. Missed out on the Jonah Hex trade so far, but I do have the Green Lantern, Metamorpho, and Superman volumes. I'll probably pick up the Justice League of America title.

Hey, Green Lantern in January! I don't think it has the classic "My ward is a JUNKIE!" line but should be fun anyway.

Now this was unexpected: House of Mystery in February. I've also heard rumors of upcoming Superman Family volumes, which would be a great way to pick up those hard-to-find Jimmy Olsen and Lois Lane stories. Well, by hard-to-find I mean expensive.

Speaking of expensive, gold and oil are near record highs this week. At the same time, old school Hasselhoffian entertainment is $1.99 a pop now that you can buy old episodes of Knight Rider at the iTunes Music Store.

(They really need to rename that thing now. Media Store, maybe. That would even allow downloadable art installations or something, should iPod technology progress that far...)

I'm not fond of the Vox Network either

Finished playing Ratchet: Deadlocked last night. The game is very, very short. I think I finished the whole thing in maybe 12 hours of play, and much of that was pretty repetitive. If you've ever played any of the multiplayer in Up Your Arsenal, you've already experienced everything in this game.

The good
The levels are big, and you have two companions to help you out. Two battledroids are salvaged by your pal Al (who you may remember from the first and third Ratchet games), and they go through every level with you, watching your back and doing some of the tedious grunt work. New villians, higher bolt counts than ever, a couple of new vehicles including the Landstalker tank. There are 150 skill points to pick up for your OCD gotta-catch-'em-all pleasure. Each weapon has 10 levels and multiple upgrades. The voice talent is its usual high caliber.

The bad
There's a lot of running around, no puzzles to speak of. The Ratchet series has always been a great hybrid of platforming and shooting, with some great writing. This one? Just shooting and capturing nodes so you can open up another level to capture some more nodes to open up another level to capture some more nodes, etc. The only gadgets are the swingshot, charge boots, and gravity boots. This game is out less than a year after the previous release, so it's rushed schedule shows a lot in this respect. They're really pushing the limit of the PS2: some of the levels feature so much stuff the framerate slows to a crawl. And despite the beauty of the levels, they are nowhere near as interactive as they were in Going Commando. (Still my personal favorite of the four.)

The ugly
The weapon load has been vastly reduced. While previous games have had at least 12-14 weapons, Deadlocked has a mere 10, most of them recycled from other games. (Again, the rushed schedule is probably to blame...) Clank and Ratchet don't even share the same screen—Clank goes from a co-star to a cameo in this game and it's poorer for it. Gone also are the Easter Eggs like the Insomniac museum, which could only be reached by a weird combination of jumps or playing at certain hours of the day. The writing appears to have been farmed out to some interns or something There are some half-hearted attempts at parodying the Fox Network, but they don't really go anywhere. The series has had some great writing, but this one feels... tired.

I'm not sure that the rushed schedule is really to blame for my overall disappointment with this game. I finished it, but I didn't really play any multiplayer. Mostly since I hate playing with strangers online—I used to play a lot of StarCraft and Myth back in the day, but that was with coworkers when I was trying to avoid traffic jams on I-5 by staying at work an extra hour. If you're a fan of the series, it might be worth a rental, but I would not recommend buying it. I hope that Insomniac is working more on a PS3 title and this is just an attempt to cash in on the current holiday season before the new platform launches in spring of next year.

Lostzilla vs. King Mob

I gotta get me one of those anti-curiosity fields, or whatever it is they're using on the island in Lost. One of my main frustrations with the show is the inability of any character to ask a question or follow up with additional questions.¹
Evidently I am not the only person to notice this: witness the Lost Unanswered Questions thread.

I decided to reward myself this week for a feat of extraordinary magnitude. So I'm picking up Kung Fu Hustle, which I loved in the theater.

Also, I got the best piece of spam the other day:

We apologize and hope you will take a jaundiced view at medicaments we sell. Again, let us introduce our drugs at attractive prices which may be urgent needed.

I totally take a jaundiced view at medicaments.

¹ - In this respect, they may be taking a cue from the White House Press Corps.