Jun 26

Checkin’ In

Writing this while I watch UltraJMan play La-Mulana Wii.

Writing-wise, I’ve finished a revision of my Machine of Death story that, I think, is stronger than my original concept. As I mentioned before, I changed the concept a bit to focus less on the original main character and more on the reactions to her calling. I’ll have to run this by a few people to see if they agree with what I’m saying, but I personally like the new version better despite it running about 600 words longer.

We’re less than two weeks away from Connecticon, and suffice to say that my subconscious knows it. I feel like Trevor Horn (Yeah, that Trevor Horn) when he was in Yes. That’s all I’ll say on the subject for now.

How about all of you out there? Anything fun/exciting/stressful going on?

-EE

Jun 20

My Stories, They Run Away

I’ve been working on my submission for the second Machine of Death book (If you’ve never heard of the first one, you can read about the concept here), figuring I may as well aim high as I prepare for the inevitable stream of rejections for my short stories. This one’s had an interesting road so far, and it’s something a lot of writers can identify with, I think.

Right now, it’s actually two separate stories. Without giving too much away, the first story was about a woman named Jackie who receives their death prediction and, rather than running from their fate, decides to seek it out, becoming the best in the world in her chosen field in the process. Thinking about this, and reading suggestions posted by the Machine of Death editors, I decided to tackle the same basic concept from another angle, focusing on people’s reactions to how Jackie responds to the question “so how did you arrive at your calling?” with “Oh, the Death Machine told me how I was going to die, and I decided to embrace it rather than run from it”. This seemed more interesting to me in the wake of the fact that Jackie’s tiny nation is the only one in my world with a Death Machine, causing people to regard her as somewhat crazy if brilliant in her field.

While I was writing this second version of the story, something interesting happened. Jackie stopped being the main character about halfway through, giving way to her publicist, Alan. This particular version is still in the first draft stage, meaning I’ll have to revise it heavily to more accurately reflect that, but it’s fascinating to me to witness firsthand all these things that more high-profile writers say happens to their stories, where they start one place and end up something completely different.

How about you? Anyone else have something like this happen to them with anything creative–writing, music, whatever?

-EE

Jun 17

Cardioeye

Over the last five months or so, I’ve been hitting the gym. More specifically, I’ve been going to the Planet Fitness locations in Waterbury and Meriden; which one I go to depends on what I happen to be working out that day.

Despite the fact that I’ve been going for the last five months, working out something different each day of the week, I have to confess I don’t actually like exercising. I like the results, don’t get me wrong. I like being 13 pounds lighter than I was at Awesome Games Done Quick (As my cousin would say, “that’s close to an entire bowling ball’s worth of weight you lost!”). I like how I feel at the end of workouts. The actual process of working out, not so much. I read an interview with Jack LaLanne (He of berating a much younger man for not being active enough…at age 94) where he, surprisingly, said pretty much the same thing–that he liked the results of working out, but wasn’t a big fan of the actual process.

That said, cardio work is probably my favorite out of any of the routines I do. Part of it is that I’m not aiming for raw muscle mass (Preferring to be more lean and agile), but part of it is the easily trackable progress. From the cardio machines at the gym, my current target heart rate for the “cardio” range is 154 beats per minute. Depending on what machine I’m on, I can either work from there (On the bike, where my legs as opposed to my cardio system are the weak link), or go up into the 170-175 BPM range (On the Arc Trainer, or “The Beast” as my mom calls it). There’s something about watching my heart rate climb that makes me feel good, I guess.

How about everyone else? Anyone out there have a favorite workout routine?

-EE

Jun 11

A Quick Update While I’m Not Away

Today was the last Connecticon Member Appreciation Day before the convention itself. Today was spent both playing Rock Band and preparing for the tournament. Dan came up with a scoring spreadsheet that, after a bit of experimentation, we decided seemed to be fair, which primarily takes technical ability into account, but with a performance element in it as well (The formula is currently about 80% technical ability to 20% performance). We also discovered that, while it isn’t directly stated, there does seem to be a “hidden” Band Difficulty for each song in Rock Band 3. This makes things a lot easier in terms of having to tell bands what their choices are.

Honestly, I’m more nervous about running this than I ever was participating in it. First of all, despite what happened last year, I’m working from a pretty solid foundation that I don’t want to have come crashing down. Secondly, prize support for the tournament was not cheap–while I’ll ultimately end up being reimbursed for it, for the con to fully reimburse me and still hit the break even point for it, I have to attract a total of sixteen qualifying bands somehow. I made a post on Score Hero about it, and I’ll have Dan post on the Rock Band forums as well (His 2 posts there is an infinite number more than my 0). After that, I’ll have to do some Internet searching for places to promote it.

So, I’m still here, and still being productive.

-EE

Jun 08

Gamblingeye

Saturday night, my friend Brian and I went to Mohegan Sun. My purpose for this trip was two-fold. First, it was to meet Nick Houser, one of my Skype friends and a fellow SDA member, who had turned 21 last week. The other was to play in one of the casino’s midnight poker tournaments.

At about 10 o clock, I briefly ran into Nick, who was actually winning for the night thanks to his choice of slot machine (I’ll withhold that here for his sake). Then it was time for some limit hold ’em before the midnight tournament. My money-hemorrhaging skills were on full display, as I lost $70 in just under two hours. After that, it was no-limit hold-em tournament time.

The basic rules of the tournament were that it was a turbo tournament, meaning blinds and, eventually, antes increased every twelve minutes. This is slightly quicker than the average online tournament, but in a live tournament, what it means is that you’ll get maybe one round around the table before the blinds and antes go up. What it also means is that, given enough time, even the chip leaders have either “All-in” or “fold” as their only two options.

Suffice to say that while Brian gets knocked out somewhere around tenth place out of 31 entrants, I manage, through a combination of (Mostly) luck and (Maybe some) skill, to make it to 4th place, when 5 positions paid. Dan Harrington writes in Harrington on Hold ‘Em that you need some luck to get deep into a poker tourney, and while a 31-person midnight tournament is not the main event of the World Series of Poker, I found Harrington’s thoughts to be accurate. Multiple times, I either had a worse hand suck out, or actually had a very good hand against an opponent who had no choice but to move with a worse hand.

In all, my fourth-place finish earned me $122, which after the tournament entry fee was enough to basically make up for my losses earlier. It was a fun time, and I don’t know if I’d do it regularly just because it starts so late, but I might have to make it an occasional thing I do there.

Jun 06

It’s a Party, Party, Party

As you know, I got married in January. Since January is not a very good time to hold outdoor parties, and since both Silver and I have pretty big families, our parents decided to hold our wedding celebration (One of the things I was adamant on is that it was not a reception, per se) yesterday, at the Italian-American Club in Waterbury, CT.

I have to say that in all honesty, I enjoyed the more casual picnic/celebration a lot more than I would have enjoyed a formal reception–greeting anyone and everyone is not something that appeals to me, especially since our parents made up most of the guest list, so I wasn’t even sure who a few of the people there were (This is almost inevitable when the guest list is at ~120 people). Talking to Silver afterward, she felt the same way–that not having to be, as she put it, “all formal” helped her relax and have fun talking to people.

We, of course, got presents. These included a Ninja Blender, a saladware set, and a wine glass set. The big thing, though, is that we are no longer stuck in standard-definition land when it comes to television. We are now the owners of a 32-inch Sony BRAVIA HD TV. Despite the fact that we don’t currently subscribe to any HD channels, this is a huge step up in a few ways. For one, it’s a lot thinner and lighter than the TV we had in the living room previously. For another, said previous TV is now back in my little lair in the apartment, representing a 7-inch upgrade in that room on my speedrunning TV. For a third, the TV that was in that back room is now going to college with my sister-in-law. So everybody wins!

Overall, the party was a lot of fun, and the gifts didn’t hurt either. If I could find a way to do it again that didn’t involve divorce and re-marrying, I definitely would.

-EE

May 31

As Promised, A Magician Speedrun

Here you go.

This run finishes the game in a shade under 13 minutes and 45 seconds. If you happened to watch Japan Relief Done Quick, for reference, it took at least that long to realize I was streaming to the wrong place, at which point I was less than halfway through the game (Which is an excellent indication of just how terribly I played to that point. This contributed to my mood when I finally got streaming to the correct place.). Despite that, there’s still a tiny improvement to be made with a route change, or rather, when I grab food. There’s also some execution improvements to be made, most notably my needlessly going to the menu at the end of the Dungeon because I didn’t know casting Twin took almost no mana at all.

I suppose I should explain why I’ve uploaded this video to Screw Attack (Which is not a porn site; its name comes from a powerup in the Metroid series) and not Youtube. Put simply, Youtube wanted me to link a Google account to use it anymore, and I flipped out and refused to do it for awhile. I’ve since capitulated, but I’m still not putting up any videos on it. Screw Attack is a more gaming-centered site anyway. Yeah, someone who shall remain nameless is correct when they say Screw Attack “is where tens of people will see your video!” But on the other hand, the way I see it, if you’re not willing to do some leg work and promote your video yourself, you don’t deserve to leech off the popularity (Or lack thereof) of the video hosting service you put it on.

Hence, Screw Attack it is. You’ll notice a link to my account on “Emptyeye Elsewhere On the Web” over to the right. Right now, it’s just Magician videos, but I want to eventually put my remaining Youtube videos on there as well.

-EE

May 30

What’s Been New With Emptyeye

Lately, I’ve been putting a lot of effort into the Connecticon Rock Band tournament. I finally finished the spreadsheet of songs for it, containing all 661 songs you can currently play on my Rock Band 3 setup. The spreadsheet will be printed out to help people get a sense of what they can pick, especially for the finals, where the tentative plans are to allow free song selection with the disclaimer that the same song can’t be played more than once throughout the finals. It’ll help for the qualifier too, but I have another weapon up my sleeve for that that might help even better.

That weapon is an OpenOffice.Org database. With this, I feed the spreadsheet into the database, and then, using queries and the like, can spit out the list of allowed songs (Current plans for the preliminaries are one “easy”, one “medium” and one “hard” song, with those adjectives determined by the total number of dots the song has for whatever combination of instruments are in play) for the combination of instruments being used, and the difficulty we’re trying to find a song for.

The other big news is that I’m considering a site redesign. The site, and the look for it, is almost four years old now. It has some quirks I never entirely fixed, and site technology has improved a lot as well. In other words, I don’t need to, EG, list out every single month on the sidebar anymore, I can theoretically just put the years with the number of posts, and then from there you could click and get to the months. So sometime soon, I’ll start looking into themes I can modify for my own purposes, coming up with new categories, and so on. It should be fun.

In less big news, I do still intend to finish a speedrun of Magician. In the meantime, I plan to upload the best run I have so far on my Screw Attack account, where you can currently see a couple “work-in-progress” versions of the run. I’ll make sure to post when that’s done. Really, this time.

-EE

May 30

Happy Memorial Day from Emptyeye

Just a quick note to say Happy Memorial Day to everyone whom it applies to (I just learned that the US is not the only country that celebrates it). I have several relatives and people I know in the armed forces, and while I (and they) been lucky enough that they’ve all survived the experience, I want to thank them anyway for voluntarily doing something that I never could. Suffice to say that the armed forces were definitely not an option for me. And thank you everyone who did make the ultimate sacrifice in the service of the US, or any country who celebrates the day, really.

-EE

May 26

Air Conditioned Comfort

Earlier in the week, I made a trip to Home Depot to price out air conditioners. When Silver and I moved into this apartment in 2008, there was an air conditioner already in the bedroom window. This was good, since we didn’t bring one of our own. The bad thing is that it was an ancient monstrosity, and by “monstrosity” I mean “It’s wide enough that our bedroom window is actually broken to accommodate it; the window doesn’t stay open even if you try locking it.”

After a couple years of moving this thing in and out of the window, we decided it was time for a change. I had actually wanted a portable air conditioner, but since they need to be “hooked up to” a window anyway, Silver convinced me to put the money toward a smaller window unit and use the leftovers to put toward a new bed. At Home Depot, units ranged from a cute little 5000 BTU unit, all the way up to the 25000 range (In the words of my uncle John, “I don’t even think my CENTRAL air is 25000 BTUs!”).

Today, we went to purchase an air conditioner, and it turned out I was in for a pleasant surprise. I had thought the 5000 BTU unit was $149. It was nice and light, but the downside of it (And A/Czilla’s one upside was that it cooled everything) was that it would only be enough to cool our bedroom and not the rest of the apartment. As it turned out, I misread the signs; the 5000 BTU unit was only $99, and our $149 would get us a slightly bigger 6500 BTU air conditioner. Even at the larger size, though, it was far quicker and easier to get into the window than the one we had; I feel like I could actually install and remove it (Properly, not the way I removed the last one) by myself if I absolutely had to.

Not only that, it actually works pretty well. Even if it didn’t, though, I feel like the electricity savings will help the unit pay for itself. Plus, we’ll be able to actually take it with us whenever we ultimately move out of this apartment.

How about all of you? How’d your air conditioner installation go, if you live in a place where it’s necessary and you’ve done it already?

-EE