Jul 28

My Fiance, the Philanthropist

A quick link for you.

In short, my fiance knits. And she’d like to knit a bunch of scarves for cancer patients. And she’d like your help, if possible. Basically, you can donate money (Maybe I should resurrect that “donate” link that got me a total of $0.00 during its tenure on the site), or yarn, or if you know how to knit, you can even donate a scarf of your very own. If you want to send stuff and want to contact us, you can contact her on Facebook here. If you hate Facebook, you can always e-mail me at the handy link to the side.

Thanks!

Jul 22

It Has Been Awhile

Indeed it has.

Really, the best time to make a post announcing that I was still alive would have been Sunday. See, I don’t talk it a lot here–though it’s in the About Emptyeye section–but five years ago Sunday I was officially diagnosed with T-Cell Lymphoblastic Lymphoma. In English, “A large cancerous mass in my chest was pushing on my lungs and heart, causing me dry-coughing fits and making my heart look huge on scans”. Yeah. I’m better now, obviously, but at the time I was probably a lot closer to dying than anyone told me. Without getting too gruesomely into the details, there were certain procedures performed and tubes inserted that, I found out later, are generally not inserted into people unless it’s absolutely necessary. That, plus the “We need to start chemotherapy on you…immediately.” (Which weren’t the exact words–again, leaving out details–but that was the gist of it), should have been a clue that things weren’t good for me.

Suffice to say that it wasn’t a particularly good time. While I think I can officially call myself a “cancer survivor” now–woo hoo for that–I do periodically think about it. More accurately, I sometimes wonder why I survived. On a physically level, I understand why–I was in my early 20s, and reasonably physically fit–but on an emotional level, I’m not sure I necessarily “deserved” to. Contrary to the image of the strong, upbeat, determined cancer patient, there were times when I was going through treatment and wanted it to just end, because I felt at the time that being dead would be better than going to the hospital for a week at a time and either sleeping of vomitting through most of that week.

It should also be noted that surviving one form of cancer does not magically make me an expert on giving pep talks to patients of every type of cancer under the sun. I can and do try when people ask me to do this, mind you, but one of the things that flat out pissed me off about going through chemotherapy was people telling me “I can imagine how you feel”, or even more annoyingly, “If I could take your place, I would.” To the first, quite simply, no you can’t imagine it, because it sucks. Conversely, I can’t imagine exactly how it feels for anyone else to go through it, despite what some people may think. For the second…well, I’ve told other people that I really hope my feeling on this change when and if I have kids. But currently, if I knew someone who was going through the treatment regimen that I had, and I could take their place to make them better…to be totally honest? I don’t think I would, at least presently. Because I went through it once already, and I know first hand how much it sucks. If it makes me a terrible person, and I can’t help but think it does, then so be it–but I’m pretty sure I don’t want to go through that again.

But onto happier news.

Development on my game is coming along, although I’m pretty sure I’m stomping all over best programming practices in the process. Nonetheless, I have a working movement system (Complete with tiny automap), and the start of a working battle system. Essentially, I actually have something that can conceivably be called a (Short, not yet particularly fun) game, in that you can talk to a king and he’ll say “Go kill the huge slime” and you can do that and go back to the king and he’ll say “Hey good job!” The next step is to get a working shop system up and going, and then I’ll have most of the components in place. Then it’s just a matter of expanding it. The game is going to be called Hysterium, and I’m determined to complete it, given the sheer number of projects I’ve started and abandoned over the years.

Also, I’m about a week away from Connecticon, where I have a title to defend. Unless something really wacky happens between now and then, the basic plan for this year is for myself and last year’s other Best Instrument winners to essentially form a “supergroup” this time out. Of course, it’s not strictly about score, but the rules for this year mean I should actually do better than last year, given that A. I now have a year a familiarity with exactly what the Rock Band engine wants in terms of vocals, plus B. I’ve been working on actually “performing” some of these songs in my spare time (Which, in a party environment, is preferable anyway, even if you’re not being strictly judged on it).

And that’s that.

Jun 27

Status Update

Believe it or not, I haven’t totally forgotten about the site.

I recently read through Build a Program Now: Microsoft Visual Basic 2008 Express Edition. In terms of doing what the title advertises, I suppose it’s a success–you do, in fact, build several programs, including a simple web browser, a database-using program, and a Weatherbug-esque thing using XML. As an instructional book, though, it’s rather poor. Yeah, you’ll write code, and (hopefully–see below) you’ll end up with a working program at the end, but it’s never really made clear just why you’re writing a lot of the code you’re writing. You can puzzle some of it out, and on an abstract level, you’ll probably be able to comprehend it (In a “this huge block of code makes the Options menu work”) sense, but it could stand to be a bit more detailed. There’s also the fact that some of the code is just wrong, and the instructions throughout the book don’t match the completed programs that come with the book in some cases, which leads to more frustration (I never did actually get the last program in the book to work totally perfectly).

Really, the best thing about the book is that it comes with Visual Studio 2008 Express Edition, which saves you the trouble of having to download the individual components from Microsoft’s website.

The real reason I decided to get the book was to get back into programming, in the hopes of, as mentioned before, making a dungeon-crawling kind of RPG. I have some conceptual ideas, and over the next couple of weeks I’ll be trying to create working movement code for The Shizz Game Developers’ Topic, where the unofficial deadline to have something (Anything, from “dude moving on screen” to “fully completed game”) up and running is July 6th. Wish me luck with that.
-EE

Jun 11

I Have Played Games of Late

That’s pretty much all I’ve been doing of late, really. Recently I beat both Castle Crashers and Mega Man 9, both very old-school themed games. They were both pretty fun, and Mega Man 9 in particular was quite the challenge–it took me awhile to really get rolling in it.

That’s really it for now.

May 28

Hey look, I live!

Just a quick post to confirm I haven’t gone off and died in a ditch somewhere. Lately I’ve been playing an XBOX Live Arcade game called Castle Crashers (And yes, I’m a bit late here), which is a fun little beat ’em up with some role-playing elements. It’s $15 in the XBOX Live Arcade, and is totally worth it.

I’m also working on learning (Or more accurately, relearning; I took a class in it back in 2003 for college) some Visual Basic stuff in the hope that I’ll be more useful at work. Not that I’m particularly worried about my job status right now, but our VB specialist left the department over a year ago, so I figure picking some stuff up will eventually help take some pressure off the person in the department who is basically God of All Applications right now.As a bonus, once I get more comfortable with the language, I’d like to do some of two things with it–make some form of software for organizing Rock Band tournaments, and/or create what amounts to a glorified old-school dungeon crawling game in the style of the early Wizardry games.

Speaking of Rock Band2, I achieved my goal of 84 out of 84 Expert Vocal full combos, well ahead of my goal of the end of July. When I play Rock Band now, I tend to play some of my DLC that I bought and then proceeded to not play (Yeah, I’m a model of fiscal responsibility). Eventually, though, I’ll need to work on my Rock Band 1 imports, since they’ll be selectable at Game UniCon in late August, and my scores on those are…well, let’s just say I don’t have all of them 100%ed.
-EE

May 19

Fusion Technique, Go!

One of the more amusing “Life Imitates Parody” examples is the Gillette Fusion line of razors, which were announced roughly a year after this somewhat vulgar (But funny) article in The Onion. Why do I bring this up? Well, besides the fact that Gillette actually managed to go The Onion one better–as Kareshi points out here, there’s a sixth, “precision blade” on the back of the razor, meant for things like those annoying hairs just underneath your nose (Sadly, they did not “Put another aloe strip on that [fornicator]”)–I now own one of these razors, as you can tell by my quote in Kareshi’s post.

In short: Pretty much what I said there, and pretty much the opposite of what you might expect.

For several months prior to this, I had been using cheap Bic one-bladed disposable razors. They actually shaved pretty close–a little too close, most times. On average, I’d nick myself at least once every time I shaved, and 3 to 4 times in one shave wasn’t out of the question. As far as closeness goes, I’m not sure the Fusion really gets any closer than the single-blade. On the other hand, somehow (Maybe it’s that aloe strip), I’m no longer cutting myself several times per shave, so the Fusion was probably worth it just for that.

May 07

And Yet Another Rock Band 2 Post

Indeed!

Since the last tiem I updated, I’ve gotten a bunch of Rock Band 2 full combos on Expert Vocals. My most recent was number 73 out of 84 songs on-disc (Downloadable, or DLC songs, are generally counted separately). The most recent, and the one I’m most proud of, is Uncontrollable Urge, which has a stupid hard ending and no real way to practice it in isolation (Thanks to Harmonix’s decision to not give vocalists a fully-functioning Practice Mode). In hitting this, I now actually believe that I can knock out the rest of the songs I haven’t gotten yet. And it’s a good feeling.

Apr 19

Random Thoughts on a Sunday Afternoon

Given I haven’t updated in awhile–indeed, I haven’t really even been checking on this much, to the point that my Project Wonderful ad is currently delisted–I figured I’d throw everything into one somewhat large post.

  • My quest to full-combo Rock Band 2’s vocals is moving along. I’ve now gotten the entire game gold-starred (A special designation for Expert scores a certain amount above and beyond the 5 stars that is the maximum for the other difficulties), and 45 of the 84 tracks have been full comboed at least once in solo play. So that aspect is moving along. Eventually, my rate of FCing stuff is going to slow down–not messing up a song at all is very difficult even if you know all the phrases; songs like Uncontrollable Urge or Tangled Up in Blue, which have a few phrases where I just have no idea what’s going on, are just about impossible at the moment–but I’m going to enjoy the progress for now.
  • For Connecticon ’09, I’m not actually staying at the convention center’s hotel. Unfortunately, the half hour drive from my apartment is just long enough to be annoying (Particularly after midnight), so I took advantage of my AAA membership (Thanks dad!) to score a hotel for that weekend within walking distance of the convention center at about $150 savings when all is said and done. That’s cool and all, but I’m looking for someone to split the room with to drive my cost down even further thanks to at least one other convention I’ll be going to this year. We’ll see how that works out. I’m starting with my fellow CTCon Rock Band players, and consider expanding from there if I can’t find anyone in that circle.
  • A couple weeks ago, the UConn Women’s Basketball team won their sixth national championship with their third undefeated season. Naturally, this led to some discussions about which of the five undefeated women’s college basketball teams is the best ever (The two non-UConn teams to do it: Texas in 1985-86, and Tennessee in 1997-1998). Someone wrote as a weakness of this year’s UConn model that, essentially, they didn’t have a solid rival like some of the other unbeatens did (The 1994-95 UConn squad had a very game Tennessee team which they beat in two close games, for instance). You can actually see that in the linked article, maybe 3/4 of the way down.

    Huh?

    I’ve never understood this line of reasoning. I’ve seen it applied as a knock on Tiger Woods as well–that he hasn’t yet had a truly capable rival the way Palmer had Nicklaus, Nicklaus had Watson and Trevino, Tennis’s Pete Sampras had Andre Agassi (And vice versa), etc. And I just don’t get it. Essentially, Woods and the most recent UConn team are being penalized for being too good. It’s like the fact that they don’t have a truly capable rival are because they are simply on a different level from every other competitor is somehow something to penalize them for. It boggles me.

-EE

Apr 05

Oh I-hi-hi, Weeeeeeeeell, I’m Still Alive.

And still playing Rock Band 2, of course.

With slightly less than 4 months to go until Connecticon, I’ve decided I’m on a mission to get 100% on all 84 songs included in Rock Band 2 on Expert Vocals. Currently, I’m at 29 out of 84, meaning 1 new 100% every 2 days will get me there with a bit of room to spare. I think most of them will eventually not be too difficult once I hear the songs a few more times, particularly as I have what’s considered one of the hardest ones already out of the way (“Spoonman” by Soundgarden). Three in particular that are going to be tough for me are Bob Dylan’s “Tangled Up in Blue” (Which is long, and has a ton of verses. Worse, no two are exactly alike one another, which makes it extremely difficult to 100% if you’re not really paying attention at all times), Blondie’s “One Way or Another” (The song itself isn’t that difficult, but near the beginning of it is a “broken” talkie which has no real consensus on how to consistently hit it. Then, of course, if you do manage to get through it, you’ve got to get through the rest of the song too.), and “Bodhisattva” by Steely Dan (Because, unlike a lot of hard songs which are a matter of me learning what the game wants, I’ve managed to learn how to do a couple of sections of this song completely incorrectly, and can’t seem to unlearn them for the life of me. Suffice to say that it’s a bit frustrating.

Mar 25

More Rock Bandy Goodness.

Those of you who follow this blog know that I tend to go through “phases” when it comes to hobbies and the like. Some I actually make decent progress on before hitting a brick wall (The music page); some are more fleeting in nature (Hey, what’s up card game idea?). Currently, it’s working on Rock Band 2 vocals in early preparation for defending my Best Vocalist title at Connecticon. Thankfully, so far I’m continuing to improve on most of the songs in the game, though I have an annoying syndrome I like to call ORSS, or One Random Strong Syndrome. Basically, even on songs I know well that should be pretty easy, I have a tendency to get a Strong (The second highest grade, which breaks your combo and costs you a bunch of points and the 100% grade) on exactly one phrase for no real reason. It’s a bit annoying, to say the least.