Jul 07

StarCrafty Goodness

This video will be of no interest to you whatsoever if you don’t play StarCraft. It’ll be twelve minutes of overenthusiastic Koreans shouting things as someone gets destroyed in the game. Nonetheless, I’m going to attempt to give it context anyway.

Imagine if, in Super Bowl XLII, rather than merely defeating the mighty juggernaut that was the New England Patriots in the last minute or so of the game, the New York Giants (Whom you may remember had “no chance in hell whatsoever” of winning that game according to the blantantly pro-Pats media) instead humiliated them from start-to-finish, running up the score on them to ridiculous levels and continually going for two just to humiliate them. Now imagine you got to see this carnage from the view of one of the Patriots players. That’s essentially what this video is in StarCraft form; it’s from the point of view of a player called “sAviOr[gm]”, then considered the best StarCraft player in the world, and it’s game 3 of a 5-game final in one of Korea’s major StarCraft leagues. In this particular series, his opponent, a then-unheralded “Bisu[Shield]” (Who would himself ascend to the title of “Best StarCrafter in the World” for a time), has already won the first two games by essentially showing sAviOr a gameplan he has never seen before, and that sAviOr either can’t, or stubbornly refuses to, adjust to. The third game plays out pretty much the same way, as you get to watch Bisu make sAviOr look like a complete chump through sAviOr’s eyes.

If you don’t want to watch the whole thing, skip ahead to about 11 minutes in when you hear shrieking that seemingly rivals that of a Beatles concert. Completely insane. Also note the final insult to injury as the game for some reason refuses to allow sAviOr to save the replay.

Jul 06

Emptyeye.com Week 37- I Should Really Decide Something

This past week here on the site, not much happened, though if you pay close attention you’ll note I updated the about pages to make them more current (The About the Site page had a reference to the long-gone donation button). And other than that, I’ve really been pretty lazy.

Neil Peart once wrote “If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice”, and I suppose that’s what I’m doing at the moment with The Six Day Exile–rather than decide to forge ahead without my Echo Indigo, or see if I can fix the problem (Outlined here), I’m just sort of letting it sit in limbo and playing lots of StarCraft, which I continue to be terrible at. I’ll have to eventually find a style and stick to it; I actually found a neat little map that trains your multi-tasking abilities, which I’ll have to practice a bit until I can improve those skills.

Until next week…

-EE

Jul 04

Hooray for Quality Customer Service

There are enough blogs out there about companies giving awful customer service–Verizon Math, which spawned from Verizon’s inability to tell the difference between “cents” and “dollars”, is probably my favorite–that I wanted to share one customer service call that was actually as pleasant as could be, given why I was making it (Which was to make sure I actually got my electric bill. Yeah, I could’ve played dumb for awhile, but fear of ultimately having some collection agency at my doorstep told me this was probably not the wisest course.).

So yesterday I called the customer service line of Connecticut Light & Power, to have the billing address changed to something that the post office will actually deliver to. After wading through the various automated menus, and attempting to pick the option closest to “get billing address changed”, within literally seconds, a very nice young woman named Hannah is on the line helping me with my problem. As a bonus, she spoke very clear, unaccented English (I don’t want to sound racist/ethnicist/whatever here, but to heavily paraphrase Daniel Day-Lewis, if your accent prevents me from understanding you, and my completely different accent prevents you from understanding me, and we have no other method of communication….this…screws…my…customer service experience! IT SCREWS IT UP!)..hooray! After I sheepishly admit that I don’t know my account number (An effect of having not yet received an electric bill), I proceed to give her my service address, and in about two minutes, I’m no longer a dirty energy thief (As it happens, they hadn’t sent out my first bill yet anyway, but better safe than sorry when it comes to something like this.). One of the easiest service calls I’ve ever made.

So hooray to Connecticut Light & Power for actually employing competent customer service people whom I can understand without effort!

Jul 02

I Am Terrible at StarCraft

Yep. I’m working my way through the campaign mode, again, and saved once in the middle of Terran Mission 9. After realizing that my previous strategy wasn’t working out (Hooray running out of minerals), I re-loaded from the save and tried a different tactic: Mass Battlecruisers. I managed to have just enough resources to make 4 Battlecruisers, which got me just enough land to grab an expansion that formerly belonged to the computer-controlled Protoss. I then lifted off my command center to the area and dropshipped my SCVs there to get more mineral collection going, made more Battlecruisers, and completed the objective.

It’s funny that most of you won’t know what I’m talking about, and those that will no doubt agree with the topic title. Oh well.

Jun 30

Another Grandiose Idea I Will Probably Never Finish

While The Six Day Exile work is stalled–first by my laziness, then by some equipment compatibilities as outlined here–I figured I’d throw this idea out and see what anyone thinks of it.

I don’t have a lot for it yet, but what is here is Copyright ©2008 by me, Marc J. “Emptyeye” Dziezynski. Everything is in a very early stage, so a lot of the proper names and things will most definitely change before the concept is totally finished.

Essentially, when I first got into StarCraft, I had the idea for a StarCraft trading card game. I refined that idea today so that it actually doesn’t have anything to do with StarCraft anymore, but is closer to Magic: The Gathering meets the now-defunct WWE Raw Deal (Yes, there was a wrestling trading card game. Not only that, but it was pretty fun too..I still have some cards kicking around here, I’m pretty sure.). For the overarching concept, there are basically three factions–your Knights (Chivalry, saving the world, etc.), your Villains (Trying to take over said world), and for lack of a better phrase yet, your Damsels (Who are sick of always being imprisoned/tied up/forced to await rescue and have decieded to show that they can kick some butt too). It’s a paper/rock/scissors system, with Knights being strong against Villains, who are strong against Damsels, who are strong against Knights. Knights prefer direct combat and attacking their opponents. Villains like to summon creatures to do their bidding for them. Damsels generally prefer to stay out of combat and use magic to attack the enemy (I’m not sure how practical the difference between Knights and Damsels will be in this respect, yet.).

You can play as one of several characters, each with their own unique ability (Hey there, Raw Deal influence!)–one of the Knights can deal damage directly to his opponent once a turn, one of the villains can summon creatures at a reduced cost, one of the Damsels can heal herself if her health falls below a certain point and she has…magic (We’ll call it Mana for now, though I’ll need a different name for it eventually) to spare.

Beyond that, it’s very similar to Magic in execution. You start with 100 life points (Somewhat arbitrarily chosen and subject to change), and the object is to reduce your opponent to zero, using creatures/attacks/etc. The basic currency of the game as it were is Mana (See above), which you automatically generate one of for each turn. You can save it up to cast bigger spells/creatures/etc, or use it each turn. Some cards will allow you to generate more mana per turn.

The “vision” as it were is for about 200 cards, 50 or so for each faction (With the balance within each faction being tailored to their strength–Villains would have predominantly, though not exclusively, creature cards), and another 50 or so that anyone could use.

Yeah. Like the title says…but what do you think?

Jun 29

Emptyeye.com Week 36- I Hate My Life

Well, no I don’t. But I’m not particularly happy right now.

This week was pretty much an idle one in terms of the site. I do have ideas for writings which I should really get up and running sometime soon, because I certainly haven’t been doing much lately as far as music goes, instead opting to laze around and play video games when I’m not working. Some would argue there isn’t anything wrong with this, but The Six Day Exile isn’t going to finish itself.

So today I finally tried to get up and running to resume work on said album. I say “tried” because I think I hit a major setback, and it wasn’t even the one I was expecting (Namely, Windows Vista not playing nicely with my extremely outdated version of Cakewalk SONAR…I still haven’t installed that on this machine yet, by the by). No, I went to install my Echo Indigo on it…and found out that the cardbus slot is apparently not the right size for it. Or, more precisely, there is a “notch” inside the slot that prevents the card from going in fully. Hopefully I can somehow remove it, but if not…without the Indigo, I have no idea how any recording/mixing/etc. I do on this comp will actually sound. And it really annoys me.

Anyway, yesterday I saw one of my friends from college that I hadn’t seen in close to three years. She graduated about a month ago (She was a sophomore in college during the one semester I finished up in Fall of 2005), and she’ll be moving out to Texas soon, so I went to her graduation party seeing as she lives around here for the moment. It was fun, and hopefully she’ll come by to see the apartment before she moves halfway across the country.

Until next week…

-EE

Jun 27

Random Friday Night Thought

This actually came to me yesterday sometime, but oh well.

Essentially, I was thinking about the absurdity of the fact that the U.S.’s top basketball players make hundreds of times the salary of the top high school teachers, and suddenly realized that, quite frankly, the fact that Korea has Professional StarCraft Leagues is actually sane in comparison.

Yeah.

Jun 24

Random Tuesday Thought

That’s right, in the singular. Similar to this post, it comes from an observation about work (Speaking of which, I should be grateful I even still have a job that I can make amusing observations about, thanks to the job climate, the state of the banking industry, and the cost-cutting measures in place at my place of employment). I’m not going to try to read too much into it, but suffice to say it involved copying a table in which “Women” was capitalized as “WoMen” several times. It brought to mind a Beavis and Butthead episode where for some reason, B&B stumble onto a feminist organization that called themselves “Womyn” (Because they weren’t just a subset of “Men” or somesuch), and the guys, having not heard of this, promptly inform the organization that they’re spelling “women” wrong. Don’t ask me why this came into my head at that point, but oh well.

Jun 22

Emptyeye.com Week 35- The Apartment is Better

This past week, a lot of the issues I had with the apartment got fixed, specifically the toilet and cable (The latter of which involved a simple reboot of the system on Cox‘s end). As a result, the place actually feels something like a home now, and to celebrate, we had a housewarming (Apartmentwarming, I guess) party earlier today. It pretty cool, as some of my friends from Massachusetts showed up, as did my parents and a bunch of Jess’s family. So that was neat.

In about a week, work on The Six Day Exile will resume, for real this time. It’s a good thing I had everything backed up onto two external drives, because on of them has just about died. Luckily, the second is still up and running; late next week sometime I’ll probably get another one to keep that redundancy (A good thing when it comes to backing stuff up) intact.

Speaking of things being on the fritz, my Cobalt Flux continues to not work right even after a cleaning. I’m not entirely surprised, mind you–what it did isn’t really consistent with it being dirty, but rather some type of wire problem–but it is a bit disappointing. Well, more than a bit–DDR was about my only form of exercise nowadays.

Finally, I’m back into playing StarCraft. I’m not exactly sure why, to be honest. But I’m going through all the missions again to get some semblance of skill in the game back.

Until next week…

-EE

Jun 19

Hypocrite Pride

A bit of background to the title of this post: I despise the so-called “fair-weather fan”. This hatred culminated in an angry away message the morning after the New England Patriots won Super Bowl XXXVI, essentially asking everyone at my alma mater (Then called Franklin Pierce College) where their support was at the beginning of the season when the Pats were 0-2 and everyone figured their season was lost. As a result of this, I can’t really call myself a big fan of the Boston Celtics, though I liked them in my early schooling years (Ironically after their greatest success) in the later days of the Bird era.

That said, given that the choices in this year’s NBA finals were the Celtics and the Los Angeles Kobe Bryants (Formerly known as the Lakers), which one to root for was a pretty easy decision. So I give a belated and hypocritical congrats to the Celtics for defeating their hated rivals and sending the namesake of the Kobe Bryants moping off into the sunset for another year.

(I had planned to put up some video of Kobe “I Ran Shaq Out of Town” Bryant complaining about Gilbert Arenas not being a team player after Arenas dropped 60 on the Lakers in a game not long ago, but can’t find said video, unfortunately…)