A more substantive post will be coming later–suffice to say I finally signed the lease on the apartment–but this SDA topic was too good for my speedrunning self not to mention (The actual video inside, not so much, but eh). The discussion actually reminds me of an old topic on the GameFAQs boards, which Bruplex might remember, where we created a fictional GameFAQs RPG that evolved into a “help topic” for the game. It was so convincing actually asked where to download said game…which didn’t exist.
May 27
Random Tuesday Thoughts #Over 9000!!!
Actually, no it isn’t. But oh well.
- Speaking of the meme for which this post is named, thanks to watching Let’s Plays by a guy calling himself Frankomatic, I now know pretty much everything I need to (And more) about Dragon Ball Z. How many times can you re-tell the same story in video game form? You already know the answer.
- For the past week-plus on Jeopardy!, a soft-spoken, rather cute woman by the name of Larissa Kelly has been destroying all competition (Okay, not quite true, but her average winnings per day are in the $35000 range.). Good for her; since the “five wins max” rule was discarded in 2003, she’s actually the very first female contestant to hit 6+ regular-season wins (Males who have done it include, but may not be limited to, Kevin Marshall with 6 wins, Tom Walsh with 7 wins, Dan Pawson with 9 wins, David Madden with 19 wins, and of course, Ken Jennings, with 74 wins [And people who are even bigger Jeopardy! nerds than I am have analyzed just how likely such a run really was. Conclusion: He was a darn good player, but he was also darn lucky.].) Suffice to say that I wouldn’t mind if she continued to win.
- If you’re curious, I go sign the apartment lease tomorrow night. And then I officially have an apartment, and have to really start considering how I’m going to move stuff. Hooray! I should really find out the exact address of the place…I know it’s on Canal Street in Plantsville, and I think the address is 500, but I’m actually not sure. Silly me.
- Lastly, apparently Australia has a “National Sorry Day”. This is awesome.
May 26
Late Happy Memorial Day!
Today Jess and I went to her aunt’s house for a Memorial Day picnic. It was pretty fun, even if not a lot actually happened. Mainly, we played badminton and Mexican Horseshoes, but that was good enough for me. Thanks to liberal sunblock application (Which Marco, Jess’s aunt’s dog, apparently found very tasty), I managed to not get burned (Though I don’t burn as easily as Jess does to begin with), which is nice.
Also, given that it’s Memorial Day and all, let me take a brief soapbox moment here to thank all the troops in the United States Armed Forces, both living and deceased, who willingly put their lives on the line so that I don’t have to. Thanks, guys and gals.
Coming next scene! Can Emptyeye acquire personal lodging? Find out tomorrow!
Also, an imaginary cookie to whoever gets the “Coming next scene” reference.
May 25
Emptyeye.com Week 32- New Technology Coming Soon
This week at emptyeye.com, I put out the original Intro for The Six Day Exile. Beyond that, I’ll admit I haven’t done much to advance the project (Which is why I wanted to constantly work on it–I know myself, and I know that once I stop something, take a break from it, whatever, I don’t usually pick it up again). That should change shortly, however, as I pulled the trigger on ordering a new laptop (And wireless keyboard and mouse, and printer). After that, the big thing will be backing up all the project to my second external drive, and then trying to get my hopelessly outdated copy of SONAR to run on the new machine (I imagine Windows Vista may be an obstacle here). After I pull that off, I’m seriously considering moving to, or at least going with a dual-boot setup of, Ubuntu Studio for the purpose. Not that I don’t like SONAR, but let’s just say that there are certain unwritten rules of music software use that change when you go from making music for fun (SEE: The Musical Doodlings material, especially the DoD Entries) to actively trying to profit from it, and because of this, I really shouldn’t have used SONAR even as much as I did for The Six Day Exile.
Following up on this post about MySpace Karaoke, it seems that it’s not really a contest per se. But what I really wanted to discuss was the fact that, as I mentioned in that post, the biggest Internet phenomenon of 2007 (and it seems to still be going strong now) is not represented on the available choices. Thinking about it, I’ve come to the conclusion that this is because Myspace, for all its posturing about how it’s a place for “cool young hipsters” or whatever to hang out, is owned by a corporation headed up by a crusty old dude (And please don’t take my linking to a Wikipedia article as an endorsement of the site as a whole) who is hopelessly out of touch with the Internet and its fads.
I’m still playing through Wizardry: Legacy of Llylgamyn. I’ve got two parties going now, one Good (With a Neutral character), one Evil (Also with a Neutral character). The Good party has something of a unique setup–thanks to this video, I found out that this particular collection allows you to easily re-roll your stats when creating a character. To that end, the Good party is set up Samurai-Samurai-Samurai-Priest-Bishop-Thief. I took the Bishop along to easily identify items on the fly, plus as a backup healer. Incidentally, the restrictions on Floors 2 and 3 don’t seem to include Neutral characters, which is good.
Until next week…
May 24
Who Wants to Read Old Video Game Magazines?
Hopefully someone does.
In preparing to move–which will hopefully be early next month–I’ve been taking stock of things that I can sell and/or give away to people to lessen what I have to actually transfer to the apartment. This includes my collection of video game magazines. I have no problem with getting rid of Gamepros or Electronic Gaming Monthlies, though Nintendo Powers, which I have a ton of (And which were an integral part of my childhood), will be a bit harder to sell/give away. Still, I think it’ll be the proper move to get rid of at least most of them (I may keep some of the collectors-esque issues, like some of the January blowouts they did during the early-mid 90s.).
So um, if anyone wants some old gaming magazines, let me know. I have the following Gamepros:
-August 1990
-105-107
-109
-113
-115-116
-118-119
-123
-126
-140-141
And issues 37, 47 and 48 (NOT 49, like I had said earlier) of EGM.
May 22
Vegeta, What’s the Lameness Level of this Intro?
In the Intro to The Six Day Exile (Which isn’t dead, really), I discussed the original idea for said intro, which combined early FreeCreditReport.com commercials (Offer applies with enrollment in Triple Advantage) with this scene from Dragon Ball Z.
In case you thought I was just playing around in that Intro… I wasn’t. There’s said original Intro. I had gotten the idea from this YTMND, and…well, that’s the least embarrassing thing about some of the original album concepts I had. Maybe when I become an Internet legend, I’ll reveal some of the other stuff.
And in putting up the “Latest Song” pseudo-post, I hadn’t really thought about whether or not Into the Aether stuff (Which this most assuredly is) would go in that slot or not. If this were an Ancient Greek myth, I’d be begging my brother to bail me out of this situation right now. But since I’m in the U.S. in 2008, I’m just going to decide “No it isn’t” and be done with it.
May 21
Random Wednesday Thoughts
Because I didn’t do it yesterday.
- So apparently MySpace has some kind of Karaoke contest going on. I was made aware of this by a Mr. Blade Braxton over at Wrestlecrap, who apparently wishes to rule this whatever-it-is. I looked over the song list, and am greatly disappointed that the solo debut of Rick Astley (RANDOM FUN FACT: Rick was evidently in a duo called, creatively enough, Rick & Lisa, which had a minor hit prior to Rick’s going solo) is not currently one of the choices.
- I managed to finish Wizardry I yesterday, and have started The Legacy of Llylgamyn (Which is the third game in the series, but for some reason called Wizardry II in Japan, even though it came out after Knight of Diamonds worldwide. Even more confusingly, it kept its proper title in “The Xth scenario”, making the full title of its Japanese NES release “Wizardry II: The Legacy of Llylgamyn: The Third Scenario”. Yes, really.). Going into this almost completely blind, it should be a lot of fun, as well as being insanity inducing. It’s pretty cool so far in that the enemies at least look completely different than in most of the series that I’ve played., and it seems as though you go up through the dungeon instead of down. A minor change in the big scheme of things, but cool nonetheless.
- I half-apologize for not getting this up yesterday. I say “half-apologize” because, as I said, I really didn’t intend for it to be a regular feature the first few times I did it (In other words, I’m not breaking the implied schedule because I never implied that there was a schedule in the first place).
- Jess and I are going to be totally lost next week now that Dancing with the Stars is over. Going to dinner followed by watching DotS (Yeah, that’s right, I’m admitting it) is essentially our Tuesday night routine, so who knows what we’ll watch now.
- I’ve been poking around websites for a new computer, with the intention of giving Jess this one (Even with its myriad quirks, it would be years better than what she has currently). Looks like I can get a pretty good deal at about the $600-700 range for another laptop, if I choose to pull the trigger sometime soon. I might even be ale to get a printer with one of them. Sweet!
- Lastly, I heard you like 9 and a half minutes of Mudkips!
May 19
A Brief Thought for Monday
Sometime in the future, I’d like to walk into a car dealership wearing my typical getup and announce that I to buy a car. It’s important that I wear what I usually do for this, because I want to see the look on the dealer’s face when he goes to check my credit. More precisely, I want to watch his face go from swarmy grin to a look of sheer confusion and terror as he realizes that the person sitting across from him (That’s me), who looks like he couldn’t land a job at McDonald’s, has good enough credit to not only buy a car, but the entire flippin’ dealership, if he were so inclined.
Discuss.
May 18
Emptyeye.com Week 31- P.S. Eyeytpme Sux
This week here at Emptyeye.com, not a lot of note really happened. I found out that my computer is still acting up, and it’s gotten to the point where it is unfortunately difficult to actually work on the album (Whose page I should really update sometime soon). In reality, though, that’s sort of low on the priority scale at the moment, what with the news that I’m moving out soon coming to the forefront. Oh yeah, and my Astyanax speedrun has seen the light of Internet, causing a brief spike of traffic here.
Today I went to a huge party for Jess and her family, where her grandfather gave me a hand-made pen carved out of wood. Pretty neat, even if it isn’t a clicky wooden flashlight like Jess got. I guess this means I’m somewhat officially part of the family now. I also played some Rock Band, which was Jess’s brother’s graduation present. Fun stuff, and I can actually do some easy drums on the easy level.
Yesterday I posted that my Wizardry experience was going more or less smoothly. I spoke too soon–several character deaths and one character alignment change (Which I eventually changed back) later, I’m on the tenth floor (A lot of the middle floors immediately send you into complete darkness, which I was not dealing with even with some of the improvements made to the SNES compilation to make the games slightly easier. one example is that the mapping spell, which previously only showed your location in the maze, actually gives you a picture of the floor you’re on to the extent that you’ve explored it) and into the “liberal use of the Reset button (Well, the emulator’s Reset function anyway)” phase. I’ll probably pop back up to the castle a time or two more before making my final attempt to beat the game, but suffice it to say that at this point, the game is so “Screw you player” hard that I have no problem with saying “Screw you game” right back at it and hitting reset when a group of Greater Demons surprise me and wipe me the heck out before I can do anything. Also, and I think my cousin would agree with me on this, I have no problem with a person saying that they “beat” a Wizardry game even if they had to make extensive use of Reset, or even Save States, to get it done (I’m generally of the opinion that save-stating through a game “doesn’t count” unless you use the save states to, for instance, avoid entering really long passwords when you come back to the game.).
Until next time…
-EE
May 17
*Punts Computer*
Yeah. Yesterday I went to do some work on The Six Day Exile. I decided to see what would happen if I put a touch of compression on the vocals to “The Secret“. I got an error saying that the audio was not in the right format. Fair enough.
Today is where I took another step toward a new computer, though. I went to remove the silent parts of the audio to my Rygar speed run commentary. And I got another error, one I’ve never seen before. It was approximately “Windows 32-bit error: 0x80070057: The parameter is invalid”. Bizarre. It happens maybe 20 percent into the silence removal. I wonder if this is because I’m going back through the Echo Indigo IO as opposed to the computer’s onboard audio that I used to record it. Nonetheless, it’s probably about time to start looking for another computer anyway–this one is close to 4 years old, and has a myriad of issues, chiefly the fact that it likes to randomly shut itself off.
Wizardry is going pretty well. I’m done with “part one” of the quest, getting the Blue Ribbon so I can use the Express Elevator. I can theoretically attempt to finish the game right now, but I’m wandering about the middle of the dungeon a bit first to see if I can’t scrounge up some sweet equipment first. Also, I’m not ashamed to admit that I’m using save states at times (I’ve made a total of two, and used a total of one–both were made just before I attempted to bring my Mage back from Ashen state, and the one I used was when the resurrection was botched. For those of you who don’t know the Wizardry series, “dead” characters actually have 3 states of deadness. The first is simply “Dead”, and you can have a Cleric cast a spell to try to revive a dead character or turn to the Temple of Cant to do the job. But there’s a catch–both the spell and the Temple have a chance of botching the resurrection. If this happens, your character goes to Ashen state [I think it’s technically called “Ashed” in-game]. Now you need a high-level Cleric spell, or the Temple again, to bring the character back from Ashed state [Paying more money to the Temple than you would for “Dead” characters, by the way]. But there’s a problem: The spell and/or Temple can both fail here, too. In that case, if it was the Cleric spell that failed, your character goes to “Lost” status, and can’t be revived again. Ever. That’s right, potentially hours of work go right down the drain, and you really have no way of controlling whether or not the resurrection is successful. At least you can theoretically unequip the character to give their goods to the next in line, though. This is more than you can do if the Temple fails, in which you get the message “[Character name] is buried”, and you simply lose the character and any items they had forever. Not fun.). My characters are all, I think, about level 10 or 11.