MrHoatzin

I lost a lot of faith in Will Wright and stopped playing Spore when I learned that he was not only an avid Republican but that he donated monstrous quantities of money to McCain/Palin this last election and to the RNC all his life. It blew my mind that someone so seemingly smart and rational and scientifically-minded could in any way support the Madman/Snowbilly ticket, exactly because they were so crazy anti-intellectual, anti-progressive and were pandering to the worst ignorant hick America with all might. In a particularly crazy year when moderates fled the republican label, he seemed to stick by it. The only explanation I have is that he is extremely well-monied and likes his monies more than everything else he purports to stand for. For fuck's sake, they ridiculed science spending. Whiskey Tango Foxtrot. He seems like a cool guy, his talks and his games are kindof neat, but he just made three games. I've come to look at his gaming god status as somewhat unfounded. In a same kind of breath (thinking of other god/sim games), I have started to appreciate Peter Molyneux a lot more. Sure, dude births hyperbolas every time he opens his mouth, but his portfolio is actually more rad than Will Wright's: Populous, Syndicate, Theme Park, Magic Carpet, Dungeon Keeper, Black and White, the Movies, Fable. Sure, they were not perfect games by any stretch of imagination (the lasting reputation of his games would be a lot better if it weren't perceived he was hyping them, refer to graph at the bottom of the post), but the dude should get more respect than Will Wright with his trifecta of Sim City, Sims and Spore. Plus, I don't think Molyneux donated to goddamn Sarah Palin. :( :molyneuxcrown:

At first I was like, lolwut, but a few clicks later, whiskey tango foxtrot!? ____ _________________..._ ':buyme:_ ________ _____________.__ _'':tfart: I can't imagine anyone thinking that the Shack could be anything but a liability for a services company. Fileshack is kinda fancy, I guess, and the game coverage is not offensive as it is, but shackers are completely batshit loco. I guess it must be straightforward diversifying, and Shack seemed within reach and purchasable. Still, it is kindof sad that the site is bound to be vanillafied eventually and over time, now that it is run as a tangential venture of a business with aspirations of respectability, and not as a primary endeavor by a salty Texan douchebag and his boring Dutch sidekick.

Yes. No. The movie was sweet, but, jeez, was it hammy. I keep expecting something more from Danny Boyle because Trainspotting was so refreshing, yet he keeps delivering well-executed, but highly bathetic melodramas.

Creepy ass cat

That is what I love most about Remo: every interview is an extreme awesome obstacle course of depravity—and yet so civil.

Honestly, I don't even know who they are (I don't know which one is the song name and which one is the artist). I just asked my girlfriend to name me an emo band and a song by said band.

A million years ago I bought a dinky, trusty Thinkpad T30 before Thinkpad became Lenovo. It was neato, had a decent video card, half a gig o' RAM, decent megahertzage, etc. I used it for years and then it started to clog up with random software and grow slower than I would have liked it to... I backed up stuff that I needed and formatted the machine. I formatted also the mystery partition that I learned later contained the XP restore "disk". The computer had a sticker on it that I figured was a regulation XP serial number, and I planned to install my copy of regular desktop XP and use the serial from the sticker. However, the serial didn't work because it was a serial for IBM's version of Thinkpad T30 XP restorewhathaveyou disk. There doesn't seem to be a place online where I could download this particular restore disk, and to buy one I have to phone Lenovo because they don't seem to offer it through any online store. Fuck Windows and fuck Lenovo. I will prolly use the laptop for text processing, plugging it into TVs and projectors to watch movies, light emulated gaming (with or without controllers), browsing the internets in coffee shops, light scripting work, etc. I will likely not use it for much photoshoppery any more. When I bought it I bought it because IBM had a reputation of being Linux-friendly. I ran Auditor on the laptop before without any issues. By "I ran", I mean I put the disk in, booted it just fine, then proceeded to be utterly baffled by the tools it offered, failed to use them, never tried again. TLDR: SO! My question is what is the best Linux distribution for my portable Thinkpaddy computing needs? I don't want to mess too much with trying to get shit to work. I just want it to be boring and dependable and have a relatively light footprint.

Ubuntu so far has been behaving rather respectably. I'll let it sit there for a while before I raze the poor machine. Surprisingly also, the on-board wifi card works now. It had stopped working about a year ago and I had been using a usb dongle since then. I figured it was just its time to die, but I guess it was a software issue. As far as issues go, the monitor's back light turned off randomly twice, I am not sure what prompted it to do so. I had to turn the display off and turn it back on for it to reappear. If it keeps happening I will dig deeper.

I think a surprising number of them simply aren't. The Patriot Act comes to mind as a scary example. It was a hideously long document that was rushed through Capitol Hill far faster than it could've possibly been read, let alone thought about, debated, etc. I hope that Obama's sangfroid and calm deliberativeness influences the way things are done in DC for the better.

See, this is why I dread incomplete human interaction of the internet variety. I made a random silly, whimsical, infantile comment that wasn't all that funny, but was in good humor. Then Chris proceeded to explain the error of my ways with excruciating exactness. Then I felt dumb and tried to backpedal, only to make syntheticgerbil think that I am a race baiter of some sort. It was a completely irrelevant interaction, no one involved should remember it in two days time, and yet, it has hovered in my mind like some faux-pas for the past 24 hours. I just need to get this out of my system. It feels soooo stupid awkward, like high school. ¬¬¬ Oh, christ, what have I done. This reads like a livejournal post. Mood: Music: Dashboard Confessional - Vindicated

Bill Hicks, like Citizen Kane, is sadly cursed by the incessant, "why was that great?" questions.

Still, nigga's gotta keep it real.

Hot shits, Erkki.

Well, I found this diary of Ubuntu on T30 installation woes. It is Ubuntu from a few versions ago, but I'll refer to it for inspiration if shit don't work. Edit: also. Well, it doesn't look too bad, honestly. I was dreading more problems than this.

Oooh, burn. Are you just gonna sit Idly™ by and let it slide?

DAMNING PROOF

Oh man, yeah, it looked pretty damn hot and the developers seemed cool and really with it. I remember (to touch upon that observation from one of the recent podcasts) the duders really had a fairly coherent if esoteric and elaborate explanation of their creative influences. Anybody knows if the game is actually happening? This is not too reassuring. It says new trailer coming soon, but the copyright date on the picture is 2006. Well, they're not dead, but this still makes me emo. :tmeh: '';('' :tmeh: ......

How does Hitler tie his shoes? How did the Pope get bird flu?

:shifty:

I don't think this is a deal-breaker. They can just feign ignorance of the actual iMUSE and then when they're done, show it to LEC and pay some patent use fees. I dunno, maybe it is not all that hot an idea, potentially a dangerous waste of time.Maybe it would be better to license the thing and then improve it, but LEC has had a schizophrenic business plan for the last ten years and they may just cock-block it because they're protecting their assets or something equally tarded. How long do patents on something like that last? 20 years from the earliest claim date plus any extensions granted, says wikipedia. If they don't extend it (which they might simply because LEC is a bunch of douchefag lawyers with nothing better to do), it will fall out of patent on November 25th 2011 (iMUSE patent is filed on that date in 1991). A corollary: Holy cow, it has been near twenty years since MI2 came out. I feel old.

Grigori Grimoire

A developer that would benefit immensely from an iMUSE-like system is Bethesda. I dug the wandering music and the battle music in all their games, but they would always click on and off weirdly, with the crescendo falling off the cliff or being interrupted by a drum roll of some sort before the regular wandering music would timidly wander in. Their efforts seem to be directed entirely towards hiding the seams in the music tracks, which is a pity. I know nothing about music in general and have only a rudimentary understanding of how MIDI works, but I wonder if there is some benefit to having a half midi, half recorded track composition of some sort. The midi part of the composition would do all the fancy transitions while the taped instruments (or voices or noise or whatever) track would just establish some grunge to the sound, so that it is not all synthetic-sounding. It could be that this method is more trouble than its worth, and delivers something that is not as good as either of its parts. That said, a really good artist could work with the shortcomings of this mutant method to create something compelling... Ultimately it is just a matter of time before we have a composer/programmer with vision and ability to make another iMUSE. I think Valve would be a safe entity to expect some species of iMUSEish revival from. The Half-Lifey musics are mostly (completely?) electronic, and they tend to cross fade more cleanly than Bethesda's games, but it would be rad if they interweaved more dynamically than they do. They have money to burn and tend to be obsessed with the cinematic qualities of their games; they ought to be reminded of how awesome iMUSE was and encouraged to go further in that direction. Hint, hint, etc.

I only read vegan bibles myself.

Man, I am flattered, touched, etc.I have come to realize (and not fight the fact) that I am a Remo fangirl of some sort. I've spent the last three (+?) years skipping around the internets getting my hit of quality game-based coverage and pondering from the fine web institutions that patronized him. It only made sense that I would sooner or later venture back into this hive of scumm and villainy. So hi, how's it goin?

Ok, but for realz this time: In the general context of Boards of Canada-type musics*, I really dig (and maybe you would too!) Dead Voices On Air & Einsturzende Neubauten. __________________ *A caveat: The music may not have much in common with Boards of Canada, but in my mind I file them together.