Vorlonesque

A doggy helped us plow snow off the driveway! It was the neighbors dog and the neighbors were helping to plow our driveway of snow and the dog (named, rather appropriately, Wheeler) likes to sit on the 4-wheeler when its not in use.

I don't organize them, and that is perhaps a problem: I tend to just use recent to find the games I'm currently playing and use the search function to find new games I want to play...but this isn't an ideal system and over the past 10-12 years I've bought a lot of games on Steam (a lot of them from packages of a company's back catalog when they went on steam summer/winter sale at some point and it was cheaper than buying the 3 games I wanted out of it by themselves).

Last week's bombcast revealed something to me about myself. I enunciate Thanksgiving like Brad. I assumed I said it like everyone else (thanksGIVING) but then I said it aloud and shock of shocks....THANKSgiving!!! I was in the car driving to work and just on a whim wondered if I said it in the way I thought I did and discovered that even being aware of how I was saying it I said it in the way I didn't think I said it. I'm thinking this must be a regional thing...north-central West Virginia is relatively close to North Carolina geographically...and it wasn't until recently that I discovered that toboggan hats are a regional name for...whatever they're called elsewhere (its ingrained in my mind that its a toboggan...I called it that before I even had heard of a toboggan sled...hell, I probably called it that before I knew what a sled was given that some of my earliest memories involve me wearing a toboggan with a poof-ball on the top and my Dad grabbing the poof-ball and making honking-horn sounds and this annoying me greatly for some reason because I was 2 or 3). Toboggan isn't even a southern thing (WV isn't really the south...at least they don't claim us)...its a regional thing that may be appalachian from what I remember reading recently (after calling a knit cap or whatever a toboggan when I was away from home and having someone look at me like I was from Mars). This sort of fascinates me because I think every region has stuff that you just take for granted if you grow up there...I thought pepperoni rolls were just ubiquitous everywhere for example...but it blew my mind that the way I thought I was saying Thanksgiving wasn't generally how I was actually saying it.

Probably depends on where they are and a host of other stuff. My old supervisor used to be a police officer in the town I attended college in before becoming a programmer and eventually a supervisor (he was also a fighter pilot or radar guy in fighter planes before that, but I digress). He said he never carried his gun with him...always left it locked up in the car because he never needed it and violent crime was relatively low there. I got the impression he also felt if he ever had to draw a gun he'd likely fucked up. But that was one individual in one place (with a small population in WV) during one period of time.Other areas are different due to both policy and just the realities of the locale. In a lot of places I think police are so separate from the community that it creates friction between the public and police. I'm not sure how you fix that in an acceptable amount of time and I think it's one of the many root issues. If police don't see themselves as part of the community and start seeing the community as a threat or an obstacle, they aren't going to function as they should. I also think there needs to be almost a variation of the Hippocratic oath for law enforcement: do the least amount of harm. The best resolution should be one where punitive action is avoided, violence isn't enacted, and conflict is resolved with fairness, compassion, and humanity. But making that happen is tough and in the immediate future concrete clear policy reforms with an eye for making things better are needed...and I will admit that I'm not qualified to sharp enough to say what those should be (the site mentioned above has some good ideas) and my life experiences don't make me the ideal person to really speak on that. Edit: I typed this out on a phone so its probably a meanderings mess.

Yeah, this is handy and its what I would do with the pistol all the time when trying to get past small out posts...shoot guys in the butt with tranq darts and wait.

I just did a mission where I had to extract a prisoner from a heavily guarded base/outpost. It went really well. I happened to do two other side missions in there recently and finished a major mission in that same place rescuing somebody (its also where I got a tape). I knew the place really well from the last three missions that had gone sideways at various points. This time I just knocked a couple guys out who might have spotted me (with my dart pistol) and then used the underground crawl space thing to slowly sneak my way near where the prisoner was to extract him. I knocked out three more guys without being spotted (every time I managed to get them in the back of the head with a dart). I took the prisoner and used a fulton on him and some of the guys I knocked out and then got back in the little crawl tunnel and just got out without being noticed and with only hitting 4 or 5 guys with knock out darts. It was great...I imagine a couple guys walking in to talk to the prisoner several minutes after my helicopter had left...I imagine them eventually noticing the prisoner and the guy guarding him and the guy guarding the door were all gone...and I wonder what they imagine happened. I like to think (and the game doesn't support this, but its what I choose to believe happened) that they decided that the two guards decided to help the prisoner escape and they all defected and that I was never there. Now that I can customize my weapons, the bolt action knock-out dart rifle is becoming my new favorite. Its not too hard to just pick off isolated guys from a distance with it, or to knock a guy out in sight of another guy who is behind something so that when they guy walks over to wake him up you headshot him too and knock him out. When this works out perfectly you end up with a group of 3 or 4 unconscious enemy soldiers all waiting to be Fultoned off back to the motherbase and its really satisfying pulling that off. The only problem is that I get overly ambitious and end up forgetting that my suppressor is wearing out and then I alert a base full of enemies that I've been sneaking deeper and deeper into.

I actually played it a good bit after I had already been using ESDF with QW and Q2...but I remember it being a pleasant surprise when I went in to rebind things.

I just misheard something in a hilarious way just now! I thought Chris said Parachute was an online betting brand and that they have sheeps. I then realized what Chris actually said...but the idea of gambling sheep in Venice Beach made my day!

Thresh helped popularize WASD (though he certainly wasn't the first to use it) back during the later DOOM days...he described it more or less in his DOOM Deathmatcher's Bible and it caught with people who played DOOM2 DM competitively along with kb/mouse (which John Romero was using all the way back with Wolf3d if memory serves). Mouse/Kb weren't all that commonly used in DOOM by the average player (I tried and failed several times to make the switch, not knowing how to adjust my sensitivity until way later and not really knowing about WASD during most of my attempts...it wasn't until Quake (1&2) that I manages to successfully switch...though I used ESDF and have ever since...can't remember if I tried WASD initially or if I just started with ESDF because that's where my hands naturally go). Here's a link on way back to the DOOM guide Thresh wrote that I mentioned: https://web.archive.org/web/20000815092627/http://www.gamersx.com/bibles/doom/doom-setup.asp

This game is pretty much the game that as a child I would have loved more than any other. My fondest dream was being able to make my own games...and making my own Mario games was really what I wanted to do. I'm really tempted to get it for my little cousins this Christmas, but I don't know if they're old enough to really enjoy it (or if kids in early-mid grade school are even into Mario or platformers like I was at that age). I need to actually mess with making some levels, I think I'll play around with it this weekend if I don't binge on MGSV again. I actually have a couple ideas that could turn out to be interesting levels (or not).

This game reminds me of a dream I had as a little kid (I was maybe 3 or 4 at the time...its one of my earlier memories and it would have been before I was in school). Like many kids I was afraid of monsters...and in the dream/nightmare monsters were in my house and wondering around so I decided to scare them before they could get me...and I think I scared them with a toy raygun or something...or maybe a flashlight and then I ended up talking to them and they weren't so bad once I got to know them...they just looked scary and if I remember correctly robbed banks or drove through red lights or something that little kid me would have seen as bad behavior that didn't really impact me. The monsters actually looked like they could have escaped from Jabba's palace or whatever which would have been pretty strong in my mind as RotJ was probably the first movie I saw in a theatre that I can remember and I would have been 3 at the time and Jabba scared the fuck out of 3 year old me). For some reason I imagine this game as reasoning with the monsters that live under your bed and it turns out they're not so bad and that really makes me want to play it.

My guess (that may be wrong given Poe's Law or whatever), is that it's meant to be a parody of some very fringe conspiracy sites done by someone who has spent a lot of time reading some of the stranger or more absurd and somewhat offensive conspiracy stuff. It looks like its taking those views and just running with them to the most absurd conclusions, but some of the articles seem so close to other sincere things on the internet so it could be sincere and it just sits close to peak absurdity. It does seem to be a parody though...the articles on KISS and the draining the oceans bits seem to be really obvious satire/parody to me. I don't really find if funny if its satire even though it does seem to really nail its subject if it is that.

I have to think its fake after reading some other articles. It reads like a clever parody of people like Steve Quayle and David Eick. If its not a parody than its absurdity taken to a level near azimuth.

If it makes you feel better, Romero and most of the id guys played DOOM with kb/mouse (Romero played Wolf3d with a mouse as well...I remember reading something that mentioned it in passing in the Wolf3d strategy guide that came with my boxed copy years and years back). An article about DOOM2 before it was released mentioend he was circle strafing press guys from CGW in DOOM1 DM. I think it may be the first description of circle strafing I ever read or saw. I'll see if I can go dig it up here in a little big. Edit: ok it was the July 1994 issue of CGW...I weirdly remember getting that issue vividly (couldn't remember if it was 1993 or 1994, but now that I think about it I should have known because DOOM2 came out in '94 and I think I ended up getting into DOOM1 shareware sometime in early-mid 1994 when I was still in the 8th grade and becoming obsessed with it). It was summer and we were visiting my Grandma in Clarksburg (WV) and maybe were up there to get my weekly allergy shot (which during the school year I got on Saturdays, but during Summer I'd get on Thursday when we visited my Grandma and Grandpa before he passed away), and we were in Walden books or whatever the bookstore was at the time at the Meadowbrook Mall and I saw DOOM2 and flipped through the issue and knew I had to have is and asked my Mom thinking she'd probably say no (and I would have been ok with that), but she said yeah so I was really excited and poured over this huge magazine about something I only knew a little bit about (PC Gaming) but was wanting to dive deep into at the time after having played Civilization and DOOM and some other stuff (before that most of my gaming was with the NES and SNES and Gameboy, with the Atari 2600 before that). There were ads for all sorts of crazy things like System Shock and flight sim controls and RPGs and all sorts of stuff. That article probably further cemented my weird quasi-religious obsession or love or whatever I had regarding DOOM...I think its probably best compared to the way some people are into Nirvana or The Beatles or Kanye West or The Rolling Stones or NIN or Pink Floyd or whatever band...I have that weird part of my brain that will always regard 90's id and DOOM in that same light as a Beatles fan does the fab four and Revolver, or Sgt Pepper, or "the white album" or a Pink Floyd fan does that band and Dark Side of the Moon, or Wish You Were Here, or The Wall. Sorry, got on a crazy rambling detour there (just ignore that wall of text), basically that article on DOOM2 is seared into my brain like some other stuff from the time period and I actually re-bought that magazine off ebay recently as a weird impulse buy. I have no clue where it is now, its probably in a box under my bed from when I was putting stuff away recently and throwing away stuff I didn't want or need anymore (and taking old books I'd read to the local library; they have a metal cabinet shelf thing where you can...dammit I'm getting off-topic again). I found it on CGW Museum which appears to be legit given that they were mentioned by CGW themselves in 2005 (January issue, page 40 at the very bottom of the page) and have interviewed people who worked there at various points so I'm thinking they're probably ok to post (if not, feel free to remove the link or to tell me to remove the link): http://www.cgwmuseum.org/galleries/index.php?year=1994&pub=2&id=120 The following quote is from page 24 describing a DOOM2 Deathmatch with Romero (I'm transcribing this from the page so it may have errors and if so they are likely my fault): "Over the next few hours, Romero taught us the delicate art of the slaughter, racing around the map at supernatural speeds and using the mouse with such skill that he could, literally, run circles around us while keeping his weapon aimed at our spinning heads." Edit2: I played around with the quote to try to get the quotes in the quote and then gave up...so I just removed the redundant video link that made this huge post even bigger on a screen.

I think that racism is such a complicated thing that its hard to just give a simple answer. There are different definitions depending on you source or if you're talking about a specific field of study or whatever. It seems to be really easy to get into an argument of semantics on the issue...and I often think that a discussion of something like that almost needs to start with an agreement on or mutual understanding of terminology. Is it prejudice plus power, is it an ideology that generalizes racial groups and espouses superiority for certain groups, is it a fear of or hostility toward people outside of your racial or ethnic group. I tend to see it a having a somewhat contextual definition and when I use it I tend to lean towards one that incorporates power dynamics more (and I think that is the tendency in this conversation)...but I'm underqualified to really have a strong opinion on it definition-wise...I've got no real background in the social sciences, and as a white guy I've not been mistreated for racial reasons so I can't even use personal experience. My general feeling is that fear of the other can be a component of it and that there's overlap but not all racism is necessarily defined as fear of the other and not all fear of the other is racism.

That is amazing...on all levels...amazing.

I picked up the legacy collection, and oddly enough also ordered an NES cart of the original Mega Man off ebay or amazon recently (which wasn't in as nearly as nice a condition as my Mega Man 2 and Mega Man 3 carts which were pristine (MM2 had the box and manual and everything)...but the original Mega Man is a little more expensive and harder to find so I went with cheaper and a bit scuffed up). The legacy collection is cool because it gives me access to the games that I want to play but don't have a real nostalgic connection to in the same way as the first 3 without having to have even more physical carts (and to order more stuff). If I'm really into something I tend to prefer having the cart. That way when I have more space and can get a 15khz CRT RGB monitor and setup a dedicated space for those games I really really have a fondness for (read: an obsession for) I'll have them handy. It also makes it easy to rip them with the kazzo device I have for emulation purposes in the meantime (and using some shaders I can get them looking pretty good on my high resolution GDM 5411 CRT). I really like that they included some filters with this collection. They aren't perfect (the scanlines seem a bit too thin and don't quite look like what you'd find on either a dot mast or an aperture grille CRT), but they're good enough (particularly the monitor filter). My biggest gripe is that on a 4:3 monitor the Steam version ends up running in letterbox and then cuts off the sides so you end up playing the game in small little square, but that's more a result of my being an edge case (someone who still uses a 4:3 CRT (1920x1440 @75Hz) for modern games). I'm currently playing through the first Mega Man right now (I don't know if I ever actually beat the thing as a kid or just got to Dr. Wily's castle) and its weird that it brings back very specific childhood memories. I remember having a friend over (which was rare because we lived about 15 minutes outside of town in a rural area so it was a big occasion when other kids visited the house) and we rented Mega Man and I remember playing Ice Man's stage and both of us just screaming at the screen every time we'd screw up the blocks that pop in and out of existence or whatever and that we managed to get through it (we'd take turns...he'd try and then I'd try and then my brother and we'd keep at it until we got through it). I still hate those on that stage. They're fine on Heat Man's stage; I can almost do it by muscle memory that I somehow retained from the 3rd grade or something, but the blocks on Ice Man's stage are a fucking pain.

I went to college in the same county in West Virginia the fictional town of Grantville was supposed to be in during the time period it was transported in the story (2000 according to wikipedia)...the town was based on Mannington and I vaguely remember going there once or twice as a kid. I never have read the books...but I've heard about them several times because a lot of people from West Virginia (and I have this tendency myself I will admit) get really excited when we're mentioned anywhere resembling a national level...I don't know if that's normal everywhere or not (as I've never lived in another state for any long period of time).

Is it wrong that my brain started constructing a narrative where most 80's Bad Guys' dads are 50's or 60's Bad Guys based on your second sentence?I've been using this username since 1998...started using it the summer right before I started college if I remember correctly.

Titanfall was my GOTY.cx last year...I still play it a lot, but its not easy to find a game any time you want now. I generally play Hardpoint and on weekends I can usually (but not always) find a game and on weekdays its tricky. I occasionally play CTF and its fun but its hard to find a game (on PC at least)...so I feel like I can't play enough to get the hang of it. I love the movement...the last game I played this much was Tribes Ascend...and this is one of the few games to emphasize movement in a way that the Tribes and Quake games have...I really love having fast and graceful movement in an FPS game...I may not move gracefully in such a game but it gives me something to keep trying at (and failing at).

Lately its been Titanfall (mostly that), Star Citizen's Arena Commander dogfight module (and also admiring my ships in the hangar and occasionally climbing in the bigger ones and making pew pew sounds in the pilots seat), some Reflex (a Quake-like FPS that I really need to play more), Farcry 4 (it takes me a looooong time to finish a single player game generally, and anything open world takes me longer because I will spend most of my time doing stupid shit like jumping trucks off of stuff), Splatoon, Super Mario Kart 8, and stuff I'm forgetting. But its mostly Titanfall...before that it was Tribes Ascend...every weekend I'd spend a few hours at least playing Tribes Ascend and Titanfall has sort of filled that role now (except for when my brother is watching something on Netflix...then I have to play single player games because it makes lots of latency...we need to mess with QoS settings I think). For all the time I've spent with Titanfall (155 hours, which for me is a LOT...I spent 182 with Tribes Ascend and I played the hell out of that); I still suck:

I remember attempting to make a map...I was trying to make a DOOM E1M8 inspired map that was themed as a space ship crashed into a mountainside. It ended up looking like a giant metal penis lodged into a stone wall.

I actually managed to get this one new in box (well...it wasn't used...but it was made in 1999 so I don't know if you can call it "new" so much as "unused" or "new old stock" though I managed to scuff it up slightly getting it out of the box). It apparently sat in storage at CIS Hollywood for a few years (it had all the old shipping labels and information on the box...they did a lot of blue screen/green screen work on Star Trek TNG and DS9 back in the 90's, and they still do effects and composting work on newer stuff) and they eventually sold it off along with around 5 others they had in storage I guess. I bought it to replace my identical CRT (same model, GDM 5411) that I bought back in 2008...the fact that I could still find a new one amused me and my old one was getting to a point where I was going to have to replace it in a couple years so I went ahead and bought this one. This desk hasn't managed to sag too much, but this thing is only around 70 or 80 pounds...those 24" widescreen monitors were heavier I think. I think one of my uncles may actually have one of the 1920x1200 widescreen Sony CRTs (FW900 I think) unopened in the box that he bought years back when they were phasing them out because he thought they were cool. I was telling him about the one I just bought a couple months ago and he mentioned the one he had. Edit: adding link to composite image systems page on a star trek wiki: http://en.memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/CIS_Hollywood

The discussion of CRTs at EVO got me all excited (I get strangely excited about the subject)! I still use a CRT for playing my PC games (though a different sort of CRT, as mine is an SGI branded Sony made PC monitor that generally runs in 1920x1440 @ 75Hz...though like most CRTs of its ilk it is multisync and does a wide variety of resolutions well as it doesn't really have a native resolution (one of the reasons I still like using a CRT in addition to the lack of input lag, the excellent black levels and contrast, and just my own preferences). I really want to get a 15khz CRT (essentially an SD CRT) for old games at some point...preferably something like a 20" Sony PVM or GVM (as those have RGB inputs, usually through BNC...and you can get SCART and JP21 adapters for them...some even have VGA ports for RGB as well). I love the way old console games look on an old CRT...I love the scanlines, the phosphor dots, the glow of the screen. I can get a sort of kind of decent facsimile of the look on my PC CRT with some shaders (my CRT hooked up to my PC can't do 15khz (it will go down to 31khz I think...so 640x480 is the lower limit if I remember right...maybe 512xsomething) and is waaaay too sharp for that. Scanlines end up being too pronounced on it, as the electron beam has no "bloom" to it at all. This is what makes it an excellent high resolution monitor and why text is very sharp on it for a CRT...but I like a little tiny bit of pixel bleed on my pixel art games personally (it all comes down to personal preference). I'm wondering if the tiny monitor Spaff mentioned looked something like this: http://www.ebay.com/itm/Sony-PVM-8041Q-Trinitron-8-Color-Monitor-Portable-Field-Monitor-/201349970628?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item2ee164bac4

This reminds me of playing Quake 2 on the college network from my Dorm room...my freshman year (1998) I'd occasionally check to see if anyone was playing on the LAN (and if not I'd load up gamespy/quakespy) and one day I saw a game and got really excited and jumped in. The people playing were apparently in the co-ed dorm a good little walk away (I was in what was the guy's dorm at the time, but eventually they made them all co-ed my last year I think)...and they weren't very good. They mostly played on maps they made in Qoole (a fairly easy to use Quake/Quake2 map editor). I slaughtered them and then started chasing them around with the blaster, jumping on their heads (they almost never looked up and tended not to move, so this was amusing), and eventually they all tried to gang up on me. I later ran into a guy who was in one of those games and he said they were all in two dorm rooms next to each other and they were shouting through the walls trying to coordinate. I would always claim not to be the same person that logged in last time and would claim to be somewhere else on campus and would always have a bizarre back story. My favorite story was that I was a 4th grade elementary school student on a class field trip to see a college and that I was playing from the library. They never believed these stories and I always would make them more absurd as I went along. I was basically just bored and up to stupid mischief. The next year I discovered that the lab assistants/chem majors would play Q1 and Q2 in the chemistry lab in the math and science building with one of the Chemistry professors and I jumped in and did pretty well against them (they did actually move around and shoot at the same time and managed to look up and down...but I still managed to end up 20 kills ahead or so). I then walked down to the chemistry lab and watched them playing and asked if they ever had people show up from elsewhere on campus and they related to me that it almost never happened but just did that night. I then waited until someone finished up on a machine and jumped on and repeated my past performance and then towards the end of the round changed my username to match the one I used previously (probably to Vorlonesque, since that was the username I used online in Quake even way back in those days). I think I actually learned to type on electric typewriters (before that I used the hunt and peck method on computers...but my first real typing classes I believe were on typewriters). We had keyboarding classes all through Middle School/Junior High that were on IBM electric typewriters along with some old IBM PS/2 PCs that only had floppy drives I think (although I could be wrong...they might have had HDDs). We also had computer classes with old mid-80's Packard Bells (I think they were 8086s, though they could have been 8088s) that had dual 5.25" floppies and I initially thought that what people meant by hard drives were 3.5" disks because they were "hard" compared to t he 5.25" disks. I ended up with a typing class in high school as well (with electric typewriters) my first year...its amazing that I don't type more quickly than I do considering how many typing classes I ended up one way or another. Our typewriters never had the LED screens I don't think...and they were really really touchy. It was very easy to hold down a key for a little too long and you'd get double letters...hell the things would repeat letters fast as hell (sounding like a machine gun doing it too)...the key switches were nice as I remember...they basically felt like lighter IBM Model M keys and they had a nice click to them. The Business Computer Applications class (the one I mentioned in my story before...it was the class we played DOOM in) had us working on IBM PS/2 machines (486s with no hard drives, but with 8 megs of RAM) with either the DOS version of MS Works or Lotus or maybe the Corel equivalent. I think they had a server that actually hosted the office software we used. Games were allowed in the class so long as we had our work for the day completed (it tended to work as an incentive for people to get their stuff done) and before I got DOOM running, most people played the shareware version of Commander Keen and Wolf3d (which fit on a floppy I think), scorched earth, various card games, tetris, and some other shareware and freeware stuff I think. I actually ran into the lady who taught that class a couple years back in the grocery store and was surprised that she remembered me...I seem to remember that she said she retired several years ago.