So, I currently have a couple of duplicates of games. I've had them too long to return them and have no desire to give sell them to Gamestop or the like, so I'm going to put them up for offer here instead.

Firstly, I have Deadly Premonition. It is a survival horror / thriller game for the 360. I have a second copy of this because my brother got me a copy for Xmas and I had previously already obtained one.

Secondly, I have Comdemned 2. I believe it is also a horror game (though I've not played it yet). I have a second copy of this because I picked one up and then saw a good deal on it and picked it up again because I couldn't remember whether or not I had purchased it.

Regardless, if you want either of them, you should comment on the LJ post for this.

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RPG that I want to play or run:

Euler as a time traveler stuck in the 1700s and trying get back home. Spends years corresponding with other mathematicians to try to get enough knowledge together to rebuild the one missing part to his machine. Party is either a group of intelligentsia who've stumbled onto the truth or artisans contracted to repair his equipment (maybe both?).

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Yesterday, I wrote a blog post that was apparently full of spelling errors. I only became aware of this when Imani let me know that there were many such errors and instructed me to fix them. At that point, I decided to finally add spell check to XPost. Previously, I had been avoiding it because I thought that it would be a pain or not work well across platforms.

My initial attempt was to write a small wrapper library that would use aspell through a pipe. I had much difficulty in this due to the input and output streams coming out of sync for reasons that weren't entirely clear to me. As such, I grudgingly decided to look at using the c# interoperability features built into Mono and then use the aspell C API.

After reading through the documentation on the C# interop features, I threw together a small (less than 100 lines) interface to the underlying C library. The entire thing took less than half an hour, once I had a decent feel for the c# interop stuff and worked on the very first attempt. I was quite surprised at how streamlined the entire process was.

After getting the underlying API for the program to use, I had to integrate it with the two GUIs that I have for XPost. I did the NCurses GUI first because I have lately been using the NCurses version more heavily. I also had been the one who wrote the "text box" widget used in the NCurses implementation (one hadn't existed before). That led me to thinking that it would be easier for me. After some mucking about and relearning the oddities of my code (Why did I decide that the variable "word" meant the amount of the line accumulated thus far, rather than having it represent an actual word?), it was relatively easy to mark misspelled words by just inverting the coloring of them on the console. I use a private use XML character (0xE999) to denote toggles of correct to incorrect and then parse them out at during the rendering. A bit ugly, perhaps, but it means that I didn't need to dramatically change the general rendering loop. In total, there were perhaps 5 lines changed and 6 new lines to implement.

The GTK# GUI was even easier once I had read the documentation. It apparently has a concept called the TextTag that allows you to apply semantic information to a range of characters in a buffer. You can also associate a special rendering style which will be applied to tagged text automatically. Once I knew that, it was a simple matter of creating the appropriate TextTag and associating it with the buffer (about 6 lines of code total) and then setting up a callback to spell check and tag the text whenever a new character is typed (also short at under 30 lines).

I did decide to go back and add some compatibility code. Since it is possible for a system to not have aspell installed, I wrote some wrapper code that checks for its availability and disables the spell check should it not have access to the necessary libraries. In truth, I actually wrote it rather generically, so that there is an abstract SpellChecker class of which the aspell implementation is just one possibility. I then have some reflection code which iterates over all possible spell checkers and tries to instantiate each. If it can't find one, it simply returns a null checkers (it says every word is spelled correctly). Since library loading is done at run time, it is actually rather robust. This also means that if I ever decide to work on making the Windows version work again, I would be able to drop in a replacement spell checking library by writing a thin wrapper around it and letting the reflection code do the heavy lifting. I think that overall, this is a nice, low maintenance solution to the problem.

Of course, it won't save me when I write "responsed" instead of "responeded".

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A little while back Greg mentioned via twitter a grammatical rule relating to the discussion of narratives. Essentially, the rule he stated (which may even be correct) is that one should always use the present tense when discussing events of a game. I immediately disagreed, and Greg responsed that "narratives persist across readings". This made me begin to thing about how I think about narratives.

When I think about any narrative (game, novel, comic, etc.), I tend to speak and think about things in a strage way. If I'm discussing the premise or early setup of the work, then I tend to use the present tense. For example, from my review of Valkyria Chronicles: "Valkyria Chronicles takes place in an alternate history version of World War II." The strange thing for me though, is that I begin to think of things as being in the past the further forward in a story you go. For instance, if I was discussing Final Fantasy VII, I might say that Sephiroth killed Aeris or that Aeris died. This tendency is even stronger for me if I am playing a game where I strongly identify with a protagonist and is most likely to occur when I begin speaking of the actions of my avatar as if they were my own (e.g., I attacked the bandit camp and managed to kill them all without wasting a single stimpack).

After reaching this realizating, it started an introspective jaunt while I attempted to rationalize my absolutely contradictory verbiage. I've come to the conclusion that I think about narratives as something that are inherently consumed as I move through them. Since I can always go back to the beginning, that part remains ever the present. The middle and end, however, are in my own past and I tend to address them as such. To me, those actions are as set in stone as any other history. In a sense, when I move through the story, I am incrementally and permanently destroying the work--removing it from the future and throwing it into the past.

I wonder if I am the only one who thinks of narratives in such a way.

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Last week, I was in DC for work. It was mostly uneventful, but I did manage to make my way to the American Art Museum one afternoon. I think the most interesting part was the Alexis Rockman exhibit, but I found most of the modern art section to be rather fascinating.

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When I got back, I found that my primary linux desktop (mystique) seemed to be acting up. After some investigation, I found that one of the drives had been kicked out of the raid array (causing excessive slowness) and there was a bad bit on one of the RAM chips (causing random crashes). I initially assumed that the RAM was the cause of the raid issue. Unfortunately, after spending much of Sunday swapping out ram chips and running memtest86 repeatedly, I was no closer to actually confirming which chip was bad. Instead, I decided to replace the motherboard, process, ram, and disks since, at this point, I can't really pin down which of them is the true culprit. Multi-devices failures are very troublesome, so I'm just jettisonning the whole thing and starting over.

Luckily, I have a currently disused rackmount case (formerly freasha, now replaced with a new 1U version), so I've just pulled all the old hardware out of it and will use it to build the replacement. Also, I happened to have a portable eSATA HDD with data that could be to erased, so I've used it to rebuild the array until new hardware arrives.

The interesting thing is that the dying machine was built with 5x500 GiB drives in a raid5 array (~2 TiB total). Since I am not terribly interested in making a bigger array, what I've done is to buy 4x1TiB drives and I'm going to put them in raid6 so that I won't have to run around looking for a replacement drive should one fail. I've had to do so in the past and was lucky enough to not have to do it this time due to spare equipment.

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In unrelated news, I somehow ended up reading the entire back archive of El Goonish Shive over the last 4 or 5 days. I don't quite remember how I found myself there, and I'd never really read the comic before. I found it to be strangely compelling, so I guess I'll keep following it for now. I must say that carrying out an archive binge is really quite exhausting. It is also rather disappointing to reach the end and find there is nothing more.

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In even more unrelated news, Blogger seems to be broken in some strange way, recently. My main account for posting to it now returns an error message when it attempts to pull the list of blogs that I can post to via xpost. Initially, I thought that perhaps something had changed in the protocol api, but apparently nothing has. Instead, some change has been pushed that causes some accounts to have problems. The account still authenticates correctly, but can't pull blog lists to populate the UI. This seems to be a known issue that has been going on for over a month without complete resolution. I ended up adding my guyblade.com google apps account as an author, just so that I could post. Highly annoying.

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