guyblade.com #/


PSN
Gamercard


2009 Jun 26 relm


Guy Blade Guy Blade---12:03:00


Widescreen is the problem
I believe it is no longer possible to buy a new laptop with a 4:3 aspect ratio through any major manufacturer. I believe this is especially the case if one wants a UXGA (1600x1200) screen.

I am annoyed by this.

Published by XPost


Permalink to this post     Com/0


2009 Jun 25 harle


Guy Blade Guy Blade---09:49:00


Energi
I originally tried Bawls Guarana at a LAN party that I went to while I was in high school. I enjoyed it and, in college, began to keep a supply on hand. I consumed the last of my stockpile before moving out to California and, not knowing where a distributer might be found, gave up on it for a while. After settling in, however, I discovered that Target had begun to stock it in can form and so picked up an approximately 2 can per week habit again. While picking up various things at Target over the weekend, I found that they seem to have stopped stocking it or perhaps had reorganized it to some hidden corner of the store (away from the rest of their energy drink supply).

As such, I began looking for an alternate supply route. This led me to the Bawls website where I found that Amazon now stocks Bawls in 24 packs. They were somewhat more expensive than what I'd been paying at Target, but looking closely showed me two things:

1. I could have Amazon set up an automated shipment of 1 case per month to my apartment. This is slightly higher than the rate at which I generally consume it, but has the benefit of being highly unlikely to run out.

2. Amazon discounts items in automated shipments like this quite heavily. The base price for a 24 pack at Amazon runs $55. They take 15% off of that when doing automated shipments and give free shipping (though it would qualify for super-saver anyway).

Doing the math puts the Amazon supply at $1.9475 / can and the Target supply at $1.7975 / can. This gives a 15 cent per can price increase, but a much lower liklihood of running out. Also, Amazon's "subscription" program seems less onerous than most: they provide a web-based console where you can skip a month's shipment, request the shipment now, or even cancel the subscription entirely with minimal fuss.

So, we'll see how this works out for now. Unfortunately, Amazon doesn't offer Bawls in the classic bottles that were so awesome...

Published by XPost


Permalink to this post     Com/0


2009 Jun 21 yuffie


Guy Blade Guy Blade---12:06:00


A day in the life
I spent most of today doing two things: playing board games with people at least a decade older than me and watching anime with people either a decade older or several years younger than me. Gaming went rather well, I managed to win the first two games we played: Dominion and Kingsburg. I then lost at Puerto Rico and won a single game out of the three games of Shadow Hunters we played.

Dominion is a card game in which you are trying to build a deck out of a set of communal cards. Each turn, you draw a new hand, and using the action card and money cards available you try to either build a better deck or to buy cards that provide victory points. It is made more interesting by having 25 types of cards available to purchase, of which, only 10 are actually used in any given game. It even provides a special random choice deck for deciding which ones are availble.

Kingsburg was also rather interesting. It is fundamentally about kingdom building and resource management with an element of die rolling to provide some random generation. It is further made tricky by having explicit catch-up mechanisms (you get bonus actions and dice when you're behind on building) as well as having periodic events which upset your standing (attacks from enemy hordes).

We then played Puerto Rico which is (essentially) another kingdom building game, only the kingdom is the plantation kind in South America. It may have too many moving parts for my taste and it is very easy to get very far behind. Add that to its long play time and I'm a bit unimpressed with it.

The last game that we played was Shadow Hunters. The premise of the game is that each player is either a "Shadow" (some sort of nasty World of Darkness type thing), a "Hunter" (the kind that kills Shadows), or a Neutral. At the beginning of the game, players are assigned types randomly and those types are kept hidden. When they're assigned a type, they are also given an objective: Shadows and Hunters want to wipe out the other side; Neutral have their own unique objectives like wanting to be the first to die or collect a pile of artifacts. Players move around a board by rolling two dice (1d6+1d4) and get cards black and white cards tend to give items, weapons or instantaneous effects. Green card, however, contain questions which help to reveal the nature of the people around you on the board. The drawing player reads the card, which forces actions on certain types of characters, and then gives them to another character who then must carry out the action. Of course, all of this is done without revealing anything to any other players, including even what card was given. I think this was my favorite game of the day.

After I got home, I ended up ordering Dominion and Shadow Hunters to have at work for our board game lunches. The former will make a good addition to our set of games that can be played with three because we have very few that fall into that category. The last will make a good alternative for large groups (5+) since the game's probably only interesting with at least 5 people (I think 4 is technically playable).

As for anime, we screened a whole bunch of single episodes of things. Nothing we watched really jumped out at me as necessary, except perhaps Project Blue Earth SOS which is retro-futurism set in the far off future of the year 2000 (I'd note that the original run of the series was in 2006). It is sort of what Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow would be if done in anime form in the FUTURE! rather than the past. Of course, we'd already watched the first episode previously, so it hardly seems fair to list it tonight, but I feel compelled nonetheless.

Published by XPost


Permalink to this post     Com/0


2009 Jun 19 anthy


Guy Blade Guy Blade---05:49:00


Suddenly and deliberately
A few days ago, I finished inFAMOUS. The game itself is premised on the question "what if a normal person gets super powers?" It answers by providing an open world and a plot which forces you to make choices with a moral overtones. The gameplay itself is solid and well constructed with plenty of interesting powers. What I was most impressed with, however, were the game's "karma moments". These are, as perhaps can be gleamed from the name, the times when you are presented with said choices. What impressed me was not their existence, but the fact that the choices tend to be excessively reasonable even for the "evil" side. For example, the game is takes place in a city which is under quarantine. The first choice in the game involves your character and a government food drop. The good choice is to take only what you require for now. The evil choice is to take a few swings the nearby pedestrians who are attempting to take their own (you needn't kill or even disable them) so that you can have enough food to surive longer term with your sidekick and girlfriend. The second choice is clearly selfish (which the game tends to classify as evil), but doesn't involve the usual burning down of orphanages which "evil" choices tend to.

Overall, I'd recommend the game. It was good enough that, with the thin justification of getting the platinum trophy, I took a second pass through the game. Anymore, such a decision is a rare one.

Published by XPost


Permalink to this post     Com/0


2009 Jun 17 aeris


Guy Blade Guy Blade---04:29:00


Moving violation
On my way home from work, I got a traffic citation for running two stop signs on my bicycle. It happened while I was on lab, so I get to call some security person at JPL tomorrow to see what the citation means. Nevertheless, if I'd done it in a car, I'd lose my ability to park at lab. Personally, I hope that they tell me that I'm not allowed to park my bike on lab for some period of time and force me to drive (or bike to the edge of lab property and walk from there). I think the irony of such a turnabout would be great. I wonder if "parking" my bike in my office would count...

Apparently, some high ranking person on lab got tired of all the cyclists running stop signs, so lab security has cracked down. They're also forcing people without helmets to walk their bikes while on lab. I find the whole thing bizarre and a huge waste of security resources when there is a whole lab that's supposed to be being protected.

Published by XPost


Permalink to this post     Com/0


2009 Jun 13 yuffie


Guy Blade Guy Blade---15:19:00


Signal Compulsion
Mere moments ago, I finished watching Code Geass R2. I had previously watched the first half/season a few weeks ago, and--getting tired of waiting for R2 to come out on DVD--obtained the second half this past week. Although several people that I talked to about the series seemed to believe that it wasn't very good, or went downhill in the second season, I quite enjoyed it.

Basically, the premise of the entire series is that the main character is a strategic genius who then additionally gain the ability to, by making direct eye contact, force people to follow his commands. The series then follows his attempt to defeat (through various means) the Brittanian Empire.

The series does do a few things that make is rather unique. First, despite the main character being a strategic genius, he is shown to actually have very little skill in combat or physical prowess. Thus, rather than having the leader run in at the head of every battle (as is common in "real robot" anime), we see a leader who actively avoids getting himself in combat the vast majority of the time.

Secondly, [spoilers start here] in R2 after about episode 20 presents a very strong characterization of a properly operating "evil overlord". This even goes so far as to involve the main character actively turning people into suicidally loyal slaves which he throws at his foes Zap Brannigan style to keep them busy. Frankly, I'd almost prefer that the show stopped at the commercial break in the last episode so that we end with a view of the main character having accomplished all of his proported goals. [spoilers end here]

I would probably recommend the series to more strongly if they hadn't spent two full seasons (50 episodes) getting to the last five or so where (I think) the series truly shines. It is certainly a decent show and probably one of the better entries that I've watched in the "real robots" genre.

Published by XPost


Permalink to this post     Com/0


2009 Jun 09 elly


Guy Blade Guy Blade---12:48:00


Retrospection and Providence
A few moments ago, I finished hanging my laundry. This, at first glace, sounds like a normal activity carried out from time to time as necessary, but to me carried much greater significance. I had not, in over a year, hung my laundry up. For nearly a year and a half, I've been instead choosing to leave clean laundry in a pile, choose from it what I wished to wear and then throw it down into the dirty pile at day's end. However, I do not think that the laundry itself was the important part so much as what it reflected: my own apathy towards my environment in specific and my existence in general.

At work, I've spent most of the last year riding on the successes of the previous. I haven't been nearly as productive as I could have been; I haven't been as diligent as I should have been. At home, I've been allowing things to pile up: half-finished projects, empty boxes, unplayed games stacked 10 high. Perhaps worst of all, I have moved nowhere either socially or romantically. I haven't even looked for either sort of companionship despite the occasional pangs of lonliness that shake me. All of this I have spent the last year suppressing in the way that I have for nearly the last decade.

Recently, however, some things are bringing my errors into perspective. Firstly, I have been reading Atlus Shrugged. Although there is much within the book that one can and should disagree, much of the novel acts as an indictment of my last year of life: hanging on as a leech rather than building as I should. I don't expect nor even desire to be the sort of "tireless industrialist" that the book raises onto the highest pedistal, but it seems that I could be more than I have been. Secondly, today I went to an orientation meeting wherein I and others were prepped--somewhat haphazardly--to be "buddies" to summer students a JPL. This meeting, and the topics discussed therein, brought oncemore to the fore how small my world here in California is. I live in sprawling a city of nearly 18 million people. Somewhere in that mess must be the correct place for me. And of course, seeing the changes in others make one's own seem all the more stark.

I don't intend to try to change everything at once. First, I'll reclaim my apartment as mine, the way I wish it to be. It will become my foothold. Concurrently, I'll retake my work the way it had been when I started nearly two years ago. After that, I'll see where I stand and continue to move forward.

Published by XPost


Permalink to this post     Com/0


2009 Jun 08 harle


Guy Blade Guy Blade---07:48:00


Music Shopping
On Friday, I decided to pick up the two The Killers albums that I didn't have. This led to me wandering around the Amazon music recommendation system and eventually had me picking up a bunch of used CDs:

Alice Deejay - Who Needs Guitars Anyway?
Amber - Naked
Aqua - Aquarium
Aqua - Aquarius
Basement Jaxx - Crazy Itch Radio
Basement Jaxx - Kish Kash
Basement Jaxx - Remedy
Basement Jaxx - Rooty
DJ Encore - Intuition
Eiffel 65 - Europop
Haddaway - Haddaway
Paul Van Dyk - Global
tATu - 200 Km/H in the Wrong Lane
The Killers - Sam's Town
The Killers - Hot Fuss

Many of these are CDs that I already had obtained through questionable means, but some are ones that I'd never heard until listening to samples on the website. I was looking for more high energy stuff, but most of what I found in that category was still new and therefore expensive. Most all of the discs were under $3 + shipping. The expensive ones got added to my wishlist for when they get cheaper.

Of course, I'm always open to suggestions.

Published by XPost


Permalink to this post     Com/0


2009 Jun 04 peach


Guy Blade Guy Blade---09:08:00


Terrible, No good...
Sometime last night, my apartment lost power for a short period of time. This caused my alarm clock to fail to go off this morning resulting in my being 2.5 hours late for work on a day where there were all day meetings in which I was a key participant. Once I realized how late I was, I immediately called my boss and told him what was going on (he'd had the project secretary call to see where I was) and biked in to work. Once I got in, it was only a few hours before it began to rain. I severely dislike biking in the rain. I ended up staying quite late until I had covered my obligations (I had some margin from earlier in the week, so it wasn't terrible) and until the rain had stopped. Unfortunately, that pretty much meant that my evening was shot to hell (not that I had any real plans).

Published by XPost


Permalink to this post     Com/0

Archive
Copyright 2002-2024 Blade Libergnosis//Powered By Blogger