Looks like I might soon be taking my first ever vacation, awesomeness - even though I’m probably not leaving Toronto. My girlfriend is coming up to visit me in early September for a week and a half and I’ll be actually not working for the whole duration.
Unfortunately though, her visiting means I have to start cleaning my house tomorrow.
So I finished Stephen Baxter’s new book last night, couldn’t put the damned thing down. It’s amazing. It reads like historical fiction right to the end, and then he ties a bunch of threads together… wait, I can’t really say anything about this without spoiling it. Like nothing.
The good thing is though that it’s the first in a new series called Destiny’s Children, and I’ll be surely reading all of them.
I’ve been fairly low-key here for a bit, nothing bad is happening - I’m just busy as hell with work and what not, so here’s a few updates.
Strange… If you search through Google.icq.com you get little thumbnails of each search result.
Posting this from the 2.6-test2 kernel, and it’s working quite nicely. Strangely enough USB plug and play for a mouse works, but the builtin mouse pointer on my laptop doesn’t. Hm. The whole preemptible kernel patch is in here too, but I don’t feel it. When changing virtual desktops in Enlightenment the music occasionally skips (using XMMS). Balls. Overall I can’t really feel a difference. Still cool to use it.
Observe. More here. Via Metafilter. And no, they’re not really moving.
Small things I wanted to post about, just getting around to it now.
The plane ride on Sunday was actually kinda cool. At first I was freaking out - I was in the middle row of five seats on a 747. To my left was a gigantic black dude, and to my right was a little kid (maybe seven years old). So the plane takes off and I whip out the new Gameboy… five minutes into playing the little bastard asks for a turn. I cave and hand it to him; the whole flight I used my own toy for like 30 minutes. Not like I had a choice though, imagine sitting next to someone that young for 10+ hours while they had nothing to do. So mostly I fucked around on my laptop, watched Family Guy, etc.
Eventually I talked to the other dude and get this - he was totally Japanese. A black guy born and raised in Japan by Japanese parents. He spoke so little English that I couldn’t really figure out how that worked but it sounded like he was visiting his grandparents in Chicago something. Very cool shit.
Finally the third guy, who I talked to while the kid was in the shitter, was a fucking Apache gunship pilot. How crazy is that? Unfortunately though he was a total jarhead with absolutely nothing to take about except wanting to kill brown people somewhere in the Middle East. I’m not making this up.
I watched the movie Secretary with my girlfriend on Saturday and it kicked ass, really cool movie. Copious amounts of flesh shown too which spices anything up.
That’s it.
OK, the game rocks. Let’s get that out of the way. The graphics rule, the sound is awesome, the action is fast and amazing.
But the A.I., fuck. It’s like I’m playing with a retarded child. I beat the entire game on normal in 3 minutes and 50 seconds on my first try - and I’m generally crappy at fighting games. So I cranked the difficulty up to “Very Hard” and it’s still a damned cakewalk. I’ve probably unlocked 50% of the stuff in an hour. The fighter Raphael has a move where he does three quick horizontal hits, and using only this move repeatedly I can beat any of the matches.
When I’m fighting the computer, it just stands there and sometimes circles; no attacks, no counters, and barely ever guarding. I always count on brutally hard single-player mode in fighting games to teach me and build up my skills, but this is ridiculous.
I guess it’s just esentially a two player game, with the A.I. engines coded as an afterthought (Robin, Matt, Derek, you better help me out here). I can live with that I guess, but it’d be nice to have a decent fight here and there. And I really need arcade sticks for it, that’d be totally kick ass.
On that note, I played this a ton in the arcades in Japan last week, and it was weird. The arcades there are waaaay different. First of all, any game with a stick (like non-music games) are all sit-down models - no standing. I like that. I also like the fact that every unit has an ashtray attached to it. But the weirdest part is that none of the fighting games are two players - they all have a single joystick. Most of the fun in playing shit like Soul Calibur is beating the hell out of an opponent… I guess they frown upon competition like that.
