Pulled out all the orks and put them in one place. Ended up taking 5 pictures to get 'em all in. Images after the break...

Good: I've got plenty of orks.

Bad: At the rate I'm painting, I'll have them done shortly before 2020... though hopefully things will improve on that front now that I've got an army assembled and don't have to spend time putting together more orks.

Really bad: I could probably use another 50 orks...
more...

Posted by: Avatar_exADV at 01:11 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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1 That's one mighty Waaaaagh!! you got there.

Posted by: Jaked at January 17, 2011 06:57 PM (ypfPG)

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Had pretty good tickets - 50 yard line, close enough that any closer would have blocked the field with the players on the sideline. Cold temperatures made it tough (yeah, yeah, y'all northerners aren't impressed, but I don't OWN cold-weather clothing.) Informed Dad that his grandchildren might have been flash-frozen in the bottle, as it were. Was still a lot of fun, though.

I'm not a tremendous Tech fan, but they appeal as the scrappy underdogs to the traditional Texas powerhouses of A&M and UT. And Dad went to Tech before he got drafted out of college (ought to do a post about that story...)

With all the holiday stuff, though, my solitude-o-meter is starting to run low. Home last week with the family, new guy at work this week, Dad up here this weekend for the game... sometimes I just wanna sit around and read my book(s)! Hopefully the rest of the month will be good for playing hermit.

Posted by: Avatar_exADV at 10:27 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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And now that I'm home, I can actually post pictures. (Left the cable for the camera at home... darned non-USB interfaces.)






Most of it's pretty gun-centric, though I won't knock the books or manga (or the pictures of Grandpa and Grandma). My brother gets an E for effort - he got me a copy of Alpha Protocol (which was on sale the day before for $7.50 on Steam), a USB keychain charm (literally the same model that was already on my keychain, except twice the memory... I gave him my old 4 GB model), and a zombie comic anthology (appropriate - I gave him Dead Rising 2). The other brother's more prosaic gift of a shirt and jeans will probably prove more practical.



I'm resisting the temptation to name it...

The gun's seen some love, to be sure. Plenty of dinks and scratches in the finish. But as near as I can tell, it looks well-maintained. The grips are a really nice touch. Dad ended up carving himself a new set of grips for his own Buck Mark, and a couple of his friends saw them and asked for a set, so he's had a little practice before he got around to mine. I'll need to get this thing out to the range and see how it shoots - Kim du Toit had a lot of praise for a particular gun range nearby in Plano, so I think I'll try to sneak out there this weekend and fire off some of that ammunition.

Posted by: Avatar_exADV at 01:24 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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One of the downsides of living fairly close to the family is that I end up spending a lot of vacation time down here. Technically vacation, but it's not like I didn't spend a good amount of my life in the family home already (and dossing down on the couch isn't that great either).

The upside, though, is that Christmas is pretty rewarding. The loot pile is substantial... books by Banks and Butcher, Alpha Protocol for the PS3, a couple volumes of Lucky Star and one of Bamboo Blade, a nice shirt and pair of jeans... and Dad bought me a Browning Buck Mark .22, and hand-carved and stained a set of grips for me. (Along with a cleaning kit, a box of ammo, and ear protection...) I'd been admiring his for a while but hadn't dropped the cash on one myself, and now I don't have to. I do have to worry about finding a good range around Richardson...

Even one of the gifts I've given, I also get some benefit from. Dad went to Texas Tech when he was younger (got drafted before he graduated, and spent his entire tour in Germany after a completely-improbable series of follies that deserves a post of its own), and he's still a big fan of their football program. This year they got into a bowl game, which turned out to be in Dallas on the 1st; I picked up a pair of tickets so that we could go. Hoping for fairly warm weather instead of snow!

Here's hoping everybody else is having a merry Christmas too.

Posted by: Avatar_exADV at 03:30 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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Been working like crazy the last couple of weeks. Some of the branches at work which have been... "historically quiet", shall we say?... have discovered that they can sell stuff too, and evidently the bad economy is causing people to sue like mad. I can afford to be generous on Christmas, that's for sure...

Dropped FF14. Lack of content was killing it; it's got a great crafting system but no real compelling reason to DO anything. It got a big update to fix some of the ugly interface problems, but... I updated the software, and then thought "I don't really want to play this, huh." Not even for free. Maybe they'll have some content in there in time for the PS3 launch next year, but eh, I think I've given it its shot.

Picked up Gran Turismo 5. Good stuff overall. Turns out that one of the (few) Mustang variants on offer is Dad's old Mach 1, which I've been having fun tooling around with. Plenty of extra game modes on offer, though some of them are a little frustrating - the steering on the kart racing is so sensitive that it's really quite difficult to control, and the NASCAR sections are even touchier. I'm not enough of a race fan to contemplate getting a steering wheel to play. But it's definitely worth the money, and the game's got a lot of famous tracks; reading Wonderduck's most excellent F1 coverage has given me a lot more appreciation of what I'm looking at on that score. There's a whole special game mode for learning to drive the Nurburgring...

Been painting some more on the orks - the lootas are nearing completion. The paint-and-chat at the friendly local game store on Sundays, two blocks away, is helping a lot on that score. Wondering if I ought to do another ten regular troops (of the 100+ I have on hand) or try my hand at a vehicle; I've got a few trukks, a couple of battlewagons (generously provided with big spiky steamrollers), or a few killa kans. Or I could do the biker squad... I'll put up some pics of the lootas when I finish the last few guns.

Been pretty low-key on the anime season. I'm enjoying Oreimo, though I wouldn't mind slapping Kirino so hard her teeth rattled sometimes. I've got it on good authority that Panty and Stocking actually got good, but I haven't seen any of that aside from the music video clip (disturbing but promising). There are a couple of other shows on my "ought to get around to it" list, but it isn't a bad time to work through some of the DVD backlog either. And I want to watch Legend of Black Heaven again, for some reason...

Posted by: Avatar_exADV at 02:48 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Wonderduck doesn't want to talk GA. Well and good, we'll do it here!

The original assertion was that GA is a little bit more like Azumanga than Hidamari Sketch. Not that Hidamari is bad, mind you, but everyone, everyone in the series is fundamentally a nice person. GA has a jerk, and that makes it a little more realistic.

Pete immediately responded with a defense of Tomokane, and he's correct. She's not a jerk; much more of a Kagura than a Tomo. She's capable of hurting someone thoughtlessly, but that's not the root of her character - they're both tomboys, not jerks.

I wasn't originally thinking about Tomokane, though. Noda's the one with the jerk character. Even that's not really fair - it's more accurate to say that she's creative to the point of froth, and she goes with her ideas. But she goes with them with total disregard of the people around her. The other characters will occasionally have an out-there idea and think about it for a bit, then put it aside. Noda thinks of that idea and goes straight to implementation.

The yaminabe incident is illustrative of this. Noda comes up with a screwball idea, everyone goes along with it, chaos(-nabe) ensues, Noda tries to sneak out of the consequences.

She's not as bad as Tomo, because she's not a jerk just to be jerky, just a loose cannon that hits her friends on a doubles roll on 2d6.

Posted by: Avatar_exADV at 09:37 PM | Comments (4) | Add Comment
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Watched a few episodes of Asobi ni Iku yo, enjoying thoroughly so far. (Yeah, that anime stuff...)

One of the limiting factors for crafting in FF14 is the fuel supply. Crafts require crystals or shards for fuel. Each crystal or shard type is associated with an element. In FF11, you got crystals by killing monsters, which would randomly drop a particular type of crystal depending on what type of monster it was (and then, only if it was a monster that gave you experience). In FF14, you can obtain crystals in that fashion (though they're a lot more random - monsters can drop several different kinds of crystals or shards, and they can drop multiples.)

Shards come from almost everything. You get 'em when you do local crafting quests, you get them from killing monsters (sometimes half a dozen at a time or more), you get them from mining, you get them from harvesting, you even get them from -fishing-. They don't count against your inventory space and you can carry up to a thousand of each shard (or more if you give some to your retainer, put them up in your bazaar, etc.) Crystals were relatively rare in FF11, but they're a little more common in FF14, and shards they hand out like candy.

On the other hand, you need many more shards in FF14 than you needed crystals in FF11. FF11 had relatively few intermediate crafting stages, and each recipe took one crystal. You'd use a crystal to smelt copper ore into a copper ingot; you'd use another crystal and a few copper ingots to make a copper whatsit. FF14 has... well, lemme illustrate it. I made a Bronze Chain Coif for a guild member last night. The recipe itself required 8 earth shards... not much at all, that's only two or three marmot kills. But the components to make it, now... It's composed of a sheep leather strap, a brass buckle, and 2 sheets of bronze chain. But the sheep leather strap had to be cut from sheep leather, the brass buckle forged out of small brass squares and a brass nugget, the chain had to be forged out of 6 bronze rings, which had to be linked from 4 spools of bronze wire, which had to be extruded from bronze ingots, which had to be smelted from bronze nuggets, themselves smelted from copper and tin ore...

The total damage, assuming you skip smelting your own bronze and purchase bronze wire from a vendor, is one fire crystal, 13 fire shards, 4 ice shards, 2 water shards, 22 wind shards, and 55 earth shards. All that for a piece of head armor that sells for maybe 25,000 gil. And that's if every combine goes perfectly; add more shards to re-do any failed intermediate steps. And that doesn't even talk about the base cost of the ingredients.

The problem is that the market price for shards hasn't stabilized yet (though without a functional market, NO market prices have stabilized yet!) Enough people from FF11 are playing 14 that the idea that crystals and shards are valuable is already there; sure, shards aren't as valuable as crystals, but surely they're worth 100 gil apiece? Looking at the above recipe, though, I was down 96 shards; if we value them at 100 gil apiece, I'm over 70k in the hole for ONE piece of armor.

That's not the whole story, though (else I wouldn't have made it!) I didn't perform this transaction purely for charity - it required several smaller crafting attempts, each of which gave me experience, and I actually gained a rank of armorer from the whole thing. Since shards are needed for crafting, and you get crafting experience by crafting, there's a use value in expending them on crafting attempts - or, to put it more bluntly, there's a gil value on gaining experience. And to be sure, I've picked a recipe that has several intermediate steps with a pretty steep cost for illustration purposes. There are other things that I've done which weren't nearly so shard-heavy.

Still, either we're going to see a fall in the price of shards (once a market gets up and running) or we're going to see a hike in the price of finished materials (ditto) - the current price differential isn't sustainable for the long term.

Posted by: Avatar_exADV at 04:42 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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So if the combat's merely lackluster and the player economy model severely hampered by lack of tools, why am I enjoying the game?

The crafting! Which seems a bit silly, especially if you're fighting with a hand tied behind your back when it comes to selling the results, but there you go.

In WOW, crafting is fairly lackluster. Your character picks a couple of professions (generally a gathering one and something that uses the results of the gathering profession, unless you're some kind of masochist), and that's all you'll ever get to do without throwing away something else. There's a big standard book of recipes that everyone can learn from a trainer, crafting is "collect materials, hit button" simple, and most of the equipment is completely useless. (There's so many dropped items in the game, usually with stats superior to what you can craft, that crafted items are either just toys or a sign that you're badly undergeared.) There are a tiny number of recipes which are dropped as items, but most of them are so rare (and several only available in raid dungeons) that you can't effectively go after them, as a crafter. There's no such thing as individual skill; if you have the recipe, you can create the item, and if you don't, you can't.

FF11's crafting was much more open, but also profoundly player-unfriendly in several ways. No such thing as recipes - if you try to combine the proper items, your character will attempt the craft, and then it's a matter of skill, luck, phase of the moon, and two or three other factors as to whether you succeed or not. Failure costs you some or all of the materials, success gets you the item, and occasionally you get a high-quality version of the item (or, if the item has no high-quality version, you get extra finished product.) However, the skill-ups were much more random than in WOW (which gave you a "yes-maybe-possibly-no" as to whether you could gain skill from a recipe) and the slower pace of the game meant that leveling a craft could be very hard. It wasn't unusual for someone to go through the results of a month's worth of gathering in an hour, only to fail on a significant number of the resulting recipes and to gain very little skill out of the whole deal.

FF14 has some of the good from each system. First off, attempting to craft starts up a little mini-game, where you attempt to fill up a completion bar, try to avoid depleting "durability", and simultaneously try for a higher-quality end result. For a difficult recipe you're just barely able to do, it's likely to be a race between running out of durability and getting that last few percent of progress. For a recipe you outlevel by 20 ranks, you may want to try more high-risk "bold" crafting in order to drive the quality up high enough to get an exceptional result. It doesn't require a terrible amount of skill to figure out what you should be doing, and there's a goodly amount of random luck in there too, but it adds a tension to crafting that's absent in WOW and too arbitrary in FF11.

Furthermore, crafting isn't something that's tacked on to your character; each craft is its own class, and you gain experience points from crafting the same way you do from killing monsters (i.e. more for tougher ones relative to your level). Even failed attempts get you a little something, so there's some salve for your lost materials, and you can get an idea of how many attempts it will take to go up a level (there's no "dry spots" where you'll try something 20 times and not get one point; you'll know after 1 that you need 19 more, if that's where you are.) But more importantly, because each craft is a class, that means that the crafts have other things associated with different classes... equipment and abilities!

The abilities are mostly things you can activate while doing the crafting mini-game, to help you craft more reliably, or to drive up quality, or to bail you out if you're about to blow it, and their presence makes things quite a bit more interesting. (I've only got access to one so far - the blacksmith's "Maker's Mark", which gives you a higher chance of success on normal crafting for two or three attempts - and it's already saved one or two crafts that I'd have flubbed otherwise.) The gear is mostly generic between crafts, excepting each craft's individual tool, and upgrading to a new tool can have a tremendous effect on your success rate, as much as upgrading a weapon does in combat classes.

Still, by itself this wouldn't get around the problem of having to build up huge stocks of materials to make mostly-worthless products merely to level your craft. However, the game also has crafting quests! Essentially, it hands you materials and crystals, points you at a recipe, and says "get cracking"; you are rewarded for succeeding X out of Y times, a bit more for better quality, and the experience is yours to keep no matter how it turns out. You're free to do your own crafting on your own dime, so if you really want to push a particular craft skill, nothing's stopping you but a lack of crystals to fuel it... but if you're in one of those ugly patches where every completed synth costs you huge amounts of gil, and failed ones even more, you can take it easy and let the crafting quests carry you through. (You're limited to 8 every 36 hours, and there's several different crafts, so you can't just buzz to the top this way... but it's a lot better than having to hunt down the stuff to work on!)

As far as I'm concerned, the crafting system makes it worth putting up with the bugaboos of a broken market, at least long enough to give Square a chance to iron things out a little.

Posted by: Avatar_exADV at 02:47 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Picked up Final Fantasy 14 and started playing. Goodbye, free time...

The game has some rough edges on it. Some of it's the inevitable stuff that happens when an MMO launches, but honestly, I think it's a little more stable than I remember WOW being on that first week. Its shortcomings are mainly in the design phase.

Specifically, the players don't really have the tools to set up a player economy. There's no auction house, no interchange where people can put items up for sale. You can hire a retainer to vendor your stuff (and incidentally to serve as a mule character), and there are dedicated "market wards" where the retainers can hang out and vend goods to players. All the market wards are identical, so of course there are a tremendous number of retainers packed into the first one and the rest are deserted. (Nobody ever named their business B-Affordable, after all...)

Trying to actually shop in the market wards is an exercise in frustration, mostly because there's a tremendous variety of stuff in the game and no way to tell what any particular vendor has on hand without opening up their menu (about five seconds of time, maybe ten). You can't really go in there with something in mind - you're highly unlikely to find it.

Square's figured out that what they have isn't going to work (or more accurately, must have known what was coming, since FF11 had some of the same problems). However, they're married to the retainer concept by now, by their business plan if nothing else; it's quite likely that extra retainers will become available for a monthly charge at some point.

Their current idea is to remove the (meaningless) names from the market wards and to organize them by type of merchandise - boots go here, pants go there, shields go here, food there, crystals over there, etc. Not a bad plan! A little harsh if you've got a wide variety of merchandise that you wanted to hawk, but you can still do that if you want to. Square's idea is to offer a lower tax on merchandise that's sold in the appropriate ward, so you can have your vendor with half a dozen stacks of bronze ingots in the metalworker's ward, and still sell a cotton doublet on the same guy - you pay the current tax on the doublet and enjoy the lower tax on the bronze. The capitalist in me likes this plan; why couldn't they have implemented it before launch?

(Eventually they plan to have a system where you can search bazaars without accessing them individually, which would be fantastic.)

I'll talk (plenty) more about the game later. It's got some warts on it, but it also has a really nice crafting engine - even deeper than the one in FF11, without some of the frustrations, more accessible to casual players, and at the same time avoiding the spreadsheet-wars feel of EVE. I'm really enjoying that aspect of the game so far. The combat's not terrible either, though I'll probably enjoy THAT more once I've got something better than the starter knuckle-dusters...

Posted by: Avatar_exADV at 03:00 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Steven opens up a post that starts off with a battering ram and ends before an argument can start. But we here at the Ego's Nest don't fear arguments!

There are a couple of problems with militarized police departments. Of course, one of them falls under the "lessons of history" department and is one of the reasons we have, for example, the Posse Comitatus Act et cetera. And this is indeed a good argument.

There's a more practical side, though, and that goes to how police heavy weapon units get deployed.

The original SWAT teams were put together to deal with a particular kind of crime - the hostage situation. The criminals are static, they're communicating with officers (because you can't get ransom if they don't know you want it), and there's a very strong bias toward keeping the situation static and calm, because a lot of the time if you do it right, the criminal will surrender himself without hurting anyone. (And the spread of this book of tactics is one reason that taking hostages is almost unheard of these days; the crook just doesn't win anymore.)

But the steps you take against a hostage-taker are different from the ones you take against a "mucker" (Marc Danziger, the Armed Liberal, started using this to describe the kind of crazy who commits suicide-murder by shooting up a crowd, and it works pretty well). Against a hostage-taker, the most important step is to make sure his escape routes are completely cut off (because he won't kill the hostages unless he's sure he can get away). Against a mucker, if you immediately move to secure the perimeter, by the time you get around to trying to intervene, the mucker has killed everyone he intends to kill and is probably just going to commit suicide.

If your police had a heavy weapons unit that would arrive at scenes like this, charge in and either make sure everyone is all right, or engage Bad Guy With Gun in a firefight, that would be one thing, and it would justify all the automatic weapons and armor and battering rams they could carry. But almost by definition, your heavy weapons unit is a SWAT unit, and so the first thing they do when they get to the scene is make sure nobody gets away... and they do it carefully and methodically, because they're working out of a manual and nobody wants to get shot because they weren't being careful.

And it's not like that isn't a reasonable impulse. Cops don't like getting shot up any more than anyone else.

But the police aren't soldiers, who can justify that sort of thing in terms of force preservation and shrug off the losses. Think of firefighters. When they arrive on the scene of a fire, sure, they don't necessarily charge in like Leeroy Jenkins. But if there's lives at stake, they're expected to risk their own, even if it means going into a burning building that might be ready to come down. There's a manual that says "don't do that!", but firefighters do it anyway, and the ones that do are heroes.

There are heroic cops, too; but SWAT training is completely against "being a hero" in that sense. On average, the SWAT officer is a lot less likely to go in fast when it might save a life; their whole training is only to go in as part of a coordinated, well-planned assault, and that's how they do it, by and large.

On top of that, there's the Rodney Balko problem - police departments get these SWAT teams, and by and large they don't need them for hostage situations (because, well, there are SWAT teams and it doesn't pay!) So they use them for the other dangerous-assault job they have - serving search warrants for drugs, using a quick entry to avoid "flushing the stash". This leads to all sorts of other problems - innocent people shot by police, or shooting police, because all they know is that there are men with guns storming into their house in the middle of the night.

And frankly, that's not worth the cost. I'd rather a lot of people flush their blow when the cops come knocking than have the cops bust down a door, shoot a man's dog, then shoot the man for objecting...

Posted by: Avatar_exADV at 09:18 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Finished my first game - taking it easy on Chieftan, small map, space victory. Some more things that are different...

Happiness has been completely overhauled. Previously, your happiness was a function of cities, and having an unhappy city was bad, bad, bad, so a great deal of the game devolved to micromanaging city happiness, and a lot of towns ended up with a cookie-cutter build (you pretty much had to have X happiness-causing structures to support Y population). In more recent Civs, luxury goods were one way to get extra head room - each good produced one happy person in every city in your empire, so an empire with a few luxury goods was in good shape. Civ 4, with its automated management of specialists, required less micromanagement in this respect.

In Civ 5, your happiness is no longer a local function - your empire has a single happiness score. It's increased by structures, by certain policies, by luxury goods (worth a bit more than a coliseum each, with a bonus equal to the number you have), and by the occasional oddball effect such as the presence of a Natural Wonder (I found the Great Barrier Reef, Old Faithful, and Mt. Fuji... ironically on a different continent than the Japanese civilization, heh.) Unhappiness is caused by number of cities, population, and especially in conquered cities, which are tremendously unhappy places until they build a courthouse... which is expensive and most conquered cities will take quite a while to build.

It's worth noting that the last couple of Civ games clamped down ferociously on the number of cities you could have before your economy took a tremendous hit. Civ 5 seems to be a lot more lenient in that regard.

Luxury resources are about what they always were, in the sense that getting one is enough for the whole empire and multiples are mainly useful for trading away. Strategic resources are an entirely different kettle of fish. Each resource site yields a certain "amount" of that resource, which can be used to construct the necessary units, or occasionally city upgrades. This means that getting access to multiple resource sites can be very important when it comes to letting you build the units you want. Initially I had only four iron available, and quickly expended it on two swordsmen and two catapults; I was quite distressed to find that I could no longer build either unit!

There aren't that many strategic resources, however. There's plenty of horse to go around, so the stuff that's in short supply is iron, coal, aluminum, oil, and uranium. In past Civ games, having access to Coal was vital in order to get to build railroads; that's no longer necessary, but you still need a plentiful supply of coal, because you need one for each factory you build (and 50% to production is a biiiiig bonus). Uranium is mostly notable for nukes, nuclear plants, and the occasional Giant Death Robot. There are a whole group of units that use iron, aluminum, or oil...

Posted by: Avatar_exADV at 09:26 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Civilization 5 is out, and I'm enjoying it. Quite different, more different than Civ3 vs Civ4...

The hex grid is a big difference, especially how it affects borders. Your national borders are your city areas - there's no influence beyond that. But you can expand the city areas! You start with a single ring of hexes, and every so often your city will add an additional hex. You can also pay gold to add another hex, and it can be any hex that's adjacent to a current hex... so you can stretch your border out to claim that one extra resource. (Further away means more gold, and the amount goes up every time you buy one as well, so you don't wanna overdo it.)

No more stacking units is a huge change to the combat. Previous Civ games mostly turned on marching up to an enemy city, putting your mega-stack on the best defensive tile right outside it, and pummeling it until the 10-15 units in the city finally went down. Not tremendously complicated, really. Now you can't defend a city square with more than one unit at a time... which means the terrain of the surrounding countryside is more important (and you've got some incentive to post units outside your borders - an approaching enemy will have to deal with them in place, lest they descend into his rear and slaughter his siege train!)

Lots of other changes, but I'll probably end up breaking them down - if you put everything in one post, it'd be a mile long.

Posted by: Avatar_exADV at 03:59 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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I'll add to this as they crop up. (And crop up they do...)

Posted by: Avatar_exADV at 09:50 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Been playing the heck out of Recettear.

The game's ostensible scenario is thus: your character is Recette, your dad abandoned you three months ago to pursue his dream of being a hero, and the bills are coming due. Now, faced with the threat of foreclosure, your only hope is to leverage your sole remaining asset - the plaza facing of your house - and open up an item shop. You'll buy low (hopefully), sell high (hopefully), pay adventurers to (hopefully) make it back with piles of loot to sell, and stave off your creditors with huge sacks of money...
more...

Posted by: Avatar_exADV at 03:00 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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If you have Steam, go try the Recettear demo. Quirky item shop RPG with Zelda dungeon gameplay. Was hard, hard to come to work an hour after installing it...

Posted by: Avatar_exADV at 01:11 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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No, I'm not getting paid to blog. Actually, I've been asked not to blog about the stuff I'm working on these days (which is at least partly to blame why I haven't been keeping up... most of the interesting stuff I've got to say is about that!)

Not sure how I feel about that, honestly. I'm doing well enough with the day job that the money I make subtitling isn't that important anymore... so it's kind of, if I'm not enjoying it, why do it? (And a lot of enjoying it is sharing it, as it were...)

Fortunately, I'll have this project wrapped up soon...

Posted by: Avatar_exADV at 12:43 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Discipline. (di si plun) n.Playing the first two missions of Starcraft 2, then coming to work on time.

Posted by: Avatar_exADV at 01:43 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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So, while out at the grocery store last night, I see on the shelf... Dr. Pepper made with pure cane sugar. Apparently it's their 125th anniversary and they're doing it as a gimmick.

This is not the first time I've had the true Elixir of Life. They've always made a small amount of the stuff, though they didn't market or ship much of it. But every so often, Dad would find himself out near the plant in Sweetwater and he'd bring home a 12-pack of the stuff. The idea of having a whole 12-pack to myself is purely luxurious...

But I got to thinking... everybody knows that the cane sugar version tastes better than the corn syrup version. But it's the corn syrup version we got, because of high sugar import taxes, which were designed to protect the corn market. Even though agriculture is a tiny percentage of the nation's product, and the effect of the tax on the corn market is pretty minimal, and practically everyone I've ever met has drunk a ton of cola in their life... we still get the corn syrup version.

All because Iowa has their caucus first, and the momentum that gives a presidential candidate is worth a good amount (or, at least, is reckoned as worth a good amount...)

And that's why I'm in favor of small government.

It's not just things like health care, immigration, and military spending. The more the government does, the more opportunity it has to choose one interest over another - and usually the narrow interest is going to win out over the public interest. If you don't understand why that's important, go find a can of the real Dr. Pepper, drink it, and think for a second. Every cola you have ever had, your whole life long, could have tasted that good, should have tasted that good. They didn't, because someone in the government thought that buying someone's vote was worth stealing that happiness from you, long before you or I was born (well, maybe not some of us, heh.)

And that's just the Dr. Pepper. There's plenty of issues of broad national concern to worry about, but how many little, everyday ways is your life not as good as it can be? Ways that aren't mysterious, ways that we know well, but for some reason or other aren't followed, because someone got a law passed. How many of the little laws, the inconsequential little regulations, the unanticipated ancillary effects, are keeping our lives from being Dr.-Pepper-with-cane-sugar good?

Posted by: Avatar_exADV at 01:53 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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Turned 32 today. Woke up and found that the Supreme Court had incorporated the 2nd amendment. Thanks, guys! Boy, that's a hard present to top.

(Not that my Texan rear was short on protections for that sort of thing, local law being what it is. But I still approve!)

Spent the weekend playing Just Cause 2. A little repetitive but still good shoot'em'up fun. Essentially a Grand Theft Auto-esque sandbox game, with the added joy of playing on a tropical island. Terrible writing, of course (and I mean it; this thing is offensive to everyone, and just poorly written and acted). If I was there for the plot, I'd be greatly disappointed. On the other hand, it's not so bad doing missions for different factions when they're all completely terrible people that you, in fact, are planning to screw at the earliest available opportunity, and the main villain is essentially a Kim Jong Il clone, so hooking cables up to statues of him and pulling them down is satisfying.

The gameplay's entertaining, mostly because it's quite kinetic. Between your never-ending supply of parachutes and your forearm-mounted grapple claw, you're what the Bionic Commando wanted to grow up to be. At the top of a cliff and need to get to the bottom? Just base-jump down! At the bottom, need to be at the top? Just grapple up, or parachute-climb using the grapple to keep pulling you along. Soldiers get tired of taking assault rifle rounds to the face, and call in a chopper? Rejoice - it's like they're delivering a gun platform to you via FedEx! (I hijack more choppers...)

Even the cars handle a little better (and it's very easy to leap from car to car to car, just by pressing a button, like you were starring in The Matrix...) Though honestly, I don't jack that many cars - their need to stick to roads cramps my style, and they're only a little faster than a parasail run.

Posted by: Avatar_exADV at 09:50 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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From Ani-Nouto:

Watching Index and Railgun, you can't help but get the feeling that not all is right in Academy City. For such an advanced techno-capital, with darned near panoptic observation and super-powered anti-crime units, there still seems to be an awful lot of crime going on. Spoilers below the fold...
more...

Posted by: Avatar_exADV at 05:56 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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