My brain hurts. xkcd. I shouldn't read horror, even horror-as-a-satire-of-critical-analysis.

Also, last week I finally saw Watchmen. It was like watching Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy again - a movie made by some people who obviously really, really loved the source material but had little idea how to make anything but a blockbuster action movie. Watchman strains when hammered into that kind of mould, even when the director tried to stay true to the source material. Nite Owl was wonderful, Manhattan was good, Rorschach was inconsistent, Silk Specter was bad, and Ozymandias was a freaking catastrophe.

I'm back from 4 weeks in Argentina. 4 weeks is just long enough for the place you were staying to start feeling like home, and the place you left looks damned weird when you get back.

Pictures on my Flickr page.

This title should make no sense at all.

Now, you're probably thinking: "StarCon" sounds like it refers to Star Control, which it does. Star Control was, obviously, released... many times in fact, including sequels and ports. So WTF is Martin going on about?

First, a history lesson: Star Control was a really, really good pair of games (SC and SC2) released back in the '90s. The first was a boardgame/duel game hybrid, the second was a space-adventure/duel game hybrid. Both of them excelled at their 1 on 1 action and their outer-game components. Star Control 2 in particular is remembered as one of the best games of all time. They were made by Paul Reiche III and Fred Ford, AKA Toys for Bob. Star Control II is available for free online, thanks to TFB releasing all content to the 3DO version of the game under an open license. If you haven't played it, get it. Now. Like, stop reading this post and go download it and come back later.

The third game was not. Accolade (the publisher) retained many of the rights to Star Control, particularly the name, but not specific characters, so they hired a third party company to make a sequel to SCII. It flopped.

The fourth game also was not made by Toys for Bob. It was a PS1 game that was heavily divorced from the series - a behind-view shooter based on the Colony Wars games, instead of a top-down adventure game. Even the name was changed - instead of Star Control 4, it was simply called StarCon. Or at least, it would have been, if it had been released. But really, nobody wanted a confused sequel to a series that had obviously become utterly aimless and was also long-past it's sell-by date (SC2 was originally a DOS game).

At least, until now. I stumbled upon this news while looking for a way to get SC2 music as a ringtone (I suck, I know).

StarCon Released

It was a sequel nobody wanted that the company decided to can, so it probably isn't any good... but I'm downloading it now with bewildered curiosity.

You fail at failing:

Unable to cast object of type 'System.Web.Configuration.ScriptingAuthenticationServiceSection' to type 'System.Web.Configuration.ScriptingAuthenticationServiceSection'.

Am I the only one thinking that Harper has been planning this move since before the last election?

Look at it: call an election when the Liberals are weak and useless, with an impending recession. Then, with the political capital of a fresh party, go in for the kill - disembowel all the opposing parties' funding.

This puts the Liberals into the position that they have to use their ultimate desperation tactic - the coalition with the NDP and Bloc, on the brink of a recession. Even if Canadians accept the pseudo-legitimate (edit: clarification, I don't see them that way, but the public will) government, they are going to be presiding over an economic catastrophe that will utterly destroy what little respect they have left. Particularly with a vicious back-biter like Layton clinging on for the ride, the Liberals are utterly hopeless.

This is going to be a disaster of epic proportions.

Somebody in the Con party is an evil, evil genius.

Personally, I'm taking this as a sign that there's something fundamentally wrong with simply assigning the control of Parliament to the party with the most seats by default. It's created a position where Harper got to simply demand whatever he wanted, while the Liberals had to choose between rolling over and pushing the country into another miserable election. Minority governments are supposed to be about compromise, not playing chicken with the electorate.

The Prime Mininister and his cabinet should be elected by an internal vote run within the House of Commons. That would make sure that minority governments still represent the majority of Canadians - or at least the majority of Canadians whose representatives can produce some sort of a consensus.

edit: some more clarifications. I don't think the Cons would do any better with running Canada through the recession. I just think that they could weather the political storms of recession better than a Liberal government that the Canadian populace sees as questionably legitimate, particularly with since Layton has an incredible knack for making them look stupid. I *want* a Liberal government back. I just think that this one is going to be our last Liberal government for a long, long time.

Think about it - when Dion steps down, it's going to be between Ignatieff and Rae. While I despise Ignatieff's support for neoconservative military policy, I think he's a strong enough leader to pull it off... but if the NDP has any say in the replacement, which they might, then it'll be Bob Rae.

Think about that: Bob Rae, running a government, in a recession.

Doesn't matter how good a job he does. He, and by extension the Liberal party, will be scapegoated for every single problem of the recession.

The conservatives know this. They've put the Liberals in a suicidal position.

Like I said, somebody in the Con party is an evil, evil genius.

Today, my boss took us all out for dinner and drinks at the Snooty Fox.  I biked over, since I bike to work, and locked up my bike in front.

At Between 5:30 and 7 pm, in broad daylight, in the middle of Westdale Village, somebody stole my freaking bicycle seat.

What is f*cking wrong with people?

On the right... is that.... an ad? NOOOOOOOO!

So, Apple has thoroughly entrenched itself in the list of "companies that will, from now on, keep their grubby paws away from my PCs".  After being frustrated with how dismally bad iTunes is when I was managing my music myself, I figured I'd let apple give it a shot and am now running under the alternate approach where iTunes manages my music and moves everything into their heirarchy.  I use this because it's obviously how iTunes was meant to be used, since if you don't do this you run into all sorts of trouble when you try to edit ID3 tags or do similar operations.

It fails even worse.   I now have 3 copies of every file in The Slip.

First, this:
http://gizmodo.com/5019516/classic-clips-bill-gates-chews-out-microsoft-over-xp

It's probably fake, but the Seattle Pi does say that they asked Gates about it.  If so, I have both newfound respect and disappointment for the man.  He knew about the problems with Windows... but he couldn't change them.

Also, I really wish the band described below was real:

http://questionablecontent.net/view.php?comic=1173

If you don't read Questionable Content already, you can thank me/curse me later.  Incredibly funny and well-drawn, but the plot moves at a snail's pace so once you catch up to the author you really miss being able to keep reading.

And yes, I'm a sucker for romance.

Lindsey bought a new Nikon D40 this spring, and has been quite the shutter-bug. She's taken a mindblowing number of awesome shots, I haven't even begun to start cropping and properly sorting them... but I uploaded a few priceless ones. Head to my flickr page for a peek.

I'm a big webcomics geek, so maybe I'm the only one who thinks this is cool:

http://www.pvponline.com/2008/04/29/live-feed/ (can't get the embedding to work)

Scott Kurtz doing his big Wedding comic strip of pvponline, live, right now.

If you're through making visual studio freeze up like an ice-cream Sunday, I'd like to get some work done today. In the time that VS has taken performing a single autocomplete, I've downloaded and installed Notepad++ so that I can keep working on classes.

I just dumped some fun baby pictures onto Flickr. Let the "Awwww"ing commence. After seeing these photos, I think that some enterprising toymaker needs to make turntables for babies. Jules would like to learn to scratch.

Nine Inch Nails once again proved that they (he?) are the coolest people (person?)* on the planet. The latest album, Ghosts I-IV (a 36-track series) is sold online for $5. So, last night I picked it up in FLAC lossless. For $5. No DRM, no quality degradation, just 600 megs of pure above-CD sound.

And then, to play it and get it onto my iPod.

Crap.

For those who don't know, FLAC is a sound/music file format that is perfect, and well-compressed. Handy to have for your master-copies - you can make degraded versions from there. MP3 has better compatibility and is much smaller per-file, but if you convert from a high-quality MP3 into another format, it will degrade. FLAC will not. I figured "I'm a nerd, I should get the FLAC and transcode a copy into MP3 for my ipod and other players".

Seemed easy enough.

Until I found out that none of the mainstream apps have 1st-party support for FLAC, despite it being the standard for lossless. Then I went looking for opensource tools (my typical second-choice after free MS products). Double-crap. The OSS tools are little command-line Perl scripts that were designed for Linux and seem to complain about various missing dependancies on Windows XP - I even went to the trouble of installing ActiveState Perl onto my machine to run them.

So, I ended up fetching Foobar2000 - a decent freeware app. Still, I wince at using freeware, because you always worry about getting what you paid for, and since it's closed-source, you don't know what's inside.

Foobar2000 is actually surprisingly nice - it feels like a stripped-down iTunes using the Windows native interface, with far more power-user-friendly features. It's happily grinding away at converting my unreadable (but archive-quality) FLAC files into MP3s.

* NIN is a band... but it's a band of hired guns run by the owner, composer, lead performer, etc. that is Trent Reznor. So I often think it's kinda silly to refer to it as a band when he does more than most singer-songwriters.

Just went shopping. The mall calendar/boardgame store is starting their discounts on boardgames now, so it's a good time to pick up that game you've been holding off on. They've got Settlers of Catan for $40, and the 5-6 player expansion pack for $21. I was tempted, but the also had this:




Which won out. Risk as it should be - with nukes, lunar colonization, and a 5 turn limit. Plus, all my friends already have Catan sets, and since I usually end up playing with them I didn't feel it necessary.

Also, at Zellers, I saw this for $30:




Battlegrounds: Crossbows and Catapults - Orcs Vs. Knights. I already have a set, but any younger gamers out there take note: Crossbows and Catapults is not to be missed. This was a kids game, but is very playable as an adult. It's half war-game, half bar-style darts/pool ballistic skill game. Very fun. I have a combination of the original set and the Base Toys re-release, but the new one looks much more stylish - replacing Vikings and Barbarians with Orcs and Knights is extra-cool, and the darker, grittier paint-jobs (and the new cannon piece) are very nice.

Only worry is that the Base Toys re-release was very light on the rules (we played from memory of the '80s version, and I'll bet this one is similar since it's a children's toy. Plus, they only come with 8 pucks per team, but of course they come with lots of the little stand-up men that were only spies in the original, so if you use the old rules you could probably use them as "captives" and keep the pucks in play.

Last night I found something hyper-cool online, so today I'm just taking my lunchbreak to post it:

part 1, part 2

Watch it before YouTube yoinks it as being copyrighted. I tried to do this as an "embed" but some bug in either FF, YT, or LJ meant that one of the videos kept replacing the other.

To explain what you're looking at: Larry Niven is one of my favourite authors. "The Soft Weapon" is on of his better short stories set in his "Known Space" universe.  This episode of "Star Trek: The Animated Series" is a near word-for-word adaptation of Niven's original story, but with TOS Enterprise crew in place of the original characters. It's remarkable that the story isn't changed further, since the various Known Space concepts of Slavers, Kzinti, etc. are totally out-of-place in the Star Trek universe, but are included anyways.  Weird to see a story I used to read over and over done up as a campy animated ST episode.

For more information, a Wiki article on the episode over at the Star Trek Wiki, Memory Alpha.

Happy Holidays, all. Today was the ending of my Xmas vacation time, so I'm back to my joyous bicycle commute. Several things happened over the holidays of note, but I'll chose to pick 2 at random.

Julian and Teething

Julian may or may not have been teething for the last week.  The signs were all there - drooling, chewing, and misery... but he's only 4 months old.  Also, don't let people understate how hard it is to deal with a teething child.  He was outright miserable - it wasn't just the crying and lack of sleep - it was the heartbreaking whimpering of a baby in pain, with nothing to do but hold him.  Either way, by some inexplicable miracle he seems to have bounced back (save for one backslide last night).  As for his other assets, he continues to grow at an absurd rate, bursting his way into 9-12 month size clothes at under half that age.  He's still mastering the fine art of sitting up, and is waging an ongoing war between frustration, laziness, and self-soothing when it comes to the skill of grasping and stuffing toys in his mouth.

He still loves his gym, and he's enjoying his "Sophie the Giraffe" - a French teether-toy made of natural rubber.  He's been mauling it so hard he's given its face nostrils.

He's freaking awesome.

Super Mario Galaxy

Wifey bought me Super Mario Galaxy for xmas.  The game lives up to the hype, it is awesome.  The maps are constantly innovative, the minigame-esque puzzles are constantly startling and exciting, and the game never seems to frustrate me.

But of course, I'm a curmudgeon.  You already know the sixteen flavours of awesome that SMG is.  So, I'm going to grouse about the minor flaws I've found in the game, because flaws are far more interesting than excellence.

First off, the game is easy.  Maybe this is because I already ran through Mario 64 multiple time and am twice the age of the target audience, but I didn't break a sweat until the third Bowser fleet.  I find myself frugally storing up ammo, simply because most adversaries are simple enough to dispatch manually, and the star-bits are generally ineffective against the ones that aren't.  Still, the game is really, really picking up now (although I'm well-over halfway through, I think), for example the the Ghost race got my heart going, and I'm starting to shoot my way through some of the tougher brawls.

One thing I notice is that the game is pretty tight on revealing the old 64 moves - it seems to assume you remember how to triple-jump, long-jump and black-flip (the punch-related manoevers are long gone, along with the punch-button).  I could see the game being much harder without that knowledge.  On the other hand, the wall-slide means that wall-kicks are actually possible and no longer insanely frustrating.

The game revealed an odd insight about my taste in games: I hate games that are based on secrets.  If you gamed during the late NES through to the early N64 era, you remember secret-oriented games.  The heart-tanks and upgrades of Megaman X.  The various goodies of Mario 3.  The switch-blocks of Mario 64.  These things drive me batty - it's not just that they frustrate you with backtracking and nasty challenges that were intended to be simple based on a previous pick-up.  It's that they screw you up in other games.  In Galaxy, I find myself squeezing every level to the fullest, leaving no foe unsmashed, no corner unchecked, and so-on, simply because of the risk I might miss some essential secret needed to make the gameplay a proper experience.  Galaxy seemed pleasantly bereft of these features ... until I found a (*SPOILER FOLLOWS*) "green star" in the Floating Fortress level, which apparently unlocks some sort of Trial Galaxy.  Also, I can't seem to figure out how to re-rescue Luigi from the first galaxy. (*END SPOILER*) 

This sort of stuff drives me batty - it sets off a twisted OCD in the hindquarters of my brain.  I keep reminding myself that Galaxy isn't like that - I'm probably just missing a few hidden worlds, not essential crap like the gun-upgrade of Megaman X.  Galaxy is kind - the bee suit is right in front of you on the bee world - you don't have to track down some absurdly-hidden switch-block to enable it a-la Mario 64.

Hell, maybe that's why I find Galaxy so much easier than 64 - not that the game is simpler, but because it's so much more pleasurably straightforwards.  There is no endless meandering trying to ferret out an ambiguous objective - the game is generally linear.  Still, I do occaisionally miss that feeling of first arrival in Thwomp's Castle in Mario 64, where I first got that sensation of "wow - this looks cool.  Let's go exploring!".... but on the other hand, Galaxy delivers so much more fun-per-second, the payout is definitely worth it.

To me, that's where the game is really paying off.  Fundamentally, there seems to be three approaches to gaming these days:
1) Short and sweet movie games.  Deliver constantly new whiz-bang content, but have under 10 hours of play.
2) Endless repitition.  Sixteen million variations on the same damned theme.
3) Get lost.  The player spends so much time getting from point A to B or finding the next objective that they heardly spend any time actually _dealing_ with said objective, and so the content is stretched out.

Galaxy is none of the above.  It is endlessly fresh and fun.

Galaxy Review Addendum

There were three nits I have to pick that I missed in the review:

1) Spare lives are pointless.  They don't get saved, they don't get recorded, and since half the time the Princess has a letter full of them waiting for you when you log in, you're never short of them.  This wouldn't be a nuisance except the game is full of little side-puzzles for which the reward is an extra man.  Worthless.

2) I haven't tried it, but the "second player" job seems pretty dull.  There are a lot of parts in the game where starbits are absent or useless, and starbits are the only thing player 2 does.  Speaking of the wiimotes, the "shake to spin" gimmick is cute, but a button-mapping as an alternative would've been nice.

3) The camera.  It still has all of the flaws of the Mario 64 version - it seems like whenever I want to use the left/right buttons to rotate, it tells me I can't.  The first-person look mode has a limited field-of-view, which is similarly frustrating.  And even worse, the camera controls under water are terrible whenever you want to do a fine movement - the arrow buttons totally fail to work, and the camera does not adjust to face the same direction as Mario.  Even the painful whirling of Monkeyball's camera during fine-motions would've been preferable to the terrible underwater camera behaviour.  Still, it beats the Sonic Adventure series.

On the other hand, shell-riding underwater is holy-crap-lots-of-fun, so underwater levels still kick ass.

I'm back working in Hamilton again - the contract work at Exposoft is done. For any dotnet developers looking for work in Mississauga - bug these guys for a job. It's the kind of pre-dot-com style office everyone dreams of working in. Casual atmosphere, overseas business trips, razor-scooters for getting around the office, an X-box with a wide-screen TV, and a freakin' basketball court. Nice place to work, fun people. I'll miss it.

That being said, it was the wrong way up the QEW, which is the driving equivalent of swimming up river. So, I'm back to biking to work, and the weather's let up nicely. It's a refreshing experience to wake up at seven and be home by a quarter after five.