In three days I played and beat HL2 episode 1, 2, and Portal.
All three were fun, though I especially enjoyed episode 2 and Portal.
Episode 2 had a great traveling feel, and some of the battle scenes (the strider attack) were especially inspired. Portal was good puzzle fun with a feeling of action and movement, not to mention a little humor.
I'm looking forward to episode 3. I really wish I could play Stalker: Clear Sky, but unfortunately the library iMac's can't handle the graphics requirements. That's right, my gaming computer is a library iMac...
Anyway, it's a good feeling to play some video games again. It's been a long time.
There is some kind of anime cosplay meetup on campus. A few hundred high school students, mostly female, are dressed up and running around LG7 and outside.
The thing is, I can't seem to recognize any of their costumes. The only one I recognized was one guy dressed up as a dragon ball Z character, an anime I don't even watch.
I'm not a fanatic, but I've watched a lot of anime series in my day. Of course, Hong Kong high school students probably enjoy watching different shows from me, but I would have expected to recognize more outfits than I did.
It got me thinking, though. Who would I dress up as if I ever went to a convention? I decided that my brother and I would dress up as Ed and Al from FMA. I would be Ed, with the coat, medal, and auto-mail. My brother would be Al. He could wear cardboard armor and stilt shoes (he's already a bit taller than I am).
Either that or Ash Ketchum, though I think that is more appropriate for a Halloween costume.
Long ago my sister and I created a cyberpet called Chingawunga. We had a mythology (complete with a flood and savior), an adoption program, and many different colors available. After people applied to adopt, they would put one of our creatures, which by now they had named and chosen the color of, on their website.
Exhibit A: Intro Page Exhibit B: Chingawunga in the Wild and finally, Exhibit C: That's right, I was already examining the concept of mind uploading at age 13.
Unique Valentine gift Fly with our 737 flight simulator over a Caribbean island or choose a most romantic city in Europe, with strawberries and champagne.
In the future, long after all real romantic gettaways are destroyed in the third and fourth robotics wars and all remaining romantic artifacts have been destroyed by the New Imperial Inquisition, everyone will save up their recreation credits to buy a chance in the lottery for one or two hours in the simulator with their loved one between their shifts working in the acid mines.
The animation isn't that great, but it was the best of the ones I saw in a ten minute search.
I leave with you the words of youtube commenter interioroutbreak69: Goerge Bush (sic) might not have been the greatest president in the world, but at least he was good at dodging shoes.
I'm sure everyone knows about this. With Tay Zonday-like laser-dodging skills our brave Premier Bush dodged two terrorists attacks. I was feeling kind of down about Bush lately, but after seeing the extreme agility in his recent performance I want to change the consitution to allow for Bush to extend his term another couple of years, he has clearly got it in him.
This is a boon for the youtubes and online meta-culture. All over the world, thousands of people with too much free time and creativity and a little bit of skill at some production technology will be creating parodies.
I look forward to the video of machine gun shoe swarm from Iraqi Agent coming at matrix parody bullet-dodging Bush. I suspect it will be online within the next couple of days.
Seriously, though, Bush handled it pretty well. I don't want to joke about real assassination attempts, but about the only more awesome thing that could have happened besides Bush's skillful dodging is if a secret service agent jumped in front of the shoe...or maybe even caught the shoes.
sometimes things happen that make me think there is more than coincidence in this world. science tells me it is just a psychological effect, but it is hard to insist on this in subjective reality.
i watched the movie stalker at last. confusing and slow (i guess all of Tarkovsky's movies are like this). I wanted to play clear sky...I have to wait for a new computer though. I might try to read the book Roadside Pinic, it seems good.
I want to buy an ebook reader. The problem is that the market is at about the point smart phones or PDA's were five years ago, pre-iPhone. Everything is unsatisfying on some level or another, and to accomplish anything I want to do will require hacks and compromises.
But still, I am willing to tolerate it. Certainly, it is better now thatn ever before, but there is still this "wait six months" obsession I'm hitting. If I wait until the spring to buy a reader, I MIGHT be able to get the 10" ones instead of the 6", important for viewing large PDFs. Decisions, decision...
Some things simply engender in me strange feelings. Or one strange, beautiful feeling. Usually it is music, sometimes it is words. It is something like rapture. I think.
It took me a bloody long time to relocate this quote, so please enjoy:
No intellect is needed to see those figures that wait beyond the void of death -- every child is aware of them, blazing with glories dark or bright, wrapped in authority older than the universe. They are the stuff of our earliest dreams, as of our dying visions. Rightly we feel our lives guided by them, and rightly too we feel how little we matter to them, the builders of the unimaginable, the fighters of wars beyond the totality of existence.
The difficulty lies in learning that we ourselves encompass forces equally great. We say "I will," and "I will not," and imagine ourselves (though we obey the orders of some prosaic person every day) our own masters, when the truth is that our masters are sleeping. One wakes within us and we are ridden like beasts, though the rider is some hitherto unguessed part of ourselves.
--Severian, in The Shadow of the Torturer, by Gene Wolfe.
This was a post I made offline when I was in Japan, I completely forgot about it so I am posting it now. (Original post date October 3rd, 5:37pm)
Japanese girls are so cool. They can wear boots that look like they are in post-apocolyptic sci-fi shows like Resident Evil: Apocalypse. They also all have these huge phones with really complex user interfaces and myriad features.
You don't see Hong Kong girls wearing post-apocolyptic boots. Never.
In my rush to depart I forgot my contact lenses. I'm pretty sure my glasses are the thing that is causing me to have a headache every afternoon, so I'm trying to take off my glasses as much as possible.
It makes taking the train a lot scarier because I feel lost all the time. I can barely read the signs and I have to get really close, but it is kind of fun, somehow.
Unexpectedly, I started a marathon reading session and finished wind-up bird at 2:49 am.
That book makes me very pensive about relationships and love, and also life.
I liked the book. Which is to say, I spent a lot of time reading it and usually enjoyed it as I was reading it. That said, I can't really comment on the narrative as a whole. The book is over six hundred pages; I started it so long ago I can't even remember the beginning. Additionally, the story itself is quite strange and at times nonsensical. But, as I said, I enjoyed it at the times when I was reading it.
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