yangfeili

Lurulu, Jack Vance's most recent and probably last novel. After finishing it, the only unread Vance on my bookshelf will be the Durdane trilogy from the early 70s... I mean, he's made up the majority of my reading material for the last ten years, and now it's about to end.

I guess I'm in the odd position of being someone who liked the series before but has unexpectedly grown bored with Brawl very quickly. Whereas we used to do all-day Melee-fests, with Brawl I often find myself doing just a few rounds, and then listlessly dragging my cursor across the character select screen thinking "Who do I want to play as now? Ehhhhh... nobody, really." It might help if we turn off Final Smashes. We've all agreed that with each passing round they are inching closer and closer to being permanently disabled. Likewise, more and more of the stages are getting turned off in the stage select, almost always by unanimous agreement...

Am I the only one who thinks it should be "Blade of the Exile" (not "Exiled")?

I just graduated last December with a Bachelor's in History and Sociology with a concentration in Criminal Justice (I'm dual wielding!!!). My professors really pushed me to go on to graduate school, insisting I needed to teach... but I really don't want anything to do with it. I've been doing a combination of graphics and research/writing for musuem exhibits for the last few years (just put in a 50-foot wall-mounted timeline of the Roman Empire with actual coins of each emperor along with a short biography). I figure if I'm going to continue with either one, it's going to be the graphics (which I originally started doing entirely as a hobby, with no formal training). Sort of makes me wonder what the heck I just spent the last several years at school for...

Not sure if it's quite what you're looking for, but you might like the band Onmyouza. They're metal with traditional Japanese folk influences, and all their songs are about Japanese mythology and gods and demons and all that stuff. In some songs you can hear the classical Asian sound more than others. The female vocalist sings in the enka style occasionally, and in some songs they break into Shinto chanting and Noh yells. This is one of their more recent songs, a bit more pop sounding, but it has a pretty cool Japanese-flavored solo in the middle: http://youtube.com/watch?v=4_uTeKlJmoA

Maybe I'm just way too easy-going, but at times I actually find it strangely fun to be cheated against. I remember waaaay back in the day playing Jedi Knight on a public server with a friend, and all of a sudden a third guy joins in. Both my friend and I are instantly killed by a hail of rapid fire concussion rifle shots. We look up and see a giant floating stone head descending towards us, raining a constant stream of destruction upon the map. The guy hung around for about 10 minutes before he got bored, but I at least found it strangely fun trying to desperately survive while still getting the occasional kill off of my friend. Now I guess if it happened every time I tried to play the game, that might be different... EDIT: That's actually the strange thing I've found: if you laugh and continue to have fun when a cheater shows up, that seems to piss them off more than anything for some reason, and they leave pretty quickly.

I was always under the impression that most policies make some sort of allowance for family members occasionally driving each other's cars, but maybe I'm crazy. I've only ever been in one accident, and while the official paperwork says it was my fault, I would like to point out that it occurred on 9/9/99 while I was making a left turn onto 9th Street. Higher forces were clearly involved.

Massively seconded. Oath in Felghana is pretty much the only JRPG I've enjoyed at all in the last several years. Although that probably has something to do with the fact that it's a hardcore action game disguised as a JRPG for marketing purposes.

When I was playing Cave Story and decided I needed a gamepad for my PC, my immediate preference was to go get a PSX-USB adaptor. The Playstation controllers are pretty much where it's at as far as I'm concerned, basically a beefed up version of the SNES controller (which has become the sort of underlying standard for all controllers). The only improvements I can think of would be to relable the buttons as SNES-style ABXY (although this may not be possible due to patents or copyrights or something). And then to perhaps come up with some sort of design where the analog sticks and the D-pad/ABXY buttons were on little modules, so you could swap positions. In other words, move the left analog stick to where the d-pad is for games which primarily use the stick, and then change it back for games which primarily use the d-pad.

Yeah, I remember reading that, and thinking how ridiculous it was that people freaked out and wanted to get all legal about it. To my mind, that guy demonstrated how MMOs should be played. Epic heists, intrigue, mystery, murder! Some big and interesting stuff going on, rather than hundreds of hours of grinding and harvesting. I mean, there ought to be a way for him to run off with all the money... and there ought to be a way for an alliance of the victims to go after him and try to retrieve their money... and he ought to be able to use his resources to assemble all kinds of defensive measures. And if the players ever do track him down and get the goods back, one of them ought to be able to scam everyone else again and run off with the loot before it can be redistributed. Years later, bits of the original money continue to turn up, like stolen Nazi gold.

I use Photoshop at work, but I've always used Paint Shop Pro at home over the years. The newest version usually retails for $100, but you can get older versions for a lot less. I bought PSP7 a while back for about $30 (I think PSP 9 had just come out at the time). They're up to PSP11 now I think, but the newer versions are by Corel rather than JASC, so I don't know what changes there have been for better or for worse. But PSP probably does about 90% of what Photoshop does. That extra 10% is some pretty cool stuff, but you can still get great results for the sort of things you're wanting to do. In fact, I'd actually say it's superior to Photoshop for "low intensity" stuff like pixel art. And just to end my excessively long recommendation with a story: I took a "Intro to Computer Graphics" class in my last semester of college since I've always done this stuff on a self-trained basis and wanted to feel semi-legitimate. The semester prior, I visited the professor to get an idea of the content of the class and to see if I needed to take it at all. I mentioned that I used PSP a lot and how it was a nice cheaper alternative to PSP. If Photoshop has the power, I'd say PSP has the more friendly interface. Out of nowhere she switched to this smarmy uppity tone: "Well, you get what you pay for." I didn't say anything at the time, but later on in the class (which I have ultimately decided was a waste of time), I covertly did a couple of the assignments at home on PSP rather than in class on Photoshop, just to see if she could tell the difference. She didn't notice a damned thing.

The way I do things is to buy a new PC every several years for super cheap, and then play the backlog of games I missed, again for super cheap. At least that's what I had been doing. But the consoles are so crappy this generation, and I've been having so much fun with PC games lately (including some great import stuff from Falcom: it's pretty weird that the best console-style games I've played lately are on the PC), that I'm actually going to drop the cash to get myself a decent gaming laptop. EDIT: And I guess I might also add that I've always been primarily a console gamer, and yet my "Top Ten List" would probably be at least 50% PC games, which is way out of proportion with the ratio of console:PC games that I've played (which is probably something like 95:5).

Yeah, kids have done play-fighting since the dawn of time. Several decades ago they probably played GI vs Nazis. Centuries ago they probably played at Knight vs Other Knight. And before that they probably played Hercules vs Random Mythological Creature. And hell, sometimes they just play Me vs You. Same activity, just the "skin" that keeps changing.

I already mentioned Go!Go!7188 earlier... but I'll do it again because I just found this song I hadn't heard before, and it's totally awesome. http://youtube.com/watch?v=dgkJg2XHPqg&feature=related

GO!GO!7188 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kG4Kz3nXfto

You might want to take a look into some of the criticisms of the American Cancer Society before you dismiss my half-serious/half-facetious hyperbole. link This sort of thing is fairly well-documented among sociological circles, these self-perpetuating organizations that have a tendency to set goals which are unobtainable either by nature or by intentional design/self-sabotage. Child's Play strikes me as a pleasant alternative.

Medical research is a scam anyway. Most organizations don't actually want to find a cure for whatever it is they're dedicated to, because then they go out of business.

Maybe not quite as heavy and a little more power metal than you're looking for, but .

Yeah, I actually didn't like Looney Tunes much either as a kid. I always saw it as "the boring cartoons" when it came on. One funny thing, a lot of people--myself included--rant against the excessive anime influence in modern cartoons, but one of the shows I would most like to see come to DVD is "Grimm's Fairy Tale Classics" which used to be on Nickelodeon... and was all done by a Japanese animation company. (But it was that more subdued oldschool late 80s/early 90s variety of anime, which I tend to like a lot more than the all-out-eXtreme tone they aim for these days.)

The thing I've noticed about a lot of recent cartoons is that there seems to be less and less emphasis on having a coherent narrative in favor of just blasting kids with a half-hour of directionless zany antics.

Yeah, I capped out at about level 45 and then dropped down a bit. I guess reading nothing but Jack Vance novels for the last few years has had some unconscious side-effects.

Is there a way you can have them send the rice to you instead of Africa or wherever? I mean, I'm not technically starving, but I am pretty hungry.

It's things like this that further solidify my belief that most developers don't understand the good and bad parts of their own games or what is important to the fans of their games. (Every Final Fantasy after FFVII also serves as evidence of this phenomenon.)

I have no musical skill to speak of, but I do often find myself looking over visual works I've done. Particularly after I've just finished them, I'll sit there for an hour or more just kind of staring at it, thinking "Sweet, I did that." Edit: Actually, wait, I did make a kind of neat song in Electroplankton/Audacity once, if that counts for anything.

As do I. I particularly miss the later phase of that competition, where the SNES was pretty well dominating, and yet some of the greatest games ever came out during that period (sort of messes with the whole "We need competition" thing).